Religion

Extra-Biblical ‘Noah’

by

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah rose above (or likely because of) the controversy surrounding it to have an impressive $44 million opening weekend. I was writing my review, but getting bogged down in some technical details regarding the Watchers. I’d much rather focus on some of the themes from an LDS perspective, so I thought I’d share this blog post from Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis (Adjunct Professor of Rabbinics, University of North Texas) that covers a lot of the interesting extra-biblical bits of Noah with further links. (I’ll likely build on these in my own review, but now I don’t feel obligated to explain it all.)

These include:

  • Watchers: “The fallen angels, based in Gen. 6:4 and grandly elaborated on in the Book of Enoch and the Book of Giants, are a big part of the storyline…Aronofsky elides the more lurid part to the tradition, their coupling with human women and producing giant offspring, focusing instead on their role in Enoch as the bringers of knowledge and technology to humanity.”
  • Tzohar: “The glowy-explosive substance used repeatedly in the movie is based on the tzohar, a miraculous gemstone that tradition tells us illuminated the interior of the ark.”
  • The Garment of Adam: “…I assume this is where the idea for the magical-glowing-serpent skin-arm tefillin worn by the shamanic patriarchs of Seth is derived from. In Jewish tradition, the garment is made from the hide of Leviathan [i.e. the sea serpent]. Here, it’s the sloughed-off, pre-corruption skin of the edenic serpent.”
  • Tubal-Cain: “The terrifying and terrified king is constructed from a single verse of Genesis where he is credited as a worker of bronze and iron, but is then fused with the midrashic King Nimrod, the power-mad tyrant of rabbinic fantasy who attacks God’s messengers.”

Drawing on a parable from the Zohar, Dennis writes,

Hopefully…people are finally coming to understand that the fundamentalist critics of this film are all masters of wheat as alluded to by the Zohar. They think that in cleaving only to the bare bones of the biblical narrative, they are masters of all aspects of the story, but in fact they are, to a great extent, suffering from a kind textual indigestion, or perhaps a spiritual ciliac disorder, in which they fail to absorb the full nutritional value of the biblical narrative because of their restrictive way of reading.  The Noah story as received, a mere one hundred verses, with little dialogue, minimal motivation, no character development or insight, no struggle, is a mere skeleton which the readers must flesh out with themselves, projecting their experiences, emotions, and conflicts, and imagination onto the scaffold of plot to fully realize its many on complex meanings and implications. The movie Noah steps into those many gaps and fills them with clever, and sometimes crazed, midrashic storytelling.

I couldn’t agree more.

 

Here are a few more Noah-related posts from biblical scholars and biblically literate moviegoers:

 

Times And Seasons: As Much As I Know Anything

by

2014-03-31 Before the PulpitToday’s post for Times And Seasons is basically just my testimony. I’ve had lots of people ask me why I believe over the years, and usually I’ve been incapable of giving a simple, concise answer. When I got asked the question again the week before last, however, I finally had an answer. Along with it, I had an understanding of why I’d been unable to express my faith more easily in the past. Read the post at Times And Seasons for the rest. It’s called As Much As I Know Anything.

Incidentally: I neglected to link to my last Times And Seasons post when I posted it two weeks ago. That one was called Human Evolution: Problems and Possibilities.

Science and Seances

by

Image result for seances

Nathaniel posted this past week on the relationship between religious faith and scientific evidence in the wake of new evidence for cosmic inflation. I followed up with a brief post about religious scientists (including Big Bang discoverer Georges Lemaitre). To top it off, this month’s issue of Nautilus has an excellent article entitled “Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark.” The author presents a fascinating history of modern science. Here are a few gems:

