Author: S. R. Welch
Publication: The Secular Web
Date:
URL: http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=363
[Note: A slightly different version
of this article was previously published under the title "Sins of the Missionaries"
in the February/March 2004 issue of Free Inquiry magazine.]
Each year Americans contribute millions
of dollars through corporate-giving campaigns and Sunday tithes to support
the "faith-based" humanitarian work of overseas Christian missions. This
work--feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving medicine to the sick--seems
a worthy cause, an outwardly selfless endeavor unsullied by the salacious
headlines and bitter disputes now roiling the life of the church at home.
But Christendom's missionaries bear
their share of controversy. Though most private donors and corporate sponsors
are unaware of it, overseas missions in certain parts of the world have
long been embroiled in scandals involving allegations of predatory behavior
towards the vulnerable. Though the largely poor and illiterate victims
have complained loudly for decades, their allegations involve no sexual
misconduct and thus garner few headlines in the West. Their outrage, vented
from halfway across the globe, rarely reaches English-language media at
all.
Evangelism is waged in earnest in
a large swath of the underdeveloped world spanning from North Africa to
East Asia. Missionary strategists call this region the "Unreached Bloc"
or the "Last frontier."[1] In the rural backwaters and isolated tribal
hamlets of countries like India, missionaries routinely peddle the fruits
of generosity--food and medicine--as "inducements" for conversion to Christianity.
When these allurements fail, more- aggressive means may be employed, not
barring fraud and intimidation. As we shall see below, in India at least,
"harvesting" souls has become an end that justifies almost any means.
This subordination of humanitarian
service to proselytizing is a matter of theology--evangelical Christians
believe they hold a divine mandate, their "Great Commission" from God,
to spread their creed. But it is also a matter of policy. During his 1998
visit to India, for example, Pope John Paul II bluntly stated that the
Christianization of Asia is "an absolute priority" for the Catholic Church
in the new millennium. He openly likened the Vatican agenda for that region
to its conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
His language, says Sanal Edamaruku, founder of New Delhi-based Rationalist
International, leaves little room for interpretation, even among secular
and progressive-minded Indian citizens. "It is, in fact, not the fantasy
of [Hindu nationalists]," he states, "but hard reality ... nothing less
than the conversion of ... the Hindus of the world is targeted."[2]
The church's "soldiers" in the field
get the message. As a Mumbai (formerly Bombay)-based missionary whom we
shall call Paul attests (he asked that his real name be withheld), he and
his colleagues in India have been unequivocally instructed by their superiors
to "work extra hard in the conversion process and choose any means possible
to convert these heathens." With such marching orders, earthly consequences
can be cavalierly disregarded. "It's not how we convert that matters,"
Paul insists. "Conversion is what counts."[3]
In India, considered one of the
richest "harvest grounds" in the Unreached Bloc, the methods employed by
missionaries like Paul have stirred seething bitterness and resentment
among the "heathen" public. Perhaps no mission tactic galls more bitterly
than the intentional targeting of any society's most vulnerable members-
-its children.
Missionaries have long capitalized
on the leverage they exercise over India's young through thousands of church-run
hospitals, schools, and orphanages. In a 1923 report to Rome gleefully
titled "The Spiritual Advantages of Famine and Cholera," the Archdiocese
of Pondicherry related how a famine had "wrought miracles" in a local hospital
where "baptismal water flows in streams, and starving little tots fly in
masses to heaven." A hospital is a "ready-made congregation," the report
contended, where there is "no need to go into the ... hedges and compel
them to 'come in.'" Thanks to infection, they "send each other."[4]
Thirty years later, a government
inquiry exposed the wile by which the baptismal water had been made to
follow so easily. Catholic priests had been instructed to learn something
of medicine in order to gain access to the bedsides of sick Hindu (and
Muslim) children. There, on the pretext of administering medicine, the
priests secretly baptized the children before they died.[5] What is troubling
are the reports that this practice continues today, with formulas of baptism
whispered and holy water sprinkled surreptitiously over non-Christian patients
even in the hospices of such well-known orders as the Missionaries of Charity.[6]
Christian missionary schools, too,
remain ubiquitous in modern India. Many Hindu families believe that missionary
schools offer a good education; for others, a church-run school is their
only, or only affordable, option. Nonetheless, these schools can abuse
parents' trust by trolling the classroom for converts. In one highly- publicized
1998 case, the I. P. Mission Girls' School in the town of Rajkot, Gujurat
state, issued New Testaments to Hindu schoolgirls and pressured them to
sign declarations of Christian faith. The declaration, printed on the last
page of each New Testament volume, stated that each signatory was a "sinner"
and that she had accepted the Lord Jesus as her "personal savior."[7]
Naturally, parents were outraged.
