cultural scars of christian brutality

8/22/2019 Cultural Scars of Christian Brutality

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The Christian practice of eating bread and drinking wine represents the body andblood of Christ. This macabre ritual encouraged by Jesus himself and is calledcommunion, supposedly to give everlasting life.

Here is corpse god Jesus in his own words encouraging

cannibalism:http://www.vatican. va/archive/ ENG0839/_ _PXE.HTM

Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son ofMan and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.54Whoever eats 19 my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise himon the last day.55For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.56

Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.57

Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also theone who feeds on me will have life because of me.58

This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate andstill died, whoever eats this bread will live forever."

Is it any surprising Christianity has been a death cult symbolizing death anddestruction to millions of people. wherever the death cult has set foot, it hasdestroyed, and decimated existing cultures, religions and people.

Read here how Christians appeased their cannibalistic god Jesushttp://www.geocitie s.com/ paulntobin/mission. html

We will look at missionary activities in all the major "mission fields"of the world The South Pacific Africa Asia South America

The South Pacific

We start our catalog of the brutality of Christian missionaries in the island of Tahiti.In 1797, thirty years after the discovery of Tahiti by Wallis, the first missionarieslanded on the island. The missionaries, sentby the London Missionary Society, tried for seven years to convert the natives butwere unable to make any headway.


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It was then that they discovered, as if by miracle, the proper method of convertingthe Tahitians. They discovered that the local chief, Pomare, liked alcohol (distilledby the missionaries) - so much that he became an alcoholic. Addicted to the distilledspirit (perhaps the holy spirit),

Pomare agreed to back the missionaries in their work of conversion. Pomare,supplied with western firearms, easily subdued his native opponents. Upon hisvictory over his rivals, the whole island was forcibly converted in one day.

Then the process of inculcating "Christian virtues" began. Persistent unbelievers,those who refused to be converted, were executed. Singing was banned (except forhymns) and all forms of adornment, flowers or tattoo were disallowed. Of course,surfing and dancing were not permitted as well. The punishment for breaking any ofthese rules included, among others, being sentenced to hard labour.

Within thirty years of missionary control, the population of Tahiti fell from an initalestimate of 20,000 to 6,000.

From Tahiti, the missionaries moved on to the neighbouring islands. They employedthe same tactic that had served them so well in Tahiti: they would introduce thelocal chief to alcohol, made him and alcholic, convert him to Christianity and thenleave it to the chief to convert the locals. After converting the majority the minoritythat refused to convert were persecuted and sometimes executed. On the island ofRaratonga, men were conscripted into the missionary police to help eliminate theremaining idolators. On another island, Raiatea, a man who was able to forecast theweather by studying the behaviour of fish was executed for witchcraft.

This was how the South Pacific was Christianized. [2]

Africa

Africa is widely considered to be a missionary success story. Sub-Saharan Africa iswidely considered to be the most Christianized place on earth. Kenya, for instance,has 65% of its population claiming to be active Christians. [active meaning church-going] . In Malawi, 68% of the populace made the same claim. The DemocraticRepublic of Congo (formerly Zaire) has nearly 200 times as many evangelicalChristians as its former colonial master, Belgium.[3]

Perhaps the most famous missionary to Africa was David Livingstone (1813-1873).Livingstone spoke of "the white man's burden" to evangelize and civilize the

peoples of Africa. (Nobody bothered the ask the Africans what they thought ofthis!). A rarely know fact about Livingstone is that, as a missionary, his mission toAfrica was a complete failure. Throughout his many years in Africa he made onlyone known convert. Even this convert, Sechele, eventually lapsed from his faith. Yetit was Livingstone, through his book Missionary Travels and Researches in SouthAfrica (1857) and his lectures in England, who introduced a whole new group ofEuropeans to the "romance" of missionary activities.[ 4]


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Yet, in reality missionary activities were anything but romantic. Many of themissionaries' attempts to free slaves and teach them Christianity amounted to nomore than changing one form of slavery to another. Given below is an account ofhow the Holy Ghost Fathers, a missionary group in the second half of theninenteenth century, went about "freeing" and Christianizing the slaves:

