Eastward, evangelical soldiers!
VIJAY PRASHAD
source: Frontline, Volume 22 – Issue 04, Feb. 12 – 25, 2005
U.S. evangelicalism does not represent Christianity but does represent the Bush administration’s agenda for global hegemony.
TWO days into United States President George W. Bush’s second term, The New York Times ran a major article on its front page. Entitled “Mix of Quake Aid and Preaching Stir Concern” and with a photograph of a friendly American woman surrounded by Sri Lankan children at a relief camp, the article detailed the slippage between concern and coercion in the work of U.S. missionaries. As an example, the article followed the work of missionaries from the evangelical Antioch Community Church based in Waco, Texas, who are working to convince people to “come to Christ”. A local Methodist minister, Reverend Sarangika Fernando observed their work and told The New York Times that he felt that the missionaries acted unethically: “They said, `In the name of Jesus, she must be cured!’ As a priest, I was really upset.” The main opposition to these U.S.-based missionaries, according to the Times, comes from the Sri Lankan Christian leaders. They see this intensified missionary activity as unnecessarily inflammatory in a country where there have already been attacks on their work by Buddhist chauvinists.
Antioch Community Church members Dayna Curry (left) and Heather Mercer in Islamabad, on November 16, 2001, after they were released by the Taliban
The Antioch Community Church is no stranger to controversy. In August 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan had arrested two of its members, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. Curry and Mercer came to Kabul with Shelter For Life, a Christian missionary and relief organisation that works in Afghanistan, Angola, Burundi, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, India, Kosovo, Macedonia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Western Sahara. The Taliban accused Curry and Mercer of proselytising, a crime during its regime in Afghanistan. Their incarceration played a small role in the U.S. government’s media campaign against the Taliban, and when they were released President Bush feted them on the White House lawn. Few denied that Curry and Mercer had gone to convert Afghans, for they had been part of a global movement of U.S. evangelicals whose goal is to harvest as many souls for their brand of Christianity. Neither Curry nor Mercer denied what they had done, and their pastor, Jeff Abshire, told the press that “they wanted to serve others and show God’s love for people through practical ways”, and “introduce people to God and see them `disciplined’ as followers of Christ”.
Revelations about the agenda of evangelical missionaries in periodicals like Tehelka and elsewhere have given fodder to anti-Christian forces in India. Hindutva is not new to this. After all, the legions provoked and carried out a violent anti-Christian campaign in Gujarat (in the Dangs district) in 1998 and the murder of the Australian missionary Graham Staines in 1999. As the Hindutva-led government flouted every nationalist aspiration and conducted a fire sale of domestic assets for transnational corporations, the anti-Christian crusade allowed its family organisations to claim to be “anti-foreign” or even “anti-imperialist”. The hue and cry over Sonia Gandhi’s “foreign origin” is of a piece with this sort of duplicity, and so are the recent rumbles about U.S. evangelicals. The Indian Constitution allows people “freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion” (Article 25i). This is unambiguous. People have the right to proselytise and convert, as long as this is done without physical and monetary coercion.
When Reverend Fernando expressed his misgivings about the Antioch church, he raised an important point: that the work of U.S. evangelicals should not be taken to represent the work of all Christians, and U.S. evangelicalism must not obscure the diversity of opinion on conversion and other issues in the planet’s Christian community. U.S. evangelicalism does not represent Christianity, but it does, however, represent the agenda of the Bush administration.
IN the 1980s, U.S. evangelicalism left its borders with ferocity. In Manila, U.S. evangelicals held an important conclave in 1989 that brought together church leaders from across the planet, and partnered them with U.S. churches. Luis Bush, head of the AD2000 & Beyond Movement, offered a concept for the new evangelism called 10/40: “The core of the unreached people of the world live in a rectangular-shaped window! Often called `The Resistant Belt’, the window extends from West Africa to East Asia, from 10 north to 40 north of the equator. If we are serious about providing a valid opportunity for every person to experience the truth and saving power of Jesus Christ, we cannot ignore the compelling reality of the 10/40 Window regions and its billions of impoverished souls.” The Manila meeting gave U.S. evangelicals the impetus to coordinate activity and to work in the10/40 Window among the poor. As the Manila manifesto put it, “the Gospel is Good News for the poor”, and since “the poor are lost, and the lost are poor”, with evangelicalism will come development and prosperity.
