Some random thoughts on Conquest, Missions, and Salvation

It seems to me that our understanding of learning is drenched in a mentality of conquest. More often then not people see learning a subject such as multiplication as ‘conquering’ the subject. I am even guilty of telling people that they should 'own' a subject before a test. The cross application of this mentality to learning another culture brings with it some obvious problems. In order to avoid falling into paternalistic patterns of thoughts and action we need a new way of looking at the process of learning.

Instead of seeing knowledge as this outside source that we conquer as a means of adding it to our collection of thoughts, like animal heads on a hunter’s wall, what if we saw knowledge as persons? Like subjects, we often dehumanize culture, i.e., we take the human out of the reality to make dealing with it easier. Once either is separated from its humanity it becomes very easy for someone in the 21st century to think of it in terms of conquest. Knowledge as well as culture are not things outside of us that we seek to conquer, but instead the thoughts of human beings that we should strive to befriend and get to know like we would any neighbor.

Along side this idea of befriending, it is very important to keep in mind some important aspects of friendship. First, friendship cannot be forced upon a person; friendship must be a mutual decision made by two independent individuals. Secondly, friends respect each other. This includes their religion and culture. They believe that each has something valuable to say and encourage each other to speak by fostering a healthy environment.

Considering these two criterions of friendship I do not see how a missionary can be a friend. Missionaries more often then not force themselves upon a people. This of course applies to pre-colonized areas. Once the first missionary has come in it is often the case that the colonized individuals become dependent on the presence of a missionary there after. Secondly, I think that missionaries come in thinking that they have the truth while the persons they are going to meet lack it, or even worse hold false beliefs. This relationship is not mutual, it is one sided. The mentality of the missionary is not one of an adult going to befriend other adults, but that of an adult going to educate a child. This has been the mentality of European conquest as the civilized ‘adults’ go to the world and pull up the primitive ‘children’ of the non-European world.

More and more I hear talk of adopting an incarnation model for missions. This model, as it was explained to me, begins with committing to a life-long or at least long-term ministry. Using the story of Jesus as an example the proponents of incarnation ministry advocate for becoming a part of a foreign community, a putting on of the flesh if you will as a means for sharing Christianity. The underlying assumption that goes unchallenged is that those from Europe and the United States represent the divine God while those in other lands represent sinful humanity. If a missionary represents God and the other represents humanity then a missionary is infallible, omniscient, and all-powerful while the other represents vice ridden, lost, weak sheep that are blind to the truth. There is no respect of friendship in this.

In recent years a move has been made to rely less on missionaries from Europe and the U.S. and more heavily on ‘local’ leaders. I put local in quotes because most of those who are selected to lead have more often then not abandoned practically every element of their person that made them local. As Schreiter notes in “The Study of Culture” those who are selected as local leaders are selected because of how successful they were in ‘rising up’ to mimic the divine, i.e., Europeans/American. They have been chosen because they were the most successfully “alienated from the roots of their own culture [and] socialized into the invading culture.” In short they were the most successful converts, the products of conquest.

Though many Christians today see the growing number of Evangelical churches in Latin America as proof to the success of missions, after spending some time there studying the ‘workings of the spirit’ I think that it is more accurate to say that this growth is another indicator of the success of the European/U.S. conquest. People all over are abandoning their traditional songs, rejecting the words of their sages, spiting upon their history and going to the church to be saved from the ‘foolishness’ of their culture.

This is the current state of the colonized because of the colonizers decision to see Latin Americans not as possible friends, but as a mission field, a place to sow and reap. I hope humanity will learn from its history and re-humanize our methodology.

-Mateo