missionaries

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Holiday musings from Brazil: Is it time for missionaries to leave indigenous tribes alone?

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Holiday musings from Brazil: Is it time for missionaries to leave indigenous tribes alone?

It’s that time of year again.

We’re talking about The Holidays, the season when Thanksgiving and Christmas bookend America’s annual celebration of its history of Christian influences, even if today’s mass-media crush obscures that. It’s a season of family gatherings, annual notes to far-flung friends and acquaintances, garish holiday-themed sweaters designed to provoke smiles, and, for some, even a few religious services.

It’s a big deal journalistically, too, of course. Editors/producers and reporters/content providers seek out warm-and-fuzzy, feel-good features meant to remind media consumers of the genuine goodness individual humans are capable of showing others, including strangers.

We call it the holiday spirit and, except for the rampant consumerism, I appreciate the seasonal goodwill. And why not? Upbeat news is a welcome change from the disconcerting stories we’re usually fed. It’s good for the soul, and I need not subscribe to the traditional beliefs for it to warm my heart.

It’s also a time when journalists seek to probe the theological aspects of our holiday narratives, often to the distaste of those news consumers who prefer the comforting familiarity of traditional tellings or even the more sobering messages of traditional Christian faith in Advent and Christmas.

Such stories — here’s one example from a few years back that ran in the Guardian — are tricky, requiring solid sourcing and clear, even-handed and respectful explanations.

Another category of holiday stories addresses the consequences of past Christian actions that a reporter can link to the season, even if the link is indirect at best. Take this recent Washington Post story — “This tribe helped the Pilgrims survive for their first Thanksgiving. They still regret it 400 years later” — on how the indigenous tribe, the Wampanoag, that first encountered the Pilgrims in what is now Massachusetts were decimated by the encounter. Here’s a large bite of it:

Just as Native American activists have demanded the removal of Christopher Columbus statues and pushed to transform the Columbus holiday into an acknowledgment of his brutality toward indigenous people, they have long objected to the popular portrayal of Thanksgiving.

For the Wampanoags and many other American Indians, the fourth Thursday in November is considered a day of mourning, not a day of celebration.


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That question again: What's happening to religious believers and others stuck in Afghanistan?

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That question again: What's happening to religious believers and others stuck in Afghanistan?

This is a case in which I don’t want to say, “We told you so,” but -- well — we told you so.

If you dug into this recent podcast-post — “ 'What's next in Afghanistan?' Warning: this news topic involves religion” — you’d know that the GetReligion team has been worried about what will happen to elite news coverage of human rights issues and, specifically, religious freedom, in Afghanistan under this new Taliban regime. In fact, that podcast included many themes from an earlier GetReligion podcast-post with this headline: “When the Taliban cracks down, will all the victims be worthy of news coverage?”

It appears that there are two problems.

Reality No. 1: It’s hard to cover the hellish realities of life in the new-old Afghanistan without discussing the messy exit of U.S. diplomats and troops from that troubled nation. Thus, new coverage will please Republicans, who are infuriated about that issue, and anger the White House team of President Joe Biden, which wants to move on. New coverage allows Republicans to “pounce,” as the saying goes.

Reality No. 2: There are many valid stories inside Afghanistan right now, but some are more explosive than others in terms of fallout here in America. This is especially true when dealing with stories about Americans who are still trapped there. Then there are religious believers — including Christians and members of minority groups inside Islam — who face persecution and even executions because of their beliefs. It appears that some journalism executives (and foreign-policy pros) continue to struggle with the reality that religious issues are at the heart of the Afghanistan conflict.

Thus, cases of political and religious persecution in Afghanistan are “conservative news.” For a quick overview, see this National Review piece: “In Afghanistan, ‘Almost Everyone Is in Danger Now.’ “ Note this snarky line:

The sort of headline that shouldn’t just be local news. … Those knee-jerk Biden critics over at . . . er, the Connecticut affiliate of NBC News report: “43 Connecticut Residents Still Stuck In Afghanistan.”