  • “Who now will stand up for the British physicist Edmund Fournier d’Albe, who in 1908 put forward the theory that the human soul is composed of invisible particles called “psychomeres” possessing a rudimentary kind of intelligence?”
  • “[W]hen science first began to fixate on invisible entities, many leading scientists saw no clear distinction between such occult concepts and hard science…Victorian physicists were particularly prone. Some conjectured that there exist intelligent, unseeable beings on the subatomic or the cosmic scale. Others speculated that high-frequency waves outside the visible range could transmit thoughts between minds, or that immortal souls were consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Anything seemed possible, as it often does when we awaken to our ignorance.”
  • “It is no coincidence that these discoveries [e.g. radio waves] happened at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for spiritualism, in which mediums claimed to be able to contact the souls of the dead. The two trends supported each other. The new physics hinted at explanations for thought transference, whether from other people or from spirits; and a widespread belief in invisible influences and intelligences created a receptive environment for ideas in physics that seemed scarcely less incredible. If radio waves could transmit invisibly between a broadcasting device and a receiver, it did not seem so hard to imagine that human brains—which are after all quickened by electrical nerve signals—could act as receivers.”

And so on. Check it out.

Scientist Priests

by
Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest
Georges Lemaitre: scientist priest

Nathaniel made an interesting observation the other day about physicist Andrei Linde’s reaction to the new evidence for cosmic inflation. The scientist worried, “What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful?” This led to a discussion about religious faith and scientific evidence. It might be worth remembering in light of the new discovery that Georges Lemaitre, the Father of the Big Bang, was a Catholic priest and a physicist at the Catholic University of Louvain. RealClearScience has a couple brief pieces on the history of scientific and religious thinkers:

Check them out.

What If I Believe This Just Because It Is Beautiful?

by

2014-03-25 Bicep2 Telescope

Just over a week ago reports with headlines like Big Bang’s Smoking Gun started to appear all across the Internet. Just yesterday the New York Times weighed in on the significance of the discovery, ranking it alongside the Higgs-Boson:

These gravitational waves are the long-sought markers for a theory called inflation, the force that put the bang in the Big Bang: an antigravitational swelling that began a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the cosmic clock started ticking. Scientists have long incorporated inflation into their standard model of the cosmos, but as with the existence of the Higgs, proving it had long been just a pipe dream.

There are already skeptics[ref]Cosmologists Say Last Week’s Announcement About Gravitational Waves and Inflation May Be Wrong[/ref], but I want to focus on an odd, impromptu interview with Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde and what it says about the relationship between science and faith. Linde is one of the physicists who first proposed the theory of inflation decades ago, and in the video Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprises him at his home with initial results confirming that Linde has been right all along. Something Linde said really struck me:

If this is true, this is a moment of understanding of nature of such a magnitude that it just overwhelms and… let’s see. Let’s just hope that it is not a trick. I always live with this feeling “What if I am tricked? What if I believe into this just because it is beautiful? What if…?” Yes, so this is really helpful, to have evidence like that. It’s really, really helpful.[ref]This is my own transcription from the video.[/ref]

Professor Linde’s question really struck me the first time I heard it. “What if I believe it just because it’s beautiful?” What that expresses to me is a much more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of human belief and faith than we are usually allowed to glimpse when the guardians of right and proper rationalism are busy trying to drive their wedges between religious faith and scientific evidence. Just so we’re clear: I’m not equivocating the two, nor am I in any way suggesting that this new discovery itself validates theism.

What I’m doing is just pointing out that belief is about more than just rationality and objective evidence. It’s about intuition and symmetry and beauty and value. I think it would be a terrible misrepresentation of Linde’s faith in his unverified theories to call it “wishful thinking,” or “blind belief,” although there are aspects of both wishing and blindness in it. Similarly, ugly dismissals of religious conviction using the same labels strike me as a fundamentally impoverished view of what it means to be a human being in a world of mystery and contradiction where questions always outnumber answers on any truly meaningful issue.

From where I’m standing, the kind of tentative, pioneering scientific faith that precedes (but dos not obviate) experimental validation is a close cousin of the kinds of thoughtful, humble religious conviction that have animated so many believers in so many traditions for thousands of years. Obviously we should never merely accept this kind of faith where there is the prospect of evidence at hand. But isn’t it just as clear that this kind of faith is intrinsically noble and important? Clearly there are important differences between religious and science inquiry, but this is one commonality: faith is the beginning and not the end of inquiry.