In 1868 the Holy Ghost Fathers chose Bagamoyo as the site of the first missionstation on the East African mainland...Their ambition was to build a Christiancommunity of freed slaves. Ransoms were paid to slave traders for the freedom ofthousands to slaves. Most of those released were placed in "Freedom Village" onthe mission compound, but they soon discovered that their freedom was notabsolute. The disciplinary codes enforced by the missionaries were severe, with arigorous timetable of work, Christian education and prayers. As the baptised ex-slaves grew up, they were married off in batches and resettled under the authorityof a missionary priest in a Christian village somewhere inland. [5]

The anthropologist Jaques Maquet had called missionary activities in Africa a"religious commando attack, aimed at extirpating 'superstitious and idolatrous'

practices and converting whole groups." [6]

The missionaries in general have little respect for African cultures and regard theirpeoples as ignorant savages. One early twentieth century methodist missionary inUmtali, Zimbabwe, wrote of the people he had set out to evangelize: "Heathen andnaked as new born babies, and as ignorant as beetles." The solution was simple,educate the children away from their parents and give them western clothing towear to cover their naked bodies.

As another missionary from Umtali wrote in a letter to the US in 1916: "Heathenmothers do not know much, but many boys and girls go to our schools now and arebegging to read God's word and write and to take care of their bodies and be cleanand dress like the people of America." These "heathen" boys and girls were alsogiven "Christian" names like Kitchen, Tobacco, Sixpence or Bottle. [7]

The missionaries were, of course, part of the oppressive colonial forces in Africa. Inan effort to set up a successful mission in what is now Zimbabwe, Catholic Jesuitsentered into an alliance with the British South Africa Company (BSAC). Ran by CecilRhodes (1853-1902), the collaboration between the Jesuits and the BSCA wouldhave made any imperialist proud. BSAC needed labor for their gold mines but thenative South Africans were not interested. They were self sufficient farmers andthus had no need for the salaries offered for work in the mines. The imperialists hitupon a brilliant idea, the "hut tax", a form of property tax imposed on Africans thatmust be paid in cash. [It is important to note that white farmers did not have to paythese taxes.] Thus to pay for the tax, the Africans were forced to work. If they failedto pay, they were imprisoned and then sent to work as prison laborers anyway! Inreturn for donation of land and protection from Rhodes, the Jesuit took the role ofcollecting the hated taxes for the BSAC![8]

Today the number of missionaries from liberal churches are dwindling, theirnumbers being taken over by the fundamentalist, pentacostal and evangelicalchurches. However much like their ecclesiastical forefathers of the previous


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centuries, these missionaries do not believe the Africans, now largely Christians, aresmart enough to keep the faith and churches going. Thus the rallying cries of thenew missionaries involve "making Africa born again" or "fighting the forces ofsecularism" or "battling AIDS". Yet is it obvious that it is not the social or physicalwell being of Africans that concerns these modern day missionaries.

Armed with US$250,000 from the Southern Baptish Convention, Dr. JohnGoodgame, an American missionary in Uganda, launched a most unusual campaignagainst AIDS. Rather than using the money to provide healthcare or medicine, themoney was used to purchase and distribute 100,000 Bibles with sheets pasted ontothem giving selected Biblical passages to read. Some of these passages arepredictable exhortations against adultery and other such "carnal" pleasures. [9]

Yet, just as 150 years of Christian missionary activities failed to prevent poverty,under-development, famine, apartheid and civil wars in Africa, it is unlikely thatthese new evangelical missionaries will be a force for any good there.

AsiaWith the exception of the Phillipines and South Korea, Asia has been quite resistantto Christian evangelism. The missionaries found resistance from an entrenchedIslam in countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei. In countries with deepcultures such as India, China and Japan, the locals saw little need to replace theirprevailing myths with foreign ones. Yet this lack of success have not stoppedChristian missionaries from the conversion activities and causing much sufferingamong native peoples.

Our first story concerns the Mois, a native tribe of Vietnam of Malayo-Polynesianstock related to many of the native peoples of Southeast Asia such as the Dayaks of

Borneo islands and the Aetas of the Philippines. From an initial estimate of onemillion populating the mountainous regions of South Vietnam, their numbers beganto dwindle in the 1950's. This was partly due to these people being forced into hardlabour by the French colonialists and partly due to the activities of the missionaries.

