The Stealth Crusade | Mother Jones
Love is 49, a black-leather-jacket-wearing whirlwind of a man with a
salt-and-pepper beard and a quick sense of humor. He's a chronic
multitasker, routinely praying aloud while drinking coffee and
simultaneously reviewing his lecture notes. Little known outside the
missionary world, he's an icon within it-an evangelistic entrepreneur
who wins admirers with what he calls his "middle linebacker"
personality. His seminars are usually closed to the media and the
public.
This morning's lesson is about going
undercover. Many of Love's students are missionaries themselves,
temporarily home from assignments in places ranging from Kazakhstan to
Kenya. They know firsthand that evangelism is illegal in many Islamic
nations, and they face expulsion if their true intentions become known.
Love's lesson for today is how to mask one's identity while secretly
working to convert Muslims. Evangelists, he explains, should always have
a ready, nonreligious explanation for their presence in hostile areas.
Love fixes his gaze on a studious, spiky-haired missionary dressed in
Patagonia clothing. "If people ask you, 'Why are you here?'" he asks,
"what do you say?" The young man, on leave from Southeast Asia, squirms
in his chair. His jaw opens but nothing comes out. "Bingo!" Love says
with a smile. "You bite your fingernails, and people go, 'Of course he's
not hiding anything.'" Love notes that before he went to western
Indonesia to proselytize among Sundanese Muslims, he went back to school
and earned his credentials to become an English instructor. That way,
he says, he had an excuse to be in the country. "I could look someone in
the eye and say, 'I am an English teacher,'" he explains. "'I have a
degree and I'm here to teach.'"
That, he says, is the
model for winning converts in the Islamic world: Find another pretext to
be in the country. Build friendships with the locals. Once you've
developed trust, then it's time to try to gain new believers. But don't
reveal your true purpose too early. "How did Jesus explain why he was
there?" Love asks the class. "Indirectly," volunteers a veteran
missionary. "He'd say, 'Why do you think I'm here?'"
"Did Jesus ever lie?" In unison, the class says, "No."
"But did Jesus raise his hand and say, 'I swear to tell the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth?'" Again, 20 voices call out,
"No!"
There are lots of ways to camouflage yourself,
Love tells the students. In Indonesia, evangelists ran a quilt-making
business to provide cover for Western missionaries, allowing them to
employ-and proselytize-scores of Muslims.
The students
nod thoughtfully; they agree that Muslims must be reached by whatever
means possible. Their zeal is helping to fuel the biggest evangelical
foray into the Muslim world since missionary pioneer Samuel Zwemer
declared Islam a "dying religion" in 1916 and predicted that "when the
crescent wanes, the Cross will prove dominant." Over the past decade,
evangelical leaders say, the number of missionaries trying to convert
Muslims has jumped fourfold, from several hundred in the early 1990s to
more than 3,000 today. Many are sent by the Southern Baptist Convention,
with the rest coming from a network of church-supported groups with
names like Christar and Arab World Ministries.
Missionaries work in remote villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan; former
Soviet republics like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; Middle Eastern hot
spots like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; and African countries like Somalia
and Algeria.
"We see Islam as the final frontier," says
David Cashin, a professor of Intercultural Studies at CIU who used to
don Muslim clothing and pursue converts in the tea shops of Kaliakoir,
Bangladesh. Like many of his fellow evangelicals, Cashin regards the
Islamic world as a hinterland that must be penetrated before the Messiah
can return. "History is coming to an end," he says. "If you believe
Christ is coming back, why has he delayed 2,000 years? We haven't
finished the task he set out to do." That task, he says, is to win
converts among all the world's ethnic groups.
The
growing movement to hunt souls in Muslim lands-by missionaries who often
pass as aid workers, teachers, or business owners-has raised hackles
outside the evangelical world. Missionaries themselves acknowledge that
their work endangers the lives of converts, and critics charge that it
disrupts the delivery of humanitarian aid and fuels resentment of
Westerners during one of the most dangerous moments in recent history.
