Uncovered: Life Beyond

30. Rereading The Pineapple Story

• Naomi and Rebecca • Episode 30

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Have you ever reread a cherished story from childhood only to find your sense of nostalgia replaced by cringe?  In this episode, we reflect on The Pineapple Story, a seemingly innocent book that, for us, represents a mashup of influences that colored our upbringing and sense of the world.

The Pineapple Story is just one example of a missionary story that at first glance may seem to be an inspirational story of faith and personal growth, but when examined more closely, reveals a colonialist, xenophobic mindset and political agenda. We use  research and analytical tools learned in college to question its assumptions and challenge its narratives.

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Speaker 1:

This is.

Speaker 2:

Rebecca, and this is Naomi. We're 40-something moms and first cousins who know what it's like to veer off the path assigned to us.

Speaker 1:

We've juggled motherhood, marriage, college and career, as we've questioned our faith traditions while exploring new identities and ways of seeing the world.

Speaker 2:

Without any maps for either of us to follow. We've had to figure things out as we go and appreciate that detours and dead ends are essential to the path Along the way, we've uncovered a few insights we want to share with fellow travelers.

Speaker 1:

We want to talk about the questions we didn't know who to ask and the options we didn't know we had.

Speaker 2:

So whether you're feeling stuck or already shaking things up, we are here to cheer you on and assure you that the best is yet to come. Welcome to Uncovered Life Beyond. Hello everyone, Welcome back to Uncovered Life Beyond. This is Naomi and this is Rebecca. So today we're going to talk about the Pineapple Story. This is a book that was central in my childhood. Growing up it was always there on the living room bookshelves. It was published by IBLP, Bill Gothard's organization, and it's an illustrated children's book about a missionary who was torn between his mission work and pineapples. It also tells the story of his personal growth. But I think when we zoom out and look at the story in a broader context, we start to see some other layers that I certainly missed when I was young. Rebecca, what was your introduction to the pineapple story?

Speaker 3:

So, interestingly enough, we had just moved back from Paraguay, so I would have been pretty young and I remember Great Aunt Lydia gathering a bunch of us kids around and reading the story to us.

Speaker 2:

Great Aunt Lydia was one of Grandma's sisters, right I think so, wasn't she married to Simon Salloy? Yes, and he was Pentecostal preacher, right? And so I always think of Aunt Lydia as kind of injecting a different perspective into things, because she and grandma were pretty close, but she was grandma's link to what we consider the health and wealth teachings that were popular on TV at the time, right.

Speaker 3:

And they seem to always be well-respected by the family, which I always found fascinating, because they didn't at all fit the mold of what we considered right and good.

Speaker 2:

Right, they were not plain. She didn't wear a head covering. Yes, I think about it now. I find it more interesting now because I just didn't think about it before and now when I think about that, their role in the family was really interesting in light of how they didn't conform to the expectations and I wonder what the story is there.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, they always took an interest in us kids and I remember them interacting with us, reading stories and I wonder if they were in some weird way cool because they didn't conform and they seemed at peace with it. Like it almost gave them credibility in some weird way, because she was quite outspoken for a female as well.

Speaker 2:

Right and very outspoken about her holiness beliefs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, it definitely made an impression to me because we had just come back from Paraguay and I remember kind of identifying with the author and almost feeling like, oh, someone else gets this.

Speaker 2:

The experience, the experience of being in another place, very different from the US, yeah, it's the white missionary.

Speaker 3:

Feel like I got that.

Speaker 2:

Right, okay, can I pause here for a tangent, a tangent off of a tangent. I'm just, it's just striking me how, what a mishmash of influences we're talking about here. Because here in our Amish Mennonite upbringing, amish Mennonite context, we're reading this story that was published by IBLP Institute on Basic Life Principles, which was definitely not a Pentecostal organization, a Pentecostal organization, right, and much more Christian fundamentalist, much more of a Baptist flavor than Pentecostal, but introduced to you, in your case, by your Pentecostal aunt, a great aunt. So I think it's such a great example of how different influences come to bear, and influences that often go unrecognized, and influences that really mix up what would otherwise be seen as the purity of a given cultural experience.

