Missionary movements

[a_majoor]

This piece from the American Interest mostly laments the loss of historical knowledge of the American Missionary movement which sent thousands of Christian Missionaries around the world, but I thought the most signficant passage was the line about Americans being replaced or supplimented by Braziliansm Koreans, and Indians.

This is thought provoking in several ways, since missionary movements spread a lot more than just Christianity; underlying cultural beliefs, habits and institutions have also followed the missions abroad (other missionary movements did similar things, the spread of Bhuddism from India to China and Japan is an example of this cultural diffusion at work, as is the spread of Islam to the Phillipines and Indonesia).

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/10/31/americas-forgotten-missionaries/

America’s Forgotten Missionaries

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating piece, worth reading in full, about how American missionary organizations are scaling back their global footprint in the face of budgetary pressures and increased competition from missionaries hailing from the non-Western world:

Peter and Jennie Stillman felt a divine calling to preach the gospel abroad. So the Southern Baptist couple left Texas with their three young daughters 25 years ago and became missionaries in Southeast Asia.

Now, the Stillmans are responding to a new call: early retirement. They are among hundreds of Southern Baptist missionaries working abroad who are being summoned home in a move to slash costs, after years of spending to support missionary work around the world led to budget problems. […]

The cuts to the program, considered America’s flagship evangelical missionary organization, underscore a fundamental change in mission work as the church becomes more global and the tradition of lifetime assignments for Christian missionaries sent “from the West to the rest” declines.

The most important news here is that the spread of Christianity around the globe is changing the nature of world missions—there are relatively fewer (expensive) Americans, and relatively more Brazilians, Koreans, and even Indians. As of 2010, according to the Journal, these countries had more than 60,000 Christian missionaries spreading the word abroad.

More broadly, however, the story should remind us of the overlooked importance of American missionaries in shaping the history of this country and the world. Evangelical missionaries aren’t fashionable topics today, and missionary history is almost totally neglected by the educational establishment, but the almost 200 years of American foreign missions has been one of the most consequential long-term movements in American history.

American missionaries played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity in East and South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands and of Protestantism in Central and South America—an epic tale of courage, sacrifice (and occasional follies and missteps) that, for most Americans under 50, is completely unknown and untold. In the 19th and 20th centuries, missionaries opened professional doors to women both here and abroad, helped lead lead the the attack on segregation in the United States upon their return (to say nothing of the anti-slavery movement), and spread ideas about democracy, development, and medical education around the world. Missionaries and their children have also been closely involved with American foreign policy and diplomatic service.

You can spend a lifetime in elite American schools and colleges without knowing that any of this ever happened—or that more than 100,000 Americans are serving abroad in this capacity today. This is one of many ways that Americans are losing touch with some of the important values and movements that shaped and continue to shape this country and the world.

Changes in communication technology, faster travel in an age of jets, and above all the rise of vibrant Christian communities across the global South, are changing the mission of Americans seeking to share their faith overseas, and this change has driven and will drive more changes in the ways missionary agencies work.

But if Americans are going to understand their own history and society, much less the nature of America’s role in world affairs, our colleges
and schools are going to have to recover one of the most dramatic and consequential elements of the American story.

 

[a_majoor]

The explosive growth of Christianity in Africa is creating some strange side effects. The political and social changes in Christian Africa is bound to be as profound and far reaching as the growth of Radical Islam in Africa.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/08/04/ugandas-porn-police-strike-again/

Uganda’s Porn Police Strike Again

The Ugandan government has announced that it is going to sink some serious cash into a “porn detection machine.” Quartz has the story:

Having nude photos on mobile and electronic devices in Uganda can land you in jail for up to 10 years under the country’s anti-pornography law, which parliament passed in 2014 with an aim to “stamp pornography out of the Ugandan society.”

As part of the clampdown, Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s minister of ethics, told state-owned media that the country has bought an $88,000 pornography-detection machine from a company in South Korea. It will arrive in Uganda next month, he said.
Uganda’s anti-porn thrust comes as part of a larger story we’ve been tracking in sub-Saharan Africa: the spectacular growth of Christianity. The number of Christians in Africa has skyrocketed from 9 million at the beginning of the 20th century to more than half a billion today. But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. European and American missionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries mainly brought mainline Protestantism and traditional Catholicism to the Continent; today, Africa’s fastest-growing churches identify as evangelical, apostolic, and Pentecostal.

These charismatic sects are less squeamish about the line between church and state than their mainline counterparts; they aren’t afraid of squaring public policy with church doctrine. In other words, Africa’s Christians are not just growing in sheer numbers, they’re also growing in political clout. The culture wars may be largely over in the United States, but they’re just heating up in places like Uganda, where followers of conservative Christian sects square off against more liberal urban elites.

Another major trend is working at cross-purposes with the growth of socially conservative Christianity in Africa: the spread of technology. Porn-detection devices aside, technology promises more freedom for the individual and greater access to the wider world. The mobile phone revolution has allowed Africa to “leapfrog” landlines and rapidly expand access to online services, such as banking. Remarkably, smartphone usage in Africa has doubled in just the past two years. Quartz has it in a different story:

Lower smartphone prices are driving a digital revolution in Africa, allowing mobile phone users to access the internet at unprecedented levels. Operators and developers are also leveraging the power of mobile networks to transform services in health, agriculture, education, energy and water management.

The number of smartphone connections across the continent almost doubled over the last two years, reaching 226 million. Selling prices have dropped from an average of $230 in 2012 to $160 in 2015, according to a report published by GSMA on Africa’s mobile economy (pdf).
The growth in smartphone use is pushing telecommunication companies to develop new products to boost their user base. Kenya’s Safaricom, which in 2011 partnered with Huawei to manufacture an $100 Android smartphone, is offering new services, for example, that would help tackle social challenges facing local communities.

Christianity and technology are on a collision course in Africa. Doctrinaire conservative forces have never had more widespread popular mobilization to influence African politics, while individual Africans have never had more freedom to explore the ideas and images of the wider world, including content many believers consider to be deeply sinful.

Africa’s coming culture wars will have many battles, and it’s impossible to forecast when each of them will take place and which party will prevail. In this case however, we’re willing to hazard a prediction: Uganda’s porn crackdown is risky business, and it won’t succeed.
Google searches for porn originating in Uganda declined sharply after the law was passed but rebounded not long after. The 2014 porn ban notwithstanding, searches for “porn” have outstripped searches for “Jesus” in the East African nation in every month since June 2004. If the goal is to stamp porn out of Ugandan society, a lot of Ugandans are going to end up in shackles (and not in a way some might like).

 

[ueo]

Jesus wept. A porn detector from Korea? Cue minds exploding!