Real Clear Religion Runs My Article on OW

by

2014-03-24 RCR Article

Real Clear Religion is running an article I wrote about Ordain Women and the letter they received from the Church Public Affairs Department. They titled it The Mormon War on Feminism. I asked them to change it on the grounds that there are plenty of Mormon feminists who do not support the goals of OW, but they liked the headline they’d picked. I’m not too bothered, because at least I really like the lead in they wrote for it: “Ordain Women risks losing their current position as a standard bearer for reform.” That’s pretty accurate. So it’s not the same as the article I published on DR last week, but there are some similarities. In any case, it’s definitely exciting for me to be reaching new venues. (This is my first article at RCR.)

What Does Ordain Women Really Want?

by

Disclaimer: If you do not like sarcasm, you may find it difficult to get through this. I understand your point of view. But please note that I sass with love.

I recently stumbled upon the idea, from an OW supporter, that the OW movement simply wants the prophet to pray about Mormon women in the priesthood. They just want some updated revelation. This was of course surrounded by others saying that women “need” the priesthood for eternal progression (I won’t quibble about that today) and women have the “right” to the priesthood (ditto). However, let’s take for a moment the idea that all that OW wants is for the prophet to hear their concerns and pray on their worries. Let’s say that all the people who say women need, want, and have the right to the priesthood are just miscommunicating their desire to get the prophet to pray for revelation. There is a scriptural tradition for such requests in ancient and modern texts.

In this case, I hate to tell you, but OW you are going about it in all the wrong ways. Nate Oman discussed to this in his poorly received (at least by OW) article on why the movement is currently set up for failure. But I can tell you one reason why you are doing it wrong: I had no idea you just wanted more revelation. In fact, I thought you only wanted one particular revelation, if that, otherwise you just wanted ordinations to begin yesterday.

Oo, somethings not right here.
Oo, somethings not right here.

Now, I may just start rehashing some of the things Nate and my husband have already said, but I hope I can bring a little more to the discussion. First of all, I am a woman, so my anatomy does not disqualify me from disagreeing with other women (truth). Secondly, I have children, so I speak for all mothers (sarcasm). Third, I am getting my PhD in a science, so I am liberated, intellectual, academic, and logical, and I speak for all the people who are or prefer those things (again, sarcasm). I also grew up in a household that was technically without the priesthood: yes my mom was a working single mother, I was the product of, whisper it with me now, divorce, and there were no boys to hold up the mantle. (But I could go on and go on about the many incredible, humbling, and teaching ways the priesthood blessed my family, headed by a divorced single mother with cancer, but I will save that for next time.)

Let me explain how the OW movement looks through the eyes of this tired, stressed-out mother and PhD student, who grew up in a completely imperfect Mormon home located in the South. I realize that many people are invested in this movement, and any negative thing I say will sting. I understand. When I received the first draft of my Honors thesis back from my undergraduate advisor, which looked like he had gleefully bled all over every. single. page. I was devastated; like someone had handed me back my baby and said, “Actually, she’s hideous.” So with that in mind, I say, the OW movement appears to be a media-hungry enterprise that cares more about acceptance from the world than working together with the everyday Mormon woman and is solely seeking for everyone, including the prophet, to confirm that its opinions are right. Phew, I know, that came out strong. Commence picking it apart!

Really though, I’m not saying this is what the movement is, or that any particular member feels that way. But, overall, this is how it appears to me. When you have the media discussing what is a very personal and spiritual part of doctrine, when there are more spotlights on Kate Kelly than I can count, when you don’t go through the grass root efforts of talking with sisters who disagree (or at least don’t talk to them kindly or with respect), when you reciprocate the church’s “I’m a Mormon” campaign for a cause, when you have members who very much appear to be making demands (beyond asking for a prayer) from the prophet, it makes me very uncomfortable.