Speaker 3:

Right, and while my parents were fine with great aunt Lydia introducing this story, they would have probably been a little bit more salty If, say, your dad would have introduced the story Because at that time my dad was a huge proponent of IBLP, Bill Gothard's seminars, and your parents were not Right, right, I think it's also an interesting point to how far reaching Bill Gothard was. It's actually quite frightening.

Speaker 2:

Right. Even in a household where his materials were actively rejected, it still reached you Right, right, yes. So to get back to the story, the context is presumably in the 1960s 1970s, and I'm basing this on when the book was published and some of the events in the book that would have not taken place before the 1960s or 1970s, and the missionary was living in West Papua, new Guinea, and Papua or Western New Guinea has gone by a number of different names, but it's the western part of the island of New Guinea. So I'm curious, rebecca, what comes to your mind when you go back and read the story today, what strikes you as interesting and what are new perspectives that you see that you maybe missed the first time that you read the book?

Speaker 3:

So it's interesting. In my early days of deconstruction I was having a meltdown about the Old Testament and a wise friend looked at me and she's like you do know that stories are usually told by the winner, and when you win it's easy to believe that it was thanks to God. And I thought of that while I was reading this book. Stories are often told by the one with the most power and, to be fair, in many ways the book was well-read. There was a lot of humor in it, but there was also fringy humor used.

Speaker 3:

So the author was a missionary and he doesn't say whether he was actually invited, but chances are good he wasn't. We certainly were not invited to come to Paraguay. We just bought a colony. We moved down and while he was with them in the jungle he started getting hungry for pineapples, and another missionary group that he knew of had pineapple plants for sale. So he bought a bunch and brought them to the jungle and the first thing that kind of stood out to me was he hired the indigenous people to plant them for him, and he even noted they didn't really understand the idea of money, but he wanted to pay them and then things got complicated. So it takes pineapples like what, two or three years to actually ripen.

Speaker 2:

Or to mature. For the plants to mature, yes.

Speaker 3:

Correct, yeah. And then the fruit to mature and he and his wife were taking walks and they were excited because pineapple was becoming more and more ripe. And then the one quote says they stole them before they were right. That is their art Steal it before it is right. So he sets up the people in the tribe as this people who have an art of taking things their sinful practice is what they excel in.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, that's a really, really interesting way to characterize it, and you know, when we were getting ready for this, I watched the video. There's a there's a YouTube video of him giving a talk about this, where he gives more background details and the cringe factor is is is just ratcheted up to 11 in the video.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and soon after that he starts talking about how annoyed he was that the tribe is not even grateful for what him and his wife do. And him and his wife are doing all these great things and yet here they are stealing these pineapples from them. Naomi, they literally he and his wife literally withheld clinic health care as punishment and he says, I quote life was cheap over there, they didn't care.

Speaker 2:

Oh my gosh. And eventually his wife felt so guilty for withholding health care and seeing the babies die as a result, Right right that they decided they needed to try something else.

Speaker 3:

So they opened up the clinic with a stern warning and scolding the people in the tribe that they should not steal any more pineapple. Okay, okay, so we, we now have an understanding, but guess what? They came back and stole more pineapple. So apparently they had a little store that held basic necessities. They shut down the store and when that didn't work, they got themselves a dog, a big dog that scared people.

Speaker 2:

They got themselves a dog, a big dog that scared people, a guard dog that would chase them. Yeah, and they were scared of it. That was the whole point.

Speaker 3:

Yes, I mean I think he wrote something along the lines of that did the trick, the dog did the trick. It's not only cringe worthy, it's sad. It is sad that your pineapple, probably that, were growing, probably not even on your own land, probably community land, is worth shutting down healthcare. It is worth shutting down a convenience store. It's worth getting a guard dog.