Not only was this "conversion" performed without their consent--illegal
in India when minors are involved--but several girls reported that school
staff had intimidated them into signing the declaration. Parents and other
Hindus marched to the school to protest, and a wave of publicity quickly
mounted. Embarrassed, the school recalled the New Testaments and published
an apology with the promise that "such literature" would not be distributed
again.[8]
Along with the apology, the school
accurately denied a rumor alleging that protesting parents had burned copies
of the Bible during their demonstration. Nevertheless, this rumor circulated
wildly in the India's English-language press and was later repeated uncritically
by Western media, adding fuel to a propaganda campaign that claimed that
Christians in India faced regular persecution from Hindu fundamentalists.
Since the campaign began, the money to missions in India has increased
considerably- -demonstrating that prosecution of the Great Commission requires
more than Bibles and baptismal water. John Joseph, a Christian member of
the National Minority Commission charged with investigating reported cases
of persecution, complained that most of the cases that hit national and
international headlines in recent years were nothing but "colorful lies,
half-truths or highly exaggerated stories unleashed by Indian Christian
NGOs and missionary groups to mobilize Christian donor agencies to open
their wallets."[9]
Even when the wallets are open,
overseas ministries feel strong pressure to pay at least part of their
own way. Some missionaries have become quite inventive fundraisers; others
have sought revenue in less than ethical ways, as recent exposures of child-
adoption rackets in missionary orphanages have revealed.
Like parochial schools, church-run
orphanages have long been fixtures of Christian evangelism in India. Legally
wards of the orphanage, the children are usually raised as Christians,
and it is not uncommon for those who do not find homes to adopt the church
as their surrogate family and become priests or nuns when they mature.
This swells the ranks of native clergy, a welcome bonus given the dearth
of seminary admissions in the West. Distasteful as this may be to many
Hindus, an Indian orphanage is within its rights to raise its wards as
it sees fit. Still, those rights do not extend to fraud. But fraud is what
twenty-five families encountered in 2001 in Arunachal Pradesh, a mountainous
state in India's northeast.
With the promise of providing their
children an education, a Catholic priest from the neighboring district
of Nagaland reportedly charged parents 10,000 rupees per child (about $250
each) for tuition, room, and board at the St. Emmanuel Mission Convent
in Rajasthan, some 2,500 kilometers away in India's northwest. That price
was high, but parents considered it a bargain for a "sahib-run" (i.e.,
Western-style) school. Some parents later developed misgivings, however,
and traveled to Rajasthan to visit their children. On arrival they were
shocked to discover that the children were not enrolled at St. Emmanuel's.
In fact, they were not in any school at all--they had been placed in an
orphanage. The priest who ran the orphanage said he had paid 5,000 rupees
per child to a fellow priest--from Nyasaland--and allegedly demanded compensation
for this sum before releasing the children to their families.[10]
The victims of such schemes typically
come from India's "tribals," Hindu communities in India's most underdeveloped
enclaves that have retained distinct local cultures that set them apart
from the modern Indian mainstream. Illiterate and desperately poor, tribals
rank high on missionaries' target lists for conversion. They are the unreached
of the Unreached.
Both Rome and its Protestant competitors
have been particularly aggressive in efforts to convert the tribals. Exploiting
customs that make female children economic burdens on their families, missionaries
reportedly induce tribal mothers to relinquish baby girls shortly after
birth. Often the mothers are promised that rich Westerners will adopt their
daughters and they will live a "much better life." The mother is typically
paid about $70 for her child, which is then adopted by Western parents
for a "donation" of $2,500.
There is an irony to the notion
of tribal "orphans," according to Arvind Neelakandan, a volunteer with
the Vivekananda Kendra (VK), a Hindu nonprofit that works among the tribals.
In most tribal communities, Neelakandan explains, "Orphans as we know them
are nonexistent"; parentless children are typically cared for by their
extended family. But, he explains, missionaries will "fleece money from
their foreign donors by projecting these very same children as 'orphans'"
in fundraising campaigns. Indignant, Neelakandan suggests that, rather
than focusing their efforts on schemes to raise money or allure converts,
evangelists ought to focus on the social betterment of tribals, particularly
their young girls. The VK, for instance, specializes in educating tribal
girls in useful--and secular--subjects such as science and mathematics.[11]
The practice of allurement, or providing
"inducements" to the poor in return for their conversion to Christianity,
is quite common, and one that many missionaries readily admit using. It
is also nothing new. In the days of the Portuguese invaders, the Jesuits
simply paid Hindus by the hundreds to participate in mass baptisms. Today's
methods are more subtle: conversions are now "bought" with food, medicine,
promises, and micro-loans. Micro-lending programs are increasingly popular,
providing a revenue stream for cash-strapped missions as it adds financial
credit to the other blandishments missionaries can offer in exchange for
conversion.
