Several years ago, my wife received an email from a college student who worked for her one summer. This girl — an Evangelical Christian — wanted to let Polly know that she was raising $6,000 so she could go to a “secret” country and do illegal missionary work. The girl meant well, I am sure, but her email was a reminder to me of the Jesus Vacations® many Evangelicals take each summer to foreign lands to spread white American Christianity. Scores of Evangelicals take these trips each year, spending millions of dollars as Jesus tourists; convincing themselves that what meager, incidental work they do matters.
Why didn’t the girl’s church pay for her trip? If the goal is winning souls for Christ in a country that forbids such things, why not have the soulwinners or their churches pay for the trip? Instead, trip-takers turn to people they know — family, friends, casual acquaintances, workmates — to cough up the money so they can take an unnecessary Jesus Vacation® to what they believe is the foreign mission field. Polly, of course, did not respond to the email, nor did she forward it to others as the sender requested. In our Christian days, we didn’t support such wastes of energy and money, and as unbelievers, we sure as hell aren’t going to help American Evangelicals harass foreign non-Christians.
Jesus Vacations® are taken primarily by White middle-class Evangelicals. While certainly “some” good is accomplished; say, building housing, digging wells, and improving the welfare of people in poverty-stricken countries, the irony here is that many Evangelicals who minister to material needs while on their Jesus Vacations® won’t do the same in their own country. In their minds, Haitians are worthy of care, but poor Blacks, Whites, and Hispanics in impoverished areas in the deep south? Let them starve. Get a job! Mexicans on the American side of the border are criminals worthy of deportation, abusers of American goodness and largess. Mexicans south of the Rio Grande? Why, now they are a mission field; people worthy of missional attention from rich white Evangelicals.
After these Jesus-loving travelers return from their Jesus Vacations®, they will stand before their fellow congregants one Sunday and give a testimony of all the things they did for Jesus; of all the goodwill they spread to the poor; and, most of all, the number of people who prayed the sinner’s prayer and asked Jesus to save them. Charismatic vacationers will regale their churches with claims of miracles, yet will not provide evidence for their claims. Year after year, Evangelicals take Jesus Vacations®, never considering whether they are doing anything meaningful or whether the money spent for travel and other expenses could have been put to better use.
Jesus Vacations® tend to support the false notion that poor people of color in other countries need affluent white American Christians to help them and deliver them from Satan. Why not, instead, send the money to Christians who live in these countries and let them spend it helping their fellow citizens? Wouldn’t doing so be more cost-effective? Instead of fifty college students coughing up $6,000 each for a Jesus Vacation® — $300,000 — wouldn’t it be far better to send it to people who know their country and communities, and what needs people might have? Bruce, surely you know we can’t trust poor Blacks with White people’s money! They need us – “us” being affluent White Evangelicals — to manage how the monies are spent. USA! USA USA! JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!
Of course, sending the money to the field and forgoing Jesus Vacations® will never happen. You see Jesus Vacations® give the appearance of doing good in Jesus’ name. These trips are feel-good, Hallmark-like experiences. They allow trip-takers to oh-so-humbly brag about how Jesus used them to materially help and evangelize poor people of color. Praise be to Jesus! Look what I, uh, I mean, Jesus, did! The humble-bragging extends to pastors and older congregants too. Look at what WE did for Jesus! Look at how we helped those poor, helpless Haitians (and ignored the poor people who live next door to the church)! As with most things Evangelical churches do, no one will ever question the value of taking Jesus Vacations®. No one will ever ask, WHY do we take these trips every year? Oh no, you don’t: thou shalt not question. Summers are for vacation Bible school (VBS), youth camp, and Jesus Vacations® (and here in Ohio a day trip to either King’s Island or Cedar Point). And so it goes, year after year . . .
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Maybe a TL:DR. Well said, Bruce.
This topic is one that gets me on my soapbox! Deeply entrenched in fundy church and mission, hubby had first hand experience of this over some years. He had a fund of stories, e.g. the african school which had its classrooms painted 3 times one year as the Head knew that the western x-tians brought generous gifts too so got them them come and had to find jobs for them to do. Or the church group of western teens who built a wall badly and locals went out after dark to build it properly. They didn’t want to offend the annual ‘cash cow’ that his group was. Daughter volunteered at a x-tian ‘orphanage in India and found the kids weren’t necessarily true orphans, very poor parents put their kids there as that meant they got food, education and shelter. Maybe we’d do the same. But the orphanage marketed itself as just that, with pics of skinny, abandoned kids who needed jesus, cleverly designed to pull the heartstrings of western donors and helpers. She suggested brits give money to parents, not to orphanage directors – she met more than one – prospering by their orphanage businesses. Or the group that appealed for trainers (sneakers) to take, so african teens could look ‘cool.’ Apparently the USA-teens wore designer versions and they distributed cheaper ones their church friends had donated. Oh, and I once contributed a bra to a Scout trip to Ghana. They wanted them for Ghanaian girls. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the handing over ceremony took place and imagine the embarrassment of shy village girls receiving our cast-offs!