But to those at the heart of the movement, including Rick Love's
students, any damage done by their work is outweighed by the importance
of their mission: to wipe out Islam. "I believe it's a false religion,
and I'd like to see it be gone," says Kim McHugh, a 36-year-old CIU
student who is training to convert Iranian refugees in Turkey. Her
husband Brent agrees. "If they don't have a chance to experience Jesus,"
he says, "they're going to hell."
For most Americans,
the first glimpse into Muslim-world evangelism came last November, when
the Taliban created heroes out of two fresh-faced missionaries named
Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. Incarcerated for three months on charges
of spreading Christianity, the women made headlines after U.S. Special
Forces helicopters whisked them away from a prison outside Ghazni,
Afghanistan. "They had a calling to serve the poorest of the poor,"
President Bush said at a White House ceremony shortly after the
Hollywood-style rescue. "Their faith was a source of hope that kept them
from being discouraged." But Curry and Mercer were doing more than
relief work: Once home, they admitted to violating Afghan law by showing
"part of a Jesus film" and giving a Christian storybook to a Muslim
family. Another missionary from their organization, John Weaver, also
garnered wide-spread media attention for his refusal to leave
Afghanistan despite the growing anti-American tensions.
Like many missionaries in Islamic countries, Weaver trained at CIU, one
of three schools in the United States with a degree program
specifically devoted to converting Muslims. A campus of boxy brick
buildings located at the end of a wooded boulevard in Columbia, South
Carolina, CIU has the look of a second-tier state college. But rather
than publicizing frat parties and rock concerts, the colorful posters on
its walls and bulletin boards announce prayer services and
opportunities for overseas missions. In the student center, next to a
wide-screen TV, a book provides Christian reviews of Hollywood movies.
(Harry Potter? Amistad? Billy Elliot? All rated "very offensive.")
Faculty and some 1,000 students eat together in the cafeteria, praying
over smothered chicken and talking spiritedly about lessons from the New
Testament.
During this two-week "winterim" session,
it's hard to find anyone of traditional college age. Many of the
students are from the front lines of missionary work, men and women who
have spent years in Muslim countries. Christian Dedrick is squeezing in
some additional schooling before returning to the field next year. A
lanky 33-year-old with thick blond sideburns, a pageboy haircut, and
oval, horn-rimmed glasses, he has an easygoing style and an enthusiasm
for challenging conversation. Pass him on the street, and the first
impression would be tweedy intellectual.
For two years,
Dedrick worked in a small port city in Kazakhstan, teaching English and
living with a local family, sleeping on a cotton bedroll in a sparsely
furnished room he shared with his host's two sons. Although the family
were devout Muslims-the father considered it a sin to leave the
faith-Dedrick spent much of his time trying to persuade them to convert
to Christianity. He read them the Bible and showed them a Kazakh
translation of the "Jesus film," a Campus Crusade for Christ movie that
graphically depicts the crucifixion of a blue-eyed Jesus. "We wrestled
over that a few times," he remembers. "I'd say, 'I have to tell you what
changed my life. You don't have to accept it, but I have to tell it.'"
While the family didn't convert, neither did it evict the American,
whose $50 in rent represented a sizable chunk of the monthly household
income.
Like the other missionaries who have come to
CIU, Dedrick is constantly reevaluating his evangelical technique. He
rejects his old attitude as "pretty paternalistic," saying he'll ask
more questions before making judgments about what he sees when he
returns to Central Asia next year. But he still believes Islam is the
work of the devil. "People cheer at baseball games," Dedrick says. "I
cheer at worship services. And when I go to a culture 10,000 miles away
and don't see that righteousness, that holiness, reflected in that
culture, I get sad. Satan has deceived them away from a relationship
with their creator God."
For all their work, Dedrick
and his fellow missionaries win few new believers. That doesn't seem to
faze them. "My goal is not to convert a Muslim," says Al Dobra, a
45-year-old with a gravelly voice and military haircut who befriends
Muslim businessmen in Nairobi, Kenya, and then tries to convince them of
Islam's fallacies. "My goal is to plant a tiny seed that will fester
and gnaw and grow, so that eventually they will begin to question their
religion. My prayer is that they will become restless sleepers and
troubled by what they hear. That's a horrible thing to wish on someone."
