The problem of
Christian missionaries
BY Koenraad Elst
http://swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/archives/byauthor/koenraadelst/tpocm.html
My involvement
Now that the dust has settled, let us have a look at the problem of Christian missionary
activities which raised a storm during the past autumn and winter. In a debate on
conversions, it may be useful to hear the voice of a convert. I was raised as a Roman
Catholic in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, which was for centuries a
Catholic frontline region against Protestant Holland and Masonic-secularist France, and a
top-ranking provider of missionaries.
One of my uncles is a missionary in Brazil, another was a parish priest in
Antwerp until his death. We were raised with the example impressed on our minds of
countrymen like Father Constant Lievens, who built the Jesuit mission in Chotanagpur in
the 19th century, and of Father Herman Rasschaert, the Jesuit who was martyred there in
1964. He had tried to prevent a tribal, largely Christian mob from killing some local
Muslims in revenge for the mass-killing of Garo tribals, also mostly christianized, by
Muslims in nearby East Pakistan. His death is included as number 2 in the list of
"atrocities on Christians" circulated by the United Christian Forum for Human
Rights. I still have the highest regard for Father Rasschaert, though I have become
skeptical of the claim made in all the press reports and literary narrations of his
martyrdom that he was killed by "Hindus": in the Christian version, tribals are
emphatically "not Hindus", except when they misbehave.
In a sociological sense, I am still part of the Catholic
community, meaning that my children go to a Catholic school, I am a member of the
Christian-Democratic trade-union, cultural foundation and so on. I have also retained my
sympathy for the causes of Catholic nations, like Quebec's sovereignty and the Irish
cause, and I can still argue the Catholic point against Protestantism or refute the
allegation that the Inquisition killed millions of people or that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi
collaborator. I still think highly of the Catholic social teachings and occasionally
reread passages from Saint Thomas Aquinas. And I would still feel at home in the company
of a Lievens or a Rasschaert, or their successors. Nevertheless, I am no longer a Roman
Catholic. I am a secular humanist with an active interest in religions, particularly
Taoism and Hinduism, and keeping a close watch on the variegated Pagan revival in Europe.
The reason why I became an apostate has nothing to do with revolt against Christian
morality, nor with indignation at the inhuman persecutions of unbelievers in various
countries and ages, nor with a rejection of the Church's political alliances, Left or
Right. The real reason simply is that the basic doctrine of Christianity in all its
denominations is untrue. While ultimate truth may elude us, it remains perfectly possible
to decide on the untruth of a given doctrine, when it is found to be contrary to reason
and to observable facts.
Christianity, a mistake
The essence of Christianity is a belief, a particular truth claim:
that Jesus was the sole son of God and that he redeemed mankind from sin by his
crucifixion and resurrection. Modern Bible scholarship has made that belief untenable.
Jesus was a troubled personality whose beliefs were entirely within the Jewish tradition,
at least within its extremist fringe of people who expected Judgment Day to arrive within
their own lifetime. He never founded a new religion, Saint Paul being the real inventor of
Christianity as a sect separate from Judaism. The Gospels are highly doctored texts,
rewritten to suit the theological developments and political needs of the budding Church.
Thus, the injunction to pay taxes to the Romans ("give unto Caesar...") and the
depiction of Roman governor Pilate as innocent of Jesus' crucifixion were included to
mollify the Romans after the defeat of the Jewish revolt in AD 70. Most importantly, Jesus
never rose from the dead. The decisive difference between the dead and the living is that
the living are someplace in this world, while Jesus, like all dead men, is nowhere to be
found in this world. He was spirited away in the "Ascension to Heaven", which
amounts to dying: he left this world. Of course you could say that "his spirit lives
on", but that is equally true of other inspiring characters, both historical and
fictional.
The reason why Christians are a shrinking minority in Europe is that an
educated population, which applies its mind to religious questions, cannot keep on
managing the contradiction between this faith and reason forever. This is not for want of
trying: generations of Christian intellectuals have tried to harmonize faith and reason.
The Saint Thomas institute (Leuven, Belgium) where I studied philosophy was founded in
1889 as an instrument to prove the basic unity between Aquinas' Christian philosophy and
modern science. But to no avail: most professors teaching there now are no longer
practising Catholics themselves. Many moderns including myself have discovered that
religion is still relevant, that the religious urge has survived the interiorization of
the scientific worldview, that "the 21st century will either be religious or not be
at all" (André Malraux); but the Christian belief cannot satisfy that religious
need, because we cannot base our lives on fairy-tales anymore.
