This
article was written for and first published in
Captive Canada:
Renditions of the Peaceable Kingdom at War,
from Narratives of WWI and the Red Scare to the Mass Internment of Civilians
Issue #68 of
Press for Conversion (Spring 2016),
pp.18-19.
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The Occupation(al) Psychosis of Empire-Building
Missionaries
By Richard Sanders, Coordinator,
Coalition to
Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)
The Canadian mission to expand the British empire was a spring-board for
spreading “Christian values” around the world. Capturing the Canadian west
was seen as a moral exercise to build the religious muscles of civilisation.
Fixated on their Social-Gospel mission, progressives took up the “white man’s
burden” to uplift heathens and inferior races wherever they could be found:
“[I]f Prairie society were given Christian foundations, Canada
could become a mighty base for exporting the Christian evangel on a global
scale,” said historian George Emery, so that “Canada could participate fully in
the Anglo-Saxon mission to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.”1
As its “Board of Missions” reported in 1908, “the
mission of the Methodist Church is to save Canada, that through Canada we may do
our part toward saving the world.”2
By 1919, Canada’s Protestant churches supported 768 overseas
missionaries in ten countries, at a cost of about $2 million ($25.5 million in
2015). This, said historian Robert Wright, “rendered Canada the greatest
missionary nation in Protestant Christendom on a per-capita basis.”3
This global “missionary enterprise,” he continued, “owed much ...to the
generosity of wealthy Canadian businessmen in the Layman’s Missionary Movement.”
Much of this largesse came from the pockets of “executives, brokers and lawyers”
in Toronto’s three richest churches.4
Besides their devotion to spreading “The Word,” these businessmen were avid
promoters (and beneficiaries) of empire. Being enslaved by their blind faith in
both religion and capitalism, Canadian businessmen and missionaries shared an
inability to see beyond the shackles of their cultural programs.
In 1918, when economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen5
coined the phrase “trained incapacity,” he applied
the term to capitalists, critiquing their “habitual addiction to pecuniary...
considerations.” Arguing that businessmen have a “trained inability to apprehend
any other than the immediate pecuniary bearing of their manoeuvres,” he said
their “habitual employment... holds them more rigorously and consistently
to...pecuniary valuation.”6
Veblen’s book also described how religion provides “national
strength” to “predatory cultures,” which were “essentially... parasitic...,
despotic, and, with due training, highly superstitious....” Religion, Veblen
maintained, “fosters the national pride of a people chosen by the Most High,”
and “trains the population in habits of subordination and loyalty.”7
Veblen’s idea of “trained incapacity” has been widely adapted. In
1931, philosopher/psychologist John Dewey applied it to ethnology and created
the phrase “occupational psychosis.” In 1935, literary theorist Kenneth Burke
used Veblen and Dewey’s work to explain many maladaptive beliefs and
behaviours. In 1937, Belgian sociologist Daniel Warnotte applied it to his
study of “professional deformation” in bureaucracies. US sociologist Robert
Merton added to the idea in 1949 when studying dysfunctional “overconformity”
and inflexibility in large institutions. Recently, theology professor Birgit
Herppich has tried to use the idea of “occupational psychosis” to reduce
“cultural bias in missionary education.”8
Using the “trained incapacity” theory to improve
missionary success rates reveals a learned inability to see that “missionary
education” is, in itself, a clear form of “cultural bias.”
Missionaries are preoccupied with the task of educating nonbelievers. This is
not a mere job, career or occupation. It is a self-righteous calling or
mission that can seize, capture, take over or possess those who occupy this
field of work. Trained in the business of conversion, missionaries may become
so engrossed, fixated or occupied by their task that they are blinded to its
harmful effects. For example, being incapable (or unwilling) to see that
residential schools were the tools of cultural genocide, missionaries gave
glowing tales to bless their efforts to educate heathens.
Such narratives were blindly taken as gospel by many who, though outside the
missionary field, professed Christianity. Because political and economic elites,
occupying many professions, adopted missionary beliefs, the vocation’s trained
incapacities spread widely and infected many huge institutions. The missionary
mindset, having escaped its professional confines, was able to seize settler
culture as a whole.
On a social level, missionary attitudes were central to Canada’s colonial
occupation, that political habit of seizing, occupying, controlling and
profiting from lands already settled by others. Missionaries rendered
progressive-sounding narratives to justify the containment of Indians, atheist
socialists and other threats to the status quo. This Christian evangel has now
been replaced with the Good News that global salvation can be found by spreading
“Canadian values.”
References/Notes
1. George Emery, Methodism on the Canadian Prairies,
1896-1914, 1970, pp.11-12. (PhD thesis, History, UBC.)
http://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/123796/UBC_1970_A1%20E44_4.pdf
2. Annual Report, Missionary Society, 1907-08, pp.55-56.
Cited in Ibid., p.12
3. Robert Wright, A World Mission: Canadian
Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939, 1991,
p.53.
https://books.google.com/books?id=s-r0AwAAQBAJ
4. Phyllis Airhart, Serving the Present Age:
Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1992,
p.188.
https://books.google.com/books?id=GoE8LZQPWG0C
5. In 1899, Veblen wrote The Theory of the Leisure
Class, coined the term “conspicuous consumption” and took on Stephen Leacock
as a PhD student in the Political Economy at the University of Chicago.
6. Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship,
1918, pp.347-348.
https://archive.org/details/instinctofworkma00vebl
7. Ibid., pp.166-169.
8. Birgit Herppich, “Cultural Bias in Missionary
Education: The Unintentional Dynamic of Trained Incapacity,” Papers, Bk
32, 2014.
http://place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/32/
