In case you haven’t heard, John Allen Chau, a 26-year-old missionary and graduate of Oral Roberts University, was killed last week trying to spread his faith to North Sentinel, an island in the Andaman Sea. Read about it here.
Yesterday my friend Kate Carte unleashed a tweetstorm connecting Chau’s missionary endeavors to the story of 17th-century European imperialism, particularly the so-called “first Thanksgiving.”
I am not sure I agree with everything Kate has written here, but I have been thinking about and processing her comments all day and I think they are worth considering. I present them here for your consideration. (I apologize for the fact that I do not know how to embed a tweet in my blog without including the previous tweet. Sorry).
1/ I’m a historian of early American religion, and I confess, I love Thanksgiving. This year I’ve got a problem. The problem came from a dead American missionary on an island off the coast of India. #thanksgiving #amrel #vastearlyAmerica #twitterstorians https://t.co/eQEUt935rZ
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
2/ Before I heard that story on Friday, I had already seen a significant uptick in the criticisms of T’giving circulated by my colleagues and throughout the wider American community. So I was already rethinking the holiday. Pieces like this: https://t.co/Z8GeqOom3M
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
3/ And this: https://t.co/tBv9ehIWuH
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
4/ I share the belief that the myth of T’giving should not be celebrated, because the Pilgrims, their fellow colonists, and their descendants undoubtedly did far more harm than good to their native dinner companions and to their descendants.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
5/ I also appreciate the thoughtful work of my fellow historians, like @rahermann, who have carefully explained the holiday’s history to the wider public. https://t.co/x0hyPlCSWJ
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
6/ And I know my opportunity to ignore the consequences of settler colonialism for the day reflects my whiteness and privilege, even as I continue to enjoy it.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
7/ So, by sharing these thoughts, it’s not my goal to tell anyone else how to feel about Thanksgiving. And full disclosure, my ancestors include Puritans who arrived in the 1630s, so if there is hereditary guilt, I’ve got plenty.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
8/ I spent this weekend questioning why I want to protect T’giving, which clearly requires discounting its mythology. Then I heard the story about the Sentinelese, and I saw more clearly what I hope to see from country so that I can continue to enjoy it.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
9/ First, here’s what Thanksgiving means to me (fair warning, it’s pedestrian and banal): family & friends coming together, rituals over food, welcoming those around us to joy and seasonal abundance. My mother-in-law’s annual feast embodies all these values.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
10/ It’s also about building community in inclusive ways. It’s a holiday that in its practice (not its story) welcomes people of all faiths and backgrounds. That matters to my Jewish family, which often feels left out of the oncoming Xmas season.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
11/ I also think its very important that Thanksgiving is not usually celebrated as a patriotic holiday, despite its origin myth. That makes it a little break from the partisanship that is so scary and so powerful right now.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
12/ Even all the stories about how to talk to your racist uncle point to T’giving as a moment of bridge building. It’s a holiday about thanks, giving, and, in the process, empathy. And it turns out we mostly don’t fight about politics over thanksgiving. https://t.co/mndH4LofGN
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
13/ T’giving can also build new community. Almost everyone I know both takes in stray friends and has been taken in as a stray. I had one of the loveliest Thanksgivings of my life with a college friend and her family, who had never met me before, in Vernon, Connecticut.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
14/ In other words, for me at least, the experience of Thanksgiving diverges diametrically from any meaningful understanding of its attached story of Pilgrims.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
15/ Up to now, my response to this divergence has been pretty nondescript. I cringed when my children donned pilgrim and Indian costumes at school, and my husband and I once snarkily decorated his mother’s pilgrim candlesticks with napkins labeled “small pox,” but not much more.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
16/ I was fine with a certain dissonance between myth, historical truth, and current practice if that practice was welcoming and positive. And I don’t forget what really happened in early America when it’s not Thanksgiving. Talking and writing about it is literally my day job.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
17/ But on Friday I heard a short report on @NPR that told of the death of American man, John Allen Chau (missionary? traveler?), who invaded the island of North Sentinel in order to convert its residents.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
18/ The Sentinelese reject all contact with outsiders, likely because they fear something like what happened after our first T’giving, or one of many stories like it. The Indian gov’t enforces their wish. https://t.co/MFaOCLM5UY
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
19/ Chau defied Indian laws and disrespected the express wishes of the Sentinelese. His religious motives, that he shouted out “My name is John, I love you and Jesus loves you,” do not change these facts. https://t.co/xUbZMkIPM0
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
20/ On his way, Chau dragged a number of Indian citizens into his crime. His eagerness to convert the islanders against their will extended to his disregard for the health, welfare, and safety of people in another nation, India, which has also been a victim of colonialism.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
