The North Sentinelese people live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have no contact with other tribes. The island is home to an indigenous tribe that has resisted contact with outsiders for more than 60 years. He is currently a Baptist student at Duke Divinity School pursuing the master of divinity degree.Can you fly a drone inside north sentinel island? Kaleb Graves was ordained as a CBF minister in 2019 and has served churches in Arkansas. The families and communities of the headlined certainly are, long after the media spotlight passes. Do not make them stand-ins for your insecurities, anger or fear. Do not turn them into headlines on a social media feed, devoid of the image of God. But do not do to them what I and others did to John. It is OK to feel passion and want to seek a better life because of what happened to them. This year has been full of death, especially with people taken by COVID-19 and police brutality. He was not a headline, article topic or sermon illustration. I grieve him sharing his endless supply of turkey jerky. But I grieve these things separately from grieving John. I do grieve that I could not have done anything to help John. I do grieve for a missionary mentality that turns the “called” into infallible saviors from the Western world. I do grieve for toxic Christian sects that refuse to question their theology, contributing to John’s death. This macabre ritual attempts to draw me back into a world of talking heads, but I will just grieve instead. And again, as we approach the two years after his death, they have begun again. Last year at this time, the cycle of emails, messages and phone calls began again. He was complex, a life full of unique experiences, and made in the image of God, just like all of us. John Chau was not any one of these things. “It is not right that I and others have dehumanized John and turned him into something he was not.” It is not right that I turned him into a symbol of personal grief and a vendetta against bad theology. It is not right that some progressive Christians and secularists have turned him into a one-dimensional demon of imperialism and colonialism. It is not right that some evangelicals turned him into a faultless martyr. It is not right that reporters and headline scavengers have turned John into any number of characters in a story. It is not right that I and others have dehumanized John and turned him into something he was not. I just called it John.Īnd that’s not right. I constructed a representation for my anger, fear, anxieties and grief. He was an idea, something that kept me up at night, haunted my nightmares and scarred my conscience. Slowly, my grief and guilt melded with John, and he stopped being a person to me. Could I have saved him? Could I have changed his mind? What if I had prolonged or continued our conversations? Would he still be alive today? I already was suffering under the guilt of my aunt’s preventable death from cancer a few months earlier, also caused by bad theology and a denial of medical science. One reporter summed up what I had been thinking: “You’re the only one I know of in his life who did not believe these people were going straight to hell with no hope.” I knew that, but hearing someone else say that devastated me. Could I have saved him? Could I have changed his mind? What if I had prolonged or continued our conversations?” I remembered that summer session, when John talked about a tiny untouched tribe in the Indian Ocean that did not even know how to make fire, and how he wanted to reach them “for the gospel.” I remember conversations about eternal conscious torment in hell, and a true belief that every single North Sentinelese person had none of God’s saving grace because they never had heard of Jesus. I became quite evangelistic about John’s death, giving interviews and appearing on podcasts to blame the fundamentalist culture that perpetuated the poor theology behind John’s fatal missionary endeavor. So, they came up with their own bizarre or simplistic stories where John played the victim or the villain. None of them could understand what would drive a young twenty-something to do what he did. Or, as one reporter suggested, a deeply repressed gay man. Or, a brainwashed member of a yet unknown cult. His missionary activities were not yet known to them.Īfter a few more days, GQ, the New York Times, and other outlets began contacting me about John, but this time, they had the religious angle. To them, he was a wild-eyed adventurer, an Indiana Jones type, who had met his end in search of a thrill. They already had worked John’s story out for the morning news. When I spoke of John’s faith and missionary work, media representatives were surprised. the next morning when the phone calls, messages and emails began from media sources.
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