Perhaps you covered this more in the radio segment that I haven’t had a chance to listen to yet, but how did the local people tend to react to the more aggressive missionaries? In my narrow view of things, it seems like that would be perceived as an attack on their culture that wouldn’t be particularly welcome.

I attend a fairly casual Catholic church, and occasionally we have sisters come in from places in South America, Africa, or India to discuss their work and ask for financial support. As far as I can recall, every one of them has made some sort of distinction between the aid aspects of their work (hospitals and clinics, for example) and the religious aspects of their work (churches, evangelical centers, and suchlike). It seems to me that if you’re going to have religious organizations working in the area, maintaining some separation between the relief work and the religious activities should be mandatory.

On the other side of the matter, I’m aware of a number of conservative Protestant missionary activities that echo the theme you pointed out – aid in exchange for soul-saving. The one that immediately springs to mind is a group that provides water filters to villages in exchange for being allowed to plant a church. This seems to be nothing so much as self-righteous extortion.

Did you ever have occasion to ask the missionaries you encountered what they believed would be the fate of people they didn’t reach? I’ve seen statements to the effect that “God would take care of the un-churched”, implying that people who had never been evangelized would get some sort of voucher to the great beyond. A logical consequence (that never gets acknowledged) of this would be that anyone who had been evangelized but didn’t convert would go into the fire, and a logical consequence of that would be that the missionaries themselves would be directly responsible for the condemnation of those non-converting evangelized folks.

Thanks for the posts!