Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 12:1 (Nov 1949)
Article: Christian Missions And Indian Culture
Author: Rousas John Rushdoony

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WTJ 12:1 (Nov 49) p. 1

Christian Missions And Indian Culture1

Rousas John Rushdoony

FROM Spengler’s day it has become common knowledge that Western culture has declined and is near death, and the analysis is echoed even from liberal pulpits. Peter Drucker has depicted in his works the end of the era of liberal economic man and portrayed German National Socialism as an attempt to create a new order on the dogma of heroic racial man. Belief in salvation by education, in the goodness of natural man, in progress towards an earthly paradise, and in economics as the foundation of true society has been savagely caricatured by many novelists since Huxley’s Brave New World. Ostensibly, if we are to believe Latourette, this is therefore the great opening for the Christian evangel. The church has, he declares, advanced precisely in the areas and periods of cultural collapse and hence from the beginning established itself in the culturally dying Roman Empire while failing to perturb India and China, both young and flourishing cultures at that time.

And yet American Indians today, holding loosely to the tattered remnants of their old culture and often with scant respect for it, show a marked disinterest in Christian missions, and the number of Christian Indians has declined since the 1890s. On the other hand, the church has shown a declining interest in Indian work, has found it difficult to man its stations and has been conspicuously unwilling to begin new work. A generation ago, the Moses of the Nez Perce, James Hayes, together with his band of fellow Indian evangelists, travelled, sometimes on horseback, from tribe to tribe throughout the West carrying the gospel as the one hope of his people

WTJ 12:1 (Nov 49) p. 2

in a changing, puzzling world. Today the once Christian Nez Perce nation has only a handful in its scattered churches, and the only travelling Indian missionaries the West sees are members of the degenerate peyote cult. Today many Western Indians are totally untouched by the church, unaware of the existence of Jesus Christ, whom they literally know only as a “cuss” word2 , and more indifferent than ever before to any approach.

The reason for this reaction against missions is in part due to the Indians’ realization of the decline of the West, naively apprehended but clearly seen, often with hatred and delight. The Indian identifies culture and religion, and historically, the humanist culture of the past three centuries has been unique in its separation of the two. Western culture is, of course, inexplicable except in terms of its Christian heritage and heresy, but it is not identical with it, a distinction ...

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