John Chau: Martyr or Misguided Zealot?

I’ve been thinking about John Chau, the young missionary who was killed trying to bring the Gospel to the people who live on North Sentinel Island.

Was he a martyr, or a misguided zealot? Opinion is divided.

First, a bit of background.

Chau, 26, was killed trying to evangelize the Sentinelese, a remote and isolated group of a few hundred people who live on an Island in the Bay of Bengal.

The Sentinelese have resisted interaction with the outside world for centuries, ever since a terrible encounter with the British in the late 19^th century.

To protect them, and keep them safe from diseases against which they have no immunity, the country of India has made it illegal for outsiders to go to the island. 

As for Chau, he had been gripped by a desire to go to the island since he was 18, according to Mary Ho of All Nations, a mission agency based in Kansas City, Mo. that partly supported him.

“It was his life's mission to go to the island and share the goodness of Jesus Christ," she is quoted as saying.

The first time Chau tried to get to the island, he hired local fishermen to take him as close as possible before he went closer in a kayak.

"My name is John!" he yelled when he spotted some Sentinelese men onshore. "I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you."

He went back a second time, retreating when an islander shot an arrow at him.

"Lord," he wrote in his diary after that encounter, "is this island Satan's last stronghold, where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?"

In his final journal entry, on Nov. 16, Chau left instructions with the fishermen for contacting friends, family and colleagues if his third visit went wrong.

"You guys might think I'm crazy in all this," he said, "but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed."

The next day the fishermen saw the islanders dragging Chau's body along the beach and then burying it.

As of this writing, Indian police have decided it’s impossible to retrieve his body, given the risk of a confrontation with the Sentinelese people.

So: Was Chau right to do what he did, or not?

Non-religious commentators are pretty unanimous in their condemnation.

This included Steven Corry of Survival International, a group that champions the rights of indigenous people.

“The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected,” he said in a statement on the group’s website.

“The British colonial occupation of the Andaman Islands decimated the tribes living there, wiping out thousands of tribespeople, and only a fraction of the original population now survive. So the Sentinelese fear of outsiders is very understandable.”

Remote tribes like the Sentinelese “must have their lands properly protected,” he wrote.

For British journalist Janet Street-Porter, Chau’s adventure “was an act of cultural imperialism and insane arrogance.”

Writing in the Independent, she called it “another example of two of the worse kinds of environmental pollution: aggressive pushing of faith to another culture and the introduction of ‘gifts’ which undermine their way of life.

But John Stackhouse, an evangelical who teaches religious studies at Crandall University in Moncton, sees it differently.  

In a blog post on Context, he acknowledges what Chau did was illegal, and could have exposed the islanders to disease against which they have no resistance—although he raises doubts about whether that might have happened.

He also questions whether it would be so bad if they were able to enjoy the benefits of modernity.

But beyond the disease question, “there seems little to argue against Chau’s initiative—at least from the point of view of anyone not already hostile to Christianity.”

Christians, he went on to say “believe—perhaps wrongly, but sincerely—that our message of salvation through Jesus Christ is the best news in the world, the solution to every culture’s fundamental problem, the hope of flourishing in this life and in the next.

“Nothing therefore can be seen as more important than hearing this good news, and John Allen Chau risked his life accordingly.”

For Stackhouse, Chau was a “brave young man doing what brave young Christians should.”

But other Christians disagree.

Writing on the website of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, said "even though I share his faith, Chau had no business going to those people."

If Chau had been a missionary trying to sneak into North Korea, “I would have thought him insanely brave,” he said.

“But the law against visiting that island was there for a very good reason: this tribe has had no exposure to outsiders, and is enormously vulnerable to communicable diseases.”

He went on to note that Chau could not have preached to these people, anyway—he doesn’t’ speak their language.

In fact, said Dreher, “nobody speaks their language. How on earth could he have witnessed to them?”

Unless he planned to spend many years living with the Sentinelese, “trying to preach to them was a pointless endeavor,” he stated.

“He might easily have been an angel of death for this tribe!” he went on to say. “The vanity and hubris of that man is really something.”

Worse, he adds, Chau’s adventure has angered Hindus in India, where Christians can be viewed with suspicion.

“So Chau’s act is now bringing pain and misery onto innocent Christians living in India under difficult conditions of bigotry and persecution. Great.”

For Dreher, the conclusion is simple.

“Chau ought to have left those vulnerable tribespeople alone. He had no chance of converting them to faith in Christ, but a good chance of giving them a disease that could have wiped them off the face of the earth. How could any Christian justify this?”

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For Christians, Chau’s misadventure raises interesting questions.

They are, after all, commanded to preach the Gospel to the whole world.

But what is the best way to do that?

Throughout much of history, missionary and imperial impulses were often mixed. Christians missionaries didn’t just bring their faith, but also colonialism—and a sense of western superiority—to other countries and races.

True, those missionaries also brought health care and education. But death and destruction came, too—both overseas and among Indigenous people in North America.

Today, thoughtful Christians are wrestling with the question of how to be a witness for their faith abroad, and in their own countries.

There isn’t agreement on what that should look like. But, at a minimum, I think it should similar to the oath doctors take: Do no harm.

Using that minimum standard, Chau was wrong to undertake his mission (apart from the fact that culturally and linguistically it made no sense, not to mention his lone-ranger style.)

Anyway: That's what I'm thinking. What are your thoughts?