This article was sent my way a few weeks ago. It's a piece about Laura Silsby, who, in the aftermath of Haiti's devastating earthquakes, tried to take some impoverished kids out of Port-Au-Prince to safety in the Dominican Republic. Sounds pretty harmless, right? One might even say it was downright nice of her. Well, they would have said that, except that she and her group got arrested at the border for trying to smuggle these kids out of the country without permission. Guess they should have thought of that.
The story would have ended right there, had the media not found one additional fact -- Ms. Silsby is a Christian. Duh, duh, duh. Cue blinding spotlights and weeks of front-page drama. The ignorance! The hypocrisy!
The torrential judgment that ensued fueled the writing of this article in the NY Times. So I'd encourage you to read it. My initial response is down below.
Well, first off I don't think anyone can deny that this is a pretty shameless case against Christianity, or at least Christian missions. But in my opinion, it's completely unfair and unwarranted. At least Ms. Silsby was doing something, motivated out of genuine compassion and following a biblical mandate to care for the oppressed. And, lest we forget, she was taking these kids to an orphanage. Reading some of these articles, one might think she was trying to take them home as slaves. If she had succeeded in her ill-guided scheme, remember the outcome would have been 30 kids nestled safely in warmer beds than the streets of Port-Au-Prince provide. Now that's not so evil, is it?
It becomes so easy to bash international Christian aid and mission efforts that have gone awry, and at the same time forget all the good that has been done by those same programs. Sure, perhaps the history of Christian missions is tainted by a few exceptional instances, but for every tragedy associated with Christianity, there has been much more good. For example, religious people consistently give four times as much to charity than any other group. And we should thank God for that, because, as that article points out, liberal atheists statistically don't give much to those in need.
I would argue that a few cases of ineffective (or even detrimental) Christian mission work does nothing to discredit two thousand years of caring for the poor and needy wherever they are -- the quiet servitude that will never make headlines. Of the hundreds of Christian volunteers who flooded into Haiti after the earthquake, 10 of them made some misguided attempts to help in the face of incredible suffering. The American media, in their incessant quest to find fault in "the righteous" blows the whole story into front-page material. In one of the greatest natural disasters in recent times, an unprecedented amount of relief work and aid flooded into a devastated nation with no strings attached. It's a story of unexplainable tragedy and compassion, yet the piece that snags the top spot is about one conservative Christian who made some mistakes.
So critical (presumably non-Christian) columnists point their fingers at one white American Christian woman who messed up, and, like in this article, inductively reason that Christian missions are a menace to society. The headlines also tell us that Tiger Woods is Buddhist. Hence, all Buddhists are selfish and sex-obsessed. Stalin was an atheist. So were the Columbine shooters. Atheists have done some bad things. So watch out for Atheists. They're a dangerous bunch.
I guess that's a little extreme, but I think it's also extreme to so vehemently antagonize this woman. I mean, nothing even happened. She got stopped, the kids were returned. End of story. Truth be told, the story isn't about kids being taken from Haiti. The story is about a Christian who isn't perfect.
I also think it would be a good idea for this evidently concerned columnist to perhaps redirect his energies to something more pressing. Say, the fact that hundreds of helpless Haitian kids are being trafficked out of Haiti as we speak. Turn the spotlight off a well-intentioned mishap before we completely miss the real tragedy.
Peace and love,
jmb
