“Home,” Robert Frost once said, “is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” It’s a wonderful line, evocative at once of both the ups and downs of life, and the abiding ties of family loyalty. We can all recognize his meaning.
But the perfervid religiosity that drives missionaries to remote and squalid corners of the earth teaches something altogether different, something unrecognizable to most of us — that home is a place of snares. It is taught that Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, was a great man because he was prepared to sacrifice his son; the implicit corollary is that family loyalties threaten the obedience that God requires of men and must never get the upper-hand in decision-making. Paul taught that marriage is for those not given the ‘gift’ of celibacy — but that it mustn’t interfere with service to God. John Calvin took Paul and Abraham’s single-mindedness a hard step further, teaching that family loyalty is adultery against God.
The Missionary Myth, by Vivian Palmer Harvey, the daughter of missionaries and a one-time student at the infamous Mamou school, is the most recent addition to a growing literature that takes-up the real-life meaning and consequence of those teachings when people are such fools they try to live by them. Though the book occasionally wanders, as most memoirs do, that shortcoming is more than offset by the history of the American missions movement and sometimes painful frankness of Harvey’s account of growing-up a Missionary Kid. Recommended; available here via online purchase.
Harvey was born in Africa, a twin, 8-weeks after her parents arrived as missionaries for the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society (now WorldVenture). Beginning at five years old, and each year until her early teens, she and her sister were sent to Mamou Alliance Academy, far distant and with no hope of contact with their parents for 9-months.
Harvey’s sister died, an alcoholic, before she reached 60-years old.
The abuses there beggar description: Physical abuse that included overturning desks as children sat in them; forbidding visits to restrooms, so that children would be obliged to sit in their own urine for hours; sexual abuse of both boys and girls; a constant drumbeat of guilt and degradation, and reminders that their parents mustn’t be interrupted in their vital work.
We had to ask forgiveness for our anger towards the aunties and uncles. They told us that if we did not, we were responsible for many Africans going to hell. We were responsible for the success of the failure of our parents’ ministry.
No sane and decent adult puts that kind of load on a child. Things haven’t changed much, though.
The following quote is from a mission update I recently read: “Please pray that Satan will not cause harm to our children; pray that the children will not be disobedient or unhappy and cause problems that will make their parents unable to do the work on the mission field.”
The teaching of sacrifice and self-abnegation permeated and perverted everything it touched:
My siblings and I were not the only ones who suffered; Mom suffered just as greatly. As a mother and grandmother, now I can clearly see Mom’s dilemma. She was looked upon as an example of the godly woman, properly submitted to her husband. Mom had little if any identity apart from being Mrs. Kenneth B Palmer, the wife of a missionary to Ivory Coast, West Africa.
I won’t ever forget one Sunday evening church meeting. Mom had purchased skin creams and lotions to take with her for the upcoming four-year term in the Ivory Coast. These were necessary for her comfort and welfare. My dad opened her small suitcase and began to call the ladies attending that meeting. “Help yourself,” he said, “because Betty won’t be needing these.”
I was in shock. I could not believe what I was seeing. I thought, Boy, he’s in trouble now! I can’t believe Dad is doing this. Meanwhile, Mom stood on the side; her expression was mixed anger, humiliation, and grief. Mom’s esteem and honor was robbed by this travesty and Dad had no clue.
There is no escaping the bottom line: The magical metaphysics and relentless degradation of a pious upbringing produces damaged, all but dysfunctional adults, one generation after another. It would be a mistake to think of the miseries of Harvey and her fellow MKs as something unique, something visited solely upon them. They, like their parents and the teachers at whose hands they suffered so grievously, are points on a self-perpetuating continuum of sick and ruinous teachings.
The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day’s time they will have turned it into a Hell.
Jeremy Bentham
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
In the missionary world, as in theocracies where there is no mitigating secular influence, hell is the rule.
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