Are evangelical missionaries good or bad? That’s the question in tonight’s PBS documentary, “The Tailenders.” The missionaries’ smugness and salesmanship tend to irritate other humanitarian workers, who typically see themselves as more respectful of the people they’re tending to. What’s more, the program implies, silencing the stomping beats of, say, the Solomon Islands in favor of pallid “Jesus Loves Me” singalongs seems just wrong.
But more disturbing than this, the documentary contends, is the psychological and spiritual danger that many progressives believe is wrought by missionaries, who swipe from indigenous people their happy, peaceful ways and stick them instead with the greed, selfishness, jealousy and wrecked natural landscapes known to be the key features of global industrial capitalism.
Despite a century of such complaints, however, Protestant missionaries persist. And they’re dogged. They dress in uncool hiking clothes and pack up uncool backpacks and buses with uncool food and uncool Bibles and venture way the heck into the jungle where they — and this is the subject of “The Tailenders” — learn thorny indigenous languages so they can actually talk with people who have never heard of America, capitalism, jihad, McWorld or Jesus Christ. Missionaries may be the most parochial and audacious avatars of our modern world.
Still, after tonight’s effort to wrestle with this paradox, you will not know for sure whether missionaries are good or bad. But you will talk about it. This gorgeous, inspired and gutsy film, the first feature documentary by Adele Horne, who also produces video art, opens up new ideological vistas on religion, technology and globalization. It dares viewers not to be surprised by it.
The focus of “The Tailenders” is the Global Recordings Network, founded in 1939 in Los Angeles by an evangelical named Joy Ridderhof. She wanted to disseminate Bible stories via phonographs and gramophones. Still photographs bring to life her adventures among those she aimed to convert; there she crouches, pale and delicate, with various less-delicate-looking figures in jungles and on beaches, marveling at a tape recorder. Of the 8,000 languages and dialects believed to exist, Global Recordings has now produced Christian propaganda in more than 5,485 of them. No linguistics department could pull this off.
The idea of releasing disembodied sound on unsuspecting people — like God in the burning bush — clearly fascinates Ms. Horne, who conveys an infectious sense of “this blows my mind.” The ingenious hand-cranked audio devices, engineered to be usable by people without electricity, are presented with the amazement that only a filmmaker pious about audiovisual technology could convey.
“Every physical movement and action reverberates throughout time and space, for good or ill,” says the spacey- and sad-sounding narrator, finding an analogy for the way sound echoes. “The ripple on the ocean’s surface caused by a gentle breeze and the deeper furrow of a ponderous slave ship are equally indelible.”
This airy poetry is anchored by down-to-earth reporting in India, Mexico and the Solomon Islands. At one point, a missionary is translating a message about Christian redemption into dialect. A native speaker finds an error. As he tells the missionary, the message now says, “We will wash away God’s sins.” Something needs to change.
Less effective than the vérité and the impressionistic voice-over are Ms. Horne’s sporadic efforts to jam her material into an interpretive framework. At the end of the film, which has presented disembodied audio as a religion unto itself, Ms. Horne seems to balk at her own originality and retreat into clichés.
The voice-over says: “Where Protestant missionaries go, industrial capitalism follows. To convert to evangelicalism is to replace indigenous collectivity with the pursuit of individual economic gain.”
And then there’s a lament for what’s lost. One of the converts says that new Protestants are shunned by their villages; they’ve forgone the religion of their parents. Only if you’ve been watching closely will you realize that that lost religion is Roman Catholicism. These congregants have not lost tribal practices, they’ve just moved on from the last wave of colonial proselytizing.