Speaker 2:

That could bite the very people that you are trying to convert to your religion.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and he talks a lot about anger, which I think is kind of interesting, his discomfort with his own emotions. I mean, eventually he discovered his anger was sin. And I would like to ask the question but is it really Like what if that anger was part of a whole lot of other emotions that he was dealing with? And what if he would have just paused and said wait, yeah, I do feel angry, but I bet there's something else going on. But he seems so uncomfortable with that Something else that stood out.

Speaker 3:

At one point he got so angry that they literally ripped out all the good pineapple plants and threw them away and then later decided to plant a new garden. But every time there were pineapple plants to be planted, he hired someone to do the work for him. He didn't work with them, he didn't do his own work. He hired someone to do the work for him. He didn't work with them, he didn't do his own work, he hired someone else. And I think about that. I think about how often, when you have power, it's easy to get someone else to do your manual labor for you, and then he also, of course.

Speaker 2:

But you get someone else to do your manual labor for you. But you take the credit for it, you take the ownership for it. I mean it's what colonizers have been doing for centuries figure this out and guess what saved the day?

Speaker 3:

He came home to America and went to a Bill Gothard seminar, and at this seminar he learned about giving all his rights to God and he learned about not being. He learned about not having ownership of everything, but rather everything we have is God. And I'm a little uncomfortable with the narrative that when you give all your crap to God that things work out the way it's supposed to. He even went as far as to say that his son got really sick and he expected him to die, but then he remembered that he had never given his son to God. So he gave his son to God and guess what? His fever broke that night. Of course it did.

Speaker 2:

Isn't there something inconsistent there about promoting a system of private property which is what he's doing but also then at the same time claiming oh no, I gave it to God, it's not ownership. I mean, he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. It just seems like a really self-serving way of seeing the world.

Speaker 3:

So eventually, of course, the tribe noticed that he wasn't angry about the pineapples anymore. And the tribe people asked him why aren't you angry anymore? And he said oh, those aren't my pineapples, I gave them to someone else. And the tribe members are asking each other, of course did he give them to you? Did he give them to you? Well, who did he give them from? Or who did he give them to? And eventually they figure out he gave them to God. Well, now they're scared of God, they're afraid to steal from God and eventually we're all sharing pineapples and having a good day. Oh, the tribe members actually wondered if maybe he had finally become saved.

Speaker 2:

That's right, tuan has become a Christian. That was a line. That was a line that was like an inside joke in our family growing up. Tuan has become a Christian. The missionary, yeah.

Speaker 3:

And then, on one of the last pages, he talks about how, and again I quote for the first time they helped him without asking for pay. He was the one who introduced the concept of paying them for labor in the beginning of the book.

Speaker 2:

So what does it mean that he's celebrating that they were doing it for him for free? Is that that smells like real exploitation there?

Speaker 3:

Yes and no. In the book he talked about how he had helped someone fix a shovel and then a few days later that person saw him struggling with fixing a chair, and so that person offered to help him fix it. And then, after they fixed the chair, the guy said oh no, you help me fix a shovel, I'll help you fix your chair. And he was just marveling that there was no need to pay.

Speaker 2:

Are we talking here about that? Someone from the West is learning about community. Someone from the West is learning about community. Someone from a very individualistic culture is learning about reciprocity in the context of a community, and this is something that the locals learn were experts at Right Right and he had been trying to impose this individualistic way of seeing labor, and they are showing him a sense of community, but that's not his lesson. His lesson is that, oh, he just needs to get over his anger problem.

Speaker 3:

Right and, and there was no reflection about well crap, I was the one that introduced this idea of money to them.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

There was none of that reflection, and I think it's unfortunate how easily we like to take our ideology of how the world should be and impose it on other people.

Speaker 2:

And decide if they are good or bad, worthy, decide how the God of the universe sees them, based on how well they align with what we think is the way things should be. Right, right.