I think part of the problem is that a grass roots effort, something akin to a letter writing campaign, would appear to have much less effect than if we can get the NYT talking about it (although I truly believe the prophet would respond to a heartfelt call from the sisters). As statistics have shown, Mormon women, in general, don’t want the priesthood. Most women see it more as a responsibility and less as an opportunity, and we’ve already got a lot on our plates. There may even be some women who take a don’t-tempt-fate attitude towards asking for the priesthood. I know sometimes I avoid praying for service when I’m really busy, sometimes I do it anyway because I don’t know how I’ll survive without the blessings providing services brings. And I know recently when our family had some financial struggles, we were blessed not with our dollar stretching further, but with the opportunity to stretch our work hours even longer.

So, OW, if you really want to be the messengers for women who just want the prophet to request revelation, I have a few suggestions for you.

First, unify your message. Don’t get caught up in what the world wants to say about the oppression of women in our completely backwards (to them) religion. Don’t demand, plead. The Lord cares about your pains and your desires, but it’s hard for some of us other Mormons to understand what you’re really asking for, if simple revelation is really what you want. In fact, I could maybe get behind a simple desire for a current prophetic response, if I’m in an OK-to-tempt-fate mood. And there is common ground between us for more sensible participation by women throughout the church, regardless of our desire for the priesthood.

Second, ban the hate-filled comments towards those who disagree. It may be true that some of us don’t understand what you are really asking for, but that doesn’t mean we just don’t know what’s best for us. That doesn’t mean we don’t understand our place in the world, the church, and our home. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about you or are distracted by some nebulous patriarchy. We are strong, loyal, and faithful women trying to make it right for our families through this crazy world. We are all in this together, even if we don’t always agree on the same means.

Finally, turn your purpose to service. If women are hurting and they feel having the priesthood will solve that hurt, help us help them. Help us alleviate their pain and suffering. We can’t give them the priesthood, but we can serve them. Please, teach us how to serve these women, and let us serve you. It has to go beyond a catchy “How Not to Speak to Mormon Feminists” and into actual deep caring for one another. The Relief Society has all the potential to allow us to constantly uplift each other, let’s harness that across the divide of OW.

Let me share my light and love with you.
Let me share my light and love with you.

On Ordain Women Being Confined to Free Speech Zones

by

Twice a  year the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints holds a General Conference, which consists of 4, 2-hour meetings for the general membership of the Church to attend at the giant conference center in Salt Lake, at church buildings around the world, or even from home via Internet and other sources. In addition to the general membership meetings, there is a Priesthood meeting for men and boys 12 or older and a combined meeting for women and girls as young as 8. Last year, at the Fall General Conference, the feminist Mormon group Ordain Women staged a protest at the male-only meeting. OW seeks to have women ordained to the Mormon priesthoods (there are two orders), but their request was denied and they were barred entrance. The incident made headlines, which seems to have been the purpose.[ref]I base this on both the language used (e.g. “Priesthood Session Action”) and also on the explicit emphasis placed on the publicity the event garnered: ” The images of us watching men and boys walk in instead of us and of each of us asking for permission to enter are powerful.” Alternatively, just look at the cameras and reporters in the pics.[/ref]

Mormon Conference

OW plans to repeat their action again at the upcoming April General Conference, and this has provoked a preemptive response from the Church. An official statement that was released to the public makes two important statements. First, it states that male-only ordination to the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods is “a matter of doctrine.” This draws a deliberate contrast with the racial priesthood ban which the Church rescinded in 1978 and further repudiated in a statement earlier this year. That practice was never based on any canonized revelation, and is now[ref]Original version said “had been viewed” which implied to some folks that it was always seen as just policy. That’s not accurate, and it’s not what I intended to convey.[/ref] viewed as a matter of policy (transient) as opposed to doctrine (permanent). The new statement even went farther and specifically disavowed the folk theology that had grown up around this policy: “None of these explanations is accepted today as the official doctrine of the Church.”