As an example of how missionary activities could lead to a dwindling nativepopulation is that of the Bihs, a subtribe of the Mois. In the 1940's one of the elevenevangelists who came with the returned French troops after the defeat of the

Japanese, went to Boun Choah, the main village of the Bihs.

Other missionaries had unsuccessfully tried to covert the Bihs before. One Catholicmissionary managed a total of only ten conversions in five years.

However the new missionary, a Mr. Jones, was not to be detered. Upon studying theBihs, he found that one of the principle acts of their beliefs was the custom of burial.

Their dead was not buried at first, but left in open coffins on trees. After a couple ofyears, the bones were thoroughly cleaned, and after some ceremonial offerings,they were finally buried.


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Mr. Jones used his political influence to force the French acting resident to suppressthis custom. When the police arrived to protect him , Mr. Jones went personally tothe trees, pulled down all the coffins on the trees and threw the contents, be theybones or decomposing corpses, into a common grave. The Bihs were thenconverted. Convinced that their ancestors have deserted them due to thedesecration of their burial customs, the Bihs stopped producing offsprings. One local

Bih explained that his people hadresigned themselves to extinction. [10]

Next on our list is Thailand. The success of the Christian mission there has beenabysmal. 170 years after the arrival of the first Protestant missionaries , there aretoday no more than 300,000 Christians there in a population of 55 million.Buddhism here (as in Japan) have proven to be a bulwark against Christianity. Themissionaries have thus turned to the hill tribes who are neither Buddhist nor ethnic

Thai. One such tribe is the Akha.

There are nearly 70,000 Akha tribes people in Thailand, with many more in theneighboring countries of Myanma, Loas, Vietnam and China. The Akhas are the

poorest of the nine hill tribes of Thailand. They live in conditions of poverty and aregenerally ignorant of the outside world. Some Akhas had taken to growing opiumwhile some women have turned to prostitution. That the Akhas need help is notdoubted, that they need missionaries is highly unlikely.

Matthew McDaniel of the Akha Heritage Foundation had chronicled the abusemissionaries had inflicted in the Akhas and their culture. Given below is a summaryof his findings. [11]

Many of these Christian missionaries to the Akhas come from the US with somecoming from other Asian countries. The missions have been at work with the Akhafor more than eighty years. Obviously their objective is not to alleviate the socialconditions of the Akha but rather to use the Akhas' poverty and lack of politicalclout as a wedge to force Christianity upon them. The methods are brutal. Honing inon the "weakest point" in a village, such as a family with problems with the elders,the missionaries would increase their converts. Upon reaching a "critical mass" ofconverts, the missionaries would claim the village as "Christian" and forbid allpractice of the Akha religion. The net effect is clear, even Akhas who have notconverted can no longer practice what has been an important part of their culture.Some churches have gone even further. They forbid the Akhas to practice anyaspect of their culture. This includes songs, dances and traditional ceremoniesassociated with the harvest. In doing this the missionaries are depriving the Akhasof a basic right of indigenous people as defined by the United Nations. [12]

The missionaries have little respect for the Akhas, their cultures and even their wellbeing. One Baptist Mission, run by an American Chinese lady, resorted tobroadcasting it's religious message over the public announcement system(loudspeakers) to the entire village, no consideration was given to whether thevillagers like it or not! [To get an idea of how unpalatable this would be to theAkhas, imagine being bombarded by Osama bin Laden's preaching over theloudspeaker condemning the "crusaders" and proclaiming Allah's will]. This mission,well funded, had added another building on its location as well as two satellite


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dishes on its roof. Yet they are unwilling to provide economic help to the Akhas.Unable to provide for his children, one Akha man drank herbicide and committedsuicide. He lived no more than 20 meters away from the mission compound. Whenasked why they didn't help in cases of such desperation, the mission replied simplythat they "cannot help everybody, we are here to teach the Bible."

Like many cases throughout history, Christianity looks set to play a prominent rolein the cultural extinction of the Akhas. Papua New Guinea is an island situated atthe edge of the Southeast Asian archipelago, just north of Australia. It has a modestpopulation of 3.3 million. With 2,300 missionaries, or roughly 1 missionary for every1430 Papua New Guineans, the country has the highest proportion of missionariesin the world. Has this proliferation of Christian proselytization lead to any spiritualrevival? No, only more cultural genocide.

