Jul 11 | Done with the Debate, Part 1 (Letters from the Coast)

This is another two parter entry on the racism and objectifying nature of modern evangelism.

PART I: SELFIES AND SALVATION

In late 2013, I applied to go on an “exposure trip” to El Salvador with the Student Christian Movement. The organization was careful to explain to us that this was not a missions trip or a chance for a bunch of us white kids to go build things and take selfies with brown children. While we would do some work with locals, the main focus of the trip was to meet Jose “Chencho” Alas, a personal friend of Bishop Oscar Romero and a leader of liberation theology, a grassroots movement most folks trace back to Central and South America in the ‘70s and ‘80s which sought to empower laypeople to deepen their faith and orchestrate their own liberation from colonialism and oppression.

I told my stepmother, who didn’t understand that last part. “So…you’re going on a missions trip?”

“No,” I said. “We’re going to learn from Chencho and help out with some of the projects his group has already started.” (We helped plant a food garden and distributed/planted fruit trees in village yards with a group of kids and adults as part of a reforestation and anti-hunger effort spearheaded by his organization).

“You remember my auntie Jilly[1], right?”

My eye probably twitched a little. “Yes.”

“If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, you should get in touch with her! Here, she sent me a postcard.”

My stepmother’s aunt was not the kind of Christian I generally get along with very well. I have vague memories of her when I was a kid, and she was a lovely, kind, vivacious lady. But as I deepened in my own faith, I began to discover that Jilly’s work was starting to make me feel more and more uncomfortable.

Jilly called herself a missionary, and a few churches recognized her as one and sent her money to support her work, which occurs in an American border town. She works mostly with children, many of them with disabilities. She regularly sent letters and postcards to her family and friends detailing the work she did.

Lots of selfies with brown children, as you can imagine.

Shortly after my stepmother encouraged me to get in touch with her, I did become curious about her work. I already knew that it was going to be the kind of thing I would be utterly uninterested in doing for a number of reasons, but I realized I had no idea what churches supported her work, or who was actually keeping an eye on what she was doing. I didn’t even know what denominational family she was a part of, although I do remember my stepmother’s grandmother was a staunch Jehovah’s Witness and remember my father debating Scripture with her – basically the only childhood memories I have of my dad engaging with religion at all.

I set about trying to find her.

She had no website of her own, but I do remember finding references to her on one missionary website which I can no longer find. There is also an archived letter that pops up when you plug her name into Google, replete with both fragmentary and run-on sentences and exclamation points. It’s impossible to tell from the letter what it is Jilly is actually doing with the kids, or exactly where it’s happening, although it’s in a border town and she claims that they are all very poor and many have intellectual disabilities. She also name drops church folks I can’t really trace, and talks about partnering with one organization which has a charitable arm that carefully omits references to Christianity and does look to be doing good work.

In short, I have never been able to fully decipher what it is that Jilly does or who is sponsoring her.

And frankly, that disturbed me.

It disturbed me even more when this story came out.

I actually heard about it through my favourite podcast, Robert Evans’s brilliant Behind the Bastards. When his episode on Bach came out, there was as yet little Western media coverage. Most of his sources were Ugandan, and the group “No White Saviours” had been putting the story out there. He was certain that the story would explode very shortly, and he was clearly right.

Once again, I took to the internet to find more information about Jilly. It was even harder to find anything this time. The letter I mention above was nine years old when I read it the first time in 2014. It’s still there, and I found one or two references in church bulletins to someone with the same name as Jilly, but there’s no way to confirm if it’s really her.

I did find her on Facebook. I won’t add her, so there will be some things I can’t see, but I still scrolled through quite a bit. And again, it’s totally unclear what it is that she’s actually doing. There are lots of selfies of her with brown kids, although it seems to be the same few, so I don’t know if these are kids she’s adopted or if they’re part of a house she’s running. There is also an incredibly eye-rolling post from the summer of 2016 that suggests voting for Trump (without ever mentioning him by name but it’s quite clear) because he’s “brutally honest,” unlike “the other candidate.” Obviously I’m not missing out on a good relationship. It all feels quite typical for the kind of Christian I remember her being.

Let me be clear that I don’t think Jilly is experimenting on the kids. Based on memory and what I’ve seen, she’s never been able to have children of her own, and I believe she does love the children in her care.

But I’m also still deeply troubled by what I perceive to be a total lack of transparency of and accountability for what she’s doing, and the weird feelings I have when I consider that she is female and, as far as I’m aware, unmarried – Fundamentalists and evangelicals have such weird double standards whenever it comes to missionaries!

Considering these two stories together, I started to understand on a deeper level what Christians of colour mean when they say white supremacy is at the core of the North American evangelical church.

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[1] Not her real name