Let's Start Over

Colonialist Proselytizers

The Surprising Discovery About Those  Missionaries

Andrea Palpant Dilley
Christianity Today

For many of our contemporaries, no one sums up missionaries of an earlier era like Nathan Price. The patriarch in Barbara Kingsolver's 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, Price tries to baptize new Congolese Christians in a river filled with crocodiles. He proclaims Tata Jesus is bangala!, thinking he is saying, "Jesus is beloved." In fact, the phrase means, "Jesus is poisonwood." Despite being corrected many times, Price repeats the phrase until his death—Kingsolver's none-too-subtle metaphor for the culturally insensitive folly of modern missions.

For some reason, no one has written a best-selling book about the real-life 19th-century missionary John Mackenzie. When white settlers in South Africa threatened to take over the natives' land, Mackenzie helped his friend and political ally Khama III travel to Britain. There, Mackenzie and his colleagues held petition drives, translated for Khama and two other chiefs at political rallies, and even arranged a meeting with Queen Victoria. Ultimately their efforts convinced Britain to enact a land protection agreement. Without it, the nation of Botswana would likely not exist today.

The annals of Western Protestant missions include Nathan Prices, of course. But thanks to a quiet, persistent sociologist named Robert Woodberry, we now know for certain that they include many more John Mackenzies. In fact, the work of missionaries like Mackenzie turns out to be the single largest factor in ensuring the health of nations.

'This Is Why God Made Me'

Fourteen years ago, Woodberry was a graduate student in sociology at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC). The son of J. Dudley Woodberry, a professor of Islamic studies and now a dean emeritus at Fuller Theological Seminary, he started studying in UNC's respected PhD program with one of its most influential figures, Christian Smith (now at the University of Notre Dame). But as Woodberry cast about for a fruitful line of research of his own, he grew discontented.

"Most of the research I studied was about American religion," he says of early graduate school. "It wasn't [my] passion, and it didn't feel like a calling, something I could pour my life into."

One afternoon he attended a required lecture that brought his vocational drift to a sudden end. The lecture was by Kenneth A. Bollen, a UNC–Chapel Hill professor and one of the leading experts on measuring and tracking the spread of global democracy. Bollen remarked that he kept finding a significant statistical link between democracy and Protestantism. Someone needed to study the reason for the link, he said.  Woodberry sat forward in his seat and thought, That's me. I'm the one.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow, Idaho

The Fragility of Civil Order

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

“I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1–2).

Whenever men have enjoyed any privilege for any length of time, it becomes part of the framework of their minds. They take it for granted, and assume that this particular privilege, whatever it is, will rise in the east tomorrow, right after the sun does. That privilege might be clean water, which you can get by turning a tap, or it might be a comfortable standard of living, which is evidenced by the fact that you are reading this on your phone, or it might be the peaceful transfer of political power. It might be the fact that when you go to the polling places to cast your vote, you do not have to walk past riot police.

Some of you might recall that after the last presidential election, I registered my opposition to the criminal prosecution of Hillary Clinton for anything.

Douglas Wilson's Letter from Moscow

The Problem of Tiffany Sugartoes

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

September 25, 2014

Scripture refers to that kind of ruler who frames “mischief with a law” (Ps. 94:20). Those who do this kind of thing are men who sit on thrones of iniquity, and God refuses His fellowship with any such thrones.

There are many ways to frame mischief with a law. Everyone grants that one example would be when a despot pillages all the poor peasants in order to fund his Belshazzarian kegger tomorrow night. That would be one example. That would be the big E on the eye chart.

But are there other examples of thieving mischief? While some established thieves are debauched, others are a bit more clever. If Suleiman the Magnificent takes 20K from me in order to beef up the personnel department of his seraglio, then that is both tacky and theft. But if Obama the Magnificent takes 20K from me in order to provide loan guarantees to Goldman Sachs, and they use it to provide a holiday bonus for a rising junior executive, who uses it on a weekend blowout in the Hamptons with a girl named Tiffany Sugartoes, then this is just as tacky, and just as much theft, but we can say that they cover their tracks better these days

Disintegration

There Goes the Hood

The crumbling of order and resulting self-destruction of the community start with broken windows not being fixed; next prostitutes and vagrants are allowed to loiter; soon delinquents and youth gangs realize they can act with impunity; and by then the neighbourhood is well on its way toward disintegration.  [Andrew Peyton Thomas]

Man is not an island.  Man was created to live in community.  Communities share a common life; they can exist only so long as common values, beliefs hold it together.   This is a fundamental Christian doctrine, traced all the way back to the Garden of Eden, when God declared it was not good that man should live alone.  To fight crime and the disintegration of a neighbourhood, the community has to exert itself.  This requires a co-ordinated effort between civil authorities, the police, and citizens above all.