The Good Egg wants to be a Missionary
There’s a really nice guy that I went to school with. He’s the sort of person who is so nice, it’s not true. The son of a local vicar, they actually had to invent community service prizes for him at school, he did so many worthy things. He’s quite a good laugh, and the sort of person that it can be a privilege to know, he’s thoughtful, well-spoken, and willing to have interesting conversations. He’s also the sort of person that always asks after your mum and dad, and opens the door for everyone. An all round good egg.
It’s a pity therefore that he really *found* religion whilst at University. Not so much because he feels that it gives him purpose to his life - each to their own. The problem really is what this purpose is, in a practical sense. He’s currently working in a church near his old university, ministering to students, running Alpha courses, and leading small groups. He’s essentially indoctrinating people (who may well be slightly vulnerable) into Christianity.
This makes me a little uncomfortable. Although I know that The Great Commission is an essential tenet of evangelical Christianity, it has always felt a little too coercive to me. Especially when it is in the context of “come and be my friend in church” rather than a more intellectually honest approach.
From my point of view, it gets worse, his current ambition in life is to be a missionary. Perhaps in Africa, or in the Middle East. Maybe someone will tell me that missionaries are not like they were in Victorian times, when they went round destroying indigenous cultures, and spreading fear in their Christianity. Maybe they really do provide help and support to communities that wouldn’t otherwise receive it. But somehow I doubt it - it wouldn’t surprise me if they were still trampling on the local flavour of Christianity in the belief that their own is superior, much like the Byzantine Crusade.
At the end of the day, I think that proselytising borders on the immoral. I can be quite protective of people being introduced to things where they don’t necessarily have access to the other side of the coin. It’s a pity then, that the nicest guy I’ve ever met has decided to cast in his lot with the soothsayers of today. He really is a thoroughly good egg, but no longer in my mind, a really moral one.
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18 Responses to “The Good Egg wants to be a Missionary”
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100% agree: it’s completely immoral.
Christians believe their religion is universal. The man is trying to save souls. I don’t believe in Christianity either, but if I did, it’s impossible to imagine anything more important. Whether it has good consequences, assuming Christianity is false, is something else entirely, of course.
So now you have to determine your moral philosophy. Are you purely consequentialist (intentions are irrelevant) or are intentions crucial?
Great post. You raise an important question. How can someone who obviously is morally upright in so many ways harbor what seems to you and me to be such a deeply immoral ambition? I have no doubt that his motives are pure.
Andrew’s question is an interesting one. Are you and I appalled because of a) your friend’s intentions, b) what we see as the potentially damaging consequences of his behavior, or c) a combination of both the intent and its potential consequences?
I think my answer is (c). I believe the intent to indoctrinate is immoral and I also believe the consequences of indoctrination are immoral. Has Andrew created a false dichotomy? Why must morality be based solely on evaluating either intentions or consequences? Those categories may serve useful analytic purposes, but it’s likely that most life situations fall neatly into one category or the other.
correction to final sentence in previous comment: but it’s unlikely that most life situations fall neatly into one category or the other.
Chaplain, certainly we can combine the two. I have no objection to that. However one man’s “indoctrination” is another man’s “education.” Plonkee’s friend presumably believes Christianity is true. Moreover, he believes that if a person is persuaded to believe it, it could (or will) save that person’s immortal soul.
Obviously, if we start from a prior assumption that Christianity is false, then Plonkee’s friend’s actions make no sense. He is wasting his own time and effort persuading people of something that will do them no good and isn’t even true.
At the end of the day, I think that proselytising borders on the immoral. I can be quite protective of people being introduced to things where they don’t necessarily have access to the other side of the coin.
I doubt this is consistently held. Does anybody really bother to give lectures on economics to people or do we just start trying to persuade people of whatever our pet redistributionist scheme is (whether that is lots or none at all)? People proselytize their own political or economic theories (often quite ignorant) all the time and I rarely hear a word raised against them.
