On Misguided Faith in Haiti

Talk of God infused much of the immediate post-earthquake commentary on Haiti, from Pat Robertson's foul claims about the disaster's origin to moving descriptions of how Haitians' faith remained upright, even in the rubble. Now, the latest installment of the God-in-Haiti narrative comes in the form of 10 American Baptist missionaries, recently arrested under charges of kidnapping 33 Haitian children to traffic across the border into the Dominican Republic. (The missionaries say they thought the children were orphans.)

Without knowing more about their intentions, it's hard for me to see these missionaries as particularly vile -- more like very, very misguided, and unusual probably only in the sense that they actually got caught (and triggered global headlines, and a diplomatic incident...and all that).

On Monday, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive described the Americans as "kidnappers" who had known "what they were doing was wrong." Well, maybe. I think the more terrifying description of the group, and in some ways more damning, was that they thought what they were doing was right.

You can see it in missionary Laura Silsby when she tells the cameras in her Haitian prison cell, "All we know is that God is going to bring us to positive closure and we're just waiting for that answer...we are trusting God," as another 20-something missionary wearing a baby blue "Camp" t-shirt stands near by. Or in the words of their church pastor, Clint Henry, who says the group's intentions were "upright and pure."

How poisonous is naiveté, and how far will the argument "We meant well" (or God was guiding us or some derivative thereof) get you? In many ways, those are the baseline questions surrounding recovery efforts in Haiti right now, as the desire to do good runs up against uncertainty about how to effectively deliver aid. So even apart from the obvious drama of blonde U.S. missionaries getting locked up in jail for snatching Haitian children, there's a particular resonance to this story that I think goes beyond that immediate punchline.

Wherever the moral answer to that question lies, it's clear that on the ground -- which is the only place that anyone seeking to assist in relief efforts should be consulting -- the missionaries' actions didn't help anyone, and in fact made the situation worse.

Prior to the quake, there were some 1,700 career missionaries on the ground in Haiti, certainly not all of whom regarded Haiti as a "spiritual sandbox in which to frolic," as Bryan Schaaf puts it so memorably, and many of whom were doing good work. But the fact is, any pervasive framework or faith is going to shield you from certain facts about a situation, whether we're talking about campaigners who seek principally to expiate the West's past deeds in Haiti, or missionaries trying to recklessly force-feed Haitian children into Christian homes. As a motivator, faith may be an amazing force, but for policy purposes, it's a dangerous one.

Photo Credit: Goldemberg Fonseca