NEWS FEATURE: Spreading the word meets increasing resistance

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ The Mormons promise to treat Southern Baptists with kindness when they come to Salt Lake City in June for an unprecedented door-to-door evangelizing blitz. But such welcomes are increasingly rare. American Jewish leaders have shunned the Southern Baptists for their resolution to focus on converting Jews. The Russian […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ The Mormons promise to treat Southern Baptists with kindness when they come to Salt Lake City in June for an unprecedented door-to-door evangelizing blitz.

But such welcomes are increasingly rare. American Jewish leaders have shunned the Southern Baptists for their resolution to focus on converting Jews. The Russian government has sought to curb missionaries, mostly from the United States and Canada. And Austria recently followed suit.


One person’s witness, it seems, is another’s arrogance. And communities and countries are pushing out proselytizers.

Civil libertarians decry legislation restricting proselytizing. But even defenders of free speech urge U.S. missionaries who proselytize _ and many don’t _ to consider more carefully the morality of their work.

Too many missionaries, they say, tread on traditions and ignore cultural differences, and some use questionable tactics to court the unsaved. Now scholars and missionaries are trying to find more ethical ways to share religious ideas in often hostile environments and less oppressive means of keeping proselytizers in check.

While Jews, Buddhists and most Hindus rarely try to convert those born outside their faith, Christians and Muslims believe they have a sacred duty to bring others into the fold.

“To tell a Christian not to share his faith is to tell a fish not to swim,” said Phil Roberts, director of interfaith witness for the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board.

Sharing is fine, said Rabbi Leon Klenicki, interfaith affairs director of the Anti-Defamation League. “But proselytizing is a real insult to another person of faith, putting in total doubt his religious commitment and relationship with God.”

So there you have the dilemma, said Emory University law professor John Witte Jr., director of the Law and Religion Program’s three-year project on the Problem of Proselytizing. “How does a community balance its own right to expand the faith, and another person’s or community’s right to be left alone?”


English and American missionaries wrote glowingly of expanding the faith during the Evangelical Awakening beginning in the late 18th century. And in more recent years, said Witte, even critics of unbridled proselytizing say that robust competition can strengthen religious groups, encouraging them to be more responsive to their flocks.

But rarely is proselytizing “exclusively about the communication of a religious message,” said Emory law professor Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, who studies Africa. “Proselytizing has been consistently used throughout history to spearhead or legitimate local domination or imperialist expansion by foreign powers,” he said.

Too few foreign missionaries, critics say, have a clue about the people they are trying to reach.

Missionaries report of working in Russia without speaking the language or having read one Russian book, notes Mark Elliott, director of the Institute for East-West Christian Studies outside Chicago. And Russians have accused Americans of being hit-and-run missionaries who use high-tech media and high pressure to reach the largest numbers in the shortest time.

Some groups, such as the Hare Krishnas, regret having used such tactics.

“Unfortunately, in the beginning there was the overzealousness of youthful converts,” said Hare Krishna communications director Anuttama Dasa of the rare Hindu group that does proselytize.

“The attitude of new converts was, `I have perfection, salvation and liberation, and you don’t.’ A person had to refuse three times before we’d take no for an answer.”


Evangelical Christian author Rebecca Manley Pippert concurs. “I thought I was supposed to offend for Jesus’ sake,” she said of her early door-to-door outreach.

The morality of material enticements may be tougher to assess. The Russian Orthodox patriarch has accused missionaries of buying people “with so-called humanitarian aid.” And Jehovah’s Witnesses, wary of creating “rice Christians” who feign faith for food, focus only on spiritual ministry.

But critics of the feed-the-soul-only approach say it ignores the faith-based mandate to feed the hungry. Hard questions arise. If you build a factory, is it fair to hire only workers who adopt your faith? If you build a hospital to serve a community, are you buying converts or helping the poor?

The anti-cult groups of the 1960s and ’70s focused on the most coercive and infrequent proselytizing tactics, such as depriving potential converts of food and sleep.

