FROM ALL THE INNUMERABLE and mostly critical reports of missionary doings appearing at this period in the Brazilian press the singular fact emerged that the newspapers had little idea of what they were up against. It was a vagueness equally shared by the governmental bodies. Although the US evangelists had been flooding into the country since immediately after the war, they were still seen as individual families, or at most small groups working in isolation to advance their particular brand of the faith. On the whole Brazilians viewed them as harmless eccentrics of the kind to be seen in those days parading the main streets of American cities carrying sandwich boards inscribed with messages of impending doom. It was assumed that, even if they did little good, they caused no damage.
By this time the two major evangelist sects, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, and the New Tribes Mission were virtually dividing the whole of Latin America, where tribal people remained to be reached, into their spheres of interest. I cannot remember a single instance when either of these exceedingly powerful organizations was mentioned by name in the press. I was never able, for example, to discover which of the sects was responsible for sending the missionaries to the Santa Cristina reserve where the Bororos were brought so close to extinction. Missionaries kept as much as possible to themselves, and did all they could to avoid publicity. In reality there was little known about them, and that was the way they preferred it to be.
The policy adopted by the Summer Institute of Linguistics in the concealment of its aims embodies the most successful missionary device since the evangelists of the London Missionary Society manipulated a drunken king to assist them in their conquest of the South Pacific.
Missionaries have many enemies. In Latin America Protestant fundamentalists are rejected by an educated minority, under attack by an entrenched Catholic Church, and at the mercy of suspicious if venal governments. The ‘Dual Identity’ which helped to establish the SIL as uncontested leaders, with 3,500 missionaries in the evangelical field, was the invention of William Cameron Townsend, founder of the Wycliffe Bible Translators of Arkansas; formerly a Bible salesman in Guatemala. To advance his missionary work and to defend it from enemies and competitors alike, Townsend devised a pseudo-scientific shield behind which it could take cover, and in due course his missionary groups were legally incorporated under the title, the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
For the purposes of his supporters back in the Bible Belt at home, Wycliffe Bible Translators remained the zealous proselytizers of old, concerned only with carrying the Gospel to the heathen. Once overseas, missionaries were at least nominally transformed into linguistic investigators, wholly absorbed in scientific studies of language. To some of his followers, there was a disquieting element of deception in this double posture, maintained even when entering into contracts with foreign governments. In soothing troubled consciences Townsend went so far as to quote divine subterfuge as a precedent. The US anthropologist David Stoll, in Is God An American?, describes Townsend’s argument that ‘1. God led us into the policy. 2. Businessmen do the same. 3. SIL’s host government thinks it’s fine, and 4. There is a Biblical precedent for it. Namely, just as Jesus came out of Nazareth disguised very effectively as a carpenter, Wycliffe Missionaries go into the field as linguists. Asks Townsend: Was it honest for the son of God to come down to earth and live among men without revealing who he was?’
Whether or not the Dual Identity ruse is honest there is no doubt as to its success and its continued employment whenever found necessary until this day. Despite the use of linguistics as a scientific front for less than scientific activities, a huge amount of biblical translation goes on, much as some of it may appear to an outsider of doubtful utility, or devoid of essentially religious content. Missionaries prefer to deal in Old Testament fulminations with little application to our times, or in the Epistles of St Paul. Quotations from the religious founder himself are generally avoided and in particular its central inspiration, the Sermon On The Mount. I have never seen in any missionary writing a reference to the blessedness of the poor, or the desirability of storing up treasure in heaven.
