Preamble: I am not addressing all of you when I say “missionary.”
Many of you come to foreign cultures in humility, realizing that Western
civilization is no less primitive than any other, although it has fringe
benefits. Many of you understand that Jesus will be worshipped in every tongue
by every tribe – that is, in every different culture. Many of you have the
heart of Jesus and offer grace, not legalism and condemnation. Put down this
letter now – you are doing a fine job. I speak to the missionaries who lived in
Ancient Rome or live now in Modern Venezuela – all over the earth in every
time. The men who are concentrated on “collecting souls,” not glorifying Christ
through love and gentleness.
Dear colonizing
missionaries,
I must confess, I am pissed off.
I find it hard not to hate you sometimes – may God help me. I would swear were
I to speak to you in real life. You, oh British missionaries to Hawaii, offered
to natives not peace, but condemnation. Woe to you! You, oh French missionaries
to the Five Nations of Canada, did not care for their culture, but for your
false religion alone. You, oh Spanish missionaries to Peru, offered not the loving
pierced hand of Jesus, but the iron fist of legalism. You, oh men who held up
the name of Christ as a pretention, as a symbol, but your black hearts were
just as stained with sin as any other man. Woe to you! Cursed be the man who
brings disgrace to the name of Christ by killing natives. By punishing them. By
oppressing them. By making them afraid. Did you not realize that men in the
future would look back in utter disdain for a Christ you did not preach? I am filled with rage.
You built your cathedrals on top
of pagan temples, you condemned hula-hoop dancing, you bound men down with
European morals, you forced them to learn an angry foreign tongue, you made
them farm and make hay-bales, you kidnapped their children to “re-education schools,”
you ravaged their lands, you flaunted yourself, you raped their women, you
despised their culture, you hated their skin-colour. Woe to you! You claim to
be religious, but true religion, says God, is helping the widow and the orphan, and being unstained from the world!
But you slaughtered the husband, raped his widow to death, kidnapped her
orphan, and showed your evil worldly heart. In the name of Anglican and Puritan
and Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox values, you ignored Christ’s sacrifice
and bound them with the law of Moses. Woe
to you! Says Christ, teachers of the
law, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You
yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.
You preached a false gospel, you
trampled on Christ’s sacrifice, you broke every law of God, you did not remove
the plank from your own eye, you lived to please man, you sat down at the head
table, you exalted yourself, you did not become a Jew for the Jew or Gentile
for the Gentile, you considered yourself better than others, you treated others
as you would not want to be treated, ad
nauseum. How do you think you shall escape the fires of Hell? Jesus saved
his most bitter rage for the most religious of hypocrites. And you are such a
man. You are a hypocrite. Repent from your wicked ways, perhaps the light of
Christ will shine in your heart still. It is truly a wonder and astonishment
that anyone at all was actually brought to Christ through your cruelty. I am
sickened.
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