One of the great surprises which Indian "secularism"
offers to people familiar with genuine secularism, is that it totally shuns and even
condemns the fundamental questioning of Christian (or Islamic) dogma. For ten years I have
closely followed the Indian communalism debate, and not once have I seen a
"secularist" mentioning the debunking of Christian beliefs, still the single
most revolutionary achievement of the secular study of religions. Even non-essential
Christian fairy-tales like the story of apostle Thomas's arrival and martyrdom in South
India are repeated as nauseam in "secularist" pieces on the current missionary
crisis.
If Christianity were true
No less surprising is that even the Hindutva campaigners against Christian proselytization
are silent about what ought to be their strongest, most peaceful yet most devastating
weapon: the fictional nature of Christian dogma. On the contrary, quite a few of them have
lapped up Theosophical stories about Jesus having come to India for his spiritual
training, and returning there after his resurrection. Their point is that Jesus' message
has been "distorted" by the Church (which is true but hardly proves that he was
somehow a Hindu), and that Jesus himself would therefore have abhorred the missionary
subversion in India, his Gurubhumi. It is probable that Jesus' injunction to "go and
teach all nations" is a Pauline interpolation, repellent to the Jewish Christians led
by Jesus' brother James, but it is quite certain that Jesus was a preacher who wanted
people to follow him.
The entire Hindutva argument against the missionaries ignores the question
of the truth of Christianity. Yet, the answer to that question makes all the difference
when we want to evaluate the practical problems underlying the present crisis. Consider
the allegation that missionaries use material rewards to induce conversions. This is
absolutely correct, as anyone from Christian countries can testify: in religion class, we
were told that "material help is a necessary prerequisite for spiritual help",
so we should put some of our pocket-money into the donation box for the missions. On the
Evangelical programme of Dutch television, an evangelist recently boasted how he converted
Nepalese tribals at a fast rate by giving them a kind of walkman reciting the whole Bible
in their own language, a modern equivalent of the trinkets given to African chieftains by
Vasco da Gama. It is likewise well-attested that missionaries use deception to over-awe
illiterate people, e.g. staged miracle healings. This material inducement or exploitation
of gullibility may seem unethical from a non-Christian viewpoint, but it looks very
different once you assume that the Christian belief is true. In that case, remaining a
Pagan means eternal damnation, while conversion brings eternal salvation, and the greater
good of eternal salvation amply justifies the minor evil of bribes and deception needed to
lure people into the true faith.
The Sangh Parivar alleges that conversion is
"anti-national", a position supported in part by the historical fact of
Christian separatism in the Northeast (and, less well-known, of 1947 intrigues between
Jharkhand leaders and the Muslim League). But here again, anti-national designs should be
evaluated differently if Christianity is true. In my country, secular nationalists recall
with sadness that in ca. 1600, Belgium failed to gain independence from Catholic Spain
while Holland succeeded, so that Holland turned Protestant while Belgium remained
Catholic. The Catholic position on this national defeat is different: the Dutch heretics
may have won their national struggle but they are now burning in hell, while the Belgians
lost their freedom but won their eternal salvation by remaining in the true faith. Certain
things are more important than nationalism. If Christianity is true, we must support the
strengthening of the faith in all Christian pockets in India, if necessary by separating
them from Hindu India. But the best would then be to convert the whole of India, which
would turn Indian Christians into the greatest patriots. 4. Failure of the Hindutva
critique The Sangh Parivar is disinclined to educate its cadres on the illusory nature of
Christianity, possibly because this would entail the tedious job of clearing the
superstitious deadwood from Hinduism as well. It avoids polemicizing against Christianity
as such and prefers to focus on the historical and contemporary misbehaviour of Christian
missionaries: the Goa inquisition, the destruction of the Mylapore Shiva temple near
Chennai, the expulsion of Riyang tribals from Christian-dominated Mizoram. These arguments
about Christian fanaticism are valid and deserve being repeated by secularists, but to
Christians they miss the point. They are well aware that all men are sinful, a basic
Christian doctrine, so the sins of the missionaries do not nullify the truth of Christian
dogma.
Moreover, their money and media power and their alliance with
"secularist" and Islamic forces allows them to trump any reference to Christian
misbehaviour with impressions of far worse sins on the Hindutva side. When over a thousand
Hindus are killed and a quarter million Hindus ethnically cleansed in Kashmir, the world
media doesn't even notice, but watch the worldwide hue and cry when a few local riots take
place and a few missionaries are killed by unidentified tribal miscreants. Christian Naga
terrorists have been killing non-Christians for decades on end, and this has never been an
issue with the world media, except to bewail the "oppression" of the Nagas by
"Hindu India". The clumsy Sangh people cannot hope to outdo the Christian lobby
at the blame game when you consider how well-crafted the recent Christian media blitz has
been, how aptly designed to satisfy the needs of the world media. The India-watchers
abroad were standing shamefaced because the predicted "fascism" of the BJP
government had failed to materialize, yielding instead a year of communal cease-fire with
the lowest number of riot victims in decades. So they welcomed the "persecution"
of Christians as a gift from heaven.