Speaker 3:

And there were parts of it that I think he was getting close or I like to think he was getting close to being like oh well, crap. And I'm really curious now what he would have to say about it. And I also get that Bill Gothard was very influential in writing the book. So I think, in fairness you know there is that but there was a lot of cringe in it for me and also cringe and some of my own self reflection in it, like there's moments in it where I see us in Paraguay, I see me interacting with friends from a different culture, I see me pushing my ideology on that too. So tell me about your thoughts.

Speaker 2:

Well, growing up, this was a book that we saw in a very positive way and the cringe moments just flew right over our heads. And, to be fair, like, the YouTube video that I mentioned earlier is a recording of a speech that this missionary gave in I believe it was 1987, right, and so at that time there was no expectation that any of the locals, any of the indigenous folks who are in the story, would ever hear this story, right? I mean, you know this is pre-YouTube, pre-everything like that, and I don't say any of that to excuse it, but just to give more context to the story, you know, and that we are seeing this now from the perspective of decades later. When I thought about this book, when we were talking about reacting to it on the podcast, I was thinking about how some of the research skills that I learned in college bring to light layers that I didn't or I really wasn't aware of before, and this is not to say more.

Speaker 2:

Well, this is not to say that college is the only way to pick up on these layers, but it's where I picked up on them and for me it goes back to a moment in my first year of undergrad. So we're talking probably 2002. I, like everyone else at the time, being a reader in the pre-internet world, I was always coming across different claims and hypotheses about how the world works. You know, and everything from things about the natural world to facts of history, to psychological explanations of things, but it was really difficult to verify anything. In my home, when I was growing up, we had a 1980s world book encyclopedia set on the shelf.

Speaker 3:

And if anyone doesn't know what that is, that's just offensive. I think we had a 1988 version at school but anyway, or you could go to the library.

Speaker 2:

But you know, now, when we go to look something up, you just put it into Google, right, and at that time you had to think through where would I even go to look up this information? And it was a whole long, multi-step process.

Speaker 3:

Well, and so when you came across a claim well, maybe that was true maybe it wasn't, and it was also really difficult, because I remember that there were so many men in my life with so much confidence telling me all the truths. I mean literally. Men were my pastors, men were my school teachers, men were the only ones in my world giving me information. I mean, to this day, men write the self-help books and women read them. We know this, isn't that true? Yeah, so true.

Speaker 3:

And to this day, if a man says something to me with enough confidence, it takes me longer than it should to challenge it.

Speaker 2:

Right, when we were in that context of limited information, instead of going online to verify things, you would compare it with what you already knew, right? And if it made sense, based on what you already knew, you went with it, right? Well, that's true, could be true, and you know, when I think back about all the mishmash of influences that I had in my life, I just man, my head must have been spinning Right. And the problem with that is that it leaves you open, wide open, to all kinds of implicit biases. Well, if this jives with what I already know, then I guess it must be true. And yeah, the filters are just, are making such an impact there.

Speaker 2:

So, coming from that experience, I had a moment in my first year of college when I was in a research writing class, was learning how to use academic sources to write research papers, and I remember the day when I was walking through the stacks in the library and let me just say here too, this is the very early days of the internet and so when we researched something, we were still being taught to look it up. Look up a topic in the print directory, taught to look it up, look up a topic in the print directory, and then that directory would show you a list of all the published articles on that topic, and then you'd go look them up in an abstract, in a you know the bound volume on the library shelves, and then that would direct you to the journal that had the actual article in it. Now, if I've lost you already, that's my point.

Speaker 3:

It was tedious, it was super tedious.

Speaker 2:

It was tedious.

Speaker 3:

But the whole world just opened up for you in that moment, didn't it?

