Wait, There's a Problem with Christian Medical Missionaries?

National Review ^ | 10/3/2014 | David French

[markomalley]

Let me begin by confessing my biases right away. Kent Brantly — the American missionary who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Liberia — isn’t just one of my heroes, he’s also (distantly) family. He’s my uncle’s nephew. I’m not sure if that makes us some form of cousin, but it feels family-ish.

And let me confess more bias. That same uncle served for years as a medical missionary in Nigeria and Tanzania, and my brother-in-law (also a doctor) has taken multiple medical mission trips. Heck, as a lawyer I feel near-useless (completely useless?) by comparison.

So, given this background, I reacted with perhaps special revulsion upon reading this piece from Slate’s Brian Palmer, where an atheist asks, “Should we worry that so many of the doctors treating Ebola in Africa are missionaries?”

Now, why would someone possibly be concerned that a number of fellow citizens have decided to leave the prosperity of American medicine (for all its problems, it’s still pretty darn lucrative), travel to the developing world, and sometimes risk life and limb to provide medical care to the poorest of the poor?

Here’s why:

And yet, for secular Americans—or religious Americans who prefer their medicine to be focused more on science than faith—it may be difficult to shake a bit of discomfort with the situation. Our historic ambivalence toward missionary medicine has crystallized into suspicion over the past several decades. It’s great that these people are doing God’s work, but do they have to talk about Him so much?

Let’s translate. Dear missionaries who are sacrificing so much because of your love for Jesus, shut up about Jesus. Squelch the beliefs that guide your life, that give you meaning and purpose, so that other people — thousands of miles away — don’t have to think of you sharing the Gospel.

(And never mind the utterly insulting insinuation that faithful Christian doctors aren’t as focused on science.)

As the writer notes, this is an old critique — one that treats the Christian message as a kind of cultural cancer, something to be contained and ultimately excised (so long as it doesn’t kill the good deeds). One hears this critique in the states all the time, especially on campus, where the only “good” Christians are the ones who shut up and serve. Get thee to a soup kitchen! And don’t let me hear a word!

This message ignores the reality that a missionary is a human being, a whole person, not an antibiotic-dispensing robot. And as a whole person — made fully alive by their faith — they recognize that physical aid (as important as that is) is only part of the story. They understand that the most significant message of Christ isn’t “Get up and walk,” it’s instead, “Your sins are forgiven.” Why should a missionary ignore the most important message to deliver the lesser service?

Not content with the classical critique, Palmer continues:

There are serious questions about the quality of care provided by religious organizations in Africa. A 2008 report by the African Religious Heath Assets Programme concluded that faith-based facilities were “often severely understaffed and many health workers were under-qualified.” Drug shortages and the inability to transport patients who needed more intensive care also hampered the system.

There is also a troubling lack of oversight. Large religious health care facilities tend to be consistent in their care, but the hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller clinics in Africa are a mystery. We don’t know whether missionary doctors are following international standards of care. (I’ve heard murmurs among career international health specialists that missionaries may be less likely to wear appropriate protective equipment, which is especially troubling in the context of the Ebola outbreak.) We don’t know what happens to the patients who rely on missionary doctors if and when the caregivers return to their home countries. There are extremely weak medical malpractice laws (and even weaker court systems to enforce them) in much of sub-Saharan Africa, so we have no sense whatsoever of how many mistakes missionary doctors are making.

In other words, he has a problem with medical missionaries because they’re not operating in first-world hospitals with first-world reporting systems and first-world systems of legal accountability? If there weren’t staffing shortages, drug shortages, a lack of large health-care facilities, and all the other issues that dominate developing-world medicine, we wouldn’t need medical missionaries.

But in the end, Palmer — despite his biases — swallows his objections because, well, there’s just no choice. Let the filthy Christians serve:

We have a choice: Swallow our objections and support these facilities, spend vast sums of money to build up Africa’s secular health care capacity immediately, or watch the continent drown in Ebola, HIV, and countless other disease outbreaks.

As an atheist, I try to make choices based on evidence and reason. So until we’re finally ready to invest heavily in secular medicine for Africa, I suggest we stand aside and let God do His work.

The column is not redeemed by a closing non-aggression pledge.