One example of the missionary attitude is that of Reverend Paul Freyburg, anAmerican Lutheran, who said "I rejoice in the memories of what I have done andpray that it will continue. I don't believe that our mission destroyed much of anyvalue." Rev. Freyburg came to New Guinea in the 1930's and, except for a brief

interval during world war II, have remained there ever since. What did Rev.Freyburg destroy in his long missionary carreer? He held "renunciation festivals" atwhich he was called in to destroy "things of darkness". This of course includes,"magical objects" and also what he ignorantly described as "vegetable items". Theformer are irreplaceble works of arts and crafts by the natives. The latter arepriceless herbal remedies and are important heritage of folk medicine. The nativeswere forbidden to perform any cultural dances and to observe their native festivals.[13]

Fundamentalists missionaries are today at the forefront of such activities.

One such mission, the Pioneers, works among the Ningram people. Sal Lo Foso, amissionary there, has no qualms about his activities. These include destroying the"haus tamburan", a "spirit house" which is the normal focal point of village life forthe Ningram, and building in its place, a church. All forms of traditional songs anddancing were forbidden. Such destruction of the Ningram culture has no meaning toLo Foso, for he believed that for the Ningrams to be "born again", they must make aclean break with their past.[14]

The missionaries lack of understanding and unwillingness to try and understandnative cultures have left much suffering in their trail. Australian administratorsreported a case in which missionaries refused to baptised men because they werepolygamous. The men started divorcing their "excess" wives, leaving the womenand their children without much visible support in their society. Another man, withthree wives, on being told that he can only have one, simply killed two of them, sothat he could then-being a monogamous Christian-"go to heaven"![15]

This rush by the natives to get converted has little to do with the Christian messagebut everything to do with the "cargo" they carry. [I]t was the possessions, thecargo, which the missionaries had in abundance that mainly impressed the tribalpeople. Inevitable they assumed that since the Christian God blessed his followers


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with cargo, they they too would be rewarded for following the "Gutnuis Bilong JisasKraist." (NewGuinean pidgin for the gospel) [16]

Papua New Guinea is now 94% Christian. Yet missionaries still arrive in droves.Why? For the simple reason that they are now importing their denominationalbickering into the country. Thus an Anglican missionary reported finding leaflets

circulated among his congregation by missionaries from the Seventh-Day Adventistchurch telling them that worshipping of Sunday is a sure fire step to Hell! In asimilar manner, the New Tribes Mission (or NTM-for more info on this group see thesection on South America below), tells the confused Papua New Guinean that thepapacy is the antichrist. In fact some fundamentalists have taken to distributing thetracts by Christian publisher Jack T Chick, with cartoons showing, among otherthings, Catholic monks going through a secret passage way for an orgy with nuns![17]

Pettifer and Bradley summarised the situation in Papua New Guinea thus:The future alone will reveal the cultural cost and the political consequences ofimporting the theological bickering of Western Christianity into an already divided

society.[18]

Mother Teresa

In India too, the success of Christian missions have been limited to the marginalgroups: the untouchables, the hill tribes and the "Anglo-Indians" (Indians with mixedparentage).[ 19] Some missions in India had tended to concentrate on proselytizingthrough the provision of social services to the poor and needy. While this is certainlya better method than the ethnocidal methods of the fundamentalists, it should notbe forgotten that these social services in general play a subserviant role totheology. The mission once headed by Mother Teresa (1910-1997) is a case in point.

Born in Albania in 1910, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, became a nun and a missionary toIndia. She subsequently changed her name to Teresa. Her work among the poor inCalcutta attracted the world wide attention culminating with a Nobel Peace Price in1979. [20] Yet her work has been criticised as not one based on the alleviation ofsuffering but on the morbid theological celebration of pain and suffering.Christopher Hitchens outlined these rather disturbing facts in his book TheMissionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995):

Dr. Robin Fox, editor of the medical journal The Lancet, visited Mother Teresa'soperation in Calcutta in 1994. He reported that he was very "disturbed" by what hesaw. There was little anesthesia to be seen and a near total neglect of medically

sound diagnosis. Why were not the sisters given proper training in simple diagnosisas well as in managing pain? Because according to Dr. Fox, Mother Teresa"preferred providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drifttowards materialism. "[21]