An additional reason why Hindutva spokesmen cannot expect to
convince world opinion, is that some of their allegations against the missionaries are
demonstrably wrong. Most importantly, they are denying the plea that the missionaries are
rendering a "selfless service". To appreciate how this criticism is mistaken,
let us first understand on what it is based, and in what respects it is right. The
Churches as such are of course not investing all their money and manpower in Indian
schools and hospitals as a matter of selfless service: they do want to gain from it, viz.
a harvest of souls. The missionary network is willing to give, but just like the Devil, it
wants your soul in return. Even in the elite schools where no direct proselytization is
attempted, Hindu pupils are subtly encouraged towards skepticism of their own religion,
and are also used as political pawns when Christian demands (e.g. reservations for Dalit
Christians) are aired through pupils' demonstrations or school strikes. This way,
Christian schools become a power tool rather than a service, and it was to serve as a
power tool that these schools were created in the first place. When the Sangh Parivar,
without the benefit of foreign funding, opens schools in tribal areas, this is decried as
"infiltration", as creating channels of "indoctrination", but such
suspicions are at least equally warranted in the case of Christian schools.
At the individual level, there is yet another gainful
element in the missionary vocation except for the satisfaction of converting people. In
many Protestant denominations, the mission is actually a profitable career, but more than
the material aspects, there is a psychological stake involved. People who would be
nobodies in Germany, the US or Australia, can derive enormous ego gratification from a
missionary career: suddenly they are promoted to a frontline post in the war against
idolatry, they are praised back home as messiahs to the poor lepers even when stationed in
non-leprosy areas, they are revered by some of the illiterate villagers for teaching them
beliefs which would only provoke laughter back home, and strangest of all, they are
applauded by "secularists" whose Western counterparts would prefer to put an end
to the whole circus of the Christian Churches. It is rewarding to be a missionary in
India, and much safer than China or Pakistan.
And yet, the element of "selfless service" in the
missionary project should also be acknowledged. Firstly, it is a fact that quite a few
Christians sent for work in the missions in India are genuinely not interested in
conversion work. A Flemish nun said on Flemish TV early this year: "I went to India
to convert people. But it is India which has converted me." Not that she turned to
any Indian religion herself, but she is doing sterling social work among housemaids in
Mumbai regardless of religious identities. Of course, Church strategists calculate that in
spite of their non-missionary vocation, such social workers are helpful in creating
goodwill towards Christianity, preparing the ground for future work by real missionaries.
Secondly, even the proselytizers are altruistic, at
least subjectively : eventhough their desire for "harvesting souls" is
objectively a peculiar type of greed, they are convinced that they are only rendering a
service to their converts. It is for the love of God and their fellow-men that they leave
their comfortable lives in the West behind and settle in the heat and dust of a jungle
village there to destroy the tribal religion. Yes, for love. If you believe that Pagans
are bound for eternal hellfire, baptizing them is the greatest gift you can possibly give
them. They are not evil but simply deluded, and the evil they work is the result of lack
of knowledge (as Socrates already understood). So, we are again face to face with the
basic issue: Christian belief. The Hindutva spokesmen are completely misconceiving the
problem of proselytization unless they inform themselves about the modern evaluation of
Christian beliefs.
Proselytizing and politics
Another mistake often made in Hindutva polemic against the missionaries is to deny that
their motive is Christian religion. It is said that their real motive is political, that
they serve the interests of a secular entity, typically European colonialism or American
hegemonism. There is a historical basis for this suspicion, e.g. the militantly secularist
French Third Republic (1870-1940) encouraged the missions as de facto French outposts and
agents d'influence in the colonies. Conversely, tribal anti-British rebellions in India
typically started with attacks on mission posts. It is also likely that during the Cold
War, the CIA supported attempts to set up a Christian state in India's Northeast as an
American foothold in Asia. Yet, apart from being largely anachronistic now, such scenarios
simply don't represent the main thrust of missionary activity.
The Churches have a history of accomodating all kinds of
political forces and regimes, and they can be quite patriotic too. In some countries where
society was very decentralized, esp. the Germanic and Slavic parts of Europe, the Church
played a decisive role in nation-building, and it is now quite hard to separate Russian
patriotism from Orthodox Christianity. Even with India being predominantly non-Christian,
the Churches have largely accepted the fact of India and are abstaining from risky
involvements in separatism or American intrigue. It is a simple calculation: if Nagaland
would manage to break away, this could hurt the position of the Churches in the rest of
India.
