When I first read, in my teens, about the five missionaries who were martyred in Ecuador 53 years ago today, I was surprised to discover that it had been big news in the States when it happened, because my parents had never mentioned a word about it in the years since. Of course, my parents would not have been supporters of missionaries trying to get people to change their religion, as they both believed that everyone would eventually come to God, if not in this world then the next.
I was inspired by the stories of these brave missionaries and their faith in God to go to such lengths to take the Gospel to people who did not exactly welcome them with open arms. For a long time I planned on being a missionary to unreached peoples like that, to translate the Bible into a language that doesn’t even have a written form yet. For a variety of reasons I became, instead, first a Spanish teacher then a clerk for a manufacturing company, then a computer operator/programmer/trainer/help desk/etc.
But when the movie The End of the Spear came out in 2006, I was excited about seeing it. We waiting to rent it on DVD, and I found the movie very inspiring as well. It is a story of faith, of the power of God, and of forgiveness. I wondered, as I watched it, just how accurate it was to the details of the true story it was based on, and hoped it did follow the true story fairly closely. But there were aspects that were unfamiliar to me from the books I had read about the lives of Jim Elliott and Nate Saint, so I tried to find info on how much the details of certain events were true.
At the time I didn’t have a lot of luck finding what I was looking for, but today I found a review (from 2006 when the movie was released) that tells a lot more of the story behind the events fictionalized in The End of the Spear.
Reality is more complicated – of course. But the extent to which the movie-makers changed the story bothers me. The issue of contact with and influence on previously isolated tribes is a difficult one in several ways. It’s is clearly dangerous to those who make the first contact, as the events of January 8, 1956 show. It almost always leads to some loss of cultural traditions by the tribal people as they adapt to the ways of the larger civilization. Whether this is, on balance, good or bad is a matter of widely diverging opinions.
I do not understand the perspective of those who think any loss of cultural traditions must be bad – any more than I understand those who think that extinction of anyspecies is to be prevented if at all possible. Change happens in nature and among people groups, and has for millennia. Causing change without considering the long-term consequences is reckless and wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s always better to leave things as they are.
For instance, since I first read, several years ago, about the practice of female genital mutilation, I have thought that any cultures that practice it would benefit much from eliminating that particular tradition. It would mean other changes in the way females are viewed in that culture, but as a female I think that would be all to the good. The fact that some women in that culture accept it, even promote it by insisting on it for their daughters, and that it has a long established history and is ingrained in their thinking about gender relationships, does not mean it should continue.
So with the Waorani, the changes to their lives and culture since January 8, 1956 have been a mix of good and bad. And the negative aspects have not come exclusively from the greedy oil companies and the corrupting influence of modern Western culture. This review reveals ways in which the missionaries who worked with the Waorani were not always the ideal Christians depicted in popular accounts of their story.
The benefits to the Waorani may (and I think do in fact) outweigh the negative effects, but it would be more honest to show that messy aspect of cross-cultural encounters than to only focus on how the Gospel delivered the Waorani from centuries of feuding and violence. Ignoring those aspects only gives ammunition to those who think such peoples should be left entirely alone rather than being converted to a religion identified with Western culture.
Addressing the complex nature of such cross-cultural influence would admittedly be difficult to work into a movie. But leaving it out, and only stressing how the Waorani benefited from contact with the outside world, suggests an attitude that only presenting the Gospel is important and perhaps even that the end (conversion of some Waorani) justifies the means (what is not shown in the film but is discussed in the review).
Some simplifying of a story is always required to make a movie. But I consider it better, when dealing with a true story, to stick to reality as much as practical. Having read this review, the movie reminds me of the unfortunate tendency among some evangelical Christians to portray the Christian life as mostly joy and victory, while most Christians I know personally struggle with a much messier reality.
Another book that I read as a teenager, that I also found very inspiring, was Joni. I think a large part of what I found so meaningful was that it addressed the many struggles Joni had in learning to cope with her disability. Not only physical problems but also emotional and spiritual ones.
The stories of the missionaries in Ecuador talk about the struggles the missionaries faced, and this movie depicts them also. But the only struggles it shows the Waorani facing are connected to their old tribal way of life. It shows nothing but good that came to them from the contact with the missionaries. Perhaps that’s another story for another time. But it’s a story worth telling.
