How do you feel about missionaries?

It's only second-hand knowledge but I grew up around a couple, friends of my parents, who were missionaries in Zaire -- they were there on and off for most of my childhood, coming home just long enough to work blue-collar jobs for a while & raise money to go back. Their kids grew up speaking English & Lingala, which I thought was extremely cool when I was 12. Scratch that, I still do. I don't know what this couple's daily ration of Christianity consisted of, but I know they worked their asses off making mechanical repairs to bicycles & vehicles, raising money to sink a new well for the village and installing it themselves (which included keeping it running indefinitely on second-hand parts & training people as mechanics), building & running a school, teaching health/sanitation, all the do-gooder stuff. And it's not like they got rich doing it, we used to take up offerings at church because they were spending their own $ to be there.

I wish I knew how they were directed to that particular place, whether the villagers knew of or approved of their coming beforehand, and whether anyone in the village was already practicing Christianity before they got there. But I don't. So there's the whole deeply shitty history of the Church's missionary "efforts" and then there's my anecdotal experience of some really cool people. I dunno, something for me to chew on.

This is a huge topic, I'm not even scratching the surface here but I have a feeling it turns on suffering & ACTUAL persecution, even martyrdom, a world in which evil had a presence & a name (the Nazis & the devastation of war), and a wide tradition of theological/intellectual response. But that's neither here nor there.

Nabbo, I hear you, but I don't know what's to be done about those people. They're ignorant because the system that produces them is FUCKED UP, obviously, and seriously?...they would AT LEAST only be 0 for 1 if they were MERELY ignorant of other cultures but were still totally sincere and emotionally generous. More dangerously, I suspect a lot of people "choose" to remain ignorant because they're already convinced of their own superiority and they're going to be small-minded, condescending pricks who impose upon others a system of values that's more confusing than the rules of Calvinball. Unless they get a sharp wake-up in the field, for which we can only hope.

I guess the solution is to prioritize a whole different kind of Christianity, which, GOING TO TAKE A WHILE.

She had a hard life. They were poor and she was finding it diffcult bringing up a teenager.

I sensed that she sometimes felt her faith was a burden.

i generally feel positively toward missions because the only experience i have with them is that several of my friends have gone on mission trips. those were heavily service-oriented. they don't talk about the religious education element as "what we taught those people about god," they talk about it as "what we learned about god there." i have never met full-time missionaries. also, i can definitely see the witnessing types being more harmful than helpful to general cross-cultural understanding and the spreading of god's love and all that, though.

someone asked one of my friends on the street last week if he was a sinner. he didn't know what to say to that and he just walked by...i mean, what DO you say to that? (one idea was "and proud of it!")

Haha, I asked that question around 6th grade, in a group bible study. One of the adults took me aside later and tried to answer it but I have no recollection of the answer, which suggests that it wasn't very satisfactory.

I don't know if this is informative at all, but

http://www.gotquestions.org/never-heard.html

Unfortunately not, as A Nairn's link underlines. A group of souls on a hypothetical island that has never been mapped and never encountered the Word of God are damned. This is because they have not recognised their own responsibility to discover the immanent Christian God and have, perhaps, happily practiced their own religion instead.

Therefore they receive no mercy and no opportunity to plead ignorance.

However, most missionaries today are probably not like this at all and are motivated by a genuine desire to help improve standards of living for impoverished people, thereby enacting the true message of Christianity. Yet there is still an element of cultural arrogance in the underlying role of a missionary; after all, the definition of the word is a "person sent to spread religious faith." It is highly condescending to assume that you know the "truth" and all others are to be damned. I realise that this is not how most missionaries would think, but it is implied in their very role.

One of my English lecturers actually specialises in postcolonialism and studying missionaries. She has recently written a book titled "Missionary Writing and Empire: 1800-1860" (Cambridge UP), and one of her comments helped clarify the issue:

“My argument is that missionaries were ambivalent and ambiguous figures in the colonial landscape – they were simultaneously on the side of white invaders but also on the side of indigenous people.”

I agree with this, that missionaries were part of the imperial project and involved in "colonising the mind," but also most had good intentions, even if these did not always yield good results. Of course, it is dangerous to generalise, and the behaviour and effects of missionary work would have differed in different regions and under different Empires.

A substantial proportion of evangelical Christians believe that once Christianity has been preached to *everyone* in the world, the apocalypse will occur. The concept of deliberately missionising in order to bring this about is the driving force in a lot of evangelical missionary work; it's known as the Great Work or the Great Commission. See, for example, http://www.apocalipsis.org/greatwrk.htm

As it is hard for them to get bibles in China, Simply giving them out for free to Chinese vacationers in a place like Thailand.