That absolute certainty that Christianity is the only
truth-and that other religions are satanically inspired-runs throughout
the two weeks of Rick Love's course. One morning Tom Seckler, a
dark-haired missionary with a bland face and thick black mustache, tacks
the Cambodian flag to the classroom bulletin board and lays a map of
the country on the overhead projector. Seckler's mission agency, World
Team, has targeted the Western Cham, an impoverished Muslim minority
group in Cambodia that was massacred by the thousands by the Khmer Rouge
in the 1970s. Despite World Team's efforts, Seckler estimates there are
only about 25 Christian converts, some of whom meet Tuesday nights in
Phnom Penh. "Please pray for the Cham people," he asks his classmates.
"There's a degree of self-righteousness among the Cham. They think
they're okay. We don't see a big spiritual hunger among them."
The class begins to worship, eyes closed, each person offering a
spontaneous request. "Lord, we come into your presence and we ask that
you would give us a fresh sense of your burden and your love for Muslim
people, especially the Cham," says Love. He falls silent, and then Brent
McHugh takes over: "I pray, Lord, that the Cham people do hunger, and
realize what they're missing in Christ."
The anti-Islam
prayers reflect CIU's official attitude toward what it considers a
competitor religion. Prominent on the university's Web site is an essay
posted shortly after September 11. "To claim that 'Islam' means 'peace'
is just one more attempt to mislead the public," it reads. "Muslim
leaders have spoken of their goal to spread Islam in the West until
Islam becomes a dominant, global power." The essay was written by Warren
Larson, who directs the university's Muslim Studies program and served
as a mentor to John Weaver, the Afghanistan missionary. A former
missionary himself, Larson fears that Christianity might be losing the
race for world domination. "Islam is biologically taking over the
world," he says. "They're having babies faster than we are."
Before coming to CIU, Larson worked for 23 years in Dera Ghazi Khan,
Pakistan, trying to convert Muslims to Christianity. He and his wife
hosted prayer meetings, Bible studies, and informal gatherings where
Muslims came for tea and Coke. Many of their neighbors showed up-some to
learn about their religion, but most for more practical reasons.
"People had the idea that foreigners have money," Larson says. "A lot of
them would come because you might be able to help them get to America.
Or they would come asking for help: 'My father, he's sick. Can you write
a letter of introduction to the hospital?' Some of them would be
willing to talk about Christianity. Most would not."
Larson was indeed rich by local standards. Not only did he hire Muslims
for domestic help, but he also owned household luxuries like a
refrigerator. And while the Larsons often engaged in community
service-visiting widows, taking people to the doctor-they were still
seen by some neighbors as the embodiment of the West. One morning, 200
armed Muslims stormed Larson's home, throwing bricks at his ministry's
two Land Rovers, kicking down his door, and setting fire to religious
literature. After that, Larson says, "whenever we would hear something
that sounded like a riot, it would scare us."
The
attack on Larson's home came in the midst of fierce anti-U.S. sentiment
in the Muslim world, which culminated in the takeover of the American
embassy in Iran in 1979. Now, in the wake of September 11, some critics
say evangelists are again fueling distrust and resentment toward
Westerners. Last October, Islamic militants opened fire on a church
built by missionaries in Pakistan, killing 16 Christians, and Muslim
rebels threatened to execute two missionaries kidnapped in the
Philippines.
"The issue is the disproportional power
relationship," says Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on
American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that
works to promote a positive image of Muslims. "They use their resources
to coerce people to do what they want them to do." Hooper remembers
reviewing a proposal by a Christian agency to send veterinarians to help
impoverished Fulani cattle herders in West Africa. But the plan had a
caveat: "You don't get the veterinarian unless you take the missionary,"
he says. "When people are in desperate circumstances, they'll do things
they otherwise wouldn't do."
Robert Macpherson,
security director for the aid group care, remembers serving as a U.S.
Marine in Somalia during the early 1990s, when some 200 organizations
were working to stave off famine in the war-ravaged country. "It was
dangerous, dangerous, dangerous," he recalls. Evangelicals only made
matters worse, he says, by showing up at food-distribution sites and
handing out Christian literature, giving the impression that food aid
was contingent on conversion to Christianity. "The next thing we know,
they got themselves in the middle of a riot," Macpherson recalls.
