MISSIONS & SOCIETIES
People protest that missionaries have no right to force their religion down another’s throat. On the other hand, when someone is willing to dedicate his life to spreading ideas in whose worth one does believe — such as modern medicine, democracy, modern methods and views of education, technology and the life — one tends to approve the changes in another society that this work brings about. As a matter of fact, the Christian religion has not been nearly so destructive of the patterns of life in traditional cultures as has the introduction of industrialism, the natural and social sciences, universal and modern education, democratic and socialist concepts, and medicine. The purveyors of these latter commodities are as truly “missionaries” of the West as the Christian evangelists are. From Langdon Gilkey’s Shantung Compound, paraphrased in Adventure in Africa, by Charles Partee
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