-- A Nairn (moreta...), October 15th, 2005.

I have no objection to people handing out bibles on a street corner or something like that. I have a problem with people going into remote villages and saying "Excuse me, your culture is wrong. Let me show you the right way." (backed up by a kind of unstated but implicit power that comes with being on the imperializing side of things). I have a general problem with the belief that one's religion is "right" and that others are "wrong" and I have a general problem with threatening people with damnation if they do not convert (which is what the whole fucking christian religion is about. So fuck off, Christianity!)

Yeah, I'm sure no one thought of it before now ...

(from http://www.etymonline.com)
missionary (n.) Look up missionary at Dictionary.com
1656, from mission (q.v.). Missionary position first attested 1969; allegedly so called because Christian missionaries forced it on "primitive" people to replace their more creative variations.

I got to give the Jehovah's Witnesses some credit–they make really entertaining publications. "Spirit Creatures: How Do They Affect US?"

They quit sending the Spanish-speaking ones to my door and some nice old ladies gave me this book. I did make the mistake of saying they could come back and discuss it with me. UH-OH. I don't like discussing religion with people who have the intention to change my mind about it. (I do find it interesting enough otherwise.) So....?

My gran's brother was a missionary. Lovely guy. Died in the jungle. :-(

Post-colonial missionaries have mellowed a bit, I think, from the really bad old days. Still, the stated goal of missionaries is to make conversions, not to do good works for the sake of doing good works.

This ulterior interest clouds the issue and introduces a thousand temptations to do wrong for a "good end", to accrue power over the weak and then to leverage it for the "greater glory of god's church". Which is totally fucked and undoes whatever good they might have done along the way.

So, screw 'em. Missions aren't expressions of love, but pure religious politics.

Which is why, just after having a painful abortion, I replied to "What can we do for you ma'am?" with

"Get thee to the liquor store and buy me some booze and smokes?"

One of my friends who went on mission trips is now doing it full-time through a mainline Protestant denomination. Not in a developing country, though, in a mainly poor & Spanish-speaking part of a US city. Her job involves a lot of random stuff, but mostly tutoring school children and helping people with their taxes. More like an Americorps job than a traditional mission! Considering that most of the people she works with probably are already Christian, and talking about it isn't a part of her daily job, it sounds to me like the stated goal is not to make conversions.

I don't think she would say the actual goal is doing good works for the sake of good works, though - she would say something more like the goal is to work toward the Kingdom of Heaven, or to help our horrible failure at being brothers and sisters in Christ, or something in expressly religious language. I've heard a lot of this kind of thinking in the past few years, that secular acts can be aimed at a religious goal and considered a religious duty.

So that's one mission that's a little different than the stereotype, hope that's interesting. Unfortunately, I *only* know anecdotal evidence, and not a more general idea of how they work.

http://www.lds.org/museum/exhibit/images/d730_mr.jpg

http://www.morethanvinyl.com/wp-content/uploads/wpsc/product_images/Future%20missionary%20use.jpg

I was a Jewish missionary (also known as a shliach) for two years after highschool. It since holds no interest for me at all, but because of personal experiences I can't help but feel a fondness for these guys. They're all really sincere and really believe what they're doing is the right + holy thing, so it's hard to totally hate them. Even if I'm not interested in what they're selling.

I admire the commitment, for sure.

Nothing cements commitment like indoctrination from childhood on and an intense need to overcome sexual guilt!

Indoctrination is a harsh word. Lots of these people are very intelligent and questioning, they just don't let their doubts interfere with their faith. In fact, I'd say doubt is a hallmark affect of religious sentiment esp in American life.

Varieties of Religious Experience paints a fuller picture

Commitment ends up being great for mega church bucks down the road, especially if it nets a couple hundred thousand latinos for the tithing coffers.

Mordy if you're going to start generalizing about American religious sentiment you can fuck right off imo

lol, as opposed to generalizing about religious sentiment in general?

fwiw I'm not talking about Jewish missionaries so don't extend your experience + a couple of books onto mine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slG_cFus6-E

I would never try to tell you about your own experience, but I would suggest that it's not novel to discuss doubt as being a fundamental part of all sorts of religious faith, and William James fwiw wasn't writing about Jewish religion but about normative protestantism. I'm not saying you weren't entirely indoctrinated without any doubt as part of your religious experience, but there is significant theological/philosophical + psychological work done about the role of doubt in faith.

i come from a place where if you don't serve a mission your community pretty much drops out from under you hence utah's suicide rate among 18-24 yo men.

xpost ok yes thats nice

Are you Mormon, Matt?

i guess i'm saying that a lot of people who have complicated relationships with their faith, have doubted but still believe and are active members of their religious community (for reasons which usually have to do with relationships) keep the larger ball rolling and the machinery greased that lets a lot of thoroughly despicable people maintain their influence.

abbott yes, i thought i might have mentioned it somewhere else. i mean until i care enough to get my name off their records.

