THE MISSIONS AND THE DAMAGE DONE Sins of the Missionaries EVANGELISM’S QUEST TO CONQUER THE WORLD Stephen R. Welch ach year, Americans contribute millions of dollars through corporate-giving campaigns and Sunday tithes to support the ostensi- Ebly humanitarian work of overseas Christian missions. This work—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving medi- cine to the sick—seems a worthy cause, an outwardly selfless endeavor unsullied by the salacious headlines and bitter dis- putes now roiling the life of the church at home. But Christendom’s missionaries bear their share of contro- versy. Though most private donors and corporate sponsors are unaware of it, overseas missions 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 halfway across the globe, rarely reaches English-language media at all. Evangelism is waged in earnest in a large swath of the under- developed world, 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 ham- lets 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. Apparently, in the Unreached Bloc, “harvesting” A White missionary baptizes a native child in an African country during the 1950s. souls is an end that justifies almost any means. of . the Hindus of the world is targeted.”2 THE FINAL FRONTIER The church’s “soldiers” in the field get the message. As This subordination of humanitarian service to proselytization a Mumbai- (formerly Bombay) based missionary whom we is a matter of theology—evangelical Christians believe they shall call “Paul” (he asked that his real name be withheld) hold a divine mandate, their “Great Commission” from Jesus, attests, he and his colleagues in India have been unequivo- to spread their creed. But it is also a matter of policy. During cally instructed by their superiors to “work extra hard in the his 1998 visit to India, for example, Pope John Paul II bluntly conversion process and choose any means possible to convert stated that the Christianization of Asia is “an absolute priori- these heathens.” With such marching orders, earthly conse- ty” for the Catholic Church in the new millennium. He openly quences can be cavalierly disregarded. “It’s not how we con- 3 linked the Vatican agenda for that region to its conquest of vert that matters,” Paul insists. “Conversion is what counts.” the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His In India, considered one of the richest “harvest grounds” language, says Sanal Edamaruku, founder of New Delhi-based in the Unreached Bloc, the methods that missionaries like Rationalist International, leaves little room for interpretation, Paul employ have stirred seething bitterness and resentment even among secular and progressive-minded Indian citizens. among the “heathen” public. Perhaps no mission tactic galls “It is, in fact, not the fantasy of [Hindu nationalists],” he more bitterly than the intentional targeting of any society’s states, “but hard reality . nothing less than the conversion most vulnerable members—its children. Missionaries have long capitalized on the leverage they Stephan R. Welch is a freelance writer who specializes in exercise over India’s young through thousands of church-run religious extremism and related topics. hospitals, schools, and orphanages. For example, in a 1923 free inquiry http://www.secularhumanism.org 24 THE MISSIONS AND THE DAMAGE DONE report to Rome gleefully titled “The Spiritual Advantages of Famine and Cholera,” the Archbishop 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 congre- gation,” 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 flow so easily. Catholic priests had been instructed to learn some- thing of medicine in order to gain access to the bedsides of sick Hindu (and Muslim) children. There, on the pretext of administering medicine, priests secretly baptized the children before they died.5 What is troubling are the reports that this “...Church embezzlement has come to exceed the global income of the missionary enterprise by a full one billion dollars annually.” 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 classrooms for AFP PHOTO converts. In one highly publicized 1998 case, the I. P. Mission A sister belonging to the Missionaries of Charity closes the door to the main entrance of Girls’ School in the town of Rajkot, Gujurat State, issued New “Mother House” in Calcutta. Testaments to Hindu schoolgirls and pressured them to sign John Joseph, a Christian member of the National Minority declarations of Christian faith. The declaration, printed on Commission charged with investigating reported cases of per- the last page of each New Testament volume, stated that the secution, complained that most of the cases that hit national signatory was a “sinner” and that she had accepted the Lord and international headlines in recent years were nothing Jesus as her “personal savior.”7 but “colorful lies, half-truths or highly exaggerated stories Naturally, parents were outraged. Not only was this “conver- unleashed by Indian Christian NGOs and missionary groups sion” performed without their consent—illegal in India when to mobilize Christian donor agencies to open their wallets.”9 minors are involved—but several girls reported that school Even when homeland wallets are open, overseas ministries staff had intimidated them into signing the declaration. Parents feel strong pressure to pay at least part of their own way. Some and other Hindus marched to the school to protest, and a wave missionaries have become inventive fundraisers; others have of publicity quickly mounted. Embarrassed, the school recalled sought revenue in less ethical ways, as recent exposures of the New Testaments and published an apology with the promise child-adoption rackets in missionary orphanages have revealed. that “such literature” would not be distributed again.8 Like parochial schools, church-run orphanages have long Along with the apology, the school accurately denied a been fixtures of Christian evangelism in India. Legally wards rumor alleging that protesting parents had burned copies of of the orphanage, the children are usually raised as Christians, the Bible during their demonstration. Nevertheless, this rumor and it is not uncommon for those who do not find homes to circulated wildly in India’s English-language press and was adopt the church as their surrogate family and become priests later repeated uncritically by Western media, adding fuel to or nuns when they mature. This swells the ranks of native a propaganda campaign that claimed that Christians in India clergy, a welcome bonus given the dearth of seminary admis- faced regular persecution from Hindu fundamentalists. Since sions in the West. Distasteful as this may be to many Hindus, this campaign began, giving to missions in India has increased an Indian orphanage is within its rights to raise its wards as considerably—demonstrating that prosecution of the Great it sees fit. Still, those rights do not extend to fraud. But fraud Commission requires more than Bibles and baptismal water. is what twenty-five families encountered in 2001 in Arunachal 25 http://www.secularhumanism.org Feb. / March 2004 THE MISSIONS AND THE DAMAGE DONE Pradesh, a mountainous state in India’s northeast. with offers of food and medicine is not illegal per se, but is hardly ethical—especially given that so many of the tribals ILLEGAL AND UNETHICAL METHODS and dalits (“untouchables”) who are its typical targets have With the promise of providing their children an education, a little understanding of the very concept of religious “conver- Catholic priest from the neighboring district of Nagaland report- sion.” The notion of conversion as such is alien to Hinduism. edly charged parents 10,000 rupees per child (about US$250 Recognizing this, Mohandas K. Gandhi criticized the practice each) for tuition, room, and board at the St. Emmanuel Mission in no uncertain terms: “I strongly resent these overtures to Convent in Rajasthan, some 2,500 kilometers away in India’s utterly ignorant men,” he once protested, criticizing mission- northwest. That price was high, but parents considered it a bar- aries who, in order to gain converts, “dangle earthly paradises gain for a “sahib-run” (i.e., Western-style) school. Some parents in front of them [the dalits] and make promises to them which later developed misgivings, however, and traveled to Rajasthan they can never keep.”12 to visit their children. On arrival they were shocked to discover Whatever one calls the offer of material allurements in that the children were not enrolled at St. Emmanuel’s. In fact, exchange for religious conversion, it does not deserve the they were not in any school at all—they had been placed in an appellation “charity.” But this is lost on missionaries like orphanage.