Here is a key chunk of that NBCConnecticut.com report:


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Plug-in: Ransom demands and prayers -- 17 with Anabaptist mission group kidnapped in Haiti

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Plug-in: Ransom demands and prayers -- 17 with Anabaptist mission group kidnapped in Haiti

As a journalist who covers religion, I’ve been blessed to report firsthand from countries such as Israel, Mexico, Nicaragua and South Africa.

As a result, when violence and war flare in those places, the news doesn’t seem a million miles away. Instead, I envision real people and places.

The same is true of Haiti, where I reported on a well-drilling ministry in 2018. We took safety precautions, but I never felt unsafe as I traveled with a U.S. mission team in the capital of Port-au-Prince.

Three years later, circumstances have changed in that impoverished Caribbean nation, rocked in recent months by a presidential assassination and natural disasters.

The latest: a gang’s kidnapping of six men, six women and five children working with Christian Aid Ministries, a global missionary organization based in Millersburg, Ohio. A gang leader has threatened to kill the hostages if a ransom of $1 million per head is not paid.

Coverage of the mission group by the New York Times’ Ruth Graham and Elizabeth Dias resonates with me.

”Christian missionary workers typically labor in obscurity, running medical clinics, building wells and delivering Bibles without fanfare — until crisis erupts,” Graham and Dias write.

Here at ReligionUnplugged.com, Michael Ray Smith talks to missions leaders about the surging number of kidnappings in Haiti, where gangs have gained control of roughly half the capital.

Other related stories that help explain what’s happening:

• As abductions in Haiti increase, churches and ministries find themselves in the crosshairs (by Jamie Dean, World)

• An around-the-clock prayer effort to save the Haiti hostages (by Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, New York Times)


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The New Yorker profiles a disgraced missionary and comes to a surprising conclusion

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Many of you may remember a story that broke last summer about a disgraced evangelical missionary who faces a lawsuit in Uganda for practicing medicine at a quasi-clinic where numerous children died. Complicating the matter was how many of these children were hopelessly malnourished and gravely ill when they were brought to her in the first place.

I wrote about Renée Bach’s situation here at GetReligion last August while everyone was ripping into her for being a white woman trying to save black African babies. I thought the amount of venom directed against this woman was over the top in that she didn’t have to take these kids on at all. The parents of these kids had other medical choices in Jinja, the city on Lake Victoria in which Bach’s clinic was set up. Jinja is Uganda’s second-largest city, so we’re not talking about a hamlet here.

So when I heard that the New Yorker had written about this story on the whole matter last month, I figured this would be another screamer of a piece ripping up folks who go to Africa for evangelistic reasons.

Instead, I found a nuanced piece by Ariel Levy, a Jewish writer who brought her faith into the picture to give a whole different read as to why a young Christian woman set up a health clinic, called Serving His Children, over there in the first place. I started digging into who Levy is and found some pretty surprising stuff.

More on her in a moment. First, the story. This section is long, but essential:

Twalali was one of more than a hundred babies who died at Serving His Children between 2010 and 2015. The facility began not as a registered health clinic but as the home of Renée Bach — who was not a doctor but a homeschooled missionary, and who had arrived in Uganda at the age of nineteen and started an N.G.O. with money raised through her church in Bedford, Virginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help the needy, and she believed that it was Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished children. Bach told their stories on a blog that she started. “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote in 2011. “I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”

In January, 2019, that blog post was submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed against Bach and Serving His Children in Ugandan civil court.


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What’s happening to the religious makeup of the world (including in locked-up China)?

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What’s happening to the religious makeup of the world (including in locked-up China)?

THE QUESTION:

What are the long-term trends for the world’s religions? What’s the situation in China?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Broad-brush, Christianity remains the world’s largest and most widespread religion and will still be so in 2050 thanks to steady growth in “Global South” nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, Islam is steadily gaining ground.