Sent to Brazil by the Sunday Times while the great Indian scandal was at its height, Donald McCullin, the photographer, was recommended by the PRO at the Ministry of the Interior, to go and take photographs of the Kadiweus—often referred to as the Indian Cavaliers—a mounted tribe of which the Brazilians were inordinately proud. They lived in a remote place, so he was obliged to travel by missionary plane, and the missionary put him up. At the Ministry someone had clearly blundered, for of the Kadiweus, whose land had been stolen, all who remained were a few sick and starving women and children who rode their skeletal horses each morning down to the mission house to beg for scraps. The missionary seemed indifferent to their plight. He was lost in a single all-absorbing task; the translation of the Epistle of the Galatians into Kadiweu. He had given ten years of his life to this, he told Donald, and expected to finish the work in another ten years. ‘But won’t all these people be dead by then?’ Donald asked.
‘Yes, they will,’ the missionary agreed.
‘Then what’s the point of the whole exercise?’ Donald wanted to know.
The missionary thought about this. ‘It’s something I cannot explain,’ he said. ‘Something I could never make you understand.’
Almost certainly Janus-faced Summer Institute of Linguistics men had been among my early missionary contacts, but none of them had ever revealed their affiliations. When I met a member of the SIL, proclaimed as such for the first time, it was by pure chance shortly after the upheavals in Brazil had settled, and outrage at the genocide practised on that country was now directed at Bolivia and Paraguay. Here, from the little news that filtered through, things went on as before.
Bolivia remained the second poorest country in Latin America, with cocaine as its principal export, and where a high proportion of German immigrants arriving since the last war had remained loyal to the Nazi political philosophy. The attitude to its Indian minorities was such that on my first day in La Paz, a column inch in the newspaper Presencia announced that an army special-force trained by the US Rangers had been sent to clear the Indian population from a large estate acquired in the north of the country by the president’s wife.
I was there in the hope of meeting the German anthropologist Jürgen Riester who was conducting a study of the migrant cane-cutters brought down annually to work on the estates round Santa Cruz. Almost all of these are debt-slaves, the debts they are induced to incur mounting every year, so that they are bound for life to a particular employer; as their children, legally inheriting the debt, will be bound to him, too.
While waiting for Riester’s arrival I decided to fill in time with a visit to the north of the country, taking in if possible the Bolivian First Lady’s now notorious estates. To be able to do this, the sanction of the Ministry of the Interior was required, and I went there and saw an Under Secretary, Dr Guido Strauss. As far as his department was concerned, there was no problem, said the doctor, adding, to my astonishment, that I should also require the permission of Mr Victor Halterman, of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. I told Dr Strauss that I found this astonishing, to which he laughingly replied that he did, too. Not only that, he added with a wry grin, but that even if he as a fairly high-ranking government official decided—which God forbid—to visit such a remote and barbarous part of the country, he would have to go cap in hand to Mr Halterman before this could be arranged. I asked him. ‘What’s going on up there?’ and he said, ‘God knows. I expect it’s something to do with the CIA.’ I never met a Bolivian who did not regard the Summer Institute of Linguistics as the base for CIA operations in Bolivia; possibly in South America itself.
The mildness of Mr Victor Halterman’s personality came as a surprise after learning something of his reputation. His reticence and modesty were reflected in his bare office in a ramshackle building. He was engaged on the telephone when I entered, taking a shopping order—from his wife, and there was some problem about finding the bag. Shoved into a corner at the back of the cheap furniture stood a splendid object of carved wood and macaw’s feathers, an Indian god, said the missionary, that had been joyously surrendered to him by some of his converts. The other decoration was a coloured photograph of a Chacobo Indian wearing handsome nose-tusks, and a long gown of bark.
The presence of these reminders of the Indians’ uncivilized past came as a surprise, because, in the mood of the Pilgrim Fathers, most missionaries frown on all such things; banning personal adornments of every kind, unless produced in a modern factory, as well as outlawing musical instruments, and jollifications of any kind in missionary compounds. Mr Halterman was more liberal in his outlook. Indians might dress up as they pleased and even sing and dance, but only in a ‘folkloric’ spirit, i.e. as long as such activities were stripped of any possibility of a hidden ‘superstitious significance’.