Mary Loudon, a volunteer in Calcutta, had even worse things to say about MotherTeresa's operation. She reported seeing in the Home for the Dying more than ahundred men and women all dying and not been given much medical care. Pain


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killers used do not go beyond aspirins. The nuns were rinsing the needles used fordrips with plain tap water. When Loudon asked them why they were not sterilizingthe needles, the reply was simply they had no time and that there was "no point".She also recounted the case of a fifteen year old boy who was dying because of atreatable kidney complaint. All that wasneeded was a cab fare to take the boy to a proper hospital. But Mother Teresa's

peons refused to do so, for "if they do it for one, they had to do it foreverybody."[ 22]

Susan Sheilds, who worked for almost ten years as a member of Mother Teresa'sorder, subsequently left the movement because of the atrocious negligence shewitnessed there. The order's obsession with poverty means that the nuns andvolunteers works under conditions of austerity, rigidity and harshness. Due toMother Teresa's fame, Ms. Sheilds reported that the charity had around US$50million in their bank account in the US. The donations kept pouring in, yet little ofthese were used to procure medicine or to provide better health care for thesuffering. The nuns were rarely allowed to spend money on the poor they are tryingto help. [23]

To Mother Teresa, like all other missionaries, spiritual well being over-rideseverything else. As Ms. Sheilds reported, "Mother Teresa taught her nuns how tosecretly baptised those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in dangerof death if he wanted a 'ticket to heaven'. An affirmative reply was to mean consentto baptism. The sister was then to pretend she was just cooling the person'sforehead with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly thenecessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known thatMother Teresa's sisters were baptising Hindus and Muslims."[24]

Perhaps a poignant summary of Mother Teresa's mission can be seen in a storyrecounted by herself. A dying man was in terrible pain. She told him "You aresuffering like Christ on the cross. So Jesus must be kissing you." To which the manreplied: "Then please tell Jesus to stop kissing me." [25]

South America

It is in South America that the missionaries are at their most destructive. During theconquest of the "New World", beginning in the 15th century, Catholic priests andfriars, accompanied the invading armies of Spain and Portugal. All kinds of coercivemethods were used to subjugate and evangelize the Indians. The Indians wereexploited, enslaved and made to work for the settlers in return for protection andreligious instructions. A total of up to 15 million Indians were reported to have died

due to such brutality. [26]

The major damage done in modern times are by fundamentalists evangelicalgroups. The two main sects that have major activities in South America are theSummer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the New Tribes Mission (NTM). The veryname, Summer Institute of Linguistics, suggests an attempt at deception, ofconceali ng their missionary activities. To the South American governments, the SILpresents itself as lingusitic investigators of the many languages of the native tribes


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of the continent. Under this cover, its 3,500 missionaries conduct their goal ofconverting the natives. It's founder William Townsend defends this patentlydishonest method by asking the rhetorical question: "Was it honest for the Son ofGod to come down to earth without revealing who he was?" [27]

Founded by Paul Fleming, the NTM today boasts of 2,500 missionaries in 24

countries worldwide. More conservative and ardently fundamentalist than the SIL,the NTM has a pronounced policy of recruiting young evangelists of limitededucation. Their lack of sensitivity for these native tribes can be seen in some oftheir descriptions of them. The natives are referred to as "naked savages" by Jean

Johnson, the widow of a young NTM missionary, in her book God Planted FiveSeeds . In one instance, Les Pederson, the NTM Field Co-ordinator for Latin Americawas reported to have said "those Indians all look pretty much the same". [28]

How do these sects, and others, spread the word of God? Do they learn thelanguage and then preach? Do the natives then, by virtue of hearing the "Truth"with a capital "T", automatically become Christians? No. The methods employed aredevious.

One method, as explained by Victor Halterman, of the SIL, involves cutting off thenatives from their source of livelihood. This involve a few distinct steps; in the wordsof Halterman himself:

When we learn of the presence of an uncontacted group, we move into the area,build a strong shelter-say of logs-and cut paths radiating from it into the forest. Weleave gifts along these paths-knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things the Indianscan't resist-and sometimes they leave gifts in exchange. After a while therelationship develops. Maybe they are mistrustful at first but in the end they stoprunning when we show, and we get together and make friends.