Declines relative to the population have been suffered by folk religions in China, tribal traditions elsewhere, and the ranks of the non-religious. In 1800, Christianity and Islam together represented a third of the world population but these outreach-oriented faiths will encompass a projected 64 percent by 2050.

All that and much more is reported in the newly published third edition of the"World Christian Encyclopedia" (Edinburgh University Press, 998 pages, $215.95), compiled by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, an evangelical Protestant school in Massachusetts. It was edited by the center’s Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo, who led a team of 40 along with hundreds of expert consultants across the globe.

The encyclopedia contains unique statistics and analysis on each religious group that exists within each of the world’s 234 nations and territories, with elaborate information on cultural groupings and 45,000 Christian denominations. Quite obviously, this monumental reference work belongs in every serious library in the English-speaking world.

Here are the estimates comparing major religions’ size as of 1970 with their current numbers.


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Hot tip: Here's almost everything you ever wanted to know about every religion everywhere

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The third edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, just published, boasts accurately of being “the most comprehensive attempt to quantify adherents of Christianity and other world religions.”

The 998 pages are packed not only with such statistics but overview articles and then descriptions about every religion and 45,000 denominations of Christianity as found within each of the world’s 234 nations and territories. This monumental project is the work of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Yes, this is a missionary-minded evangelical Protestant school, but the center's research is widely acknowledged as objective and authoritative. (The center planned a related conference on world religions March 30-April 1 that looks interesting and has just postponed it until September due to The Virus.)

The 40-member encyclopedia team drew upon the 1982 and 2001 editions in a 50-year project now led by the center’s Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo. The latter is also a fellow at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. Zurlo (gzurlo@gordonconwell.edu) can help media reviewers obtain access to a full electronic text of the encyclopedia on a “personal use only” basis.

This volume obviously belongs in any serious library, including those at media companies, despite the $215.95 price.

More immediately, there are breaking news articles here for the taking that will be enhanced by maps, charts and graphs by your art department. Here’s a sampling of research findings.

* The encyclopedia’s major theme is that “Global South” nations are the population center of Christianity after long dominance by Europe and North America. Veteran religion writers are generally aware of this shift, but consider the particulars.


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Christian Zionism: Theology shmology. We're talking about another culture war punching bag

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Christian Zionism: Theology shmology. We're talking about another culture war punching bag

I’m back — for which I apologize to those readers who hoped to be rid of me. What I will not apologize for is my good fortune to have, so far, outwitted the health-care industry. This despite what I consider some lamebrain screw ups by a few of its practitioners.

Not that I’m totally ungrateful. Medical surgeons possess extraordinary mechanical skills. Just like the best computer technicians and car mechanics. The problem is that health care has become way too specialized, leaving some practitioners unable to consider the patient as a unified field. Drug “A” may be great for gout, but how does it interact with statins? Can beta blockers negatively impact kidney function? You get the idea. Think holistically because your doctor may not. Ask questions. Do your own research.

But enough. Last I checked Get Religion was still about the business of journalism about religion. So consider this our segue.

The occasion for my return is a review of a new book on Christian Zionism that ran in the liberal American Jewish publication The Forward. For reasons beyond all sound judgement, some of the more anarchistic voices at GR thought I might want to offer an opinion. Clearly a setup, but how could I refuse?

The review in question ran under a challenging headline: “Why Everything You Think You Know About Christian Zionism Is Wrong,” and was penned by Rafael Magarik, an English professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

The book was produced by religion and foreign policy maven Daniel G. Hummel, who is associated with Upper House, which for lack of a better term I’ll call a sort of a Christian think tank at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hummel titled his book, “Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, And U.S.-Israeli Relations.”

I have not read Hummel’s book, and I probably won’t (over the years I’ve read my fill on the subject, both pro and con). Nor, I’d wager, will most of those who already have a firm opinion about the intent, value or theological underpinnings of contemporary Christian Zionism.

