In the Image of a White Savior: Part Three
If you’d like to read parts one and two before proceeding, go here and here.
Before I knew the truth of any of it — before I left my home and the church and began to see the small white savior that I had been molded into — I took one last trip.
I was nineteen, a fresh Baptist college drop-out, searching for the hand of God acting in my life and believing that he would lead me somewhere great as long as I was willing. I’d clung to my faith while recovering from years spent battling depression and an eating disorder, and I was convinced the Lord had sent me the symbol of a lion as a sign of his strength in me.
My dream was to go out into the world and make films that would lead people to Christ. And then I found a mission group that would be going to Ethiopia in the summer of 2012 to spend five weeks making short films and witnessing in the streets of Addis Ababa.
Narrow and naive, imbued with the same magical thinking of my youth, I saw that the lion was also an emblem of Ethiopia and suddenly felt called.
(Never mind the history of this lion or what it meant to the Ethiopian people; never mind Haile Salassie and his tyrannical reign against his own people, or the controversy of the Lion of Judah that still adorns flags and coins and streets. Never mind that Ethiopia has been a Christian nation since the 4th century, never mind its long fight to remain uncolonized by Europeans. My homeschooling curriculum hadn’t taught me any of that.)
I applied to the program and was accepted. I didn’t know to be bothered that, at the time, their organization’s name included the word “crusade.”
I fell in love with the idea of myself as a missionary, long-skirted and barefaced, selflessly serving in a dangerous foreign land like the heroes I’d grown up reading about in Christian literature. I didn’t particularly like evangelizing, even in my own country, and was primarily there to focus on filming with students from the Addis Ababa university. But twice while walking through the city, I was required to pull random men aside and ask if I could talk to them about my faith.
I explained to them that I’d been sad for a long time until Jesus helped me not be sad anymore (I was still pretty sad) and walked them through a tract. They sat around me and nodded politely and said yes, they would like to accept my Jesus.
It was supposed to be the shining moment of the whole trip, this “leading souls to Christ” business. But the encounters left me confused and uncomfortable. Without language to express why, I attributed my discomfort to an issue of sin or pride and moved on to hyperfocus on the East Coast boy in my group that I was praying Jesus would match me up with. (He went on to marry my same-name roommate. I think Jesus got his wires crossed.)
When I came back to Louisiana, they had me stand up in church before all the people who had donated to my mission fund and share my testimony. I talked about one of my team’s last days in Ethiopia, when our bus broke down on a country road between Ziway and Hawassa. While we stood in the dust and hot sun waiting for help, a kind family living near the fuel station brought out the only chairs they owned so that two of us could sit down. Standing behind the pulpit, I told my church the sanctimonious story I had told myself as a child coming home from Mexico. Their material possessions are few, but out of that little they know how to give better than any of us.
I showed pictures of the village children we’d been scheduled to visit one day: children living in what were termed “child-led households” who swarmed us in groups to shake our hands and practice their English. Their learned recognition of white people as bringers of treats and gadgets, and their open gestures of affection, I mistook for a sign of our own goodness.
One little girl of about five or six, with a pink butterfly on her dusty white sweater, asked to be picked up and then would not let me put her down. Standing in someone’s backyard, I held her for an hour while we watched my team play soccer and take selfies with the other kids.
I thought of my Christ-like sacrifice, my aching arms and the mud on my skirt, and how I knew Jesus would hold his children in just this way no matter how bedraggled and unwashed we came to his arms.
This was it. This was what I had been told was the greatest thing a Christian could achieve in life: denying myself, taking up my cross and following Jesus across the world to selflessly serve the least of these.
And how good it felt to finally see myself in his image: the savior.
It would be years before I would understand what kind of life a child must be living that she would be so eager for affection from a stranger, so conditioned to ask for and receive it. And worse, what could happen if that stranger were more ill-intended than I.
When people in my church saw the photos of me and this girl, they compared me to Audrey Hepburn in her UNICEF years and praised me in a way I had never been praised before. These people, some of whom had watched me struggle through years of pain while explaining that it was all part of God’s plan for me, were watching said plan unfurl before them with glistening eyes.
And standing before them all, I said the line, that thing Christians say and feel so good saying, that makes me wince to recall: “I thought I was going to change them, but really, they changed me.”
You are here for us; you exist for us. You are the stepping stones we will use for our own betterment; you are the catalyst of our own glorious testimonies. We will take your picture to post for online accolades without your consent to tell the world of the good we did. We were one white face in a sea to you, but you are a story we will tell about ourselves for the rest of our lives.
Our hubris prevented us from ever asking what we would do if a group of foreigners, missionaries from Hyderabad or Honduras, came to tell us and our children about their superior God and how he wanted to save us from our sinful ways. So entrenched in our American exceptionalism, it never occurred to us that we could be anything other than divinely right.
Even after I’d begun to deconstruct my faith, I found it difficult to escape the ideals planted in me from birth. They are embedded in our culture, our politics and films and beauty industry, and in the stories we tell ourselves when we buy TOMS shoes or THINX undergarments or donate clothing to charities that will ship them overseas, where they will undermine the textile industries in Rwanda or rot in an Indonesian landfill.
These ideals teach us that our saviorism is both necessary for all and mono-directional: we must go there, but they must never come here.
I learned this quickly after a certain self-appointed savior, more orange than white, took up his presidency and sought to deny any and all immigrants trying to find a better life in the States.
To my horror, people I’d grown up with or looked up to, who had held up international adoption and mission work as the most righteous of acts, were railing against the illegals, the “disease-ridden criminals and rapists” who were trying to cross our borders to take part in the Better that we had been going to their countries to tell them we had. So-called Good Christians nodded their heads in approval, or mutely continued to support the regime, as Latin American and Hispanic children, children like Eliút and Marisol, like my brother and sister and the little Ethiopian girl whose name I never knew, were separated from their families and treated with utmost cruelty while their parents faced deportation.
Not long after, those same people were spreading xenophobic conspiracies, calling Covid-19 the “China virus,” and mocking those of us who masked up for the safety of the world their messiah had died to save.
I thought our religion would have prevented their cruelty to people of other nations. I now realize it taught it to them. I’ve learned, with horror, of the flip side of the coins strewn about my country’s history, from the baptism of Native Americans as they died of European diseases to the international aid that keeps a foreign system unsteady and dependent on American intervention. They’re the same coins that fund border walls and genocide, while those whose pockets they came from preach love and pass the plate for their overseas ministries.
Always one white hand reaching out to give, as the other snatches away.
We will vacation in the name of Jesus; we will throw pennies at your problems like a band-aid on a broken bone. We will steal your children to teach them our history along with whatever way we have re-written yours. We have so much; we have everything; we will dangle it in your face and slap you if you try to take it. Look, and marvel at how little we are truly willing to give out of the abundance that we have.
