Missionaries…go the f**k home!
Here’s an interesting little bit of religious news. Various Christian missionaries have been attempting to contact self-isolating indigenous peoples in the Amazon for hundreds of years now. The problem is that the missionaries in question inevitably bring with them diseases that are completely new to the people they’re trying to save.
Which means that in the name of saving souls, the Christians in question often end up killing off pretty much everyone in the communities they mean to “serve.” This has been particularly true in recent months given Covid.
(If you’re interested, that’s pretty much how Europeans won the Americas. They brought diseases new to the Native Americans, and ended up exterminating something like 90% of the population, depending on which historian you believe.)
Okay, now, Brazil’s highest court has just ruled that missionaries don’t have a right to come stomping into any indigenous community they care to assault, and that peoples’ lives and health are at least as valuable as their souls.(1)
This, of course, won’t sit well with many an evangelical Christian, Protestant or Catholic, who will argue that a little thing like, you know, dying in agony shouldn’t get in the way of eternal salvation. Because, after all, you can’t go to heaven unless you hear the word of God from a preacher first. And God isn’t powerful enough to save anyone He just wants to. No. There is no salvation outside the Church. Silly old God. Thinking that He could do things without getting permission from the clergy first.
So, for the moment, the indigenous peoples may be safe from Christians and Covid. But there are two things that could change that. First, there’s Brazil’s nutcase president, Barroso, “The Trump of the Tropics,” a would-be despot who apparently regards the Native Americans as less than human, and who relies on the Protestant Evangelical vote to keep him in power. It is all too likely that he will ignore the court’s ruling or otherwise try to overturn it.
Second, it almost certain that missionaries, many of them American, will try to evade the law on the grounds that saving souls is more important than saving lives. You’ll recall some years back when a missionary attempted to contact an isolated people on an island in the Bay of Bengal.(2) These were the Sentinelese people, who are said to be among the most ancient peoples in the world. They probably came to the islands along with the first wave of modern humans who left Africa and traveled along the shores of India and Asia some 26,000 years ago. Their long isolation makes them uniquely vulnerable to foreign diseases.
The islanders have, however, an effective way of dealing with unwanted visitors. To wit, they kill them. Which is what they did to the missionary who tried to sneak onto the island in 2018.
While of course…naturally…one must not encourage so horrid a thing as murder…
Still…
Well, having dealt with a few proselytizing zealots in my time, and considering that Covid and other diseases could exterminate whole peoples…
Let’s just say I understand the temptation.
Sources:
1. “Brazil court upholds ban on missionaries trying to contact isolated Indigenous,”
by Fernanda Wenzel on 6 October 2021, Mongabay, https://news.mongabay.com/2021/10/brazil-court-emphasizes-ban-on-missionaries-trying-to-contact-isolated-indigenous/
2. “Killing Of American Missionary Ignites Debate Over How To Evangelize,” by Tom Gjelten, NPR, November 27, 20185:21 PM ET, Heard on All Things Considered, https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27/671285330/killing-of-american-missionary-ignites-debate-over-how-to-evangelize
Copyright©2021 Michael Jay Tucker
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