@Andrew:
People do proselytise in economics and politics, and I don’t think that’s ok either. It’s one thing to state that something is your opinion and another to state that it is the truth. Not that I can honestly say that I always live up to my own standards. *Sigh*
In general, one of the things about trying to convert people is that there is always a downside, and usually a considerable one. I get that if you are missionary minded you might think that the ends justify the means, but that’s definitely something that you should be willing to argue, not just assume, and decide for other people.
@the chaplain:
I think I’m most appalled equally by the intent and the consequences. I’m also appalled that he doesn’t get that there are adverse consequences, or that anyone would see his actions as anything other than universally good.
Stating something is your opinion is saying that you think it’s the truth. I hope nobody holds an opinion on an issue which they don’t think is true. I suppose I could preface every one of my opinions with the statement, “I might be mistaken, but. . .” However, not only is this aesthetically irritating, I should think that it’s entirely unnecessary. I assume everybody is already aware that I might be mistaken. Do they really need me to say so?
Anyway, I get what you’re saying if you think he’s going to start holding guns to people’s heads unless they say the Lord’s Prayer, but arguing for your beliefs and trying to convince people to share them is an entirely different thing than deciding for other people.
I think most people are aware when you are stating something as an opinion. The problem comes when you are stating something as a fact, when it is actually an opinion - all the missionaries I’ve ever met, have tended suffer from the latter problem.
I think the problem is that we see the people as innocents and also as needy. It’s like those horrible faith-based programs that George Bush is so proud of: the addicts and the hungry get what they need but there is a price attached.
In this case, the powerful missionary is from a rich country where poverty barely exists. Why is this country so blessed? Why because of Almighty Gee-Suss - and the innocents fall.
And of course often they really ARE innocents - orphaned children swept up by a Christian charitable organization.. helping them, yes, but also indoctrinating them and certainly never making them aware that there are other pov’s.
As I said, I think it’s the power imbalance that upsets me.
@ Anthony
That’s a reasonable argument. I’m not sure I’m convinced. In India, it was the Untouchables who were most likely to convert to Christianity because, unlike Hinduism, it was willing to give them dignity as people. We can talk about the power imbalance if you like, but it was also frequently the case that Victorian missionaries were converting people who were pretty discontented in the first place.
I’m not sure I see a distinction between faith-based programs giving out medicine and food to make the religious look good and political parties or ideologies doing the same thing to make themselves look good. The price of both is usually sitting through some sort of sermon, whether it’s about the power of Jesus or the power of social democracy.
@ Plonkee
We can tell the difference between facts and opinions based on whether one is drawing a conclusion or not. Any religious belief one conveys (even lack of belief) necessarily falls into the opinion camp. I don’t see how anybody could be deceived about this, no matter how confident the missionary appeared to be.
In any event, there are opinions and there are opinions. I hold opinions which I am so sure about that I am not at all reluctant to express them confidently. Then there are opinions about which I am not so sure. As Isaac Asimov eloquently put it, “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” I hear people all the time confidently stating their belief in athropogenic global warming as if it’s a fact. (”The debate about global warming is over.”) Now, personally, I’m fine with that. The evidence for the hypothesis seems to me to be in about the 90% range (as the IPCC concluded). But the hypothesis of athropogenic global warming is not a fact; it is a strong hypothesis. Should we be condemning these people? The average Christian missionary is confident in his belief; I think he’d put his confidence level quite a bit higher than 90%. I think this is crazy, but I do not object to his expressing it.
Just out of curiosity, are we holding proselytizing atheists like Mr. Dawkins to the same standard?
We should hold everyone to the same standard.
In general, if you are giving something out, then that should really be with no ideological strings attached. I’m not entirely convinced anyone every really achieves this, but people can and do come pretty close.
I’m not a fan of proselytising atheists who don’t mention that religion exists and that some people are convinced it works for them. Or anyone who doesn’t accept some kind of scientific method, whereby their ideas may well be proved wrong.
@Andrew
I’m not arguing that this is why YOU should oppose missionaries: I’m simply explaining MY feelings on the issue.
I don’t think Dawkins is proselytising - what reward is he promising? But that is of course a matter of definition and opinion. You can argue that Asimov was “proselytising” his silly roundish Earth theory too..
