In defense of missions: Why the claim that Christian missions is white colonialism is totally wrong

In defense of missions: Why the claim that Christian missions is white colonialism is totally wrong

In recent times, missionaries used to be generally respected by society. Even those who disagreed with their message had to admire those who would pack up, leave their home, and live in a foreign country to share a message of hope with the people. There was a widespread appreciation for the fact that many of these missionaries, in addition to sharing the gospel, also helped provide education, medical care, and did other things to meet their physical needs as well as spiritual needs. That sort of thing was once praised as self-sacrificial and loving.

Those times, it seems, are over.

Nowhere is that made more clear than in the world’s response to the death of John Chau. To be fair, I agree that what he did was reckless by any standard. But people aren’t merely saying he was reckless — they’re questioning whether his intentions were even good. Some, like several writers in this New York Times article, are wondering whether missionary work is even good. And an increasing number, like this writer, are declaring it’s just white supremacist colonialism in disguise.

To be clear, missionaries did at one time assist the European empires who were carving up the other five continents. Some of the missionaries had no political motives whatsoever, but their work did contribute to the success of the colonizers. We can acknowledge that. We can see why some people might associate Christianity with European conquest and colonization of lands that didn’t belong to them.

But in today’s political climate, where everything is about race, nationalism, and globalism, more and more people are unable or unwilling to see modern missions as any different. That a white person of European ancestry could declare that they have a truth that the rest of the world needs to know might, on the surface, sound like a revived version of the “white man’s burden.” To some, it seems like Europeans imposing their culture on foreign nations all over again.

But this perception is based on a deeply flawed understanding of everything to do with Christianity. The modern West is extremely biblically illiterate, even professing Christians. Most people can’t even articulate the basic truths of Christianity, much less have any knowledge of the long and rich history of the church. Reading some of these articles about Chau and missions, it’s glaringly evident how many well-read, intelligent people associate Christianity with nothing but the modern Republican Party and 19th-century imperialism, and seem to know little else. Sorry, but that way of thinking is as unsophisticated as associating Islam with nothing but terrorism and Saudi Arabia. It’s an inexcusably simplistic view that needs to be corrected.

The degree to which Christianity has been distorted in the minds of popular culture is something we need to learn how to respond to. The time has come where we need to come to the defense of Christian missions. And to do that, we need to start by correcting these basic misunderstandings about Christian doctrine and history permeating the West today. These misconceptions are the primary reason people think modern mission work is white colonialism version 2.0. Here are three to start with:

Misconception #1: Christianity is a white European religion.

Truth: Of course, Christianity is a Middle Eastern religion centered around the worship of a Jewish man. The first recorded travel of a Christian to a foreign country was an Ethiopian eunuch baptized in the desert (see Acts 8). One of the aspects the ancients found most distasteful about Christianity was how it welcomed people of all races, nationalities, and classes, and declared them equal in the eyes of God (Gal 3:28).

Even today, Christianity is not a majority-white religion. It’s actually not even close. 61 percent of the world’s professing Christians today live in the “Global South” — Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Christianity not only persists in the Global South, but is rapidly growing, with very little help from the religiously apathetic West. Some of the places Christianity is seeing the most explosive growth are places where it’s most dangerous to be a Christian. I am certain that the millions of Asian and African Christians — many of whom sacrifice more for their faith in a day than we Americans do in a lifetime — would be quite shocked to hear that they’re following a white European religion.

Misconception #2: Christianity is a colonizing, imperialistic religion.

Many who say this have a fair understanding of Second Millennium history (or at least know how to repeat what others have told them), but usually at the expense of any knowledge of the First. And any understanding of the second half of church history without an understanding of the first half is woefully incomplete.

Anyone who goes beyond the words of their favorite media sources and actually reads the Bible will readily see the stark contrast between Jesus’ teachings and the actions of the Church over the last 1,500 years. It’s so egregious that any seeker of truth has to ask: Why? And yet, not many people seem to.

For 300 years, Christians of all races and nationalities took the gospel as far as India, Britain, and the Sahara. There was no politics involved whatsoever. It was simply based on Jesus’ command to go and make disciples of all nations. To put this in perspective, the United States has been an independent nation for less than 250 years. Three centuries is a long time that Christianity operated with a driven missional mindset and no aspirations for imperial power.

So what changed? The Roman Emperor Constantine became Christian, and wanted to show imperial favor to Christianity. Almost overnight, this simple, communal faith became a matter of state. Government interests merged with Christian interests. Rome’s wars became Christian wars, and Roman policies became Christian policies. And so because it was Roman policy to expand the empire and fight the barbarians, Christians began to justify it. We can look back now and see that what resulted from this merger of the spiritually living church and the spiritually dead state was an ugly Frankenstein’s monster that corrupted both. That idea of church and state being inextricably linked is what led to the colonizing practices of the European Christian empires.

Unlike the missionaries of colonial times, today’s missionaries don’t operate under the authority of the state or in concert with the state. They don’t want to create societies where adherence to Christianity is enforced by law. They want to present individuals with a choice of whether or not to accept the gospel. Christianity was never meant to be an instrument of the state, and the atrocities that people carried out in the name of nationalistic Christianity don’t make the real gospel any less true. The real gospel is not one of colonizing or conquest, and that’s what missionaries are and should be preaching.

Misconception #3: You have no right to impose your culture/values on others!

Even some Christians seem to endorse this line of thinking. It sounds rather noble, but the fact is that no one really believes this.

If someone says this to you, ask them if they think the Obama administration was right to spend millions of dollars promoting LGBT rights in many African and Asian nations where the culture is deeply opposed to them. If they say yes, then ask them why they think it’s okay to impose their Western cultural values on others. If they say no, ask why they think an African or Asian LGBT person’s rights matter less than an American LGBT person’s rights — why we should fight for the American’s rights but not the African’s or Asian’s.

The fact is that we all recognize there are situations where we should advocate for the well-being of people in other cultures, and sometimes that means trying to persuade people to change their beliefs. Sometimes it means introducing new ways of doing things. As another example, we in the West deliver vaccinations by the planeload to third-world nations because we see them in danger from illness. No one says that’s imposing ourselves on them.

Missionaries aren’t much different. They see spiritual sickness and want to offer a cure. Someone may disagree that Christianity is the cure, but that’s a different argument entirely. And it’s probably one that more accurately reflects what most of these people who have suddenly come out as anti-missionary probably believe: It’s not that they’re against introducing new ideas to indigenous peoples. They’re against introducing ideas they don’t like to indigenous peoples.

What missionaries do, in bringing this message to the farthest corners of the earth to people who have never heard it before, is not an act of imperialism or colonialism. In fact, it’s an act of compassion. It’s saying that these people matter just as much as the people who live next door to you. Sharing the gospel with someone is an affirmation of their humanity. While Westerners play critic via their iPhones in a heated, electrified home, missionaries go out and invite people to be brothers and sisters with them.