This new statement on race and the priesthood is part of a major, but quiet, new initiative in how the Church talks about its own history and other sensitive issues. It is, in that sense, a sign of progressiveness in the Church. I, and many others, applauded the document when it came out. So it is very telling that the Church chose to refer to this document (however obliquely) in their response to OW. Referring to a new, progressive document conveys the message, “This far, and no farther” more powerfully than a reliance on an older or more traditional source would.

Which brings us to the second, and more controversial, statement:

If you feel you must come and demonstrate, we ask that you do so in free speech zones adjacent to Temple Square, which have long been established for those wishing to voice differing viewpoints.

The formal statement has drawn headlines of its own weeks ahead of the OW demonstration. Kate Kelly, the founder of OW, is quoted in the Salt Lake Tribune as stating flatly:

We have nothing in common with those people [referring to other demonstrators in the free speech zone]. They are seeking to destroy the church. We are not against the church — we ARE the church.

The idea that the Church has chosen to ostracize OW members is widely seen by supporters of OW as victory for their movement. A raft of blog posts from prominent Mormon women, like Jana Riess, have come out stating that the Church is behaving like a bully. Riess writes:

There is something deeply symbolic about yesterday’s statement, for it reveals what the Church apparently thinks of the feminists within its fold. We, as faithful and active members of the Church, are being lumped together with the same anti-Mormon protestors who routinely crash General Conference and shout that the Mormon religion is of the devil. These protestors have started fistfights with conference-goers and even stomped on or burned temple garments.

In line with characterizations like these (although not necessarily as an endorsement of them)[ref]Kristine pointed out in a comment to this piece: “I said nothing about the merits of either side’s case; I was asked to opine on the way the media would respond, and I did.”[/ref], Kristine Haglund, another prominent Mormon feminist, called the decision a “PR disaster for the church.” She went on o say that “Goliath is never going to get better press than David — the optics are terrible.” That’s all I intended folks to glean from her quote, that it was a bad PR move, but I [/ref] On Facebook I’ve seen friends express similar twin feelings of deep hurt at being excluded along with a sense that soon the tide will turn in their favor and the members of the Church will come to see OW as the good guys. I think both of those reactions are mistaken.

2014-03-19 Unjust JudgeFirst, while my heart goes out to those who feel stunned and betrayed by this announcement, I’m afraid they may have set themselves up for tragedy. The movement for female ordination often models their approach on scriptural precedents like the parable of the importunate widow, but this is a very high-risk approach to activism. But this parable is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, it is about a widow and therefore someone who self-evidently has a valid claim.[ref]The parable is more commonly known as the parable of the unjust judge.[/ref] Is it “self-evident” that we ought to ordain women? Obviously most Mormons don’t think that it is. Second, it seems like a serious mistake to apply the parable to conventional PR pressure tactics targeting the leaders of the Church instead of prayer to God. I’m not suggesting that OW should only pray about this and nothing more, but I am suggesting that enlisting this parable as a justification of conventional protests is a mistake. Unfortunately both these elements, the believe that female ordination is self-evident and also the belief in scriptural justification for their tactics mean that OW may have not really prepared themselves for the possibility that the Church simply isn’t going to go their way. I’ve often seen Mormon feminists pronounce total confidence in both the rightness and the inevitability of their cause. In light of such great expectations, there is simply no way that the Church could offer a definitive “no” that would not feel crushing.[ref]By contrast, I have often seen folks who oppose female ordination express a willingness to adapt if God reveals that to be the course for the Church. It seems this has emboldened the OW movement instead of encouraging them to consider their own back-up plans.[/ref]

Meanwhile, however, Mormon feminists often do not seem cognizant of the fact that their requests would cause just as much pain to fellow members as they themselves feel today. If they feel excluded by this statement, imagine how categorically and totally traditional Mormons (who vastly outnumber Mormon feminists) would feel were the Church to repudiate their faith and their convictions by instituting female ordination. There genuinely are two sides to this issue, and those who oppose female ordination frequently do so because of their own equally sincere convictions about what it means to be a Mormon woman. I understand that being asked to stand next to anti-Mormons may feel like symbolic ostracism. Does OW understand the extent to which, if their requests were granted, huge numbers of Mormons would feel just as betrayed? It may be asking too much while the sting is still fresh, but feelings of hurt and betrayal should eventually be examined in this context. This story ends with broken hearts, no matter how it ends.

