Christian Missionary Role In India - 6

[Guest]

P.O.V.’ on PBS: How Missionaries Spread the Word, and U.S. Capitalism
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Virginia Heffernan
July 25, 2006
New York Times

Are evangelical missionaries good or bad? That’s the question in
tonight’s PBS documentary, “The Tailenders.” The missionaries’ smugness and
salesmanship tend to irritate other humanitarian workers, who typically
see themselves as more respectful of the people they’re tending to.
What’s more, the program implies, silencing the stomping beats of, say,
the Solomon Islands in favor of pallid “Jesus Loves Me” singalongs seems
just wrong.

But more disturbing than this, the documentary contends, is the
psychological and spiritual danger that many progressives believe is wrought by missionaries, who swipe from indigenous people their happy, peaceful
ways and stick them instead with the greed, selfishness, jealousy and
wrecked natural landscapes known to be the key features of global
industrial capitalism.

Despite a century of such complaints, however, Protestant missionaries
persist. And they’re dogged. They dress in uncool hiking clothes and
pack up uncool backpacks and buses with uncool food and uncool Bibles and
venture way the heck into the jungle where they — and this is the
subject of “The Tailenders” — learn thorny indigenous languages so they can
actually talk with people who have never heard of America, capitalism,
jihad, McWorld or Jesus Christ. Missionaries may be the most parochial
and audacious avatars of our modern world.

Still, after tonight’s effort to wrestle with this paradox, you will
not know for sure whether missionaries are good or bad. But you will talk
about it. This gorgeous, inspired and gutsy film, the first feature
documentary by Adele Horne, who also produces video art, opens up new
ideological vistas on religion, technology and globalization. It dares
viewers not to be surprised by it.

The focus of “The Tailenders” is the Global Recordings Network, founded
in 1939 in Los Angeles by an evangelical named Joy Ridderhof. She
wanted to disseminate Bible stories via phonographs and gramophones. Still
photographs bring to life her adventures among those she aimed to
convert; there she crouches, pale and delicate, with various
less-delicate-looking figures in jungles and on beaches, marveling at a tape recorder.
<b>Of the 8,000 languages and dialects believed to exist, Global
Recordings has now produced Christian propaganda in more than 5,485 of them. No linguistics department could pull this off. </b>

The idea of releasing disembodied sound on unsuspecting people — like
God in the burning bush — clearly fascinates Ms. Horne, who conveys an
infectious sense of “this blows my mind.” The ingenious hand-cranked
audio devices, engineered to be usable by people without electricity, are
presented with the amazement that only a filmmaker pious about
audiovisual technology could convey.

“Every physical movement and action reverberates throughout time and
space, for good or ill,” says the spacey- and sad-sounding narrator,
finding an analogy for the way sound echoes. “The ripple on the ocean’s
surface caused by a gentle breeze and the deeper furrow of a ponderous
slave ship are equally indelible.”

This airy poetry is anchored by down-to-earth reporting in India,
Mexico and the Solomon Islands. At one point, a missionary is translating a
message about Christian redemption into dialect. A native speaker finds
an error. As he tells the missionary, the message now says, “We will
wash away God’s sins.” Something needs to change.

Less effective than the vérité and the impressionistic voice-over are
Ms. Horne’s sporadic efforts to jam her material into an interpretive
framework. At the end of the film, which has presented disembodied audio
as a religion unto itself, Ms. Horne seems to balk at her own
originality and retreat into clichés.

The voice-over says: “Where Protestant missionaries go, industrial
capitalism follows. To convert to evangelicalism is to replace indigenous
collectivity with the pursuit of individual economic gain.”

And then there’s a lament for what’s lost. One of the converts says
that new Protestants are shunned by their villages; they’ve forgone the
religion of their parents. Only if you’ve been watching closely will you
realize that that lost religion is Roman Catholicism. These congregants
have not lost tribal practices, they’ve just moved on from the last
wave of colonial proselytizing.

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