Germs for Jesus—Missionary Madness

by Glenn R. Geist

International Christian Concern, an organization that seeks to fight “global Christian persecution” wants the Indian government to prosecute Sentinelese tribesmen for having shot a Christian missionary who illegally entered their island country and knowingly exposed the natives to fatal diseases. Chau had expressed his belief that it was “Satan’s Island” and it was necessary to risk his – and their lives to chase out the imaginary demon.

 “The eternal lives of this tribe is at hand”  he wrote somewhat ungrammatically; expressing no concern for either their real lives or his.

To some that seems like murder. It seems that way in particular to the ICC, concerned with fighting “global Christian persecution.” Yes, I’m serious. It’s to be observed that the concern of this concern does not concern any general principle like the right of others to have any other religion or for their own safety, health or cultural identity. Torquemada would be proud.

Chau was warned. In a previous attempt to communicate in English (and for some unfathomable reason in Xhosa,) he produced a Bible.  Someone put an arrow through it. No further words were necessary.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to suppose that Chau’s “mission” included teaching the evil, sinful, dirty, sexually depraved and Satanic ways of the local culture and the certainty of eternal damnation. I’m sure the one-man crusade included the need for a salvation that certainly involves the end of their traditions which are certainly older than and no less well-founded as whatever twisted thing Americans call Christianity today. Bringing deadly germs is not a thing of importance when you’re on a holy mission.

Whether or not Christians in India do face persecution for being Christians, Mr. Chau, an Alabama Missionary, was a grave threat to the natives who were under Indian legal protection for that very reason. It wasn’t about his religion but about his pathogens. He made a conscious and informed decision to place the importance of spreading his mythology above the near certainty that his being there might destroy human life on that island. To them, it was an act of war and nothing less.

In fact, missionaries have, over hundreds of years been responsible for genocide: millions of deaths in the South Pacific and in the Americas. Yet we refuse when celebrating such self-promoting holidays as Thanksgiving, to acknowledge what has been a worldwide plague. The “Pilgrims” we like to think of as our founders were quite happy to thank their deity for the plague that all but wiped out the surrounding tribes, demonstrating a divine preference for Europeans – or non-Jewish, non-Islamic Europeans anyway.

The selfish hypocrisy and raw cultural aggression behind such actions seems beyond the protection of the customary euphemisms and evasive rhetoric, as does the age-old practice of invoking the persecution of Christians when, as they so often do, place their religion above human life and human rights and freedom itself.  Righteous by Divine right.

In China, missionaries brought British opium and British Bibles, and Britain went to war to maintain their God-given right to do so. It seems as though the same self-granted rights apply here. These Neolithic people had no other way to save themselves from the fate of other Indigenous Peoples. The arrows they fired were fired in self-defense. No divine interference on the part of any European deity was observed as the arrows of justice hit their mark. As always God is silent.

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