As the author and journalist, Norman Lewis, explained in his book The Missionaries:God against the Indians (1988), the gifts are placed in such a way that at the endthe Indians become far removed from their sources of food and game. It is then thatthe gifts are stopped. Halterman continues: We have to break their dependency onus next. Naturally they want to go on receiving all these desirable things we'vebeen giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that fromnow on if they want to possess them they must work for money. We don't employthem but we usually fix them up with something to do on the local farms. Theysettle down at it when they realise there's no going back.

That work at the "local farm" oftentimes amounts to slavery was (indirectly)admitted by Halterman when he mentioned that "abuses" sometimes occur. [29]

Another method, aptly called "manhunt" by Lewis, involves the missionaries goingout, sometimes in motorized vehicles, hunting for natives to integrate them intoreservtions set up for missionary work. The NTM, for instance, went on such amanhunt in Paraguay. Five missionized natives were killed in one such manhunt.

Those unconverted natives were taken to the NTM camp in Campo Loro. Within ashort while, according to Survival International, all had died of new diseases theyhad no immunity to. Stung by criticism, the best reply the NTM 's Director in


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Paraguay could muster was: "We don't go after people anymore. We just providetransport." [30]

A final element needs to be added. As Lewis wrote:The unimportance of a comfortable earthly life, weighed in the balance against thethreat of eternal punishment in the next, inspires many missionaries to gather the

souls at all costs, often with disregards for the welfare of the converts' in this world.[31]

These elements make for a militant fundamentalist missionary campaign. One thatwe would expect to cause harm to the natives. And we would be right. Below aresome examples of the evil committed in the name of Christian evangelism.

The contact work, done in conjunction with the "manhunt" are sometimes done byChristianized natives who are trained by the missionaries to carry guns. The "newlycontacted" natives are then rounded off to the mission camp. One Americanorganization, Cultural Survival, reported in 1986 that natives in the NTM camp inParaguay were held there against will. In short, they had been kidnapped.

In another such "manhunt" in 1979, also in Paraguay, one of the frightened nativesfell down from a tree and broke her leg. (Her right breast had already been shot offby a previous encounter with the missionaries. ) She was compelled, with herbroken leg, to walk back to the mission camp. She subsequently died. [32]

If the process of rounding up the natives to be converted were bad, their lives withinthe mission camp were even worse. Some examples.

Once in the mission camp, many of the natives either die from starvation or fromdiseases transmitted by the missionaries with which the former had no immunityagainst. In one such mission camp in Paraguay, the German anthropologist, Dr.Mark Munzel, reported that food and medicine were deliberately withheld by themissionaries. From a total of 277 natives in

April 1972 only 202 survivors were left three months later. A US congressionalreport confirmed that 49% of the camp population had vanished! [33]

Surely the (uninformed) believer may assert: these natives would be allowed toleave if they do not accept the preachings of the missionaries. Surely that would bethe Christian thing to do. But that is not the case. Take the following eye witnessaccount by Norman Lewis in a missionary camp in Paraguay:

I followed him [Donald McCullin-the photographer from The Sunday Times] into thehut and saw two old ladies lying on some rags on the ground in the last stages ofemaciation and clearly on the verge of death. One was unconscious, the second inwhat was evidently a state of catalepsy... In the second hut lay another woman,also in a desperate condition and with untreated wounds on her legs. A small,naked, tearful boy, sat at her side...The three women and the boy had been taken ina recent forest roundup, the third woman having being shot in the side whileattempting to escape.[emphasis mine][34]


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Of course Paraguay is not the only place where the defenceless natives weresubjected to Christian genocide. In Bolivia, William Pencille, of the South AmericanMissionary Society, was called in to help when white ranchers moving into the tribalareas came upon the Ayoreos. Pencille persuaded these natives to stop resistingthe encroachment of the cattlemen and to settle on a patch of barren land beside arailroad tract. The natives, having no resistance to common diseases of the

