Rod Dreher over at BeliefNet has a weather eye for religious oddities, and yesterday posted a note about an evangelical missionary to the Amazon jungle who lost his faith after getting to know a tribe that saw the world in a radically different way:
[Dan] Everett spent decades living with the Piraha tribe, learning their extremely difficult language so he could translate the Bible for them, and lead them to the Christian faith. How he lost his own Christian faith in the process is a story that he tells in the book all too briefly; this is primarily a book about language. Still, I find myself this morning taken by a concept that recurs in the book: the subjectivity of knowledge, or, to phrase it another way, the cultural contingency of epistemology. Which is simply a fancypants way of saying not simply that the truths we know are culturally conditioned, but our way of knowing truth is also.
Instead of converting the tribe to Christianity, the missionary lost his belief in the notion of truth.
Now, I am not a Christian, much less a missionary, but it seems to me that there is something strange about the underlying assumption of this kind of mission, namely that every tribe in the world should be converted to Christianity as a tribe, in its own language, and within the terms of its own culture. Christianity is “the tribe of Christians” (Origen), the assembly of those who are called out of their nations to be adopted into Israel. There’s nothing wrong with translating the Bible into any convenient language (Jews for that matter are allowed to pray in any language they understand, although Hebrew is encouraged). But the presumption that each of the 6,000 languages now spoken on the earth must be the locus for Christian conversion seems weak, particularly given that at least half of these will disappear over the next hundred years.
When Isaiah wrote that the nations were just a drop spilling out of the bucket or dust on the scales, he was talking about larger and longer-lived tribes than the Piraha of the Amazon. Christianity emerged out of the wreckage of innumerable tribes and cultures, from a great extinction of the peoples arising from Hellenization and Latinization, followed by the collapse of these empires.
Lest I seem heartless, let me add that I admire the efforts of ethnologists who record endangered languages, often under difficult and dangerous conditions, and that I support efforts to protect fragile peoples from harmful contact with the modern world. Nothing is going to slow the great extinction of peoples now underway, however. Those who associate their own faith with the outcome for primitive tribes are likely to be disappointed, like Dan Everett.
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