CHAPTER 80

Do Missionaries Destroy Cultures?

Don Richardson

Don Richardson pioneered work for World Team (formerly RBMU International) among the Sawi tribe of Irian Jaya (now New Guinea, Indonesia) from 1962–1977. Author of the missionary classics peace Child, Lords of the earth, and eternity in Their hearts, Don later served as minister-at-large for World Team and a frequent Perspectives class instructor.

Adapted from Don Richardson, Moody Magazine 8, 1976; The Washington post, August 3, 1976; and Wherever Magazine, a publication of TEAM.

Many people have acquired distorted stereotypes of missionaries. Often these views of missionaries and their work have more to do with portrayals in novels or movies than reality. It will serve us well to examine the actual record rather than to circulate distorted stereo-types. There have indeed been occasions when missionaries were responsible for needless destruction of culture. When Fray Diego de Landa, a Catholic missionary accompanying Spanish forces in the New World, discovered extensive Maya libraries, he knew what to do. He burned them all, an event, he said, the Maya “regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” The books, in his opinion, were all of “superstition and lies of the devil.” And so, in 1562, the poetry, history, literature, mathematics, and astronomy of an entire civilization went up in smoke. Only three documents survived de Landa’s misguided zeal.

This incident and many more show that missionaries have sometimes acted in a culture-destroying manner. Whether through misinterpreting the Great Commission, pride, culture shock, or simple inability to comprehend the values of others, missionaries have sometimes needlessly opposed customs they did not understand. Some of those local customs, if they had been rightly understood, might have served as communication keys for the gospel.

Critics seem to suggest that if only missionaries stay home, primitive people will be left undisturbed to live out the myth of the “noble savage.” In fact, pioneering missionary to Africa David Livingstone was preceded by Arab slave traders; Amy Carmichael, who served the poor in India, was preceded by victimizers who dragged boys and girls to the terrors of child prostitution in the temples. At times, evil forces like these have destroyed entire peoples. In North America, not only California’s Yahi but also the Hurons—and possibly twenty other Indian peoples—were pushed into extinction by land-hungry settlers. On one occasion, pioneers sent gifts to a tribe: wagonloads of blankets known to be infected with smallpox.

Only a small fraction of native peoples remains in Brazil from an estimated original population of four million. In the past seventy-five years, more than one tribe per year has disappeared. People may assume that the missing tribes have been absorbed into society, but this is not the case. Thousands have been brutally poisoned, machine-gunned, or dynamited from low-flying aircraft. Thousands more have succumbed to a slower, more agonizing death—death by apathy. Native men have even been known to cause their wives to miscarry. As encroachment caused their cultures to disintegrate, they have refused to bring children into a world they no longer understand.

Similar tragedies are unfolding throughout the world. There is widespread concern today for endangered animal species, and justly so, but hundreds of our own human species are in even greater danger. It may be a conservative figure to put the loss at five or six linguistically distinct people groups per year.

The “enlightened” policy of “leave them alone” clearly isn’t working. What, then, can halt the march of minority cultures toward extinction? Land grants and secular welfare programs may help on a physical level, but the greatest danger to many people groups is one that such programs cannot touch. The greatest danger is the breakdown of their sense of “right” relationship with the supernatural. Almost every indigenous culture acknowledges the supernatural and has strict procedures for “staying right” with it. When arrogant outsiders ridicule their beliefs—or shatter its mechanisms for staying right—severe disorientation sets in. Believing they are cursed for abandoning the old ways, they often become morose and apathetic. Believing they are doomed to die as a people, they act out a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Materialistic social workers and scientists can’t help these people. The people can sense even an unspoken denial of the supernatural, and it causes them to grow further depressed. Who then can best serve such people as spiritual advocates? None other than the ones popular myth has maligned as their number one enemy—the Bible-guided, Christ-honoring missionary.

A Case History

Brazil’s Wai Wai tribe had been reduced to its last sixty members less than a generation ago. This was due largely to foreign diseases and the Wai Wai custom of sacrificing babies to demons in attempts to prevent these diseases. Then a handful of missionaries identified themselves with the tribe, learned their language, gave them an alphabet, translated the word of God, taught Wai Wai to read, and brought modern medical care.

Far from denying the supernatural world, the missionaries showed the Wai Wai that a God of love reigned supreme over it and had prepared a way for them to “stay right” on a deeper level than they had ever dreamed. The Wai Wai now had a rational, even delightful, basis for not sacrificing babies to demons. The tribe began to grow and today is fast becoming one of Brazil’s more stable tribes. Wai Wai Christians are now teaching other dwindling groups of native peoples how to cope with the modern world through faith in Jesus Christ.

The missionaries introduced culture change, but it was not arbitrary, nor was it imposed by force. The missionaries brought only changes required for New Testament ethics and for the survival of the people. Often the two requirements overlap.

Once an interviewer chided me, perhaps facetiously, for persuading the Sawi tribe in Indonesia to renounce cannibalism. “What’s wrong with cannibalism?” he asked. “The Sawi practiced it for thousands of years. Why should they give it up now?”

“Can a people who practice cannibalism survive in the world today?” I asked in reply. “No, they cannot. The Sawi are now citizens of the Republic of Indonesia. The Indonesian Republic does not permit its citizens to eat other people. Therefore, part of my task was to give the Sawi a rational basis for voluntarily renouncing cannibalism before the guns of the police decided the issue.”

The Sawi are among perhaps four hundred Melanesian tribes just emerging from the Stone Age in Irian Jaya. Some years ago, the Netherlands ceded Irian Jaya, then called New Guinea, to Indonesia. Now over one hundred thousand Indonesians have migrated to Irian Jaya. Will the original inhabitants be prepared to cope with their more enterprising migrant neighbors? Or will they become extinct?

Scattered throughout Irian Jaya, there are a few hundred evangelical missionaries ministering the gospel to both the majority and minority peoples. Knowledgeable in Indonesian as well as in many of Irian’s four hundred minority languages, they are helping members of clashing cultures to understand each other. With the sympathetic help of the Indonesian government, the missionaries are optimistic that major culture shock may be averted. Already, through faith in Christ, tens of thousands of Irianese have begun a smooth transition into the modern world. Surely ethnic crises of this magnitude are too sensitive to be left to the dubious mercy of purely commercial interests. Missionaries, whose hearts overflow with the love of Christ, are the key.

RETURN TO LESSON 12: Christian Community Development

Photo courtesy of Sierra Madre Congregational Church, Sierra Madre, CA.