"modern" man, began to die. Throughout all this Pencille had the means to save thelives of these people. He had access to many modes of transport, including anaeroplane, and to funds which could easily have been used to buy medicines forthem. Yet this is what he said: "It's better they should die. Then I baptize them (onthe point of death) and they go straight to heaven." [Extract from a conversationbetween William Pencille and Father Elmar Klinger, OFM , quoted by Luis A. Pereirain The Bolivian Instance] A total of three hundred natives died in his "care" within amatter of weeks.[35] [a]

In Guatemala, the leadership of the Summer Institute of Linguistics had a closerelationship with the former military dictator Efrain Rios-Montt, a fellow evangelicalChristian and an ordained minister of the Gospel Outreach/Verbo Evangelical

Church. Rios-Montt has been implicated in the genocide of the indigenous Mayansand political opponents in Guatemala during his rule in the early 1980's-with morethan 70,000 people reportedly murdered by his army. His scorched earth policy (orin his own words "scorched communist policy") against guerilla insurgents wasimplemented indescriminately. More than 400 Mayan villages were burned to theground-their properties, crops and lifestock, destroyed. Mayans suspected ofsupporting the insurgents were tortured and murdered, their women and girlsraped. In the midst of all these atrocities, Rios-Montt was regularly giving broadcastsermons on morality! Of course, the fact that Rios-Montt was a Christian was moreimportant to our missionary friends that the fact that he was a mass murderer. Therelationship between the general and SIL was so cosy that he once had hishenchmen serve as escorts for the SIL. [36]

But the worst of the mission linked atrocities happenned in Brazil. Granted that themain culprits of the genocide were functionaries of the grossly misnamed IndianProtection Service, the missionaries were at least partly responsible for these. In the1980's the Brazilian attorney general's office began an investigation into theatrocities committed by the agency over a period of thirty years. It's findings wereshocking.

Many native tribes were hunted, murdered and some to the point of extinction.Some of these include: Munducurus tribe: reduced from 19,000 strong in the 1930's to 1,200 Guaranis tribe: reduced from 5,000 to 200 Cajaras tribe: from 4,000 to 400 Cintas Largas: from 10,000 to possibly 500 Tapaiunas: completely extirpated Other tribes were reduced to only a few (one or two!)individuals and some by onlya single family.


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These peoples were culled by various means by greedy landrobbers who wanted todeveloped the untapped natural wealth of the Brazilian rainforest. Some of themethods include: The Cintas Largas were attacked by dropping dynamites from aeroplanes. The Maxacalis were given alcohol and then shot down when they became drunk. The Nhambiquera were killed in huge numbers by machine gun fire.

Two Patachos tribes were exterminated by giving the unsuspecting Indianssmallpox injections. Some of the Indians were murdered by presenting them with food laced witharsenic and formicides.

The above does not exhaust the creativity of the murderers but should suffice toshow the almost unparalleled cruelty that were visited on the Indian tribes. Whathave all these got to do with the missionaries? The Brazilian newpaper, O Jornal doBrazil had this to say: In reality those in control of these Indian Protection Serviceposts [where the majority of the atrocities had taken place] are North AmericanMissionaries. ..

This was confirmed by the Brazilian ministry of Indians. Thus, in essence, themissionaries allowed the atrocities to happen. As Lewis remarked: Despite the lawof every civilized country...that those who witness...a crime without denouncing it tothe authorities are held to be accessories to the crime, there is no record to befound of any such denunciation [by the missionaries] .

As the newspaper O Globo reported: "it was missionary policy to ignore what wasgoing on."

Of course the missionaries were not only passively supporting the genocide of theBrazilian natives. They played active roles in many of the atrocities. One missionarypersuaded 600 Ticuna indians that the end of the world is taking place and they willonly be safe on a ranch. On that ranch the Indians were made slaves and tortured.

The Bororos, a tribe studied by the reknowned anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss,fell prey to the missionaries as well. They were banned by the missionaries, whowere aided by the local police, from performing their customary burial rites on theirdead. That left the Bororos without a cultural identity and, one by one, theycommitted suicide. As the O Jornal do Brazil explained:

It is sad to see the plight in which these people have been left. The missionarieshave deprived them of their power to resist. That is why they have been so easilyplundered. A great emptiness and aimlessness had been left in their eyes.

Thus was the power of Christian love in the Brazilian jungles. [37]

cultural scars of christian brutality

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