The practice of enticing the hungry
and sick to Christianity with offers of food and medicine is not illegal
per se, but is hardly ethical--especially given that so many of the tribals
and dalits ("untouchables"), who are its typical targets, have little or
no understanding of the concept of religious "conversion." The notion of
conversion as such is alien to Hinduism. Recognizing this, Mohandas Gandhi
criticized the practice in no uncertain terms: "I strongly resent these
overtures to utterly ignorant men," he once protested, criticizing missionaries
who, in order to gain converts, "dangle earthly paradises in front of them
[dalits] and make promises to them which they can never keep."[12]
Whatever one calls the offer of
material allurements in exchange for religious conversion, it does not
deserve the appellation of "charity." But this is lost on missionaries
like Paul, who offers no apologies when confronted with Hindu objections.
"If Hindus believe that certain tactics like offering money, food or clothes
to their naked children in return for embracing Christ is immoral, then
what can I say?" he protests. "All congregations and missionaries have
been advised to follow these techniques, as others will only fail. Sounds
immoral but that is the only way."
One cannot help but ask how conversions
garnered through allurements can in any way be considered sincere, to say
nothing of genuine, in the sense that the convert has experienced a significant
change in beliefs. This has been a longstanding criticism of evangelical
methods, and missionaries in India are reminded of it each time money runs
short: they are forced to renege on their promises, and their flocks return
to Hinduism. But when asked how aping conversion for a bowl of food could
be considered a "real" conversion, Paul has a quick, if rather optimistic,
answer. "Embracing Christ through 'food,' 'shelter' or some other way may
be considered a full conversion," he says, because "their children," being
raised in the Church, "will soon be one-hundred-percent Christian."
History suggests otherwise. Duarte
Nunes, the missionary prelate of Goa, expressed the very same doctrine
as far back as 1520.[13] Almost five hundred years have since passed, much
of that time under the rule of pro-Christian imperial governments, and
yet Christians stand at no more than 2.4 percent of India's population.
That may be why, out of either impatience or desperation, some missionaries
have chosen to adopt more persuasive measures than allurement to secure
conversions.
In the time of Duarte Nunes, support
of the Portuguese military allowed the Jesuits to have Hindus forcibly
seized and their lips smeared with pieces of beef, 'polluting' them as
Hindus and thus making Christianity their only option for salvation.[14]
Such blatancy is not possible today. Instead, the violence of others can
be used as a threat.
The tribal village of New Tupi lies
in a deep, forested valley in the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
It also borders the district of Nagaland, where a guerilla war between
Naga separatists and the Indian government has ground on for years. A Protestant
missionary started a primary school in New Tupi and actively evangelized
there for a number of years. Response to his ministry was lukewarm, however,
and villagers report that their pastor was feeling pressure to move on
to greener "unreached" pastures. Failing to uproot the people from their
traditional Vaishnavite faith (a monotheistic branch of Hinduism) apparently
became a prestige issue with him, so as a last resort he played what could
be called his "trump card."
The pastor of New Tupi began preaching
a new sermon. According to villagers, he told them to "get converted within
one and a half months," or else "everybody will be in trouble." In his
warning he allegedly invoked the name of the National Socialist Council
of Nagaland, or NSCN, the gun-toting insurgents in nearby Nagaland who,
as locals know well, indulge in kidnapping and extortion. The people of
New Tupi clearly got the pastor's message: Convert to Christianity now,
or terrorists may soon arrive at your doorstep.[15]
Sadly, this is not solely the behavior
of a few renegade clergy. Displaying the "neurosis of the converted," as
V. S. Naipaul terms it, many ex-Hindu converts seek to demonstrate their
faithfulness to their new creed by affecting open hostility toward the
faith they abandoned. This hostility is usually expressed through contemptuous
labeling: calling Hindus "heathens" and Hinduism "demonic" or "evil." Too
often, contempt manifests as physical aggression: disrupting Hindu festivals,
harassing recalcitrant family members or neighbors, and desecrating Hindu
temples and relics.
Tension between converted tribals
and their Hindu neighbors had gained national press coverage in Dangs,
a district in Gujurat state. The conflict grew so intense that villages
and even families were being rent apart. In 1999, India's National Human
Rights Commission convened a special investigation into the conflict. Some
of the most damning testimony that investigation heard was given by Ghelubhai
Nayak, a respected social scientist and disciple of Gandhi, who has worked
in tribal welfare in Dangs for over fifty years.
