A Reflection on "The Color Purple", by Alice Walker

A Reflection on The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Madame, he said, when Aunt Theodosia finished her story and flashed her famous medal (for “ her service as an exemplary missionary in the King’s colony”) around the room, do you realize King Leopold cut the hands off workers who, in the opinion of his plantation overseers, did not fulfill their rubber quota? Rather than cherish that medal, Madame, you should regard it as a symbol of your unwitting complicity with this despot who worked to death and brutalized and eventually exterminated thousands and thousands of African peoples.

Well, said Samuel, silence struck the gathering like a blight. Poor Aunt Theodosia! There’s something in all of us that wants a medal for what we have done. That wants to be appreciated. And Africans certainly don’t deal in medals. They hardly seem to care whether missionaries exist.

The Africans never asked us to come, you know. There’s no use blaming them if we feel unwelcome.
The Color Purple, page 234.

When I was ten or eleven, a missionary couple came to our church to show us slides and to talk about their work in some country in Africa, one whose name has changed a time or two since then. The woman talked about the mission’s school, which operated in a small cinder-block building with a tin roof. Slide after slide showed the building overflowing with children, so many that some classes were held outside due to the lack of space. The school was at a crossroad: Either a larger facility would have to be built, or they would have to turn some children away. Statistics about the number of village children, per capita income, infant mortality and illiteracy came at us rapid-fire, and she concluded her part by sharing anecdotes about one child or another convincing her parents to come to the mission to hear about Jesus.

Her husband took it from there, effusing about the religious conversions among the adults and the diminishing influence of the shamans and folk religion. His patter of statistics began with the number of young natives who felt a call to the ministry, and concluded with an estimate for the cost of building a seminary. “This is the Great Commission in action! This is what Christ told his disciples to do!” I was mesmerized.

The congregation dutifully contributed, and I was thrown into my first of many vocational dilemmas. Clearly, the work done by the missionaries was God’s work, I thought, and without their efforts all those people would be eternally lost. What calling could possibly be more important than to help save the souls of the children in those pictures?

Reading Nettie’s account of the mission to Africa reminded me of that night, and the subsequent conflict that exists in me today. I did not become a missionary, but have known several, and I admire their spirit of service and compassion. There is a selflessness about the vocation, and a genuine reliance on faith. And while there are more and more missionaries that see their purpose as primarily (exclusively?) humanitarian, there still exist thousands who rest in the conviction that they are called to “go into all the world and preach the gospel…baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

Therein lies my conflict. Years ago, I began to better appreciate diversity in faith and culture. I studied western and eastern religions in graduate school, and enjoyed spending the weekends taking in a variety of worship and ritual services. I enjoyed studying the history of a faith, as well as its cultural context. Occasionally I grappled with the inevitable questions about which religion was the true religion, or at least the truest. I tended to skirt a final, or for that matter even a workable, answer to that question, preferring to place it in the realm of academic discipline rather than rule for life. Thus, proselytizing indigenous people became little more to me than a curious idiosyncrasy of a religion.

Over the past few years, however, faith has beckoned me. That faith is not the certainty of religious conviction that served my parents so well throughout their life, but it is at its core Christian. Recently, I have had difficulty reconciling the inherent exclusivity of Christianity with noble ideas about the equal sanctity of all faiths and cultures. I would like to be one of the cool liberals, readily accepting the validity and equality of opposing positions, but I keep coming back to the notion that if everything is Truth, then nothing is Truth.

If one embraces a religion, and identifies himself as an adherent, does he do a disservice to his faith by watering it down, equating it to all others? A Christian says that Jesus is “the way, the truth and the life, no one passes to the Father” except through him, while a Muslim prays the Shahadah: “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger.” They are not saying the same thing, and because they are not, they each have missionaries. The missionaries may seek novel ways to make their gospel pertinent and understandable to those they seek to proselytize, but to equate their religion with all others makes the key component of their mission immaterial. I think they are obligated to be set apart.

Samuel’s loneliness and lament that the “Africans never asked us to come” crosses the mind of many missionaries, I suspect. Despite that, I think it is right that they serve.

Ed Bowling
January 2007