Cross-cultural Identity and the Gospel in The Mission

By David Chase

National Geographic Documentary Films’ The Mission tracks the life of missionary John Chau, son of Patrick Chau. 

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ohn grew up with a multicultural heritage, with his mother being a white woman from the US and his father having a Chinese background. Because John's father experienced the threat of an official cultural perspective being enforced, John and he had radically different views about Christianity, the Great Commission, and the overall aim of life. John’s friend is quoted as saying that “John was proud of his Chinese heritage” and embraced it alongside his US heritage as well. This idea of belonging to two different heritages—Chinese and American—played a complex role in his self-concept. His experience of living in two cultures and their spaces seems to have fostered in John the sense that he could more easily move into a third cultural space, and that he had an empathy for people who lived in ways that contrasted with the dominant global culture.

The documentary notes that Patrick Chau, John's father, left China during the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, the youth of major cities joined in a revolutionary fervor that targeted the "Four Olds (i.e., old ideas, customs, culture, and habits of mind), and the movement quickly escalated to committing outrages. Many elderly people and intellectuals were physically abused, and many died." Perhaps this explains his apprehension over his son becoming increasingly focused on an ideal that departed from traditional career and educational channels, although this connection is never made explicit in the film. 

What the film does do is scrutinize John's faith and his missionary actions that resulted from it. Watching this documentary, I saw my faith held up to an uncomfortable mirror. The film quotes John’s teacher at a Christian high school, Dan Davis: “There’s also the prevalent belief among evangelical Christians that for Jesus to return . . . that every tribe, every nation needed to have exposure to the gospel.” 

Similar to John, I heard missionary tales every Sunday night that praised missionaries' sacrifices to reach all people. I fully expected that I might lose my life in some remote area of the world—or even at home if the End Times started—for the sake of Jesus. If I wasn’t a coward who was afraid to tell–which was the worst thing you could be. Being a coward was a fear that haunted Chau as he planned his attempt to reach the Sentinelese.

Despite my fears, the missionary stories were also gripping, a fact that the film picks up on. There was a certain Indiana Jones flair to all the missionary tales: eating new foods, meeting new people, seeing new places. Battling snakes, wild beasts, demonic influences. This same thrill seems to have captivated John Chau. 

To hear the documentary tell it, John Chau was enticed by somewhat problematic tales of the exotic as a boy, pretending to be on Robinson Crusoe’s Island or traversing the jungle like Tin Tin. As innocent as adventure stories might seem, there was always the encounter with the Other woven throughout these tales.

John Chau’s father feared that the missionary impulses that moved his son owed something to this exoticizing of people: “I am not a part of the radical evangelicals and don’t agree on their views of the Great Commission, the biblical-based slogan distorted for the hidden colonial or imperialist identity. But my opposing rational influence failed to counter the irrational religious and glamorized adventures of exploration.” 

While Patrick Chau's Christianity is not fully explored in the film, it is clear that there exists a generational and cultural gap between his and his son's worldview, and that this is at the heart of this father-son rift. This raises questions about what it means to respect the wisdom of our parents' spiritual and cultural heritage while also making that heritage our own.

In exploring this generational and cultural tension, the documentary retells John Chau’s past via interviews with various friends and experts, as well as via animations accompanying the words of his father's letter to the filmmakers and John’s own diary. Footage of the Sentinelese is also included. These are the people whose island John Chau prayed about, asking God if it was “Satan’s last stronghold." These are the people John Chau gave his life trying to reach.

The film’s technique reminded me of another poignant documentary from National Geographic Documentary Films, The Fires of Love, about a volcanologist couple, the Kraffts, obsessed with arriving at volcanoes and understanding their eruptions, at great personal risk. That documentary also used animations and the words of the Kraffts to drive home its questions about their lives. Was their obsession with volcanoes ultimately worth it, since it cost them their lives? 

Their unyielding passion mirrored Chau's missionary zeal. And The Mission asks similar questions about John Chau's passion.

