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.

Press for Conversion! is the magazine of the
Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT).
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Here is the pdf version of this article as it appears in
Press for Conversion!
 


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/
 



This article was written for and first published in Issue #68 of Press for Conversion (Spring 2016), pp.18-19.
Press for Conversion! is the magazine of the
Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT).
Please subscribe, order a copy &/or donate with this
coupon, or use the paypal link on our webpage. 

If you quote from or use this article, please cite the source above and encourage people to subscribe.  Thanks.