In his testimony, Nayak said that
the conflict in Dangs was rooted in the work of the Christian missionaries.
In the preceding three years, Nayak stated, there had been at least fifteen
instances in which Christian converts, "under the influence of their preachers,"
desecrated idols of the Hindu saint Hanuman, who has been venerated by
the Dangs tribals for generations. In one incident, he said, the converts
urinated on a statue of Hanuman, in another they "crushed Hanuman's idol
to pieces and threw it away in the river." In addition to the desecration,
Nayak testified, converts had raised the ire of their Hindu neighbors by
repeatedly publicly denouncing Hindu saints as shaitans, or "Satans." This
was done, again "under the influence of their preachers." The native clergy,
it seems, where also ex-Hindus afflicted with the Naipaulian "neurosis."[16]
On the whole, no one can deny that
through the efforts of Christian evangelists, thousands of people across
the developing world have been fed and clothed. But the question remains,
when the benefits of mission work are weighted against the social costs
of aggressive proselytizing, are the peoples of the Unreached Bloc better
or worse off for having Christian missionaries in their midst?
One has to wonder. According to
the World Evangelization Research Center (WERC), there are more than four
thousand mission agencies. Collectively they operate a huge apparatus,
manned by some 434,000 foreign missionaries wielding an annual global income
of eighteen billion dollars. And yet, for all the money that is spent--an
astonishing average of $359,000 for every person baptized--the benefits
of evangelism are meager.[17] Even harsher realities are revealed by WERC
research, which finds that most plans to evangelize the world have fallen
"massively short" of stated goals and reveal that church embezzlement equals
the annual global income of the missionary enterprise.[18]
Meanwhile, the quality of life for
India's Christian population remains dismal. Despite "crocodile-tears for
the oppressed," says Edamaruku, and contrary to apologists' frequent boast
that Christianization brings justice and equality to the "untouchables,"
dalits who convert find that as Christians, they remain "as 'untouchable'
as they had been as Hindus."[19] While more than 75 percent of the Catholics
in India are dalits, dalits make up less than 5 percent of Indian priests.
Most priests come from upper castes. The vast majority of the church hierarchy
is upper caste also, a fact bitterly lamented by Christian "untouchables."[20]
Undeterred, Christendom forges ahead
with its drive to plant churches. As Paul tells us, the Vatican planned
to add forty percent to its missionary budget for India in 2003. "That
could mean a lot of rupees," he says. "More churches will be built in India,
thus more converts." That those rupees could be spent on more productive
endeavors does not occur to him.
Even the assertion that mere exposure
to Western ideas and institutions provides some benefit holds little water,
particularly when the principal effect of mission work is to replace one
set of superstitions with another. Tales of miraculous healings, even exorcisms,
are frequently found in evangelical newsgroups. In a typical testimonial,
an ex-Hindu claimed that, after losing her sight following a fever, her
husband had practiced Hindu "witchcraft" on her but could not heal her.
But, after "accept[ing] the Good News" and taking a vow "never to worship
idols," the woman "felt a touch" on her eyes and was miraculously made
to see. "Now," she says, "I am all right and all my family members have
accepted Jesus Christ."[21]
This is hardly the fruit of Western
"enlightenment." In the end, evangelism seems to offer little more than
an exchange of idolatry for bibliolatry, gods for devils, and magic for
dogma. Meanwhile, families are ruptured, division sown among communities,
and ancient traditions no less valid or holy than those striving to replace
them are disparaged for the sake of a jealous ideology bent on homogenizing
the world.
It is not widely advertised in the
West that Gandhi, that icon of compassion and self-sacrifice, detested
proselytizing. In his Collected Works, he states categorically that "the
idea of conversion ... is the deadliest poison which ever sapped the fountain
of truth."[22] If missionaries could not conduct service for its own sake,
he said, if the price of their charity was conversion, he preferred that
they would quit India altogether. This was a man who was neither a Hindu
"fundamentalist" nor extremist. And he well knew the suffering and need
of his poorest countrymen.[23]
Nonetheless, missionaries in the
field remain ever optimistic, albeit misguided, about what they are doing.
"I do admit our means of conversation are almost horrible in nature," admits
our friend Paul, "but I suppose we are doing this for a reason." Self-doubt
seems to hover in his words, but he then finds harbor in a familiar rationale.
"The reason is Christ. It is honorable."
He then pauses and asks, "Wouldn't
you say so?"
Notes
[1] "The Last Frontier," International
Mission Board, December 19, 2002, http://www.imb.org/core/WE/lastfrontwo.htm.