Another historical development is that with the demographic stagnation of
Christendom in Europe and North America, and with the emptying of the churches in Europe,
most Churches have mentally prepared for the shift of their centre of gravity to the Third
World. Very soon, the average Christian will be non-white. Already, one third of all new
Jesuits are Indians. For the Catholic Church in particular, priestly recruitment is
targeting India more than any other country: while most other peoples tend to dislike or
ridicule the celibacy imposed on Catholic priests (which is why in Africa, many priests do
have a common-law wife in defiance of Church rules), Indian culture holds it in high
esteem. Of course, none of this alters the historical fact that Christianity is a foreign
religion, but depicting it as something which the West is trying to force on India is
anachronistic. The indigenization of missionary work has advanced to the point that all
over North India, you find Christian institutions manned by Kerala Christians.
It will not do to say that "Christianity is not a religion
but a political ideology masquerading as religion", for even where Church interests
are closely intertwined with certain political forces, the deeper motivation of most
Church agents is definitely religious. Moreover, if American power collapses and there is
no political danger anymore in a foreign connection of the missions, would that make the
replacement of native religion with Christianity acceptable? At this point, the Hindutva
movement has to decide whether it is a nationalist movement (as frequently proclaimed in
its efforts to sound secular) or a Hindu movement. From a Hindu viewpoint, the Indian
Republic's unity and integrity are necessary to provide Hindu civilization with a home,
but lose their importance if India ceases to be Hindu. The problem with Christian
proselytizers is not their degree of patriotic or foreign loyalty, but their determination
to destroy the native culture.
Is violence warranted?
An
aspect of the current crisis which no "secularist" would dare to mention, is
that the Churches have a fawning respect for strength. They lick the boot that kicks them,
and bite the hand that feeds them. When millions of Christians were persecuted in the
Soviet bloc, Christians in the cosy West started the quasi-Marxist fad of Liberation
Theology. Now that Christians are oppressed in Islamic countries, the Christian media are
full of sugary rhetoric on Muslim-Christian dialogue. In India, the Christians have formed
an anti-Hindu front with Muslims and Communists, as has been obvious once again in the
support which the Christians have received during the recent missionary crisis from Imam
Bukhari, A.G. Noorani, Syed Shahabuddin and other veterans of the Babri Masjid cause, who
gratefully remember how the Christian media supported the Muslim side in the Ayodhya
conflict.
These media give far less coverage to the numerous acts of terror
against Pakistani Christians, because it would only make things worse for them. So they
save their fire for the propaganda war against the Hindus, who have given Christians
hospitality for a full sixteen centuries, and who today give them facilities and
constitutional privileges which contrast with the restraints imposed on them in most Asian
countries. Since the missionaries have no hope of converting Pakistan, they concentrate on
converting India and consequently vilify Hinduism much more than Islam.
So, there seems to be a connection between beating the Churches
and gaining their friendship, as also between generosity to the Churches and earning their
hostility. There is a name for this peculiar psychological disorder, but that need not
detain us here. The point is that one could understand impatient young Hindus who conclude
that force is the language which the missionaries understand best. Beat the padre and he
will start praising you, right? Yet, they would be mistaken to think that force will
further the Hindu interests.
First of all, there is a moral problem. Hindus are
right to be skeptical of Mahatma Gandhi's unbalanced and masochistic rejection of the use
of force in all circumstances, which amounts to submission to the aggressor. But they
should not go to the other extreme. Let us take a leaf here from Saint Thomas Aquinas's
"just war" theory. The doctor angelicus taught that the use of force should not
be ruled out altogether, but should always be subject to strict conditions: it should be a
defensive war, all peaceful means of achieving the war aims should be exhausted first,
there should be a reasonable chance of victory, the non-combatants must be spared, and so
on. To a mature mind, these conditions ought to be self-evident, especially to Hindus who
should recognize something of their own notion of Dharma-Yuddha here (contrary to
Khalistani and "secularist" usage, Dharma Yuddha is not a Hindu equivalent of
Jihad, but a war restrained by a code of ethics and chivalry). How do these principles
apply in the present conflict? The Hindu side is definitely on the defensive, but it
cannot claim to have exhausted all peaceful means of countering the missionary offensive.
It has not even challenged the missionaries to a debate on the irrational beliefs in which
they try to indoctrinate Indian tribals. In Sri Lanka in the 1870s, the Buddhists
challenged the Jesuits to public debates, and it is generally acknowledged that their good
performance in these debates has stemmed the tide of conversions to Christianity.