Which is entirely the point of Magarik’s review — a verbal dart aimed at the vast majority of liberal Jews (in Israel and elsewhere), and equally liberal Christians, not to mention Muslims of all ideological stratums, who look upon Christian Zionists with utter political disdain.


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If you feel snarky about missionary John Chau’s death, read this elegant GQ update

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Here’s a confession: when the world learned of John Chau’s death late last year when he tried to make contact with the isolated and violent residents of North Sentinel Island, I had one immediate reaction: “That young man was a fool.”

I admit that with shame. Like Chau did, I believe that the good news of Jesus should be spread across the world; that everyone should hear this good news; that serving Jesus may well mean becoming a martyr; and that missionaries discern God’s clear direction to take the good news to a specific group of people somewhere in the world.

Unlike Chau, I do not believe this means disregarding laws meant to protect outsiders from probably fatal encounters with the Sentinelese, and to protect the Sentinelese from unwelcome visits by outsiders. There are still thousands of people groups throughout the world that have never heard anything of Jesus Christ. Obeying Christ’s Great Commission hardly obliges a missionary to attempt a mission among people quite likely to kill first and ask no questions later.

Nevertheless, I was haunted by the hostility of my initial reaction to Chau’s death.

I cannot forget Christ’s warning about calling someone a fool, or about the noble church tradition of the holy fool. Maybe God did call Chau to this quixotic errand. I tremble at that thought, and then can only find comfort in the thought that only God and Chau know the answer.

Now comes Doug Bock Clark of GQ, whose work I have praised before, when he wrote about the underground railroad leading out of North Korea. He has also written in stunning detail for GQ about Otto Warmbier’s ordeal as a prisoner in North Korea, and of the brazen murder of Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. If a report is set in Asia and it involves complex details, Clark is the man for the job.

As soon as I saw the web headline to Clark’s 10,000-word essay — “The American Missionary and the Uncontacted Tribe” — I knew that Chau would benefit from Clark’s style of extensive research and elegant writing.


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NPR: Female missionary to Uganda story brings out 'no white savior' syndrome

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There’s a curious story on NPR’s site about an American woman who moved to Uganda years ago, set up a Christian charity to help malnourished kids and now is being sued by two Ugandan women who claimed that her negligence led to their children’s deaths.

Renee Balch, who moved back to west-central Virginia after it was clear things were going south in Africa, is fighting back, claiming she had nothing to do with these deaths.

There’s enough about this story that raises a lot of questions about the high rates of death in certain African countries; about foreigners who travel to Africa to do what they can to help and whether they should be held liable for any of these deaths. The story picks up with an anecdote (which I am skipping) about a critically ill child whom Bach (allegedly) nearly killed through lack of medical knowledge.

Ten years ago, Renee Bach left her home in Virginia to set up a charity to help children in Uganda. … Bach was not a doctor. She was a 20-year-old high school graduate with no medical training. And not only was her center not a hospital — at the time it didn't employ a single doctor.

Yet from 2010 through 2015, Bach says, she took in 940 severely malnourished children. And 105 of them died.

Now Bach is being sued in Ugandan civil court.

One in nine kids dying is not a good ratio. But, would these kids have died anyway? Was Bach’s facility the only one that was available?

Uganda has an infant mortality rate of 49 deaths per 1,000 people, but when Bach moved there, it was around 83.4, which is very high.

How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country? To understand, it helps to know that the place where Bach set up her operation — the city of Jinja — had already become a hub of American volunteerism by the time she arrived.

A sprawling city of tens of thousands of people on the shores of Lake Victoria, Jinja is surrounded by rural villages of considerable poverty. U.S. missionaries had set up a host of charities there. And soon American teens raised in mostly evangelical churches were streaming in to volunteer at them.

Bach was one of these teens. On her first trip, in 2007, she worked at a missionary-run orphanage — staying on for nine months.

Once back home in Virginia, Bach — now 19 years old — came to a life-changing conclusion: She should move to Jinja full time and set up her own charity.

I googled “missionary groups in Jinja” and sure enough, there’s a bunch.


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