Western Missions: A Letter from the Files

Memo: April 30, 2014

To: The Third Wave of Western Missionaries

Re: Please, please quit imposing your values on us!

The West, and particularly America, has hit us hard three times over the past 250 years. The missionaries came first with a message of Jesus that attracted a few fringe people. To your credit, your faith was briefly attractive in the 1500s in China and Japan. Second, the colonialists made the missionaries look like our friends, and in reality, they were harmless compared to the colonialists who treated our land and our people as commodities to be used and sold to enrich their nations. Third, your government bureaucrats and their cronies may imagine that you are treating us well, but you are not. That is why I am writing my plea to you now.

Let me be clear, it is this current missionary wave that we find particularly distressing. You believe that we are damned to perish in poverty or heat, and you offer us a scheme of rules, making Moses look like a mere poet. You not only believe these things, you impose your will on us, making us break with our ancient religions and wisdom and discard our customs and cultures to conform to your will and ways. You do not even stop to think that there may be other points of view besides your own.

We believe, first of all, that the world is infinitely old. So hearing that the universe started with a bang a few billion years ago sounds absurd. We cannot distinguish between this view and the seven days of Genesis except that seven days seems like a longer time. To hear that this is science is interesting, but to learn that you imagine that since the source of this thinking is science, all questions are settled except for superstitious objections. This is a distressing rejection of our understanding that science has a role, though not a final role in the world. Plus, our idea that the cosmos is infinitely old, as we thought even enlightened Westerners believed, has been dismissed as ‘unscientific’. We never said it was scientific; it is understood as the reality of the universe.

Secondly, we do not believe in the damnation to extinction that is part of the Western understanding of climate change. The missionaries told us that we would be damned by our sins. By simply doing what eternal generations of our people have done, we were not regarded as misguided or falling short of the standards of the ancient golden age, but regarded as evil, as if we, including our elders and wise men, were deliberately obnoxious. So, are we to accept this fate of climate extinction as a big improvement? Rather than going to hell for our sins, we are going to destroy the earth due to living on it. Do any of you really believe that?

Third, we heard the missionaries discussing legalism, but you exceed even them. We do not believe that any nation can make enough laws to create a society of good people. Goodness comes from wisdom and from living in right relationship with our ancestors, parents, teachers, brothers, and children. Yet you impose a rules-based system of regulating life and commerce and speech and even our government institutions. By faith, you believe that it is possible to ‘get it right’ and that the path to rightness is not wisdom, but laws enforced by the state. You have lawyers; we have wise men.

Fourth, let me pick up on the idea that I just mentioned: it is possible to get it right. The problem here is not the rightness or even the method (which was my third complaint). The problem is the idea that human life is subject to improvement and repair by human action, and in your case, by government action. What arrogance! What hubris! To think that men who live and suffer on the wheel of life can somehow escape from that wheel, fix it as if it were a wagon, set the wheel off in a new direction and not be ridiculed as a novice who believes that he can influence life itself. We simply do not believe in effective human action. We believe that our role is to cope with life as it is and as it comes to us, which requires wisdom, not your false religion of science and your delusional missionary zeal to fix the world.

Fifth, you have decided not only to give us the gospel of human rights, but that you will impose it on us regardless of our wisdom, religion, culture, and practices. I realize that this will offend your missionary zeal most of all. Before I get specific, please let me implore you to quit this arrogant imposition of your will on us. Human rights originated with the Jews and were later adopted by Catholics as natural law, and the Enlightenment simplified and renamed them. You have redefined these rights to include your especially offensive and convoluted rights of women. What do you know about how to treat women? What do you know about children? You come to us and say that we must allow women to have rights to wear the western clothes that you wish to sell us, to go to school to be educated, to marry whom they choose and to divorce. Together, these are very offensive, but not as offensive as the idea that an abortion is a human right. What foolishness to make this issue not only a strong issue, but a state or economic issue that you insist we put in our laws. You make us long for the return of the missionaries.

Sixth, and I ask you to forgive me for being so blunt, but your own shameless openness to criticize us invites me to evaluate you. You do not know how to handle suffering as we do. Long ago, we learned the path of wisdom that helps us cope with suffering. You are amazed that we simply return to normal after a typhoon or tsunami. We do not hold meetings or have endless and needless discussions to determine who was at fault. We do not have legal battles to determine who caused the tsunami damage. Can you imagine? You actually think the weather and economy and all of life can be controlled and that any failure is someone’s fault. We never understood the missionaries who wanted to explain God’s decrees either. We simply take life as it comes and deal with it. We see the favor of heaven being withdrawn from those kings or leaders who rule when such a striking event occurs. Our men may wish to go on a journey later in life to learn wisdom and to be enlightened. You take your journey as children in college who seek not wisdom, but a playground, followed by a degree and a job. We simply do not understand these things. They may be fine for you, but, again, we resent your imposition on us.

Seventh and finally, and seven is a propitious number to complete this letter, you believe that the future will be better than the past. As we get to know you, we are coming to understand that you really do believe that. That means that you believe in a kind of heaven as the missionaries did, but worse, you do not believe in a Golden Age of the past when the rulers led the kingdoms with the favor of heaven. You do not believe that we will be judged by our ancestors, that we will not compare ourselves to the glories of the past. You believe that today is bad because tomorrow will be better, and it will be better because of your human effort. On the basis of what do you believe that? I am glad to see that your post-moderns, though silly, at least see the folly of the myth of progress. The missionaries called this ‘salvation in Christ,’ but you seem to see it as a kind of technological or governmental deliverance from ignorance and folly (meaning our ways of life). You live and think as if your post-WW2 prosperity is the new unshakable way of life. We have our doubts.

Thank you for allowing me to criticize your Christian worldview and beliefs. Like the earlier missionaries, you have taken what you imagine is the high moral ground. Your goodness, your education, along with your right-ness and your confidence in the truth of all you think and say, may keep you warm at night, but it all has a chilling effect on us. Please keep it all to yourselves and refrain from imposing it on us through diplomacy or the UN, through treaty negotiations or the World Bank, through your ambassadors or your economic pressures.

We need you to respect us for who we are, not for how you would like us to be.

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