A would-be evangelist on North Sentinel Island
A lot of controversy has sprung up over John Chau, a would-be Christian evangelist who was killed by people he was trying to evengelise on the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. American John Allen Chau killed on North Sentinel Island by native tribe said “God sheltered” him from authorities – CBS News:
Police say Chau knew that the Sentinelese resisted all contact by outsiders, firing arrows and spears at passing helicopters and killing fishermen who drift onto their shore. His notes, which were reported Thursday in Indian newspapers and confirmed by police, make clear he knew he might be killed.
I have followed the controversy mainly through questions asked on the Quora web site. One such question was “Why did John Chau refer to Sentinel Island as the ‘last stronghold of Satan’?” and my answer was:
Only he would be able to answer that, and he isn’t around to ask.
If he actually did say that it was the last stronghold of Satan, then I believe he was simply wrong. Satan has strongholds in the boardrooms of arms manufacturers selling arms to Saudi Arabia to use against Yemen, to give just one example, but why he thought that didn’t count and that the isolation of people on an island did count as a stronghold of Satan is something only he could answer.
John Chau’s actions and motivations are certainly of interest to missiologists, but the reactions of other people to them are just as interesting, if not more so.
One of the questions along these lines was, With the historical destruction of indigenous tribes and cultures, can the excuse “they were just bringing them Christianity” ever be justified?
The answers to that one revealed a lot of anti-Christian bigotry and prejudice, especially from Western secularists. The implication behind that question, and most of the answers to it, is that Christians are chiefly responsible for the destruction of indigenous tribes and cultures, and that such destruction is a bad thing.
The impression I get from many of the answers to such questions, however, is that they are motivated more by hatred of Christianity than by love of indigenous tribes and cultures. Destruction of indigenous cultures is seen as a bad thing when Christians do it, because it is Christians doing it, but perhaps some might have a different view if the indigenous tribes and cultures in question practise things like female genital mutilation that those who criticise the Christian missionaries also disapprove of..
[image error]I was recently reading a book that raised just such questions. It was fiction, a whodunit set in Botswana, called Death of the mantis. I recommend it to anyone who is concerned about such issues, because it looks at them from many different points of view, and doesn’t come up with pat answers. My review of the book is here, with more information about it.
In Death of the Mantis the indigenous people in question are the Kalahari Bushmen, and their culture includes their hunter-gatherer way of life, which conflicts with that of the majority of cattle-keeping Batswana.
For hundreds of years the wild animals hunted by the Bushmen were free like the air. The idea that wild animals could be “owned” by anyone would have seemed utterly bizarre in the southern Africa of two centuries ago. It is capitalism, rather than Christianity, that has changed that. See, for example, The Limpopo buffalo that sold for R168m – Destiny Man.
Where is the average Kalahari Bushman going to get that kind of money for the equivalent of a week’s grocery shopping? And if the week’s grocery shopping includes what Western culture regards as “endangered species”, then I suspect it suddenly becomes for many people who criticise Christian missionaries a very “justifiable” excuse for the destruction of indigenous culture.
Many of the questions on Quora, like those in real life, tend to beg the question. The answer to the question “Do missionaries destroy cultures?” is assumed to be “Yes”, and that is a given from which everything else proceeds. There is no need for the legal principle of audi alteram partem (hear the other side), because it assumed that there isn’t another side. But for those willing to look at both sides, see here: Should a society let itself be influenced by other cultures or not?
The answer of the North Sentinelese is clearly a resounding “No”.
The answer of Donald Trump, with his tariff and physical walls, and the British Brexiteers, is less absolute and unequivocal, but apparently motivated by similar sentiments. Others appear to be more open, though it is rare to find one that is completely open, and Apartheid was an attempt to close off and isolate cultures from each other.