I hope and pray that if presented evidence that people from another faith (or no faith at all) were doing good works at a rate that put my own church to shame, I’d have the integrity to unreservedly applaud them for their virtue and exhort my church to do better.

[VanDeKoik]

So the difference between those people and the guy from Liberia is what?

Sure, let’s totally bring them here to potentially infect more people. That’s oh so “brave”.

[ansel12]

What is the difference between an American doctor or serviceman returning home for the best Ebola treatment in the world and given at the most secure, high tech Ebola/infectious disease, isolation unit in the world, or that Liberian guy at the apartments?

I just don’t believe you don’t see that difference.

[cynwoody]

Just don’t contact Ebola and then bring it back to the U.S..

Who did that?

Links, please.

[metmom]

There are serious questions about the quality of care provided by religious organizations in Africa.

Which is far better than the no care they'd receive if medical missionaries weren't there.

Then the people would restort to witch doctors.

Is that REALLY what he would prefer?

Or just that they probably die from their undiagnosed conditions?

[metmom]

So the difference between those people and the guy from Liberia is what?

If you have to ask, the answer will not make sense to you anyway, even if someone explains it to you.

[Smokin' Joe]

You’re Welcome, Alamo-Girl!

[VanDeKoik]

“Who did that?

Links, please.”

“Kent Brantly — the American missionary who contracted Ebola while treating patients in Liberia “

Right there in the first paragraph.

Like I said, if you want to go there and expose yourself to that sickness because God told you to, then go knock yourself out.

Just when you get it, then don’t think you should be able to bring it back here because you want treatment.

If people are going to freak out because that Liberian guy hoped on a plane with it and brought it here, then any of these missionaries don’t get some free pass either.

[Balding_Eagle]

If you have to ask, the answer will not make sense to you anyway, even if someone explains it to you.

Yeah, I didn't think you would be able to explain it.

Nor have the courage to admit it.

[Elsie]

Wait, There's a Problem with Christian Medical Missionaries?

Weight, It's a Problem with a vast number of Christians!

[daniel1212]

Which is far better than the no care they'd receive if medical missionaries weren't there. Then the people would restort to witch doctors. Is that REALLY what he would prefer? Or just that they probably die from their undiagnosed conditions?

Indeed. Sound like the mayor of NYC that stopped donations of surplus food to city shelters because because the city can not assess their salt, fat and fiber content, though at least in that case taxpayer money can be wasted to purchase the labelled.

[metmom]

Are you that dense that you cannot distinguish between someone who is a medical missionary who is living to serve others and some guy who deliberately went about infecting others?

Then no, you could not understand the answer.

[daniel1212]

There is nothing wrong with altruists serving as medical missionaries or whatever, as their private choice. The problem is the tendency for their private choices to become huge public costs and risks of importing the epidemic, or becoming hostages, once things go wrong. Whether it’s Ebola, being kidnapped by Muslims, or bumbling into Iran and North Korea, should people enter war zones and disease hotspots, then expect a “secular” bailout?

I support Christians serving as medical missionaries but agree with you that such should not ask for or expect help from the gov. due to their faith choices. Esp. expensive Ebola care.

Yet it would be discrimination for the government to refuse to do so, since it pays for care due to the negative outcome of other choices, whether believing sodomy is worth the risk of joining the 79% of sodomites who make up new HIV cases and over half a million dead, to those who believe the victim entitlement lie and thus live indolent lives.

Why should religious faith be placed in a distinctive class in this regard, though again Christians are not to look to the gov. to fund the consequences of their choices, though they overall work to build a strong nation.

The laws of a government are based upon certain principals and beliefs, reflecting those of its founders and the electorate (determining the interpretation of the former). And which laws usually had a religious influence or basis, and in many ways indirectly support one belief system over another. Thus ACLU antiseptic separation of church and state is impossible, and results in simply a secular atheistic ideology filling the void left by a more religious based one.

Or as in Salem MA, with celebration of witchcraft being amply supported by the gov., while refusing to allow a Christian college to use a city building due to the moral code of the latter.

[daniel1212]

If people are going to freak out because that Liberian guy hoped on a plane with it and brought it here, then any of these missionaries don’t get some free pass either.

