Missionary effects

[PSOL]

Watching a commercial on the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, a front group for a Christian sect to convert Jews, has got to be the sickest thing ever. Their current commercials that was shared on my RSS feed was sick in all the ways i preconceived missionary work.

It fitted the bill of a group well versed in parting people of their money. With a major politician like Mike Huckabee endorsing it and groomed members to look like actual Conservative Jews, it looked unconspicuous to the untrained eye. Presenting the Holocaust while next presenting poor women who lost their communities from the Genocide, with most of the film being poverty porn of what is allegedly the awful living conditions of these women. Most donors will probably be evangelical Christians, but the advertising goes above and beyond in deceit and deception.

Showing just the poor in what looks like the outskirts of Lviv instead of the actual city, the film goes above and beyond in being disgusting. On another lie, it says that these women are “oppressed” in the post-Soviet union. Given that Ukraine’s president is a Jew and all these countries are liberal democracies, once cheered on by the likes of people like Mike Huckabee back when, like lmao. Are Jews in the rural areas of the US oppressed then? Laughably, the amount of money that they are requesting is blatantly over the amount of money for sending these recipients groceries given it is in Ukraine. Furthermore, the group clearly hid their intentions of conversion to the masses not in the “know”. The film then abuses the women and the audience by saying the food is from “Christians in America” and the women then praising the senders of aid, or not. It’s hard to tell since a “translator” constantly talks over these women instead of the ad using subtitles, grossly robbing the women of their agency and also taking away our ability to “hear them”.

Outside of the obviously creepy atmosphere reminiscent of something from the Church of Scientology, a few questions remain left unanswered. Since the main reason these women are poor is the low amount of the pensions to get by, why don’t they petition the government to raise pensions? If they care, it sure seems like a more effective usage of time and more sustainable than relying on international donors, right? The worst that could happen is for them to say no, and then you just need to get into contact with politicians willing to raise the pensions. But since the goal is keeping these people destitute and robbed of agency to convert to Christianity, giving them a way out without changing their culture or sucking up to the cult leaders ain’t worth it I suppose.
It may be nothing given that very few people are involved in this, but all missionary activity is generally harmful. We’ve seen Christian missionaries be sent from Europe and the Americas to avoid the trouble of their sex crimes be exposed, and that’s not the end of it. In Latin America, the downtrodden hyper-focused on are just new units for them. The immense time and money spent to make people’s whole lives revolve around the church instead of the government, an organization that is supposed to represent the people, means resources are divided when they’d be more effective elsewhere. It keeps them poorer than they should be.

The usuals will respond that they get salvation—I say, salvation from what? The salvation of shunning gay family members? The salvation of viewing any aspect unchristian—clothes, customs, and traditions—so amoral that one would sacrifice another being for not being apart of the Church? The salvation of being eternally stuck in dogma of abusive leadership? Even the services of providing a sense of community and providing material stability is less than what flows up top, and only then only a few people benefit. It also works as a conforming agent against people opening their eyes to real effective ways to have a stable community, instead they are forced to forego enjoyments humanity needs to properly function.

The Christian sects also endorse brutal dictatorships keeping them downtrodden in the first place, like Stroessner and Pinochet, and would prefer the likes of Hitler and Franco over democracy. Even in wane, the afteraffects leads to offshoots like sucking up to the likes of people like Bolsonaro and Trump. Also they often harm their supposed recipients, as in Ukraine with Evangelicals apart of Patriot Prayer hating on homosexuals, from such doings.

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

According to Wikipedia, IFCJ was founded by a rabbi, are you thinking of a different group?

[PSOL]

According to Wikipedia, IFCJ was founded by a rabbi, are you thinking of a different group?

Oh shucks.

Alright, well outside conversion—my point still stands on the clear misleading of the donors, faulty methods of helping the supposed recipients, and the robbing of agency of these women through poverty porn. The similarities between other religious charities and missionary efforts still stands.

[PSOL]

Furthermore, more research shows that the main reason this organization exists is to make people practicing Jews, which is indeed missionary work, my comments thus even more stand to my original post

[Хahar 🤔]

The usuals will respond that they get salvation—I say, salvation from what?