21/ This story has a distinct echo of the Thanksgiving origin story, but with a very different outcome. And rightfully so. I’m not in favor of killing, but I hope the world never has to experience another era like the one that followed 1492 or 1621.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
22/ In those days, actions like Chau’s were followed by genocide and mass enslavement for the economic and political gain of a few.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
23/ I’m not outraged over the Pilgrims or the English invasion of America. It was part of a process European imperialism that transformed the world. The era needs to be understood, and outrage isn’t helpful to explanation, especially when we’re talking about a distant time.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
24/ But I am outraged as an American that on this of all weekends we don’t seem to see the current missionary as a terrorist, because that’s our word for people who act out of political or religious motives with blatant disregard for human life.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
25/ American reports have instead consistently described Chau in terms that make him appear giving and charitable, if misguided. One missionary group claims him as a hero, even as they acknowledge that he spent years planning this act. https://t.co/pTnSC4na2H
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
26/ A real sense of Thanksgiving should remind us that Chau was none of these. If we want to celebrate T’giving, and by that I mean building community and empathy, then we need to find a way to acknowledge that its putative origin story includes none of those values either.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
27/ But the point of acknowledging why we should not celebrate the Pilgrims, even when we celebrate T’giving, should also be to learn from the past. And we should use that knowledge to make the world a better place.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
28/ And that means naming the wrong done in our name, or carried out with the American privilege that we enjoy around our Thanksgiving feasts. And that’s exactly what this was.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
29/29 If Americans haven’t learned to respect a culture that has explicitly said to stay away—if we’re too blind to learn from this direct replay of our worst past—then we haven’t earned the pumpkin pie.
— Kate Carte (@KeCarte) November 25, 2018
There is much to consider. From her perspective we should not celebrate Christmas because Jesus was a “terrorist.” There is much to debate about the efforts of missionaries but Ms. Carte is wrong to claim that all missionaries are terrorists because they choose to “change” the beliefs of others.
Kate Carte is deeply wrong. Calling John Allen Chau a terrorist is gravely wrongheaded, nor are missionaries
First, he will not be and never sought to be an agent of western imperialism. This island isn’t set to be conquered or its people enslaved.
Second, Christianity isn’t about western culture. God acted in history in the Middle East to display the Gospel in Christ, choosing to incarnate Himself as a Jewish man. Not a European man.
Plus, Christian believes early spread the gospel to Africa and Asia. See Christianity: A Biography.
Finally, no matter what anyone says or thinks, we have a direct command, as Christian believers, to go and make disciples. Those who reject the exclusive truth claims of the Bible are free to disdain, but I will continue to humbly share this most important story. This young man may have been acting without sufficient planning, but I remember that he was willing to face death to try to go share the only message that leads from eternal punishment for sin to eternal joy in the presence of God.
At age 62 I’m realizing I don’t know everything. I’m a former Moral Majority conservative Evangelical, now a believing agnostic (if that’s possible). I’m just coming to terms with my own beliefs all over again. Don’t have much to comment on this tragedy.
Delivering a religious message counter to that which is the prevailing message is one thing. Killing in the name of your religion is quite another . While Chau did not intend to go and kill for Christ , he did disregard the law and the island residents’ wishes which is not what a missionary does.
On a semi-related note, before I sent my students off for Thanksgiving, I got them thinking about the Thanksgiving of Sarah Josepha Hale and Thomas Nast rather than William Bradford – the former embodying a nationalism where women could take a leadership role, the latter a Thanksgiving with a dream of all Americans sitting together around the same table as equals.[1]
[1] It was just a dream, but so was the Declaration of Independence.
John says that he is “not sure” if he agrees with everything that Ms. Carte has written. One would hope that he would strongly disagree with her claim that a missionary, killed for proclaiming the Gospel — yes, to people who did not want to hear it or have any contact with him — was a terrorist.
John spends a great deal of time on this blog documenting and denouncing the many foolish and morally indefensible things said and tweeted by the President. Ms. Carte’s tortured moral equivalence between this missionary and a terrorist is as misguided as anything Trump has uttered.
A few other things worth noting. She repeatedly calls Mr. Chau’s entry to the island where the Sentinelese live an “invasion.” I find this ironic, given that we have been repeatedly lectured by the media, in the context of thousands of people approaching the U.S. border in the “caravan” — that using the term “invasion” is nativist bigotry. But she had no qualms applying this language to one man bearing a Bible and some fish.
Second, she claims that Chau “dragged other Indian citizens into his crime.” What can that possibly mean? In reading the linked Guardian piece, we find out that a number of local fisherman helped Chau get to the island. Did Chau force these people to help him? In Ms. Carte’s telling, these people had no moral agency, and were simply the victims of a scheming “terrorist” missionary.