Secular Western Prejudices About Missions

In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins perfectly describes the assumptions that most people in the Western world now hold toward missions:

At best, in the suspicious modern view, the missionary impulse manifested ignorant paternalism. Discussion of missions today is all too likely to produce lame sexual jokes about ‘the missionary position.’ The phrase conjures a whole mythology, of deeply repressed young Victorians attempting to spread their corrosive moral and sexual notions among a more liberated native population, who do not need such Western inhibitions, and would only be harmed by them. For a modern secular audience, the notion that the missionary enterprise might involve any authentically religious content, or might in fact be welcomed, seems ludicrous. When in 1995, journalist Christopher Hitchens published his snide attack on Mother Teresa of Calcutta, he chose the title The Missionary Position, since that phrase so effectively proclaimed what every educated Westerner is presumed to believe about Christian activities in the Third World.

Of course, it is not long since that missionaries attracted deep respect, and even veneration: recall the heroic accounts of Dr. Livingstone. Twentieth-century stories in this tradition included The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) and the fictional portrait of the China missionary played by Gregory Peck in the classic 1944 film The Keys of the Kingdom. In stark contrast to these works, we think of the many negative depictions of missionaries in recent film and fiction. Movies in this hyper-critical tradition include Hawaii (1966), The Mission (1986)*, Black Robe (1991), and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991).

These recent works all offer a broadly similar view of the missionary enterprise. Above all, missions are wrongheaded, since all religious traditions are of roughly equal value, so what is the point of visiting the prejudices of one culture upon another? The vision of perfect relativism breaks down somewhat when Western Christianity is concerned, since it is seen as ipso factor a less valid and desirable model than those which it is seeking to replace. Commonly, Christianity is less an authentic religions than a package of Western prejudices and inhibitions. (41-42)

But, Jenkins adds, “If the modern missionary stereotype had any force, we can scarcely understand why the Christian expansion proceeded as fast as it did, or how it could have survived the end of European political power. There must have been a great deal more to Southern Christianity than the European-driven mission movement.” The vital growth of Christianity around the world “confound[s] the standard modern mythology about just how Christianity was, and is, exported to a passive or reluctant Third World. Over the past two centuries, at least, it might have been the European empires that first kindled Christianity around the world, but the movement soon enough turned into an uncontrollable brushfire” (53).

* I do not think that The Mission deserves to be among Jenkins’ list of the movies “hyper-critical” of missions. It is actually a very heroic depiction of Jesuit missionaries, though it presents the tragic compromises of the Catholic bureaucracy. It remains one of my favorite films.