Bottom Line: We will lose the War on Terror if we turn our lives over to the men without culture, the self-cultural men, who lack the roots to fight.
Missionary kids (MK) are pretty terrific, at least the ones I have had as students. Adam, one of my better-ever students and former aid, benefited greatly from his experiences in Brazil. He was one of those rare souls given a chance in the natural order of their lives to experience and love two peoples as his own. While praying for Adam today, I got a note from a sound student of more recent vintage who spoke of his difficulty settling on one particular home or folk!
Missionary children are international in a good sense. Like all wealthy people at times the burden of loving two peoples is too much for them and they wish they were poor, as God has called most of us to be, with only one people to love truly and well. Often, like many rich folk I know, they are tempted to abandon their high calling and just pick one group or another. If they must, then they must, but it is rare chance to love without confusion two nations while remaining one essential self.
Missionary children live in two or three nations and learn to love what is good about each one. They don’t confuse the virtues of one with the vices of another. This is not a life that one can choose . . . the “MK” gets to experience the world in a different way than even their parents.
The wholesome opposite of the MK is the good old boy who cannot imagine getting out of his county, let alone his home state!
Being utterly parochial is charming enough that if you can do it, do. There is mystery enough in one corner of a single garden to fascinate all but the most jaded man for life. There was a time when God made available to a few small village children, the opposite of the missionary kids, the chance to know one place and only one place well.
Sadly, times have changed enough that almost all of us have been expelled from that particular garden. We will have to make do with superficial knowledge of much more of the world. We must be patriots without being parochial, because for most of us parochialism is too big for our virtue. Parochialism demands a big heart to keep from becoming overly expansive about the glories one will find in one’s own garden. And yet on the narrower and less dangerous road of patriotism checked by internationalism there is certain charm.
In a world where good news is waiting in every human being, we need international men. In a world where every culture has found the image of God in a unique way, there is promise to the journeys of genuine multicultural men.
Sadly, it is not missionary kids who mostly lurk the halls of the United Nations. It is not Adam Johnson running the European Union or most of our multinational corporations (yet!). There is a second kind of international man . . . one who loves mankind so much in general that he hates every national expression of humanity mankind has produced.
This international sort has more in common with other internationals than he does with his own country of birth.
He lauds multiculturalism, but he knows no culture well enough to love it. He borrows and choices (mostly the food) from scores of different cultures. He is not multicultural, but self-cultural. He eats no national cuisine; he cries at no anthem, his mother tongue is some Esperanto-pop jargon that he has picked up from ABC-BBC-CNN. The crisis of this week was getting the i-phone and not global terrorism. He has no history, no roots, no lord, and no liberty from the tyrannical demands of self.
He turned out just the way his International Baccalaureate program hoped.
Oddly, this Self-Cultural man was made possible by the hard work of real nationalists.
Self-cultural man does not create culture, understand any culture, just loots the “best” of each culture to satisfy his desires. The patriot, the nationalist, acts internationally to protect his nation. The self-cultural man acts to protect those like self, the other self-cultural men.
Real nationalists created the international community to protect the nation states from excesses of patriotism. Internationalism blocked patriotism from becoming jingoism. The real work was done by the nationalist, but international affairs were a necessary medicine to keep the system of nations functioning.
Self-cultural men are a great danger in the War on Terror. They have no ideology or creed to answer “Islamic” extremism. They have minds like airline in-flight magazines: glossy, stolidly hip, with more images than words, and going someplace for vaction that is no place. . . if they can. We don’t need these men and women leading us.
Self-cultural men see a terrorist bombing as a reason for an international conference, not a defense of a nation or people. The self-cultural man ends up with a hollow self and no culture
Missionary kids, with the best will in the world, can struggle to integrate as persons. The self-cultured struggle to disintegrate . . . to “ambiguate” where the MK disambiguates.
Their world is the same size it always has been, it is just the people whose souls are smaller . . . too small to be trusted with too much.
Let’s pray for stout hearted parochial men in this War who will fight because their garden and neighbors are in danger. Let’s pray for international men who will understand the times, because they have expanded their hearts. Finally let’s pray for the salvation of men without countries who can find no place to stand in all the nations’ at the End of the Age.