It's pretty obvious, isn't it? They get salvation from eternal damnation. It may not make sense to you and it may seem inconceivable that someone would sincerely hold that belief, but you can't complain about not understanding something when you refuse to accept the plain answer.

[PSOL]

The usuals will respond that they get salvation—I say, salvation from what?

It's pretty obvious, isn't it? They get salvation from eternal damnation. It may not make sense to you and it may seem inconceivable that someone would sincerely hold that belief, but you can't complain about not understanding something when you refuse to accept the plain answer.

I was being tongue-in-cheek and ambiguous to state that out. I know why they do it, but it’s dead wrong given the harm it does to one currently. Most people don’t do well with long term planning, so to look forward to an afterlife instead of focusing on the now is just inane.

Unless one actually believes the visible suffering and abuse around them and to them is somehow a good thing, then ok that’s a bad reason but a reasonable one to their perception of their interests, but damnation in what comes next is idiotic.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You are saying because they are helping people directly rather than petitioning governments for change, means they like poverty and are oppressing people?

[PSOL]

You are saying because they are helping people directly rather than petitioning governments for change, means they like poverty and are oppressing people?

That’s an issue along with the overpriced kits and the sleazy tactics in getting donations.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You are saying because they are helping people directly rather than petitioning governments for change, means they like poverty and are oppressing people?

That’s an issue along with the purported overpriced kits and the sleazy tactics in getting donations.

The critique doesn't make sense to me.  It would seem to rely on the idea that government is the most effective way to help people, and also that government would be responsive to pleas for action.  But neither is necessarily true.  Oftentimes the best a missionary can hope for is for the government to allow it to do its work without having to pay out bribes.  Where government is effective, that often has a lot to do with the build up of non-government actors that create social capital. In many places this is what missionaries have done, such as through increasing literacy. 

Here is a study that looks at the impact of missions in Africa with a printing press at the beginning of the 20th century:

Using contemporary individual-level data from the Afrobarometer, we find that proximity to the closest location of a mission with a printing press has a robust, positive, and statistically significant impact on civic attitudes and social capital, such as media consumption (newspaper readership) and trust (consistent with the hypothesis formed by historians of sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Omu 1978 and Tudesq 1995).

https://voxeu.org/article/christian-missions-and-development-sub-saharan-africa

Another big impact of Christian missionaries was in contributing to the development of Arab nationalism.

The crowning anomaly of the contemporary Arab “national” resurgence surely lies in the fact that its seed was sown by Christian missionaries, chiefly from Britain, France, and America, who established missions, hospitals, and schools in the Middle East in the latter part of the 19th century. Modern Arab nationalism had its birth in Syria and Lebanon as the result of the convergence of two interests: that of the Christian missionaries, and that of the Arabic-speaking Christian communities of those countries.
....Christian, and especially Protestant, missionaries played a seminal role in the matter of language too, which was now becoming of cardinal importance in Middle Eastern life. For it was they who actually revived Arabic as a modern written language, first through Arabic translations of the Bible, and then as the medium of a periodical press.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joel-carmichael-2/islam-and-arab-nationalismthe-role-of-religion-in-middle-eastern-politics/

The impacts of missionary activity can be significant, and may change society in more fundamental ways than government actors are likely to be capable of.

[PSOL]

You are saying because they are helping people directly rather than petitioning governments for change, means they like poverty and are oppressing people?

That’s an issue along with the purported overpriced kits and the sleazy tactics in getting donations.

The critique doesn't make sense to me.  It would seem to rely on the idea that government is the most effective way to help people, and also that government would be responsive to pleas for action.  But neither is necessarily true.  Oftentimes the best a missionary can hope for is for the government to allow it to do its work without having to pay out bribes.  Where government is effective, that often has a lot to do with the build up of non-government actors that create social capital. In many places this is what missionaries have done, such as through increasing literacy. 

