I used to watch https://www.youtube.com/@MissionaryBushPilot deliver stuff around PNG in a Kodiak. If you're into aviation, the videos are golden
It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell".
If people want to go do bush plane things in remote areas and work in very challenging environments as weird foreigners, there's plenty of ways to justify that in the form of a secular NGO (something like Medecins Sans Frontiers) without combining it with missionary work.
At this stage in the ecocide and genocide of West Papua, any eyes are welcome no matter what their biases. If they want to convert people to their belief system, honestly I couldn't care right now as long as they protect the indigenous West Papuans from being genocided by Prabowo and his cronies and the beautiful ecology of the island from being ecocided.
When a more 'advanced' group use their wealth, technology, medicine etc to control a less developed group - yes that can be a problem.
ideally something not too far removed from how the world works today
Humanitarian aid also exerts influence, if anything by showing how advanced the more advanced group is. For someone whose religious practice involves traditional medicine or shamanism for treatment, western medicine seems like is obviously a religious influence and control. (It also has issues like alleged bartering treatment for sex or food supplies helping mostly the bad guys with guns)
and you're looking at locals like they are too dumb to reject a new religion. it's a condescending view. locals in Siberia did reject the new religion at first and paid the price in blood, it stopped when they learned to pretend to be Christian and keep their traditions under wraps. the situation seems completely different here.
But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.
You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.
You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)
yeah thinking "we shouldn't influence poor locals because obviously we can do it so easily" is a little condescending.
I know people from the west who reject religion but pretend just enough to get some benefit from the church, why assume locals are too dumb to do it.
there were historic cases where native people rejected a religion and paid price in blood. THAT is a problem. if there is no forcing, there is no problem.
Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel. They wouldn't bring aid without bringing the Gospel. But like that idiot who tried to convert the Sentinelese, they would bring the Gospel without aid, if they felt so compelled. I don't think it's incorrect to say that everything else is a means to the common end. Christianity is an assimilationist religion. Jesuits may do it differently than Catholics who may do it differently than Baptists, but conversion is always the end goal.
>You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them.
I mean, they didn't, that isn't ever really how that works. Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity, as will the influence of Western culture. I couldn't read the article you posted unfortunately but I did find an article that basically seems to tell the story[0]. I also found an article written by someone of Tiwi descent that tells a less friendly, or at least more complicated story[1].
I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal. It may not be fair but history demonstrates that the relationship between Christianity and indigenous peoples is one of exploitation, suffering and colonization more often than not.
[0]https://www.abc.net.au/religion/tiwi-christianity-aboriginal...
[1]https://www.thenorthernmyth.com/2017/12/20/graverobbers-god-...
While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.
Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.
> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity
This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.
> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.
Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.
But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.
"Democracy" and "human rights" is basically that but on steroids. Surely you're not a cultural relativist that simply going to allow uncontacted people to be racist and misogynist willy-nilly?