The exuberant missionary activity post-1989 is unusual for U.S. Christianity. Unlike the Spanish missionaries in South and Central America and the French missionaries in Canada, the English, German and Dutch missionaries in what would become the U.S. had a very limited career among the Amerindians. Fierce resistance by the Amerindians and underhand tactics by the settlers curtailed the success of missionaries. Only in the 1820s, during a period called the Great Awakening, did U.S. evangelicals begin to proselytise again. Once more their efforts with the Amerindians failed, but this did not stop the missionaries (many from elite liberal arts colleges such as Williams and Amherst) from going out to Hawaii and the Caribbean to spread their faith.
In the late 19th century, U.S. evangelicals once more burst forth through organisations such as the Christian and Missionary Alliance (1897), and sent their members to work in India and China as well as in the new U.S. colonies. As a historian of missions, and a missionary himself, Eugene Stock put it, “The older societies attributed to these new agencies more zeal than discretion, while the newer credited the older with a discretion that cripples zeal.” But even these zealous evangelicals worked in circumscribed domains, either through the creation of student organisations (Student Volunteer Movement and J. R. Mott’s network of Christian student organisations from India to Japan and Turkey to Australia), or else at the sufferance of the British imperial authorities. In India, for instance, the socially oppressed turned to the missions in large numbers. Fearful of the social revolution that the conversion might provoke, the District Commissioner of Delhi remarked: “The emancipation of the [oppressed] is inevitable, but it is not convenient and we should do nothing to expedite it.” The work of the missions, in this context, did not grow.
Anti-colonial national movements further dampened the ability of the U.S. evangelicals to conduct their operations in Asia, Africa and South America. The history of missionary complicity with colonialism played badly in an epoch when people revelled in independence and shied away from organisations tainted by empire. In the throes of the Cold War, the U.S. government did not promote the missions for fear that this would only alienate them from the peoples of the Third World. Instead the John F. Kennedy administration produced a secular “mission”, the Peace Corp, to send young Americans into the Third World to conduct development activities and to win over hearts and minds to America.
FOR U.S. evangelicals, the end of the Cold War provided an important opening. As the International Monetary Fund-induced rollback of state services proceeded in earnest, the U.S. government promoted “non-state” actors to do the work that the state used to do. Among these “non-state” actors, the U.S. administrations encouraged groups like U.S. “faith-based organisations” (including evangelicals) to conduct social service work around the world. It is no accident that the Manila meeting took place in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. That same year, U.S. evangelicals held the Global Consultation on World Evangelisation in Singapore and created the Joshua Project. The Global Consultation aimed to organise evangelicals to go forth into the 10/40 Window to convert the poor aggressively. To help groups like the Global Consultation, the Joshua Project maintains a database of peoples “that have the least exposure to the Gospel and the least Christian presence in their midst”. The project encourages “pioneer church-planting movements” among these “unreached” people. As the U.S. government cut back on the Peace Corp and on its already modest foreign aid, it began to encourage private work, including that of missionaries. For the past few decades the evangelicals have been a faith-based Peace Corp.
In 2003, Reverend Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals told the press, “Evangelicals have substituted Islam for the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern day equivalent of the Evil Empire.” The 10/40 Window idea spawned a movement called Window International Network, while the Southern Baptist Convention moved their International Missions Board to concentrate on Muslim populations. In the past 15 years, the number of missionaries who work among Muslims has quadrupled. None of these movements stops at Muslims alone, for the Southern Baptist Convention released a guide to Hindus in 1999 with such offensive statements as the following, “Mumbai is a city of spiritual darkness. Eight out of every 10 people are Hindu, slaves bound by fear and tradition to false gods.” The heathens in the 10/40 Window are all in the gun-sights of the U.S. evangelicals, not just Muslims.