In John Chau’s case, however, his mission was not understanding volcanoes or natural phenomena, but people. The Sentinelese are human and isolated and seem hostile to outsiders coming to their island. Unlike a volcano, which is an inanimate force of nature, people have their own will and desires. The film questions how we should best acknowledge that.

Along these lines, the documentary quotes several people, an ex-missionary Daniel Everett among them, who view contact with people like the Sentinelese not as bringing the love of God, but as bringing disease, imposing outside beliefs or superstitions on them, and generally compromising how they have chosen to live.

While I cannot speak to John Chau's experience as an Asian American, I am an evangelical Christian in my upbringing. And this film challenged me to think about other ideas that might have attached themselves to my faith. Are there pitfalls and harms in relating to others? Can I unwittingly cause harm in the name of something good? In the name of God?

Was John Chau’s life lived in obedience to God and the spread of the Gospel or was it, as his pastor feared, pursuing “a fantasy"? As his pastor put it, "There’s some sort of idealism that is masquerading as God’s calling.”

More shocking is that John Chau’s father concludes his son’s attempt to reach the Sentinelese was a “suicide mission, destined to fail” and an “unchecked inflation of the Messiah complex” where his son would somehow be the one to save the Sentinelese. Perhaps Patrick Chau was reading his son's behavior through the lens of the Cultural Revolution where youthful zeal ultimately proved destructive instead of heroic or a force for good. Neither the film nor Patrick Chau's letter that it quotes is explicit on this point.

The film concludes with the idea that perhaps we have no place to tell the story of the Sentinelese. Perhaps taking an interest in the Sentinelese is an act of self-serving behavior as the former missionary, Daniel Everett, says: “We’re telling a story about us, not about them. It’s the stories we tell that make us who we are.”

The film does not address the possibility that John Chau's behavior may have had anything to recommend it as anything better than misguided and harmful, if perhaps well-intentioned. Yet, cross-cultural mission work is not necessarily a "messiah complex" or a "suicide mission." 

Patrick Chau sounded a cautionary note that his son—from his perspective—ignored: Do not seek to impose your beliefs and cultural practices on others either as a self-aggrandizing adventure or as a means of "improving" or "civilizing" them. 

Yet, John Chau's missionary diary read aloud gave the sense that he was trying to be culturally sensitive to the Sentinelese. He arrived in a similar state of dress to the Sentinelese. He resisted the urge to place technology such as trail cameras to surveil them, out of fear they might worship the object or experience some other adverse effect. Still, John Chau did not waver in his conviction that everyone should hear the Gospel, even at risk to his own life, wellbeing, or legal consequences of his actions. 

Is there a lesson going in the other direction? If the younger generation could learn nuance or caution from the older generation in not repeating the mistakes of the recent past, perhaps the older generation might also learn something from the younger. The enthusiasm of youth, the courage to move into cross-cultural contact despite all its messiness, and the notion that the gospel, if we truly accept it, is for everyone are some lessons that might be worth absorbing. Most of us are not, after all, positioned in the extreme circumstances of interacting with a people group that has not had contact with the outside world.

Ultimately, I found this film challenging, because it asks the questions about what stories we tell ourselves about God, about ourselves, and about others. What narratives have we absorbed from our culture, from our upbringing, from belonging to multiple groups? When encountering other people, what should that encounter look like, and under what circumstances and rationales should we pursue such encounters?

I believe there is a space for faith in cross-cultural encounters, but maybe John Chau’s complex story can allow us to reflect on what ways we bring faith to others and whether those methods are meeting our goals or supplanting them with something other than an authentic interaction. That is why The Mission is my pick for this series on Asian Americans in media.

The Mission is currently streaming on Disney Plus, as of this writing.

Photo by Thijs Kennis on Unsplash

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David Chase is a humanities professor who teaches world art and cultures. Additionally, he is the father of two kids who go on his art-viewing and other adventures. In his spare time, he goes birding, reads lots, and catches movies if he can!