“ Why not, instead, send the money to Christians who live in these countries and let them spend it helping their fellow citizens? ”
Why Bruce, when you suggest “Christians who live in these countries” you don’t mean..oh my God I can’t believe I’m going to say this..indigenous Catholics?? (Gasp)..everybody knows they aren’t True Christians®️. They are clearly under the control of the satanic, (southern European) Vatican and we white (Northern European) Bible-believing American 🇺🇸 evangelicals have to go in there and minister to these poor, wonderful brown people while they are selling their crafts and produce on the beach or harvesting coffee in some other scenic vista up in the mountains where it is nice and cool..all you have to see is all the Virgin Mary statues to know they are practicing idolatry and we white Bible believing American 🇺🇸 evangelical True Christians ®️must go there and show them the right way to “Jesus”, with loud modern music, light shows, hand waiving and hypocrite pervert pastors who just keep talking and talking and talking, and who never cease criticizing local customs and religious practices that don’t align with proper white American 🇺🇸 evangelical Bible believing yay-Jesus! Christianity.
Of course I’m being sarcastic. How much better would the world be if people stopped trying to change other people’s beliefs?
Oops, Bruce, I meant my comment might be a TL:DR, not your post! Apologies!
Yes, John S. Here out in the sticks of rural Wales, it was unusual for our harbour to have a YWAM ship moored here for over a year, being re-fitted to go to Madagascar to do dental work. At the start, YWAM weirdly sent a team from Switzerland to litter-pick in the small town – for public relations presumably. Work came to a halt and a local volunteer painting the ship, said they had run out of funds for several months. It’s finally sailed. This event, and occasional updates on the refurb were in our local paper. I commented in it that Madagascar is 85% x-tian, but catholic, so obviously YWAM thinks it needs to get that changed. I asked why bibles were never mentioned as part of their ‘cargo’ only ‘dental equipment,’….there will be loads and loads of bibles on board….and YWAM should be honest, their true purpose for the ship was proselytising Madagascar and every other place the ship sails to which isn’t fundy-protestant like they are.
Raise your hand if you participated in these types of trips (ObstacleChick raising hand).
My 1st experience participating was as a college student on a spring break trip with the Baptist Student Union. We went to Miami and spent a couple of days playing with some mostly black kids at a church day care or community center or something like that. For fun we went to Key West to the beach.
My second experience was with a secular university group called Alternative Spring Break. It’s an organization found at many universities now, but it literally started at Vanderbilt, and I was among one of the 1st cohorts. It was a way for us privileged students to pad our resumes with a week of do-gooderism. I barely made the cut as a participant (there was an intensive application and interview process which favored rich Greek organization kids, neither of which I was). I ended up in the founders’ group at the Nashville site. We served food at homeless shelters,played with some kids at a community center, and the capstone was “environmentalism”. We were taught to do some water testing at a couple of streams, and worked on an “erosion” project. The environmental liaison was a guy I knew from the church I grew up in (I was from Nashville), and he got caught out for having these Vanderbilt student volunteers shoring up erosion at his kids’ private Christian school (where my cousins went to school). Yep, I blew up his free work scheme. Anyway, ASB wasn’t religious but was the same do-gooder tourism scheme.
Right after I graduated from college I went on a trip to Russia sponsored by First Baptist Church Nashville and the Baptist Sunday School Board. I went to that church during college and was desperate to travel. As I spoke Russian and had the $750 needed I was selected for the trip. We spent about 10 days with some Southern Baptist missionaries in what is now Belarus. They paraded us Christian Americans around to try to draw in young people. At the beginning of the trip we spent a few days in Helsinki, and at the end we toured Moscow. We had an interpreter while we were with the missionaries, but we had to rely on my Russian language skills in Moscow. We had a few close calls where people tried to take advantage of us.
My husband has relatives who have done do-gooder tourism to the Dominican Republic. Each trip cost $1500 minimum. They tried to get us to send our kids when they were teens, and we said no. By then I was wise to what these trips are. One of my husband’s aunts spent 3 months in DR “building houses”. She was 60 years old with a career in software – she didn’t know Jack about building houses. But she was a well-off empty-nester looking for something to do.
I’m thinking back about my trip with my (non-fundie) church to Germany. It certainly wasn’t a mission, but I would characterize it as an ambassadorial trip. It was technically an exchange, since some of the German families had visited the U.S. earlier (ironically the exchange rate was bad for them when they visited and bad for us when we did.) I like this much better than whipping out the halo polish and pretending to be doing good deeds. If you have specific skills that are needed abroad such as a physician, then it might be worth your while, but otherwise you could have just sent the money. ObstacleChick mentions that it looks good on a resume. I suppose that is one advantage, though one could add international travel as a remark in either case.
Not trippin’. But I clearly remember my mom getting completely exalted about 20 years ago because her church helped raise SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS to send BIBLES TO BOLIVIA!! Forgive the all caps, that was how she said it. When I asked her, “How will that help?” she was flummoxed. So I continued, “I guess if you boil them long enough, those poor people might be able to eat them.”
Pretty sure she’s still pissed at me.
Only the tiniest bit related but it reminds of how big pharmaceutical corps reward Docs to prescribe their drugs. They sponsor seminars. Some go sponsored as students and some get paid as teachers. The seminars tend to be in places like Hawaaii, Miami, Hong Kong, etc., not Fargo, ND, Detroit MI, or Fairbanks AL. My cardio Doc Pushed many costly pills on me, mostly with bad effect. No matter, he always had a different one to try. I researched him and and found he taught seminars in Hawaaii for drug corps. It felt like a conflict of interest so I stopped seeing him. Ten years since I quit his advice and his meds with no ill effects.