On several passes through the library, I missed this book titled “Marxist Modern” because I didn’t think it had anything to do with Ethiopia, much less the topic I’m most interested in: the development of Christianity there. But then I found it referenced in a bibliography of an article I enjoyed on the topic, so I decided to pick it up on my next pass.
The subtitle of the book is “An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution”. The author writes in a detached style in language that does not condemn communism per se, but that nevertheless acknowledges many of the atrocities that were committed during the Ethiopian socialist revolution of the 1970s and 80s. Unlike a lot of accounts, one does not get the impression that the author is denouncing Marxism, but simply telling a story about how its implementation came to pass (and ultimately fail), especially in the rural areas.
Does this all sound very interesting? It’s not really. But smack in the middle of the book is a chapter titled “The Dialectic of Modernity in a North American Christian Mission” and this one really got me thinking.
In it, the author, Donald Donham, tells the story of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), the largest and most influential outside Christian organization to make inroads into the country during the 20th century. There were other missionaries there too, but they had only a handful of people. A local woman I know here in town grew up in southern Ethiopia where her parents worked for the SIM.
The SIM was founded in 1897 by the Canadian Rowland Victor Bingham. For Bingham, the “Sudan” was a blanket reference to all of sub-saharan Africa. The organization would go on to send a lot of people to Africa, mostly to Sudan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia, where it arrived in 1927. From the beginning, the organization was not tied to a particular denominations and its missionaries, aid workers, and teachers came from all different protestant backgrounds.
In Ethiopia though, it discovered the already established Ethiopian Orthodox church. It was not welcomed by the Coptic leaders, but rather told to pack up and leave. Early on in their stay however, one of the SIM missionaries, Dr. Thomas Lambie, was awoken in the middle of the night and called to help the local governor of Wellegga where they were staying. He was in great pain and the doctor was able to, using a special pair of tweasers, remove a bug that had crawled into the governor’s ear while he was sleeping. Lambie didn’t think much of it, but his influential patient so raved about the doctor that he was given an audience with Halie Salasie not long after.
The Emperor was absolutely feverish to bring in modern western teachers and especially doctors and wasn’t about to turn down this possibility. The SIM was allowed to “do their Christian missionary thing” in the country, as long as they kept to the rural areas where the Orthodox church had almost no presence (mostly the south), and as long as they established LOTS of hospitals and new schools. At first, this sounded great, but it later became to be a strain on the evangelists. Whenever they wanted to move into a new territory or village, they were told they needed to bring in a bunch more doctors first. Just planting a church wasn’t an option, but only a reward of sorts for various degrees of modernization that the SIM could bring to the country. Lambie, now in charge of operations in the country, played this political game well. He had Ford automobiles imported to the capital (which had only a couple hundred cars at the time) as well as tractors and other modern equipment. He pushed forward with plans to evangelize more unreached rural areas while assuring financial backers back in the US and Canada that the emperor was a legitimate Christian, despite his adherence to (as far as they could tell) a largely alien religion.
Over the years, this whole setup began to have some strange and unintended side-effects. At this point I had better quote from the chapter a bit.
In the conversion process that slowly unfolded, the negative sign of anti-modernism was switched again and again. Consider for example the Biblicism that the missionaries brought to southern Ethiopia, their emphasis on the Bible as the “inerrant” word of God. To North Americans, this doctrine protected religion from the modernist claims of science: whatever science profess to know, all that anyone really needed to know was the Bile: “[The SIM missionaries] felt duty-bound to have a Bible text for every religious statement they made. They believed that their interpretations of the Bible was that held by Jesus and his apostles; they believed in an authoritative Bible and took it with them to southern Ethiopia.
In the context of southern Ethiopia, however an emphasis on the Book had entirely different consequences than in North America. In Ethiopia, being able to read the Bible (and hence other books) in a society in which no one else could separated one, not from modernity – far from it – but from tradition. In the 1930s, the SIM was allowed to use local vernaculars, but after the Italian occupation had ended, it was required to use the national language, Amharic, both in preaching and in Bible translation. For southerners, being literate in Amharic opened a whole new world on the nation, courts, newspapers, radio – in short, modernity.
Another example of this process of inversion occurred in missionaries’ notion of exactly what constituted conversion. Becoming a Christian, for fundamentalists, did not depend upon a mere rite like baptism; rather, conversion required a wholesale “separation” from the world and a basic behavioral change in converts’ moral lives. In North America, this kind of separation meant detachment from tobacco, alcohol, and other sin and, more broadly, from all forms of (modernist) attempts to dilute religious traditionalism [such as modern psychology, Darwinism, materialism, etc.]. But in souther Ethiopia, an emphasis on so-called separation led to a radical rejection of tradition, one that, as one missionary put it, would eventually “blast apart” customary assumptions.