Angered by the missionaries, Somalis climbed over one another to steal
food and set trucks on fire. "They were desperate," he says. "They were
dying. This was an emergency."
At CIU,
missionaries-in-training learn to try to avoid such hostility by
blending into the cultures they visit. In class one morning, Rick Love
opens his Bible to the book of Acts, in which the apostle Paul takes on a
disciple named Timothy. Before the two men go out to proselytize among
the Jews, Paul takes Timothy to have his foreskin cut. "He says, 'Yo,
Tim, you wanna join my team? You gotta get circumcised,'" Love tells his
students. "How's that for high standards? Wow!"
Love
is hardly suggesting that his male students undergo the knife. He's
making a bigger point: To win converts in a foreign culture, you must
take on the behaviors of that culture, even adopting the rituals of
another religion. The practice is called "contextualization," and it's
one of the hottest topics among missionaries. The idea is to get away
from the old-fashioned practice of importing American-style
Christianity, complete with wooden pews and Western hymns. Instead,
missionaries today are more likely to take on Muslim names, dress in
veils and other local clothing, prostrate themselves during prayer, and
even fast during Ramadan. "We must become Muslims to reach Muslims,"
says Cashin, the CIU professor.
If a first-century
evangelist can undergo circumcision to win converts, how far can a
21st-century missionary go? At lunch, Christian Dedrick takes a spoonful
of his wife's homemade broccoli soup and ponders the question aloud.
"Should we call ourselves Muslims?" he asks. "The old meaning of the
word is 'one who submits.' In Jordan, the missionaries had 'Jesus
mosques.' They called themselves 'Muslims of the Messiah.' We wrestled
with that. We wanted to call God 'Allah' so we could be on that
relational level with Muslims."
Dedrick drew the line
at appearing too Muslim-but others haven't. "One team in the Middle East
has a policy of not allowing missionaries to identify themselves as
Christians," reports the journal Evangelical Missions Quarterly. Another
team "called themselves Jesus-ists" and presented themselves as "one of
many Sufi or dervish mystical orders." The journal Missiology says that
missionaries urge Palestinian students to adopt Christian beliefs-but
to still call themselves Muslim.
When pressed,
evangelicals acknowledge that they often blur the distinctions between
the two religions and fail to disclose their intentions. "The line
between guile and withholding information is very, very thin," says one
missionary at CIU who asked not to be identified for security reasons.
He admits that he rarely tells his Muslim neighbors why he's living
among them-demurely calling himself a "language student"-and that he's
been forced to terminate friendships with those who ask too many
questions. "To have integrity in that is a challenge," he says.
Many Islamic and Christian leaders alike believe that evangelical
groups often fail the integrity challenge. "Once you have this kind of
sneaky way, the respect for the holy is gone," says Sayyid Syeed,
secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America. Sacred
rituals, such as prostration and the Ramadan fast, are used to lure
people away from their own religion. "The missionary," says Syeed, "is
seen as someone who is stabbing you in the back."
For
Donna Derr, the honesty issue is not an abstract one. She's the
associate director of international emergency response for Church World
Service, which provides aid in more than 80 countries while barring
outright proselytizing. From her perspective, Christian
evangelizing-particularly by missionaries who masquerade as humanitarian
workers-makes it harder for legitimate aid organizations to relieve
poverty, malnutrition, and disease. "Groups that have the need to
proselytize color us all with the same brush," says Derr. As a result,
she says, it's harder to win the trust of those communities her group is
trying to serve. She recalls one Southeast Asian nation where rural
families suffer from debilitating diseases. "It was difficult to get the
local governments to allow us to come in," Derr says, "because they had
somebody in the past who tried to start a Christian church. They'd say,
'Oh, your name is Church World Service. You're going to do the same
thing.'" In other cases, she adds, evangelicals provoked so much
resentment "that the other groups doing aid had to pull out, simply
because it was too dangerous."
