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Another reason SIL anthropologist Tom Headland cited was "ethnocide," the idea that missionaries force their own cultures on tribal peoples, destroying indigenous cultures in the process.

Headland summed up the ideological struggle between those for and those against missionaries: "Their opinion is missionaries do more harm than good and should be sent home." In contrast, Headland points to what missionaries do in addition to sharing the gospel, including community development and helping people in need. "My view is that missionaries do more good than harm. (Chavez) is making a big mistake if he sends (NTM missionaries) home."

Headland said that hostility toward missions spread with James Michener's popular novel Hawaii, which vilified missionaries. After the1966 movie, many asked Headland, then ministering in the Philippines, whether he wore a long black coat in the jungle as did the fictional missionaries in the film.

Sam Olson, who heads the Evangelical Council of Venezuela, said that in the 1960s and 1970s, NTM Venezuela was accused of collusion with the CIA and mining and exporting resources. Venezuela's Congress authorized hundreds of hours of on-site investigations that found the charges groundless. "After that, everything calmed down and missionaries continued with the work," Olson said.

Resisting CIA collusion
What hasn't helped Christian missions' images have been scattered cases that came to light in the 1970s where CIA operatives pressured missionaries to share information. U.S. congressional debate arose in 1975 concerning the government's use of clerics, missionaries, and journalists to glean intelligence. In Central America in the 1980s, for example, the CIA approached several missionaries, seeking information about leftist regimes and rebel movements. SIL and NTM have policies forbidding their workers from collusion.

Most other evangelical missions agencies appear to have such policies as well. As a Campus Crusade for Christ missionary in the 1970s, Scott Moreau, Wheaton College professor of intercultural studies and missions, remembers leaders warning in prefield training of the possibility of being approached by the CIA. Crusade leaders told the missionaries to avoid cooperation. The issue surfaced again in 1996 when CIA director John Deutch refused to disavow using missionaries and journalists as informants.

Headland provided CT with 16 instances where SIL responded to allegations of CIA collusion in letters to public officials ranging from Sen. Mark Hatfield to President Ford. SIL founder and director Cameron Townsend wrote Hatfield in a 1975 telegram: "Some of the rumored activities of the CIA in foreign lands are downright criminal. No upright citizen should have anything to do with them, much less 'missionaries' … My organization [is] the Summer Institute of Linguistics … We never meddle in the affairs of other countries."

In 1976, Townsend wrote Ford a letter asking CIA agents to not seek information from U.S. citizens who live abroad and work under contract with those governments or one of their universities, as SIL workers do. He also asked that missionaries be exempted from CIA interrogation. Wycliffe Bible Translators regional director Lester Troyer thanked Hatfield in a January 3, 1976, letter for proposing legislation to block the CIA from using missionaries as informants. On January 23, 1976, Townsend wrote Hatfield, "May I suggest that Congress put an end, at least on an experimental basis, to the meddling of the CIA in the affairs of other independent nations?"

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October (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49