Why are Hindus too lazy to follow their example? As for the
chance of victory, this moral condition brings in a strategic consideration: can Hindu
society gain from violent attacks on the missionaries? Lenin has observed that it is
necessary to gain the moral ascendancy before starting the next phase, that of forceful
action. Obviously, the Hindus do not enjoy the moral ascendancy. Destroying Hindu idols is
a standard ingredient of the conversion process in tribal villages, yet it is only when a
Christian church is damaged for once that the incident is even registered. There has been
plenty of violence by Christian converts against their Pagan neighbours, but they have
been getting away with it, their crimes go unreported and remain unpunished. Already in
the 1950s, anthropologists like Verrier Elwin and Christoph von Fuehrer-Haimendorf
described how conversions destroy communal life in tribal villages, yet even mentioning
this widespread phenomenon is denounced as "anti-Christian hate propaganda".
Christian clerics subverting tribal culture are "rendering selfless service",
Hindu sadhus encouraging tribals to stand by their own traditions are "communal
hate-mongers". Clearly, it is the missionaries who have the moral ascendancy, and
consequently, it is they who will reap the moral and political harvest of any physical
conflict between Hindus and Christians.
If Hindus want to win the war against the missionaries, they will have to
start using their brains instead of their itching fists. They will first of all have to
define the problem correctly. Thus, no more breath should be wasted on the discussion
whether Christianity is a foreign religion. Of course, Christianity originated in distant
Palestine, and the first Christian community came as hapless refugees seeking asylum in a
country which they did not arrogantly claim as their own. But if some people want to deny
these facts and insist that Christianity is indigenous, just let them. The question is not
whether a belief system is indigenous.
As Bal Thackeray has aptly said: we shouldn't take the Swadeshi
idea too far, for then we would have to do without the electric lightbulb. The law of
gravity was discovered by some paleface in distant Europe, yet even RSS schools teach it.
If Christianity is true, then we should all embrace it, no matter where it originated.
Conversely, if Christianity is untrue, we should inform everyone that a quack belief is
being promoted, in violation of the Constitutional injunction that Indian citizens should
develop the scientific temper. And we should imitate the missionaries in extending our
heartfelt love to them by patiently liberating them from their false religion.
A question to the Christians
In the 4th century AD, Christianity became the dominant and then
the established religion in the Roman Empire. The Sassanian rulers of Iran wisely foresaw
that the Syrian Christians within their borders would develop into a fifth column of their
powerful neighbour. Their solution was to persecute the Syrian Christians. Some of these
Christians fled Iran and one group, led by Thomas Cananeus (whose name would later get
confused with that of Thomas Didymos the apostle), arrived on India's Malabar coast and
asked for refuge. The generous and hospitable Hindus granted the wish of the refugees and
honoured their commitment of hospitality for more than a thousand years. The Christian
world has no record at all of any such consistent act of hospitality: the only
non-Christian community which they tolerated in their midst were the Jews, and the record
of Jewish-Christian co-existence is hardly bright. The Hindus, by contrast, have likewise
welcomed Jewish and Parsi communities. Unfortunately, the Portuguese Catholics gained a
foothold on the Malabar coast and started forcing the Malabar Christians into the
structure of the Catholic Church. Even so, the Christians, who had gotten indianized
linguistically and racially, tried to maintain friendly relations with the Hindus. This
attitude is not entirely dead yet, a recent instance is the statement by a Kerala bishop
denying the false allegation that the BJP was behind the gang-rape of four nuns in Jhabua,
a lie still propagated by the missionary networks till today. However, many other Malabar
Christians have been integrated into the missionary project, and are now gradually
replacing the dwindling number of foreign mission personnel. My question to them: don't
you think that working for the destruction of the very religion which allowed your
community to settle and integrate, is an odd way to show your gratitude?
Conclusion
To conclude, I must say that I find it sad to see something
dying, especially when the dying entity is the religion in which I grew up. Yet, it is
mathematically certain that this will happen. Just as the belief in a flat earth cannot
survive mankind's inquisitive interest in the fact of nature, the beliefs underlying
Christianity will not survive the advancement in knowledge. It is painful to lose your
faith, to find your beliefs untenable or disproven, to feel like you have been fooled for
all those years, often in good faith by your beloved parents. But then, losing an illusion
is also liberating. And to avoid being trapped in that illusion is even better. The Indian
tribals can save themselves the trouble of outgrowing Christianity by not becoming
Christians in the first place. Therefore, all peaceful and legal efforts to stop Christian
conversion work in India's tribal regions deserve our support.
|