Proselytization simply means an attempt to convert. No promise of a reward is necessary. I certainly think Asimov was proselytizing. And much of what I write is also proselytization for a particular opinion (or at least an apologia). I don’t object to proselytization, though, whether it’s by social democrats, Christians, Buddhists, New Agers, scientists, atheists, or Hare Krishnas. I am not afraid to confront other people’s ideas.
Or anyone who doesn’t accept some kind of scientific method, whereby their ideas may well be proved wrong.
We seem to be delving into epistemology here. While falsification is a reasonable criterion for defining what is science, I don’t believe it’s a reasonable criterion for all arguments. The logical positivists (who used a verificationist criterion rather than falsification, but it amounts to the same thing) insisted that it was reasonable to insist on it for all knowledge. Thus, they believed they could entirely rule out any claims of metaphysics and ethics. The problem, of course, was that this view committed them to a particular metaphysical and meta-ethical position. As Gustav Bergmann, one of the original members of the Vienna Circle said, when breaking with the positivists, “An unexamined metaphysics, i.e. one that is implicitly held, is for a philosopher the worst metaphysics of all.” Positivism, in its glory in the ’20s and ’30s, now has, I believe, not a single living defender. The verificationist criterion is neither self-evident nor verifiable, so by its own epistemology, it must be dismissed as nonsense. Popper, in a desperate attempt to rescue what he could of the positivist program, came up with his falsificationist criterion to demarcate science from philosophy (and religion). Thus, Popper, correctly, argued that the theories of Marx, Hegel, and Freud were unscientific since they weren’t falsifiable. (Although, I believe one can argue that the theories of Marx and Freud are falsifiable and falsified.) However, Popper did not go on to claim, because he could not go on to claim, that they should be dismissed as nonsense or couldn’t be accepted on some other grounds.
My point simply being that insistence on the scientific method for all arguments A) disallows philosophy as well as religion and B) undermines the scientific method itself which critically relies on deeper truths of philosophy for its acceptance.
I think I mean something that takes the flavour of the scientific method - that if you have a point of view or opinion on something, then you should be open to the possibility that it might be wrong. Whilst absolutes may exist, I think it’s dangerous to assume that you have actually discovered them.
We probably have a rather radical disagreement about epistemology here which I’m going to leave for another day (if at all). The subject is complicated and it’s well off this particular thread.
One thing I found when reading Dawkins’s God Delusion, Hitchens’s God is Not Great, and Harris’s The End of Faithand Letter to a Christian Nation was that all three men were consumed with their own sense of righteousness and convinced of the evil of their opponents, those awful religious folks. This was fascinating to me since none of them ever explicitly made a case for a morality which wasn’t emotive and subjective. It is my opinion that believing that there are no absolutes makes one even more prone to this sort of dangerous and all-consuming self-righteousness. You cannot be shown to be wrong, since you don’t even believe there is anything to be right or wrong about. A religious believer can come to doubt whether God intends them to, for example, condone slavery, as the Quakers did. But a man who doesn’t believe in morality at all can do precisely what he likes. Unfortunately, we have evolved for tribalism and “precisely what he likes” often means separating people into tribes: good guys over here, bad guys over there. Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris want to evade the question of Stalin and Mao, claiming that they did not kill their millions “in the name of atheism.” This is perfectly true; atheism is not tainted by their actions, in my opinion. However, it is hard to escape the sense that these men had been let out from under their moral bridle and this is what turned them into monsters. Believing in no morality at all, they could give free rein to whatever their personal vision was. Slaughtering millions? No problem; they were going to create a future in which billions would be happier and more prosperous. In this philosophy, absolutely everything was permissible.
So while I agree with you about the dangers of this sort of thinking, it is by no means clear that it is unique or even more likely in people who believe in absolutes than in people who do not.
@Andrew
“Believing in no morality at all, they could give free rein to whatever their personal vision was”
Believing or not believing, people do what people do. We have tremendous capability for rationalization, and neither gods nor common sense can prevent that.
Our prisons are full of people who believe Big Boopy is going to punish them for their sins.. and yet they still ended up in jail. Morality has no absolute meaning.
Exhibit A.