The difference is btwn a non-citizen lying about his health to board the plane and likely infecting others and expecting free gov. care, versus Kent Brantly and co-worker:

Although the State Department said it had been involved in facilitating the evacuations from Liberia, Emory said Samaritan’s Purse was paying for the transportation and care of the workers. Dr. Ribner said that Emory officials had communicated with state and county regulators about the patients, but that the air ambulance service, the Phoenix Air Group, had been responsible for securing the necessary clearances to bring the two to the United States...

“From the time the air ambulance arrives in the metropolitan Atlanta area, up to and including being hospitalized at Emory University Hospital,” he said, “we have taken every precaution that we know and that our colleagues at the C.D.C. know to ensure that there is no spread of this virus pathogen.”

Although social media sites have been replete with misgivings about Emory’s plan, many people near the hospital said it did not bother them, partly because the disease centers and their high-security laboratories have long been part of the Atlanta landscape.

“We’ve already got smallpox and all that other crap at the C.D.C.,” Joey Voll, who works at a bookstore near the hospital, said with a shrug soon after Dr. Ribner’s news conference on Friday. - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/us/kent-brantley-nancy-writebol-ebola-treatment-atlanta.html?_r=0

Side note:

On 4 September, a Boston physician, Rick Sacra, was airlifted from Liberia to be treated in Omaha at the Nebraska Medical Center. Working for Serving In Mission (SIM), he is the third US missionary to contract EVD.^[115] He believes he probably contracted Ebola while performing a caesarean section on a patient who had not been diagnosed with the disease. While in hospital, Sacra received a blood transfusion from Kent Brantly, who had recently recovered from the disease. On 25 September, Sacra was declared Ebola free and released from hospital.^[116]

Thus rather than causing more death, the Christian missionaries at least saved at least one.

“They are the very first individuals to have ever receive this agent,” Dr. Bruce Ribner, director of Emory’s Infectious Disease Unit, told a news conference. “There is no prior experience with it, and frankly, we do not know whether it helped them, whether it made no difference, or even, theoretically, if it delayed their recovery.” - http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/ebola-virus-outbreak/what-cured-ebola-patients-kent-brantly-nancy-writebol-n186131

Ebola survivor Kent Brantly met with President Obama in the Oval Office

[daniel1212]

Link to last story. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/09/16/ebola-survivor-kent-brantly-met-with-president-obama-in-the-oval-office/

No record if he coughed.

[daniel1212]

It's long past time for self-proclaimed "secularists" to have their totally bogus fantasy of being free of religion just blasted away. A religion of no-religion is still a religion, and it needs to be recognized as reality statutorily.

As things stand today, in America, this nonsensical belief system has become an established religion, to the exclusion of all others, and that means a complete illusion of "neutrality" in our institutions is unconstitutional.

Finally another one who sees thru the pretense! See above .

[grania]

...then expect a secular bailouts.

I am one lone voice on my feeling about this. Mother Teresa was incredible, what she did, living her whole life as part of the community she served. She didn't get sick and go home.

Missionaries caring for the people instead of teaching the people to care for themselves are enabling irresponsible behavior of those who are afflicted. And look what happened when they got sick. The unspoken message sent to Africans was that to get well one had to go to the US.

And now the suffering Africans are left with no one to care for them, no developed cures, and an out of control situation that perhaps the US military can bring into control, at great risk to our military.

Is it racist to assume that Africans are incapable of caring for themselves? Personally, I suspect so.

flame away

[metmom]

Missionaries caring for the people instead of teaching the people to care for themselves are enabling irresponsible behavior of those who are afflicted. And look what happened when they got sick.

Missionaries DO teach people to care for themselves. It's a LARGE part of what they do in treating them, the prevention of much of this stuff in the first place.

What medical missionaries do other than that is treat people for stuff that can't be dealt with by prevention.

Help with stuff like dental work (tooth extractions) eyesight, antibiotics for infections, setting broken bones, childbirth, etc.

[Balding_Eagle]

Of course everyone can understand that.

What makes him indistinguishable from the other man is that they both simply ran to the United States once they found out they were infected.

I will refrain from the personal attacks, those are reserved for those who claim to be Christian.

[MamaB]

That man was not a citizen of this country. Our missionaries are US citizens. They come home where they belong.

[Balding_Eagle]

You’re not alone in thinking what you do.

Those who are transporting this illness to the United States are irresponsible, uncaring.