Derr and others note
that there is another model for missionary work, one followed by many
mainline Christians: serving those in need without actively recruiting
new believers. For example, Catholic Relief Services delivers food and
blankets to Afghanistan, builds drinking-water systems in Morocco, and
promotes small-business development among Egyptian women-all without
trying to recruit Muslims to Catholicism. "We reflect our beliefs in our
actions, in our relations, in our respect for people," says Ken
Hackett, the agency's director. "We don't ask even our own staff to
convert. If you're a good Muslim, you're a good Muslim."
Rick Love admits that some evangelical groups "are unwise in how they
share their faith." But even if it takes some stretching of the truth,
he adds, it would be wrong to ignore the call to share the Word. "That
is what the Bible teaches," he says, "so I could never be part of an
organization that focuses on deed only." As Love sees it, the lack of
religious freedom in many Islamic countries forces missionaries to
conceal their intentions. "I want the freedom to share my faith with you
and not be persecuted," he says, "and I want you to have the same with
me. It should be a matter of persuasion, and not political power."
On the last day of the "winterim" session, things turn decidedly somber
in Love's classroom. It's the lesson in which the instructor reminds
his students that their work can have dire-even deadly-consequences for
the people they try to convert. He refers to Curry and Mercer, the two
Americans who were airlifted from a Taliban prison two months earlier.
"What happened with Dayna and Heather is not typical," he says. "We do
have people imprisoned, but usually you're asked to leave. We get a
ticket out of the country-but the new believers, what do they face? Loss
of job, children taken away, imprisonment, torture, even martyrdom."
Of all the criticisms launched at Christian evangelists, this is the
one that's least disputed: Missionary work often puts local believers in
serious danger. "It is common for mission agencies to be expelled from
countries awash with persecution," reports an internal study by the
Southern Baptist Convention based on 300 interviews in 45 countries.
"Virtually overnight, local believers are left destitute and exposed."
The study cites Indonesia, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan as
particularly repressive. In one East African community, it reports,
converts were "systematically hunted down and martyred by adherents to
Islam. Other believers are displaced; they live in refugee camps; they
reside in adjacent countries, or in the West." The common thread among
the victims? "All those martyred had a relationship to expatriate
Christians that contributed to their deaths." In another country unnamed
in the report, "significant numbers of Muslim-background believers were
arrested and tortured due to their relationship to the expatriate
missionary."
Tahir Lavi converted to Christianity
during secret midnight Bible-study sessions at a madrassah in Kashmir
where he was studying the Koran. His parents disowned him, and he was
forced to flee after a group of men threatened to kill him. For the past
13 years, he has lived in exile in a small house at the end of a narrow
lane in a north Delhi slum. But despite the risks, he continues to
preach to other Muslims, exhorting them in the words of Jesus: "Take up
your cross and follow me."
Indeed, evangelical leaders
encourage missionaries to continue proselytizing, even though converts
might be tortured or killed. "Missionaries need maturity and spiritual
toughness so that when the fruits of their witness are required to walk
through the fire, the missionary does not automatically attempt to
rescue them," the Southern Baptist study urges. "Persecution is
Biblically and historically normative for the emerging church; it cannot
be avoided or eliminated.... To avoid persecution is to hamper the
growth of the kingdom of God."
In the end, say
evangelicals, the earthly suffering of Christians pales before the
eternal hell to which Muslims are sentenced. "It's hard for me to say,
'I have a passport out of here if things get out of hand, but you have
to stay here and take it,'" says Raymond Weiss, a former missionary in
Bahrain. "But that's what Jesus says: Sometimes it will be fathers and
mothers against each other for his sake. If Jesus is cosmically,
ultimately true, then whatever cost in this world is nothing."
With that shared assumption, Rick Love's students are returning to the
field, to share the New Testament in the places they're least wanted.
The class at CIU has inspired them to renew their efforts to save
Muslims from what they consider a false religion. "Some Christians have
said to us, 'They have their own faith; why do you need to reach them?'"
says Brent McHugh, the evangelist bound for Turkey. "But if you lean
your ladder against the wrong wall and you spend your life climbing up
that ladder, when you get to the top, you'll find there's nothing there
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