In his second inaugural address, delivered on January 20, President Bush once more offered red meat to his evangelical flock. He repeated the word “freedom” several times, once in the phrase “untamed fire of freedom” (said in the same sentence as the phrase “hope kindles hope”). This, like many other statements in his speech, is a favourite Biblical echo of U.S. evangelicals. They often quote the lines from the book of Jeremiah in the Bible that say, “I will kindle an unquenchable fire in the gates of Jerusalem” (Chapter 17: Verse 27) or else “I will kindle a fire in her towns that will consume all who are around her” (50: 32). In such ways, as Matt Rothschild, Editor of The Progressive put it, these “hidden passages” send a signal to Bush’s mass base, the evangelicals. In one part of the speech, Bush says: “History also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.” The line directly refers to the Biblical phrases, “You killed the author of life” (Acts 3:15) and, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). As Rothschild notes, “The Author of Liberty is The Author of Life, and that author is Jesus.” Freedom, for Bush, is another way of saying Jesus, and the spread of freedom by the U.S. military is married then with the spread of U.S. evangelicalism by the missionaries.
Last year, I was sitting in a restaurant at Miami airport, waiting to catch a connecting flight. Beside my family sat a woman with her two children. They were from Kentucky and were excited about flying out to Jamaica along with members of their church. The church had raised money for a group of them to spend a few weeks in Jamaica doing some social and evangelical work. For this family of modest means, the opportunity allowed them to have a holiday and go to a place they would not otherwise visit. The evangelicalism seemed to be a goal, but not their motivation. I would hazard that most evangelicals who go overseas for a short period of time are Americans like this, families with little disposable income for whom the church is an important social institution, and an avenue for a free holiday. Many of those who came to Sri Lanka and elsewhere to do relief, and evangelism, also probably have complex motives. But, nonetheless, the structure within which U.S. evangelism operates is not innocent. It is an adjutant to U.S. expansion, and not the provider of the soul for soulless conditions. This is why Methodist Reverend Duleep Fernando of Colombo said of the Antioch people that they are “unnecessarily explosive”, and that they have created a “dangerous situation”.
oba samata samma sambudu saranai .we are a nondefeated nation as i know from my inside. always my wish to be with all those who try to save my mother land from name of the enemies.well sabada i know very well we can do all together {budu guna ananthai appramanai} .my name is pathum and i truely love my land and loved budhist culture.i see a situation my fellow brothers and sisters they are on a sleep. all my courage is to give a reasionable knock to their sleepy moral mind. i born in galle south sri lanka .from my bottom i am ready to offer my life as a suciede even if there is reasionable spot which can make a difference.always proud to be a sri lankan.oba samata samma sambudu saranai mage ayyala .
.i am proud all of you my brothers.with u always when ever u need me for a mission.pathum from galle{chethana bikkawe kammam wadami} i do always my self to kep alert my other sinhalese and motivate them to move with u .samma sambudu saranai {budu guna ananthai}
Mix of Quake Aid and Preaching Stirs Concern
By DAVID ROHDE; Neela Banerjee contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
Published: January 22, 2005
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E3D61138F931A15752C0A9639C8B63&pagewanted=all
A dozen Americans walked into a relief camp here, showering bereft parents and traumatized children with gifts, attention and affection. They also quietly offered camp residents something else: Jesus.
The Americans, who all come from one church in Texas, have staged plays detailing the life of Jesus and had children draw pictures of him, camp residents said. They have told parents who lost children that they should still believe in God, and held group prayers where they tried to heal a partly paralyzed man and a deaf 12year-old girl.
The attempts at proselytizing are angering local Christian leaders, who worry that they could provoke a violent backlash against Christians in Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist country that is already a religious tinderbox.
Last year, Buddhist hard-liners attacked the offices of the World Vision Christian aid group and vandalized or threatened churches and pastors 75 times. They accuse Christians of using money and social programs to cajole and coerce conversions.
Most American groups, including those affiliated with religious organizations, strictly avoid mixing aid and missionary work. But scattered reports of proselytizing in Sri Lanka; Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim; and India, with large Hindu and Muslim populations, are arousing concerns that the good will spread by the American relief efforts may be undermined by resentment.
