A Land Without Missionaries by Frederick Palmer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 15, 1909

A Land Without Missionaries

By Frederick Palmer

Why do so many missionaries go to Japan, China, India, Turkey, and Korea, and so few to Central America?

Partiality for distant lands can not explain their neglect, for Alaska is most abundantly supplied. Is it possible that the soul of a Caribbean Indian in twenty-five cents’ worth of cotton drill is less worth saving than the soul of an Aleut in furs? Latitude can not matter, else the Fiji Islands, which have been well cared for, would be under the ban.

Any excuse that Central America is already a Christian country is inconsistent, if not otherwise untenable. Mexico is a favorite field, and Mexico is a Christian country—far more Christian than Guatemala or Nicaragua. Although the Mexican state has made war on the Roman Catholic Church, the Mexican peon is a most devout religionist, reverent and superstitious.

Mention Central America to the missionary in Mexico, and he looks blank. You almost expect him to ask where Central America is.

To me, however, the absence of missionaries in numbers was deplorable. The modern missionary who founds little communities in foreign countries where the humanities and hygienics are taught is a spreader of civilization regardless of his creed. For every one of him in Japan, that learned for itself, and in China, that is learning for itself, there ought to be a hundred in this field at our door, that can not learn for itself, for which our Monroe doctrine is responsible. Can the reason be that Japan is more picturesque? that the servants in China are better? that one who returns from Burma is more of a hero at the missionary meetings than if he were back from Guatemala?

Yet the Roman Catholics have sent two American priests to take the place of the Spanish friars in the Philippines, and the boards have sent Protestant clergy to the Philippines, where they are far less needed than in Central America. On the train from Corinto to Managua was a Nicaraguan who had been in Manila and was bringing back his young Filipino wife.

“Everything is so much dirtier than at home! ugh!” this little woman kept repeating. “Everything—everything is worse.”

So it was, by all the standards of Christian civilization—worse than the Philippines under Spanish rule. That woman from her cleanly Manila was rightfully homesick. A visit of a delegation from every Philippine province to Nicaragua would be a powerful object-lesson.

The position occupied by the priesthood of Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua is lower than in any other country in Christendom not in the Caribbean region. The bayonet no longer considers it a factor to be reckoned with. It has neither political power nor religious power of any account. When I asked a young woman, head of a girls’ school in Guatemala, if she had been educated in a convent, she was quick to free herself from any such prejudicial charge against the administration, which does not permit convents to exist. When I asked if she were a Catholic, she answered, “O, yes,” carelessly.

If you are looking for real church ruins, go to Central America. Many churches are disused, and those that are not are almost invariably in disrepair. The people, poverty stricken and hopeless, take little interest in them. Religious ideas are dying, and with them moral ideas. A settled indifference of day-by-day existence characterizes the masses, who are reverting to Indian superstition.—Frederick Palmer, in Chattanooga Times.