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The message delivered to the people was not one just of the Gospel of Jesus, but was very tightly tied to free modern medical care, learning to read, and exposure to a whole truckload of other western ideas. Some regions in the rural south went from having an almost zero literacy rate to having some of the highest rates in the country thanks to the schools founded by the missionaries. These people then moved to the city, leaving the family farm in the dust and hoping to make a better richer life for themselves. Sometimes they remained in their new faith, but they frequently abandoned it for a large helping of worldliness. Donham goes on to trace how many of the most enthusiastic supporters of the communist revolution were the young Christians from the south. They used their new-found education not to read the Bible, but to overthrow the Amharas – their ancient overlords and oppressors.
Along the same lines, people also flocked to the missionary stations for modern medical care and took only a feigned interest in the preaching. This is to be expected of course and there is a sense in which Christians must always be willing to give freely even when there is nothing to be had in return. Still, the way it was set up, these things were experienced in such tandem that they could not be separated in the minds of the new converts. Many of them did not even realize until far later that their new faith had anything in common with the religion practiced by the highlanders in the north, their ancient enemies.
What was this “Dialectic of Modernity” that the missionaries are grappling with? It was the contradictory nature of much of their thought and practices. Back at home, the Christians of the SIM and their supporters were actively anti-modernist. They tried to keep traditions alive and respect the past in the face of rapidly changing secular ideas. They tried to preserve things like prayer in public schools, acknowledgement of God in the public square, no legal basis for easy divorce. They placed a high value on community life and family ties. They praised farming and field work and had strong followings in the rural midwest and the south. They decried the rat-race of the city and considered it a damaging moral influence. In short, they were very conservative in just about every sense of the word.
But here they were in Africa being radically progressive! They shunned tradition, encouraging the people to throw away anything remotely connected to the paganism of their past, be it charm bracelets, or various food rituals, or even their language. Before, a couple’s honeymoon would last several months. Now it was encouraged to be only a week so they could go back to working hard, just like industrious westerners. Following Jesus meant it was time to ditch your family if they didn’t want to come along and that was OK because you were a liberal free agent now. Lets hurry up and teach all these goat herders how to read so they can learn, not just about how their sins are forgiven, but about democracy, fertilizers, engines, and biochemistry.
It’s like one minute they were denouncing the evils of Rock and Roll, and then the next minute teaching children to play the electric guitar. How do you keep this tension in your personal philosophy? (By not facing it I suspect. It’s how we handle our own cognitive dissonance today).
How ironic that the leading Ethiopian modernist of the 1920s, ras Teferi, came to support the activities of the arch anti-modernist Sudan Interior Mission. Or was it? For Hingham, the dialectic between anti-modernism and its shadow, modernism, was always more than a simple opposition. These two stances toward the world seemed in fact to depend upon one another and at times to feed into one another.
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A phrase I often here from people that discuss evangelism, is “What you win with WITH is what you win them TO.” If you “attract” people with cool music, inspirational speaking and good parties, then you have to keep that stuff going or your “ecclesia”, your community, falls apart. Sure, there is some stuff about Jesus in there, maybe a lot of it actually, but it wasn’t a naked gospel that got them in the door, but rather a thickly clothed one. In the same way, when things like modern pharmaceuticals, books, and exciting foreign friends are part of the presentation, they also gain the convert’s allegiance along with what is taught from the Bible. It can’t help but be this way. Faith matures over time and can (and does!) overcome these entanglements, but that can take years and for some people never seems to occur.
I want to stop for a moment and say that, despite what I may be recounting above, I am not highly critical of the SIM missionaries. I am actually really impressed with some parts of their story. They did, in my opinion, a TON of things right. They were very serious about establishing indigenous churches. They trained local native pastors and got out of the way very quickly. They didn’t prop up new churches with a single dime of foreign money but made sure they were self-sustaining from the first day. They made sure it was all locals on the elder boards. One day they (the white folk) would be serving communion, and as soon as they had a few people baptized, the next week, they had THEM serve it. Great stuff. And the church exploded in their six years of absence after the Italians kicked them out of the country in 1936. This sort of “give them Jesus and get out of the way” attitude is bold, courageous, and dramatically more sustainable than some other models. For all the secular modern baggage the missionaries may have unwittingly brought with them, they still took some huge steps in decoupling their own western culture from the gospel and enabling the new churches to flourish. I dig that.
And I dig where I see that happening today, even in our own backyard, ecclesia semper reformanda. And I also am troubled by the dialectic of modernity as it continues today. I frequently have difficulty reconciling the two in my own life. One antidote is to remember that _____ (fill in the blank) will NOT save you. Christ has saved you.