The Rev. Sarangika Fernando, a local Methodist minister, witnessed one of the prayer sessions in Sri Lanka and accused the Americans of acting unethically with traumatized people. ”They said, ‘In the name of Jesus, she must be cured!”’ he said. ”As a priest, I was really upset.”
The Americans in Sri Lanka belong to the Antioch Community Church, an evangelical church based in Waco, Tex. Two members of the church were arrested, and accused of proselytizing, by the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2001. When the United States invaded the country several months later, pro-American Northern Alliance forces freed the women, who church officials say did speak with Afghans about their personal ”relationship with Jesus.”
The Antioch Community Church is one of a growing number of evangelical groups that believe in mixing aidgiving with discussing religion, an approach that older, more established Christian aid groups like Catholic Relief Services call unethical.
In Sri Lanka, alarmed local Christian leaders say proselytizing at such a sensitive time could reverse the grass-roots interfaith cooperation that has emerged since the tsunami and endanger Christians, who make up 7 percent of the population. The country also has sizable Hindu and Muslim minorities.
The Rev. Duleep Fernando, a Methodist minister based in Colombo, the capital, brought the Americans to the camp here. Mr. Fernando said they had described themselves as humanitarian aid workers. He and other Sri Lankan Christian leaders say raising religion with traumatized refugees is unethical.
”We have told them this is not right, but now we don’t have any control over them,” said Mr. Fernando, who called the group’s Web site postings ”unnecessarily explosive.”
”This is a dangerous situation,” he said.
In Indonesia last week, reports that a missionary group named WorldHelp planned to raise 300 Muslim tsunami orphans in a Christian children’s home in Jakarta brought an outcry from Muslims. The group later said it had never had custody of the children.
Sri Lankan refugees, camp administrators and church officials said the Americans here had identified themselves only as a humanitarian aid group. In an interview here on Wednesday, Pat Murphy, 49, a leader of the team, said the group was a nongovernmental organization, and not a church group. ”It’s an NGO,” Mr. Murphy said. ”Just your plain vanilla NGO that does aid work.”
But the church’s Web site says the Americans are one of four teams — for a total of 75 people — dispatched to Sri Lanka and Indonesia who have persuaded dozens of people to ”come to Christ.”
When the group’s postings were read to Mr. Murphy, he confirmed that the Americans were from the Antioch Community Church, but said the group would never use relief goods and gifts to entice or pressure people into becoming Christians. He denied that the team, which sent about half its 24 members to work in the eastern town of Kalmunai, was trying to convert people. The church has 2,000 members.
”We simply provide people with information,” he said, ”and they do with that what they like.”
A Jan. 18 posting from the team in Indonesia says the country’s devastated Aceh Province is ”ripe for Jesus!!”
”What an opportunity,” it adds. ”It has been closed for five years, and the missionaries in Indonesia consider it the most militant and difficult place for ministry. The door is wide open and the people are hungry.”
The Rev. Jimmy Seibert, the senior pastor of the Waco church, said in a telephone interview that the church would evaluate whether the group’s members should identify themselves as aid workers. But he said the church believes missionary work and aid work ”is one thing, not two separate things.”
”My hope is that as a follower of Jesus they would bring who they are into the workplace,” he said, ”whether they are in a workplace in America or a workplace in Sri Lanka.”
Older Christian aid groups like Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief and others with religious affiliations say they do not proselytize, abiding by Red Cross guidelines that humanitarian aid not be used to further political or religious purposes. Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, said that in the last 20 years there had been an increase of smaller Christian evangelical groups providing relief aid in the wake of disaster.
”I think there are new groups that are driven by missionary zeal,” Mr. Hackett said. In the last several weeks, Mr. Hackett said, his group has received anecdotal reports of proselytizing in countries devastated by the tsunami.
”From our partners in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia we’ve heard that there have been instances when American and other Christian groups have been proselytizing and casting aspersions on the faith of people there,” he said. ”Some of these groups raise questions about other faiths, saying that people would be better off if they converted to Christianity immediately.”
