Is a missionary a cultural imperialist?
How bad was Junipero Serra really? Was he a red-eyed imperialist torturer? Was he a doe-eyed humanitarian altruist? Was he an average guy just doing a job?
Emma Green at The Atlantic collects some opposing views.
“Serra did not just bring us Christianity. He imposed it, giving us no choice in the matter. He did incalculable damage to a whole culture,” Deborah A. Miranda, a Native American and a professor of literature at Washington and Lee University,told The New York Times earlier this year. She joins a host of others who arevoicing objections to Serra’s canonization.
“There is one basic article that North American journalists are writing about this: that the Indians don’t like it, and there was genocide, and there were beatings, and what is the pope thinking in doing this?” said Bob Senkewicz, a professor at Santa Clara University who is the author, with Rose Marie Beebe, of Junípero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary.
If Senkewicz is right about that, it makes a nice change. Usually the one basic article that US (I don’t know how true it is of Canadian) journalists write about the pope is: how fabulous, the pope is here! Isn’t he wonderful!
But, he said, there are a number of things missing from this story. As with any historical narrative, interpretations depend a lot on the interpreter. The controversy over Junipero Serra is not wrong or manufactured, but it is evidence of how thoroughly postcolonialism has taken over academia and seeped into the public sphere. According to Crux, roughly 25 percent of Native Americans are Catholic, and especially for them, this story is much more complicated.
Well, naturally – Catholicism is a loyalty-based organization. Catholics are going to be loyal to Catholic heroes, because that’s what it is to be Catholic. There are lapsed Catholics, liberal Catholics, nominal Catholics, background Catholics, etc, but non-adjectival Catholics are loyal to the icons.
As Pope Francis prepares to elevate Serra’s legacy, he’s inevitably raising another question: In 2015, is it possible to see a white European who came to a foreign land with the express purpose of converting native peoples as anything but a cultural imperialist?
The answer to that is no, as a matter of definition. That’s what cultural imperialism is. You need a different wording if you want space to allow a yes. You could for instance ask if cultural imperialism precluded other, more benign motives, or whether cultural imperialism is invariably and uncomplicatedly a bad thing, and so on, but there’s not much room for doubt that people who travel to foreign countries with the express purpose of converting native peoples are cultural imperialists. It’s kind of like the way there’s not much room for doubt that the pope is a Catholic.
More in a few; I need some lunch.
Decades of propaganda trained me to receive “imperialism” as a derogatory word. However, there is this well-known rhetorical move: take a derogatory term and provide for it a descriptive (non-derogatory) definition. The aim is to associate the descriptive content with the pre-established derogatory meaning. I always try to make myself immune against such devices. (The simplest method known to me is a staunch refusal to use the definition.)
Ah, but in Fowler’s Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage I found the following interesting information:
Does anyone know concrete examples of such a usage? I would love to see them!
Of course missionaries are cultural imperialists, the difference between the Spanish conquistadors and modern missionaries is simply one of degree.
Europeans employed the ‘guns, germs and steel’ program with devastating success, first the indigenous elites were massacred or subverted, then settlers moved into the areas depopulated by exotic diseases such as smallpox and influenza. Any survivors found ‘charity and spiritual succour’ with the Church, the same organization that was instrumental in the destruction of their civilizations, the price was extremely high, conversion and degradation of their culture.
Catholics are going to be loyal to Catholic heroes, because that’s what it is to be Catholic
Two practicing Catholics of NA descent working at Mission Delores with different views on canonization.
It is unquestionable that Serra was a cultural imperialist in that he was funded by Spain and explicitly aimed to eradicate NA culture, language, arts etc. But I don’t think just going out to disseminate a particular religion is itself cultural imperialism, any more than going out to disseminate any viewpoint is cultural imperialism. (Feminist outreach funded by foreign NGOs has also been called cultural imperialism, I don’t agree with that either.)
Christian missionaries have been guilty of wilfully trying to eradicate particular cultures in particular places — but they have also been deeply involved in the scholarly study of languages, creating fonts (and occasionally scripts too, e.g. Cree), bringing languages into print, creating databases such as Ethnologue (for all its flaws), to the point that academic linguists debate whether there is an overreliance by academics on data supplied by Christian missionaries. I have a hard time calling Robert Caldwell or Daniel Everett “cultural imperialists”.
It’s also true that Christian missions have pressured people to become Christian to access services in particular places and times — but they have also offered free or cheap education regardless of religion in other places. Eliza Griswold in Tenth Parallel talks about Christian groups offering heatlh services in places where there would be nothing otherwise. Of course it is a kind of advertisement but not a kind of imperialism, I think.
Regardless of Serra’s intentions (and I have seen no specifics about ‘cultural eradication’) the arrival of the Spanish was an unmitigated catastrophe for the whole of the New World.
‘Spreading Christianity’ can only mean displacing the local status quo. That might look good if you’re talking about the Aztecs, but the cultures of the New World seem to have been MORE diverse than those of Europe and the Mediterranean. Depopulation by imported diseases, the collapse of social and economic infrastructure, the imposition of strange religion onto a traumatized community of survivors… Even if Serra had deserved a saintly reputation, he was an angel of death for the actual people.