Missionary v. Anthropologist: Dawn of Justice

In which I relate a travel story and share my most deeply held personal philosophy

I believe!

I crested the escalator bank and arrived at O’Hare airport’s Concourse C at 7:30 AM yesterday to find a woman with deeply tanned skin yelling at her traveling companions “Come on, folks, put some PEP in your STEP!” in the least peppy voice imaginable. Her entire group was wearing matching t-shirts, and given the fact that they were moving as a unit, I figured they were either a tour group or, like, heading to the Price Is Right.

But as we all got to the same gate, I spied their shirts up close, and I saw that they were instead a group of missionaries. I won’t name their organization, but I will say it shares a name with a popular hobby board game, which made me laugh. The slogan on their shirts’ backs also struck me as kinda funny — “Our mission is urgent because people are eternal.” A nice try at Christian mysticism, I suppose, but if the second half of that statement is true, can’t you kinda… take your time with your mission? You’ve got Forever; what’s it matter if you’re a little pokey getting to the gate, you know?

I was flying out to Los Angeles for some work meetings, and the flight was 100% full, so the flight attendants did a pre-boarding call asking for passengers to voluntarily check their carry-ons. And, I gotta give it to them, the whole-ass mission group stepped forward to do so, just as Christ taught. (“And when there was only one set of footprints… that was when I carried on.”)

Of course, then, when it was time to board the plane, the mission group completely cut in line, eschewing the “line up along the wall” process for a “lemme just sneak in real quick here” approach. I guess you can take the mission out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the mission.

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As you may know, I went to a Catholic high school, and my senior year there, my mom passed away. I was not a religious person even then, and I didn’t really find solace in any religious fables (if anything, I find more solace in them now, because there are some rad social justice tenets embedded in Jesus’s story, and Christian mysticism is pretty cool!).

So, in the wake of my mom’s passing, our Catholic guidance councelor called me into his office and asked me if I knew the story of Jesus and the footprints. I replied that I did; I probably had heard it two dozen times by that point. The guidance counselor goes “Okay” and then launches into the story full steam ahead, like he didn’t even hear me. And every time he pauses to take a breath I go “yeah, I know this one” like I’m Norm Macdonald in that SNL Bible Challenge sketch. And yet, undettered, he continues on until he finishes the whole fucking thing, absolutely beaming with smug self-satisfaction as he reaches the grand finale — “… that was when I was carrying you.” “Yep, I’ve heard it before” was my lifeless reply.

In that moment, my guidance counselor was being a missionary. And here is the thesis of this post: missionaries suck.

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Something else I’ve written about extensively here is how much I love the writing of Grant Morrison. Back when it released in 2012, I devoured their memoir Supergods, and in that book, I found a passage that would forever change how I viewed the world. Without hyperbole, this may be the single most impactful set of words I ever set my eyes on, and it comes from some text about writing superhero comic books! The world is a magical place.

Grant says (italics mine):

My experiments on Animal Man were described by critics as “metafiction,” or fiction about fiction, and perhaps that was an easy way in for some readers, but I felt that I was onto something more concrete and less rooted in abstraction or theory. The fictional universe I was interacting with was as “real” as our own, and as I began to think of the DC universe as a place, it occured to me that there were two ways to approach it: as a missionary or as an anthropologist.

I chose to see writers like Alan Moore as missionaries who attempted to impose their own values and preconceptions on cultures they considered inferior — in this case, that of the superheroes. Missionaries liked to humiliate the natives by pointing out their gauche customs and colorfully frank traditional dress. They bullied defenseless fantasy characters into leather trench coats and nervous breakdowns and left formerly carefree fictional communities in a state of crushing self-doubt and dereliction.

Anthropologists, on the other hand, surrendered themselves to foreign cultures. They weren’t afraid to go native or look foolish. They came and they departed with respect and in the interests of mutual understanding. Naturally, I wanted to be an anthropologist.

Missionaries vs. anthropologists. While Grant specifically speaks about this dichotomy in terms of an approach to writing, there’s an implication here that this philosophy extends beyond the blank page, to the ways we interact with the entire world around us.

It wasn’t right away, but as I got more enmeshed in the world of storytelling, and as I became (I hope!) a more conscientous citizen of the globe, I recalled Grant’s words, and I tried to adapt their mindset into the core of how I carried myself in situations where I engaged with others. And occasionally, if someone would ask me about my philosophy of storytelling, or management, or just of being a person in community, I would reply with these words:

“In all things, strive to be an anthropologist, not a missionary.”