Several American evangelical aid groups have arrived in Sri Lanka, but no reports of proselytizing by those groups have emerged, according to Sri Lankan church officials. The Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham, visited Sri Lanka this week to encourage the workers of his evangelical aid organization, Samaritan’s Purse, who plan to work in Sri Lanka for the next five years.
Other American evangelical aid groups, including Gospel for Asia and World Relief, are active on the country’s devastated east coast, according to Sri Lankan and American aid workers.
Members of Mr. Graham’s group said they did not engage in proselytizing, but said if local Christians wanted to build a church they would help them. Officials from World Relief, the aid wing of the National Association of Evangelicals, have said in interviews that they try to first build trust with local people and then look for opportunities for conversions, in some cases years later.
More evangelical groups are apparently on their way. A message posted on the Web site of the Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell says the school he founded, Liberty University, is preparing to send a team to Sri Lanka, India and other countries battered by the tsunami.
”Distribution of food and medical supplies along with the dissemination of thousands of Gospel tracts in the language of the people will keep the L.U. team very busy,” the Web site says. ”Mission trips to the Asian region by many L.U. students will follow in the months, and perhaps years, to come.”
Ron Godwin, president of Jerry Falwell Ministries, confirmed that the Liberty Foundation was organizing a shipment of rice, medication and Scriptural excerpts, but said the primary goal of the effort was relief, not proselytizing. ”Everything we do is in the name of Christ,” he said. ”But we try to be sensitive in areas where it may be politically sensitive, and we have no litmus test for those we give rice to.”
According to the Waco church group’s Web site, its teams in Sri Lanka and Indonesia are performing ”children’s ministry,” seeing ”many people saved” and continuing to ”minister to families and children through prayer and evangelism.”
According to its Web site, the congregation uses small groups called ”cell churches” to attract new members. The reports from Indonesia and Sri Lanka refer to ”cells” and ”lifegroups” in both countries.
Residents of the camp here reported no healings as a result of the group’s prayers. But they said they appreciated the aid and activities for children that the group provided and did not want to see them end.
Organizers in a nearby camp have declared the Americans missionaries and barred them from entering. Camp organizers here said they believed that the group was trying to convert people, but did not want to further upset the tsunami victims by cutting off the aid.
W.L.P. Wilson, 38, a disabled fisherman with a sixth-grade education, said he allowed the Americans to pray three times for the healing of his paralyzed lower leg because he was desperate to provide for his wife and three children again. Mr. Wilson, a Buddhist, said that he believed that the Americans were trying to convert him to Christianity but that he was in ”a helpless situation now” and needed aid.
”They told me to always think about God and about Jesus and you will be healed,” he said. ”Whenever I ask for help they always mention God, but they do not give any money for treatment.”
Photos: Americans from the Antioch Community Church of Waco, Tex., led children of fishermen in exercise and song at a camp in Moraketiya, Sri Lanka. Some local Christians criticize them for mixing aid and religion. (Photo by Sriyanka Walpola for The New York Times)(pg. A7); A member of Antioch Community Church in Texas playing with Sri Lankan children at a relief camp. (Photo by Sriyantha Walpola for The New York Times)(pg. A1)
Map of Sri Lanka highlighting Moraketiya: Moraketiya is the site of a relief camp for victims of the tsunami. (pg. A7)
In tsunami area, anger at evangelists
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/world/asia/23iht-preach.html
MORAKETIYA, Sri Lanka — A dozen Americans walked into a relief camp here, showering bereft parents and traumatized children with gifts, attention and affection. They also quietly offered camp residents something else: Jesus.
The Americans, all of them from one church in Texas, have staged plays detailing the life of Jesus and had children draw pictures of him, camp residents said.
They have told parents who lost children that they should still believe in God and held group prayers where they tried to heal a partly paralyzed man and a deaf 12-year-old girl.
The attempts at proselytizing are angering local Christian leaders, who worry that they could provoke a violent backlash against Christians in Sri Lanka, a predominantly Buddhist country that is already a religious tinderbox.
Last year, Buddhist hard-liners attacked more than 100 churches and the offices of the World Vision Christian aid group, accusing them of using money and social programs to cajole and coerce conversions.