I learned with surprise that Mr Halterman was an official of the Bolivian Ministry of Culture and Education. He had a close relationship with the government, he said, and found them most helpful in their support of his missionary work.
It may be in acknowledgement of this official co-operation that the biblical text that features most prominently in the SIL’s well produced promotional literature is Romans 13:1, offered in Spanish and eight Indian translations. The Institute’s text is at variance both with that of the English Revised Version of the Bible, and its Spanish equivalent. ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers,’ becomes ‘Obey your legal superiors, because God has given them command,’ while the SIL quite remarkably re-translates ‘The powers that be are ordained by God’ as ‘There is no government on earth that God has not permitted to come to power.’ General Banzer who seized control of the country in 1971 would certainly have approved.
Mr Halterman agreed that the SIL, as well as the two other leading evangelical missions, were religious fundamentalists, and therefore ready with a tooth and nail defence of every line of the Holy Writ, including the world’s literal creation in six days, and Eve’s origin as a rib from Adam’s side.
Fundamentalists also believe that all the non-Christians of this world, including those who have never heard of the existence of the Christian faith, are doomed to spend eternity in hell. As the printed doctrinal statement of the New Tribes Mission—with whose theology Mr Halterman said he was. in complete agreement—puts it: ‘We believe in the unending punishment of unsaved.’ Thus are consigned to hell not only all those millions brought up as Jews, Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists, but all the unimaginable multitudes of good and great men born into this world before the advent of Christ. It was revealed in Time’s study entitled The New Missionary that a fundamentalist missionary interviewed by their reporter had ‘trouble acknowledging Catholics as fellow Christians’. Both SIL and New Tribes made it clear that converts other than those they share are hardly better placed in the salvation stakes than outright pagans.
‘He comes,’ as the missionaries never cease to quote, ‘not that Man shall continue to live in the world, but shall be with him in the hereafter.’ The unimportance of a comfortable earthly life, weighed in the balance against the threat of eternal punishment in the next, inspires many missionaries to gather souls at all costs, often with disregard for the converts’ welfare in this world.
‘We have a very limited medical programme,’ Mr Halterman agreed, and one could be sure he meant what he said.
William Cameron Townsend had invented a kind of pseudo-religious newspeak, by which the onus for missionary activities, which may be seen to the outsider as devious or even immoral, is placed upon God. When Townsend admitted to an underhand re-allocation of funds, contributed for scientific purposes, to church building, he spoke of the ‘out-workings of God’s unfolding plan for salvation’. This was the way missionaries, who had picked up the habit, still spoke. Not so Mr Halterman, who came straight to the point. ‘A number of Indians remain in forest areas designated for white occupation,’ he said gently. ‘They are a dangerous nuisance as it is, and they must go. Our task is to ease their passage.’ He described the method by which the occasional surviving Indian tribe was eased out of its natural environment.
‘When we learn of the presence of an uncontacted group,’ said the missionary, ‘we move into the area, build a strong shelter—say of logs—and cut paths radiating from it into the forest. We leave gifts along these paths—knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things that Indians can’t resist—and sometimes they leave gifts in exchange. After a while the relationship develops. Maybe they are mistrustful at first, but in the end they stop running away when we show, and we get together and make friends.’
But the trail of gifts leads inevitably to the mission compound, and here, often at the end of a long journey, far from the Indian’s sources of food, his fish, his game, it comes abruptly to an end.
‘We have to break their dependency on us next,’ Mr Halterman said. ‘Naturally they want to go on receiving all those desirable things we’ve been giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money. We don’t employ them, but we can usually fix them up with something to do on the local farms. They settle down at it when they realize that there’s no going back.’
‘Wouldn’t something to do on a local farm sometimes amount to slavery?’ I suggested.
He considered the word. ‘No, not a slavery,’ he said. ‘But the work can be hard. We do our best to check abuses. Sometimes they occur, but whatever can be done, we do.’