An entire research industry, deploying specialized racial and linguistic
databases, ethnic mapping projects, and training resources, has been mobilized
for the world evangelism movement. See, for instance, Global Mapping International
(http://www.gmi.org/index.html). An updated version (November 6, 2003)
is available at http://www.imb.org/WE/lastfront.asp.
[2] Sanal Edamaruku, "Indian Rationalists
Defend the Right to Criticize Pope," Rationalist International 22 (October
25, 1999). See also "Vatican's Asian Agenda Revealed," 25 (November 14,
1999).
[3] Paul [pseud.], e-mails to author,
23 December 2000, through 03 February 2001.
[4] Arun Shourie, Missionaries in
India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: HarperCollins India,
1994), p. 16.
[5] Government of Madhya Pradesh,
Report of the Christian Missionary Activities Enquiry Committee, (Nagpur:
Government Printing Press 993, 1956), vol. 2 part B, p. 54, quoted in Shourie,
p. 8. The document is also available online at http://www.secularindia.com/
niyogi_commission_report.htm.
[6] Particularly notable is the
memoir of Susan Shields, former member of the Missionaries of Charity,
whose unpublished manuscript, In Mother's House, is quoted in Christopher
Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice
(London: Verso, 1995), pp. 43-50. Shields also published a brief article
in FREE INQUIRY concerning her experiences ("Mother Teresa's House of Illusions,"
Free Inquiry, Winter 1997/98, pp. 31-32.)
[7] I. P. Mission Girls' High School,
declaration of faith (July 1998, photocopy with translation).
[8] Office of the Principal, I.
P. Mission Girls' High School, letter to Rajkot VHP and Bajrang Dal (July
1998, photocopy with translation). See also Ravindra Agrawal, "Church Conspiracy
in the Guise of Service," available online at http://www.hssworld.org/all/baudhik/christianity/
CHURCH_CONSPIRACY.html.
[9] Sanal Edamaruku, "Are Christians
Really Persecuted in India?" Rationalist International 43 (27 July 2000).
[10] Vishwinath, "Church as an Edifice
of Fraud!" Breezy Meadows (organ of the Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalayas Arunachal
Pradesh Trust) 2, no. 9 (July 2001): 3.
[11] Aravindan Neelakandan, personal
e-mail to author, 11 January 2002.
[12] Mohandas Gandhi, The Collected
Works (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1976) 64:400.
[13] M. D. David, ed., Western Colonialism
in Asia and Christianity (Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1988), p.
8, quoted in Sita Ram Goel, History of Christian-Hindu Encounters, AD 304
to 1996 (Voice of India, 1996), p. 14.
[14] David, p. 19, quoted in Goel,
p. 12.
[15] Vishwinath, "Pastor Threatens
to Call Army of the 'Good Shepherd' to New Tupi!" Breezy Meadows 2, no.
6 (April 2001): 4.
[16] Ghelubhai Nayak, (fax transmitted
to Special Bench of the National Minorities Commission, India, 7 January
1999), quoted in Arvind Lavakare, "A Gandhian Speaks Out from Dangs," Rediff
On the Net, 19 January 1999 (19 December 2002), http://www.rediff.com/news/1999/jan/19arvind.htm.
[17] David B. Barrett and Todd M.
Johnson, "Status of Global Mission, 2004, in Context of 20th and 21st Centuries,"
World Evangelization Research Center, January 2004 (July 12, 2004), online
at http://www.gem- werc.org/resources.htm. Nor are the mid-2004 figures
unusual: Barrett and Johnson noted that "ecclesiastical crime" exceeded
mission income by $1 billion in their 2003 report. According to their mid-2004
report, ecclesiastical crime is growing at more than 6 percent per year
and is projected to exceed mission income by $5 billion in 2025!
[18] $20 billion in "ecclesiastical
crime" versus $20 billion in global income. See Barret and Johnson.
[19] Sanal Edamaruku, "God Longs
for All Hindus! Covert Operations of the Evangelical Church in India,"
Rationalist International 83 (29 November 2001).
[20] See "Problems and Struggles:
Archbishop Arulappa Condemns Vatican for Promoting a Dalit Bishop as His
Successor," Dalit Christians (19 December 2002), http://www.dalitchristians.com/Html/arulappa.htm.
[21] "India: And the Blind Receive
Sight!" Fax of the Apostles (April 2001), quoted in "Religious World News
for Mission Mobilizers," Brigada Mission Mobilizers, 27 April 2001. Electronic
subscription.
[22] Gandhi, The Collected Works
of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1971) 64:203.
[23] Gandhi, 46:28.