Most U.S.-based aid groups, including those affiliated with religious organizations, strictly avoid mixing aid with missionary work.
But scattered reports of proselytizing in Sri Lanka; Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim; and India, with large Hindu and Muslim populations, are arousing concerns that the good will spread by the American relief efforts could be undermined by resentment over missionary work.
The Reverend Sarangika Fernando, a local Methodist minister, witnessed one of the prayer sessions in Sri Lanka and accused the Americans of exploiting traumatized people. “They said, ‘In the name of Jesus, she must be cured!’ As a priest, I was really upset.”
The Americans in Sri Lanka belong to the Antioch Community Church, an evangelical congregation based in Waco, Texas.
Two members of the church were arrested and accused of proselytizing by the Taliban in Afghanistan in August 2001. When the United States invaded the country several months later, Northern Alliance forces freed the women.
The Antioch Community Church is one of a growing number of evangelical groups that believe in mixing humanitarian aid with discussions of religion, an approach that older, more established Christian aid groups like Catholic Relief Services call unethical.
In Sri Lanka, alarmed local Christian leaders say proselytizing could reverse the grass-roots interfaith cooperation that has emerged since the tsunami and endanger Christians, who make up 7 percent of the population.
The country also has sizable Hindu and Muslim minorities.
The Reverend Duleep Fernando, a Methodist minister based in Colombo, the capital, brought the Americans to the camp here. Fernando said they described themselves as humanitarian aid workers. He and other Sri Lankan Christian leaders say raising religion with traumatized refugees is unethical.
“We have told them this is not right, but now we don’t have any control over them,” said Fernando, who called the group’s Web site postings “unnecessarily explosive.”
“This is a dangerous situation,” he said.
In Indonesia last week, reports that a missionary group named WorldHelp planned to raise 300 Muslim tsunami orphans in a Christian children’s home in Jakarta, the country’s capital, sparked an outcry from Muslims. The group later said it never had custody of the children.
Sri Lankan refugees, camp administrators and church officials said the Americans have identified themselves only as a humanitarian aid group. In an interview here, Pat Murphy, a team leader, said the group is a nongovernmental organization, not a church group.
“It’s an NGO,” Murphy said. “Just your plain vanilla NGO that does aid work.”
But the church’s Web site says the Americans are one of four teams dispatched to Sri Lanka and Indonesia who have convinced dozens of people to “come to Christ.”
When the group’s postings were read to Murphy, he confirmed that the Americans were from the Antioch Community Church but said the group would never use relief goods and gifts to entice people into becoming Christians. He denied that the group, which sent about half of its members to work in the eastern town of Kalmunai, was trying to convert people.”We simply provide people with information and they do with that what they like,” he said.
A Jan. 18 posting from the team in Indonesia says Aceh Province is “ripe for Jesus!!”
“What an opportunity,” the posting adds. “It has been closed for five years and the missionaries in Indonesia consider it the most militant and difficult place for ministry. The door is wide open and the people are hungry.”
The Reverend Jimmy Siebert, the senior pastor of the Waco church, said in a telephone interview that the church would evaluate whether the group should identify themselves as simply aid workers. But he said the church believes missionary work and aid work “is one thing, not two separate things.”
“My hope is that as a follower of Jesus they would bring who they are into the workplace,” he said, “whether they are in a workplace in America or a workplace in Sri Lanka.”
Older Christian aid groups like Catholic Relief Services, Lutheran World Relief and others with religious affiliations say that they do not proselytize and that they abide by Red Cross guidelines that humanitarian aid not be used to further political or religious purposes. Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, said that over the last 20 years there has been an increase in smaller Christian evangelical groups providing humanitarian aid in the wake of disaster.
W.L.P. Wilson, 38, a disabled fisherman, said he allowed the Americans to pray three times for the healing of his paralyzed lower leg because he is desperate to provide for his wife and three children again. Wilson, a Buddhist, said he believed that the Americans were trying to convert him to Christianity but he is in “a helpless situation now” and needs aid.
Neela Banerjee contributed reporting from Washington.