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I’ve had some pretty wildly bad managers in my professional career, but besides the one who was canceled into oblivion by national media, there’s another who always sticks out — let’s call him Kyle. Kyle came into a retail environment I worked in with a fire in his heart to change things. I’m sure you’ve had managers like Kyle before. The dude dropped into our store on a Monday, and by Friday we’d had about 5 new employee systems, a different store layout, and a handful of one-on-one meetings where Kyle told us all what he saw as our strengths, our weaknesses, and our long-term potential with the company. I’m exaggerating a little bit here, but barely; Kyle attempted to change almost everything about the store’s operations in the span of less than a month.

And you know what — basically none of it worked, and everyone else in the store (even some customers) resented Kyle and thought he was full of shit (which he was).

In this example, Kyle was being a full-on missionary. He read a couple business books (including The Art of the Deal, lmao) and decided he had knowledge he just had to impart to us that would revolutionize our store. At no time in his brief stint as manager (he lasted under a year, I think like nine months) did he give himself the time to or even think that he needed to understand how the store already operated. It was his way or nothing, implemented at lightning speed. And it sucked and it didn’t work and Kyle made a bunch of people frustrated and also lost his job.

Had Kyle taken the time to be an anthropologist… to see why people already loved the store, to see what was working well and build up from there by encouraging the processes and personalities that were already singing… I dunno, maybe he could have had something. But Kyle took the lessons of his favorite authors, like Donald J Trump, and decided that he knew best. In doing so, he almost ruined a great thing, and only by removing Kyle could the store continue on the path of growth it had already been on.

This is true, but it is also a parable. Mind the footprints.

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When I got to LA yesterday, I grabbed my rental car and took myself to El Pollo Loco for lunch¹. I ordered a queso-guac chicken burrito combo, and the folks behind the counter gave me an extra baggy of chips with my meal, I assumed because they recognized that I am a Special Little Chip Boy and I love them so much.

I took my meal outside to eat in the California sun, and as I was enjoying my fresh, delicious choices, a (likely unhoused) man started digging through a garbage can near me. I realized that, even though I am a Special Little Chip Boy, my extra chips could probably do more good if given to this gentleman who was (presumably) looking for food. In fact, as I approached him, he’d grabbed a half-eaten taco salad out of the garbage can and started picking at it, so I figured I had read the situation correctly.

“Hey man — are you looking for food?” I asked. “The restaurant gave me an extra bag of chips; you’re welcome to them.”

Without looking at me, the man just said “no” curtly and went back to picking at the taco salad.

I was surprised — I did not expect to be rejected in this scenario. So I took my extra bag of chips and sat back down, and I felt weird about the whole thing.

In fact, I realized that, for a second, I had felt offended — the instant thought that ran through my head was “this dude doesn’t want my food?”

In that moment, I was being a missionary. I was being shitty.

This gentleman was under no obligation to take my handout. I mean, yes, he did straight up lie to me because he was clearly looking for food, lol, but it’s his business what food he eats and what he doesn’t. It was within my power to make an offer to him, and I did, and then he gets the power to do what he wants with that offer. He chose to decline it, and it surprised me how I reacted to that.

But really, it isn’t a surprise. As a middle-aged cis white guy who grew up in the Church, I still have some of those missionary tendencies baked into me. And sometimes I still actively have to remind myself to be an anthropologist — to understand that people should be free to write their own stories and destinies, and that if I’m fortunate enough to pass into their orbit, I need to be very conscious of not overwriting their path with my own capitalist-colonial-religious ideas of “what’s best.” And this is a lesson that applies in business, and dating, and friendship, and storytelling, and just being a person in the world seeing if a hungry dude wants my extra chips or not.

I think about those missionaries I flew out here with. While (loudly) talking on the plane, they said they were spending a week in LA’s Skid Row. I wonder if they were invited. I hope they were. I fear they weren’t. I’m concerned that a bunch of fellow middle-aged men and women from Iowa (again, loud plane talk) wearing matching t-shirts are going to blow into a neighborhood they know nothing about, offer meaningless platitudes and empty parables for seven days, and then fly back to their homes, feeling like they did the “right” thing.

Maybe they’re actually changing lives for the better out here? But the thing about missionaries is that mostly, I think they’re doing it for themselves. But maybe that judgment is me being a missionary, too.

1. While I’ll agree that it is not as good as In-N-Out, I will absolutely go to bat for El Pollo Loco as the Mexican fast food equivalent. It’s fresh! Depending on what you get, it’s not wildly unhealthy! It’s great, man. California fast food is just on a different level.