But even more subtle pressure raises concerns. Is it ethical to ask potential converts to refrain from socializing with people outside the faith? Is it fair to recruit someone in a state of grief or mental breakdown?

Some countries react to such prospects by attempting to restrict religious association. Ironically, groups that have complained of being unfairly curtailed in the past _ such as the Russian Orthodox Church _ may be the ones trying to stop newer players.


Attempts to curb proselytizers on charges of harassment, disturbing the peace, and denial of preaching licenses and assembly permits have largely failed in the United States, beginning with attempts to stop Jehovah’s Witnesses in the 1930s.

But the climate in Europe is becoming increasingly restrictive, particularly with respect to religious minorities.

In September 1997, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Association instituting a strict system of state registration and regulation of religious groups. Greece had already banned proselytizing. And last December, Austria passed a law designating that minority faiths can gain legal status only after a 10- to 20-year probation.

Recent reports by the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin, Italy, and the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif., warn of the “excessive reaction” by European governments “based on misleading, insufficient and false information” about such groups as the Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Minority groups have also been targeted by the kind of anti-cult commissions that have lost ground in the United States while gaining stature in Europe.

Such restrictive legislation, said Witte, violates the right to freedom of expression, belief and association. And members of the smallest groups bear the brunt. An independent Baptist missionary, Dan Pallard of Salem, Ore., was evicted from Russia under the new law last March, only to be granted a three-month visa to return in May.


The Jehovah Witnesses say they are among those “being caught up in this web of who is a cult,” said Don Ridley, a lawyer for the group. “When you find yourself listed in a report, it puts this aura around you. You don’t want to come within 10 feet of them for fear they’ll control your mind.”

An-Na’im is among the observers who call for a middle way. He rejects restrictive laws on the grounds that it’s “vital for people of faith to have the right to witness.” But proselytizing, he said, “is too potentially destructive to leave unbridled … for the powerful to manipulate and exploit.” He suggests that parties consider a code of conduct that protects the interests of target groups with the state acting as a mediator when conflicts arise.

Witte calls for more religious dialogue, education and cooperation. “(These) may sound like tired remedies,” he said, “but these are essential first steps to a greater mutual understanding.”

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Warring parties in Russia, he said, could agree to a 10- or 20-year moratorium on proselytizing to allow for “intense interreligious dialogue, the policing of the more belligerent and dangerous groups, multilateral negotiations for future visa and import controls effecting religious groups, and aggressive affirmative action programs to shore up beleaguered Russian religions.”

The move would not be unprecedented.

Last March, 50 evangelical Christian groups agreed to abandon direct proselytizing in Israel when faced with the prospect of anti-proselytizing legislation.

More religious groups are taking stock of their own practices calling for cross-cultural training for foreign missionaries and new outreach methods.


“The desire to share has to come out of genuine humility,” said Anuttama Dasa. “Instead of saying, `I have the truth,’ it’s better to say, `Let me tell you about my experience.”’

The InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Code of Ethics explicitly rejects coercive techniques that “bypass a person’s critical faculties, play on psychological weaknesses, undermine relationship with family or religious institutions, or mask the true nature of Christian conversion.”

Other organizations are working with local religious groups on long-term projects to avoid fostering mistrust, said Elliot.

Gospel Light, a California-based evangelical publisher, and the Russian Orthodox Minister of Education are jointly producing Sunday school literature for use in Orthodox parishes.

But the most critical change, some observers believe, may require a re-reading of holy books. And more liberal theologians hope that proselytizers will reinterpret their scriptures so their goal is no longer to spread their faith, but to share their understanding of God.

“Relationship is never about mission and always about dialogue,” said Kenneth Cracknell, theology professor at Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth. “All religious traditions are capable of having a genuine experience of God. That was true of the African people long before missionaries arrived.”


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Still, many religious groups remain committed to propagating one faith. And the Southern Baptists and Mormons are gearing up for their battle for souls.

“It could be a healthy competition,” said Roberts. “It will probably blow Mormons’ minds to have Baptists knock on their doors.”

IR END LIEBLICH

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