Young anthropologists know all about missionaries before they've met any. They play a large role in the demonology of the subject, beside self-righteous administrators and exploitative colonials. The only intellectually respectable response to a tin rattled in one's face by someone collecting for missionary work is a reasoned refutation of the whole concept of missionary interference. The documentation is there. Anthropologists point out, in their introductory courses to students, the excesses and shortsightedness of Melanesian missions that culminated in cargocults and famines. The Brazilian orders in the Amazon are charged with trading in slaves and child prostitutes, stealing land and intimidating the natives with force and threats of Hellfire. Missions destroy traditional cultures and self-respect, reducing peoples all over the globe to the state of helpless, baffled morons living on charity and in economic and cultural thraldom to the West. The great dishonesty lies in exporting to the Third World systems of thought that the West itself has largely discarded.

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