Here is a study that looks at the impact of missions in Africa with a printing press at the beginning of the 20th century:

Using contemporary individual-level data from the Afrobarometer, we find that proximity to the closest location of a mission with a printing press has a robust, positive, and statistically significant impact on civic attitudes and social capital, such as media consumption (newspaper readership) and trust (consistent with the hypothesis formed by historians of sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Omu 1978 and Tudesq 1995).

https://voxeu.org/article/christian-missions-and-development-sub-saharan-africa

Another big impact of Christian missionaries was in contributing to the development of Arab nationalism.

The crowning anomaly of the contemporary Arab “national” resurgence surely lies in the fact that its seed was sown by Christian missionaries, chiefly from Britain, France, and America, who established missions, hospitals, and schools in the Middle East in the latter part of the 19th century. Modern Arab nationalism had its birth in Syria and Lebanon as the result of the convergence of two interests: that of the Christian missionaries, and that of the Arabic-speaking Christian communities of those countries.
....Christian, and especially Protestant, missionaries played a seminal role in the matter of language too, which was now becoming of cardinal importance in Middle Eastern life. For it was they who actually revived Arabic as a modern written language, first through Arabic translations of the Bible, and then as the medium of a periodical press.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joel-carmichael-2/islam-and-arab-nationalismthe-role-of-religion-in-middle-eastern-politics/

The impacts of missionary activity can be significant, and may change society in more fundamental ways than government actors are likely to be capable of.

The benefits of Missionary work, oftentimes byproducts or inputs, are really only true when dealing with incompetent and at times nonexistant school systems and institutions in general. Usually those governments at hand are usually post-colonial ran by corrupt politicians stashing their wealth overseas, so no brainer that things like schooling are better in church-ran schools. Meanwhile, countries with an strong centralized and stable government usually have less need for sending people to religious schools.

Fundamentally, it is the role of the government as the representative of the people to serve their interests, not a religious body whose primary reason for doing so is indoctrination of students into their religion. The byproducts have been seen from Pakistan to Guatemala that religious schooling is not effective in most cases and has politically harmful ramifications.

There’s also the issue that here, which primarily deals with feeding pensioners in Eastern Europe, is not only conducting their “aid” in an inefficient manner but sleazy in getting donations. The root problem here is that pensions given monthly are not enough, so that requires raising said pensions along with better elderly care. Why outsource when it’s the governments job to deal with it?

[2952-0-0]

What about in cases where a government is capable of ruling over its territory, but is still not interested in the public welfare? Sometimes, the church is the only alternative to the state's control. Churches were at the forefront of the opposition to dictatorships in South Africa, Poland, South Korea, the Philippines, and many other countries.

The problem the OP describes lies in religious groups preying on the material deprivation of their targets, but plenty of completely secular groups do likewise as well. There are plenty of religious missions that engage local communities in a respectful way, without the high-pressure tactics as described. All religions declare charity as a virtue in itself, and conversely that grifting off charity is at best misguided and at worst sinful.

[PSOL]

What about in cases where a government is capable of ruling over its territory, but is still not interested in the public welfare? Sometimes, the church is the only alternative to the state's control. Churches were at the forefront of the opposition to dictatorships in South Africa, Poland, South Korea, the Philippines, and many other countries.

The problem the OP describes lies in religious groups preying on the material deprivation of their targets, but plenty of completely secular groups do likewise as well. There are plenty of religious missions that engage local communities in a respectful way, without the high-pressure tactics as described. All religions declare charity as a virtue in itself, and conversely that grifting off charity is at best misguided and at worst sinful.

It is undeniable that various religious bodies opposed the dictatorships mentioned for a variety of reasons, and socialization aspect of organized religion provided a place for organized opposition to be a reality. However, in several of those cases, the church was neutral or provided supportive energy at the least at the overthrow of said dictatorships. The result is meeting the demands of the people and providing the support not provided by the state.

In Ukraine, and in a lot of other liberal democracies, purportedly one can form associations to change policy and support the people. A religious body can only supply support if it materially can procure the necessary aid and be able to distribute it, which doesn’t really work in cases of economic calamity where the membership now is broke and unable. Even still, as a liberal democracy that has apparently established association rules similar to other Eastern European democracies, there is little excuse.