Mordy fwiw: Mormon boys *have* to go on a mission when they're 19, it's literally a commandment from God. And any parent whose son didn't go on a mission would be privately shamed, and of course the boy shamed even worse. When they're on a mission they have to do all this stuff that is IMO not a lot unlike some classical brainwashing/cult techniques of daily confession of sins to each other. They can't watch/read the news or listen to music (except Mormon music). They can't even send email through a regular account, they have to use a Mormon-church-provided email service. They can only talk to their family on Christmas and Mother's Day, and no other time of the year.

So, I think "indoctrination" is a fair word to use to describe the Mormon missionary experience. It might be something a lot of them do because they really believe it, but others are there because they were essentially forced to be, and then they get two straight years of this day-in day-out exposure to only Mormon ideas, plus having to confess to this other guy in this same situation if you ever had a wicked thought or something. I know a lot of people who were essentially estranged for choosing, against almost immeasurable pressure, not to do this. So that suicide statistic rings true.

xp – Sorry, Matt, I hope this post doesn't offend you. I grew up Mormon but obv I am not anymore; I spent all day listening to my brother literally in tears about this very situation, so sorry if I sound really strident and angry here!

I also have a cousin who knocked up a woman on his mission – and this is a #1 guilty lol for me. (And shaming: his mom wrote a vanity press book she's selling on Amazon about how her son fucked up hardcore, and what a terrible person he is, to "raise money" and "help him out.")

i mean i understand it's probably a lot more decentralized for different faiths, especially american ones, but mormonism and probably like jehovah's witness are a lot like corporations and the missionaries are the salesmen, and then the presidents of the corporations give a lot of money to shitty causes and wield a lot of influence. x-post

abbott, i feel just as strongly about it!

Not to be a downer, but what Abbott just said - "Mormon boys *have* to go on a mission when they're 19, it's literally a commandment from God. And any parent whose son didn't go on a mission would be privately shamed, and of course the boy shamed even worse." - I didn't know any of that. And one of my very best friends, a Mormon, killed himself when he was 18 1/2 or so, a couple months before I graduated high school. Well, his family were Mormons. He obviously didn't want to be.

That's tragic!

It really was, he was the pretty much the most well-liked kid in the school, everyone loved him...

In other related news, my dad really pushed me to be a missionary after I got my bachelor's degree, even though he knew I hadn't been to church in several years. I'm thinking maybe he thought I was a v v special christian who was so into it that I was like, beyond going to church

his mom wrote a vanity press book she's selling on Amazon about how her son fucked up hardcore, and what a terrible person he is, to "raise money" and "help him out."

This is so horrible! :(

Ugh. I had no idea about any of this stuff. Feel like a heel for that "admire the commitment" stuff earlier. Wow.

I'm down for missionary people going to help people out with medicine and food and building shelters and stuff, but yeah the association it brings up of righteous Christians going in to save some poor savages who don't know they need to call God _this_ name not _that_ name is a big dud. Charity, tho, is probably the best thing about organized religion.

Fuck em.

Indian authorities struggle to retrieve US missionary feared killed on remote island

In pages left with the fishermen who facilitated his trip to the island, his musings are a clear indication of his desire to convert the tribe.

"Lord, is this island Satan's last stronghold where none have heard or even had the chance to hear your name?" he wrote.

I'm just hoping the North Sentinelese didn't catch a disease while handling his body.

For real

meh

fuck em an all tbh

Harking back to the OP: "Are you against the basic idea of a person going to some place and telling the people there about what they believe is truthful and encouraging them to consider it?"

This is such a whitewash of what missionaries represented throughout the colonial period. They came, not just equipped with beliefs, but with the full power of the colonial rulers staunchly backing them. Those who rejected the missionaries' version of the truth were systematically punished, impoverished, and oppressed.

In more modern times, the means are less crude, but usually include bribery, where economic benefits accrue to converts which are unavailable to others. Christians often make much of the hardships endured by missionaries in pursuit of converts, but they were and always have been uninvited guests whose 'truth' invariably undermines the culture they parasitize upon. Such invaders should expect to be rejected and abused and being given such treatment grants them no moral superiority whatsoever.