Second, and for a great many reasons, I do not think that the Church’s statement will result in a significant shift in Mormon perception of OW. It’s important to step back and realize that OW does not even speak for all Mormons who feel dissatisfied with the status quo as it relates to the priesthood and gender issues broadly defined. As I’ve written before, the word “conservative” takes on strange connotations in a religion that is dedicated to ongoing revelation. Mormons believe in a Heavenly Mother, but we know very little about Her. Mormons believe that there are other scriptures beyond the Book of Mormon, but we don’t have them yet. We believe that God “will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God.”[ref]9th Article of Faith[/ref] In a broad vista of possible futures, the movement to ordain women to the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthood orders is one tiny possibility that does not have broad support even among Mormons who look for forward to further light and knowledge.[ref]I also suspect that the Bloggernaccle is something of an echo chamber for a relatively radical Mormon minority.[/ref] In fact, one of my chief disagreements with OW is precisely that it seems completely deaf to the possibility of a genuinely new and uniquely Mormon resolution to the questions it raises, seeing instead only the conventional secular redress.

What’s more, however, the Church’s statement isn’t in any way a proactive attack on OW itself or its members. This is not some kind of sequel to the September Six. As quick as folks are to draw comparisons with the civil rights struggle and other forms of oppression and persecution, the Church has actually done nothing as it relates to OW generally. It has only specified that if you want to come to Temple Square for the purpose of protesting the Church General Conference you have to do so in the area that has been designated for that purpose. In other words, the statement does intimate that the aim of OW runs counter to the doctrine of the Church, but the only action the Church is taking is a specific, limited, response to a single, contained tactic of OW that causes even generally supportive Mormons consternation. This is not the stuff of which martyrs are made.

Mormonism is an incredibly open-minded faith because of its atheological nature, and I do not believe that the statement from the Church presages an offensive against Mormon feminists in general or even specifically against OW. Lots of Mormons believe lots of things, and lots of Mormons think that other Mormons are crazy for the things they believe.[ref]Welcome to humanity/[/ref] When it comes to behavior, we’re a pretty rigid Church, but when it comes to philosophy it’s pretty much every man or woman for himself. And I like it that way. I like the big tent approach to philsophy coupled with firm stances on ethical actions. But there is a difference between “all people are welcome” and “all ideas are accepted.” No matter how much we as individual members may love our Church, it is ultimately not up to us to define what the Church believes. It isn’t really our Church at all. Every religious tradition must decide for itself which beliefs are essential, which beliefs are somewhat optional, and which beliefs are banned.[ref]As a general observation, I think religious traditions are always more tolerant in this sense than the individual members within that tradition wish they would be.[/ref]

I certainly don’t want to get out ahead of the prophets and declare this answer conclusively resolved based on one sentence from one public relations statement. So I am not going to try and argue that the Church’s position on female ordination is as central as, for example, the divinity of Christ or the Atonement. It isn’t, and it never can be. But I do think that proponents sometimes fail to appreciate the extent to which a commitment to gender essentialism and traditional gender roles is a deep part of our culture, history, and doctrine. Unique teachings that define Mormonism, like the centrality of the family to exaltation, are inextricable from teachings like gender complementarity. These beliefs have been reaffirmed recently with the proclamation on the family. And they seem to be at odds with OW’s particularly severe and uncompromising vision of gender egalitarianism.

