{"id":3558,"date":"2024-04-10T07:51:25","date_gmt":"2024-04-10T11:51:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=3558"},"modified":"2024-04-10T07:51:25","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T11:51:25","slug":"the-missionary-effect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2024\/04\/10\/the-missionary-effect\/","title":{"rendered":"The Missionary Effect"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

Mark Twain cherished no love for Christian missionaries.\u00a0

In 1872, the famous author and satirist declared, \u201cHawaiians enjoyed an idyllic life before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.\u201d\u00a0

By the middle of the 20th<\/sup> century, Twain\u2019s opinion was echoed by countless others.\u00a0 At the top of the list were sociologists who blamed religious outsiders for shamelessly imposing Western values and hangups on indigenous cultures.

Whereas the 1800s used to be celebrated as the golden age of the Christian missionary movement, those same men and women are now generally seen as the exporters of the worst aspects of colonialism.

They may have thought they were bringing God\u2019s good news to the rest of the world.\u00a0 But instead \u2013 so the charge goes \u2013 they merely frustrated the initiatives of the local people, stripped them of their wealth and resources, and corrupted the wisdom and beauty of traditional cultures by insisting on the superiority of their own ideas.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0

In his book How the West Won<\/em>, the late sociologist Rodney Stark begs to differ.\u00a0

Stark acknowledges that cricket \u2013 which the British introduced to every nation in their Empire \u2013 is perhaps not the greatest game on planet Earth.\u00a0 And Coca-Cola is surely not the most worthy Western export.\u00a0

But the world seems to be a much better place because Western outsiders insisted on ending female foot-binding, the stoning to death of rape victims because of their \u201cadultery,\u201d and the practice of sati, where widows in India were compelled to burn themselves alive on their husbands\u2019 funeral pyres.

All of those initiatives were spearheaded by Christian missionaries.\u00a0

Mission workers brought far more than sermons and religious rituals.\u00a0 They exported medicine, education, and hope.\u00a0 Moreover, they often rallied to the defense of the people they were serving, protecting them from colonial officials and Western church governance.\u00a0 It\u2019s well known, for instance, that the Catholic church occasionally threw Jesuit missionaries out of particular nations for the \u201ccrime\u201d of advocating for the just treatment of locals.\u00a0

Stark suggests that an appropriate way to evaluate the work of Jesus\u2019 followers is by applying Jesus\u2019 own standard: \u201cYou will know them by their fruits\u201d (Matthew 7:20).

In that regard, missionary efforts that are more than a century old are still yielding a remarkable harvest.\u00a0\u00a0

In a 2012 article published in the American Political Science Review<\/em>, Baylor research professor Robert D. Woodberry, summarizing 14 years of research, made the startling claim that Protestant mission workers can take a generous portion of the credit for the rise and stability of democracies in the non-Western world.\u00a0 Its eye-opening title was \u201cThe Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.\u201d\u00a0

According to his research, the greater the number of mission workers for every 10,000 people in a local population in 1923, the higher the probability that nation is now characterized by a stable democracy.\u00a0

Woodberry examined 50 other factors that might have influenced the positive health of Developing World countries, including GDP and whether that nation was at one time a British colony.\u00a0 The so-called \u201cMissionary Effect\u201d surpassed them all.

That thesis runs so counter to the prevailing opinions of sociologists \u2013 that missionaries are the cause of the world\u2019s woes, not an antidote to them \u2013 that Woodberry\u2019s article was subjected to a storm of pre-publication criticism.\u00a0 He was compelled to turn over his notes and data so others could test and retest the validity of his conclusions.

The result was grudging acknowledgement.\u00a0 Then applause.\u00a0 Then came four major awards, including the prestigious Luebbert Article Award for superior research in the realm of comparative politics.\u00a0 \u00a0

Woodberry points out that missionaries were \u201ca crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, and colonial reforms that made stable democracy more likely.\u201d

If we zero in on just one realm \u2013 medicine \u2013 the numbers tell the story.\u00a0

By 1910, Christian mission agencies had established 111 medical schools, more than 1,000 dispensaries, and 576 hospitals in non-Western nations.\u00a0 They had recruited, trained, and released thousands of local doctors and nurses.\u00a0 Woodberry reports that the higher the number of missionaries per 1,000 local residents in 1923, the lower the infant mortality in 2000 \u2013 a determining factor nine times as large as current GDP.

In other words, the presence of missionaries a century ago is positively correlated with higher life expectancy today.

Rodney Stark asks whether that should really be labeled as \u201ccultural imperialism.\u201d\u00a0

\u201cThen so be it,\u201d he replies.\u00a0

Sometimes, in our own churches, we hear mumbled apologies that our culturally out-of-touch great-grandparents were so obsessed with spreading the Good News that they bent over backwards to send missionaries to every corner of the world.\u00a0

Praise God that they did.\u00a0

And that we can know them by their fruits.\u00a0
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here Mark Twain cherished no love for Christian missionaries.\u00a0 In 1872, the famous author and satirist declared, \u201cHawaiians enjoyed an idyllic life before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3559,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[712],"class_list":["post-3558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-missionaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3560,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3558\/revisions\/3560"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}