There will always be some members of faith traditions who find their treasured convictions on the wrong side of the boundaries of their faith. That is an awful predicament to find oneself in. Historically, some in that position have ultimately been in error, but sometimes it is their particular faith tradition that has made mistakes. (Sometimes both, of course.) That is why, even if the Church gets increasingly explicit about male-only ordination as a matter of essential doctrine, I will sympathize with those who cling to their beliefs and their conscience. I think they are wrong, but (in this possible future) I hope that all those who find themselves in that position realize that they are loved and wanted and welcomed even if one or more of their beliefs have been categorized as out of bounds. I hope they find a way to live with the tension between their competing beliefs (a tension we all feel to some extent at different points in our lives) and remain within our community.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Theology as Rhetoric

by

My friend Tyler Andersen recently completed his MA in Rhetorical Studies at Idaho State University. His graduate paper explored the theology of German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer–who was hanged by the Nazis for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler–through the lens of rhetorical devices ethos, logos, and pathos. The paper is titled “Ein Festre Burg: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Use of Theology as Rhetoric.” As an admirer of Bonhoeffer (I have to agree with Tyler that he was “a god among men”), I was thoroughly impressed with the paper. Be sure to check it out. Tyler notes that Bonhoeffer is “little known outside theological seminars and niche academic circles” (pg. 2). We should all become more familiar with this man.

Missionaries and Modernization

by
The medical missionary David Watt Torrance.

Walker recently posted on a study showing that 19th century missionary efforts had a positive, even vital effect on the development of liberal democracy.

The study focused on “conversionary Protestants,” but if we look beyond the scope of democracy, we still find that the influence of missionary group was by large a positive one. This includes ”non-conversionary” Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. Some interesting examples come from missionary efforts in 19th century Palestine, and they have something to tell us about the supposed dichotomy between science and religion, as well as the contention that religion is a corrosive, negative influence.

Missionary movements have made a very real contribution to the spread of modern medicine. As an example (though certainly not the earliest), for over half a century one of the few modern hospitals in Israel/Palestine was the one run by Scottish missionaries in Tiberias, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 1885, the young Dr. David Watt Torrance arrived as a medical missionary. His clinic was at first very small- only two rooms- and the locals were understandably suspicious of his motives. Torrance gained the confidence of the locals due to his skill and compassion, although very few took any steps toward conversion. In 1894, a proper hospital was built, and it remained in operation until 1959. Malaria and dysentery were among the most common illnesses treated at the hospital.

To give an idea of just why this was a big deal, before the medical missionary efforts traditional medicine in Palestine involved amulets, pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men, exorcisms, and bloodletting. This was true no matter to what religion or social class you belonged.

One measure of these medical missions’ success was that Jewish communities in turn made increased efforts to establish their own hospitals and clinics wherever missionaries operated as a way to counter their influence.

It is probably not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands owe their lives to the Torrances’ religion (Herbert took over from his father until his own retirement in 1953), and the number increases significantly if one takes other mission hospitals into consideration. Torrance himself paid a terrible price- he buried two wives and four children in Tiberias. It was Torrance‘s faith in God which led him to dedicate his life to improving the health and lives of Galileans, regardless of their religious denomination or convictions. Science, that is, modern medicine, was his tool, but religious faith was the motivator. What the Torrances and other medical missionaries show is that religion has often led to the spread of science in very practical ways.

The scholars Ruth Kark, Dietrich Denecke, and Haim Goren wrote a paper entitled “The Impact of Early German Missionary Enterprise in Palestine on the Modernization and Environmental and Technological Change, 1820—1914.”

We suggest that it is informative to emphasize a new dimension to the study of missions- that of the relationship between religion and belief systems and place or space. Within the missionary context this relates to the study of the impact of missionary concepts and activity on environmental and spatial change and the creation of new urban and rural landscapes. These reflect far-reaching effects that remain evident to the present.

Their study deals with two German missionary groups. The first, Protestants, founded an orphanage and school in 1860 just outside of Jerusalem for Christian victims of persecutions in Lebanon. Not only did they provide schooling, they also taught the children various practical trades employing and constantly upgrading modern methods of production.

In 1889, German Catholic missionaries purchased land at Tabgha, the traditional site of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. They established a network of schools for local Arab Christians, and an agricultural commune run by monks. They introduced a lot of modern agricultural tools and techniques, re-introduced bananas to the region, and sailed the first motor-boat on the Sea of Galilee.

The article is well worth a read, and it gives a new spin on the role of religion in progress and modernization.