Speaker 2:

Exactly Because I suddenly realized, oh, I have access to what the researchers themselves observed and analyzed and how they put this information together and made sense of it. I don't have to go oh well, someone says it works this way and well, that kind of makes sense, so I guess they know what they're talking about. No, you could actually. There was actually a way to verify information, and the thrill of that has never left me, and I try to pass that thrill along to my students with more or less success when I teach them research writing, because it is so empowering to realize that you can get direct access to the information, you're not at the mercy of this convoluted, untraceable game of telephone in trying to differentiate between fact and fiction, and so that was very empowering. Fact and fiction, and so that was very empowering.

Speaker 2:

Now I do want to make a disclaimer that along with that realization, along with the world opening up for me in that way, I was also learning that research knowledge is always contingent, it's always dependent on what is known at the time.

Speaker 2:

Dependent on what is known at the time, it's not complete, it's not unchangeable. So this is a different kind of knowledge than, say, knowledge from the Bible that does not change right, or that's understood that way as never changing. Research knowledge at its best is what researchers have concluded based on what they empirically observe, right, what the five senses tell them and what another individual would also observe. And so discoveries down the road might shift everything we know today, or another researcher might look at the evidence and give a different interpretation of it, but the shift for me, even though this information that we're getting is not claiming to be written in stone and concrete like the biblical knowledge I was raised with, it gave me an alternative to orienting my life around the speculations of lay preachers attempting to tell us how a Bronze Age document applies to our lives today.

Speaker 3:

And it's interesting to me as to how much those two growing up were at odds. Yes, when they actually don't have to be, because we are always learning, we are evolving, we are always growing, we're changing. It's a dynamic world. We're dynamic people.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, and so this way of seeing the world or, you know, the term for it, is epistemology how we know what we know is based on what we can actually see, touch, hear, taste, smell, which can change right and which is not infallible. But it is a whole lot more reliable than what some random guy with a platform claims to be channeling through his direct line to the God of the universe. I mean, if I'm a betting person, I'm going to bet on the reading of the world that's based on what we can empirically verify, then on something that's more or less imagination.

Speaker 3:

Imagination, but also power.

Speaker 2:

And that's behind it all.

Speaker 3:

Right, Because if I tell you how to read the Bible correctly or how to read the Reader's Digest correctly, and then it becomes truth, the one that's holding all the power I can structure the truth to validate what I need for everyone to get in line Right.

Speaker 2:

You can tell people what you need them to think.

Speaker 3:

Right, and if I can get God to agree with me, man, we're winning.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, absolutely. So. That realization really shifted things for me, and I think one of the reasons that was so pivotal for me was because growing up and this is not just an Amish midnight thing, this is also an evangelical thing where we're told to be very wary, we're warned about going to college and we're warned about the indoctrination that's going to happen there. And we walk into that primed to be suspicious and hold everything at arm's length. And yet what I found was something very different from what I was told I would find. And I realized, oh, this is not about learning the opposite dogma of what I was told I would find. And I realized, oh, this is not about learning the opposite dogma of what I was brought up with.

Speaker 2:

This is about learning there are 27 sides to an issue. There are so many layers to know about and we'll never know them all right. We explore them to the best of our ability and there's a humility that comes with it that we wouldn't presume to know everything that there is to know about a topic. We wouldn't presume to have a direct channel to the God of the universe. So this also doesn't just matter for obvious things like science, but also for areas like interpreting stories right, and, as an English major, this was something that I learned to do in college and learned about the importance of understanding the material conditions of a story's context and how that can make all the difference in how we interpret its meaning, which I think is really relevant when we're talking about the pineapple story.

Speaker 3:

So how does that play out for you when you're reading an article? How does this ability to verify play out for you when we're getting a lot of information thrown our way?

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's a huge question, because back in 2002, the challenge was finding the information. Right Now, we have the information coming at us like a fire hose, and so that's a really good question. And this is where I tell my students that, as they are reading popular information, as they're watching YouTube videos, as they're watching claims people make, there are questions they can ask about. What is the evidence that this is based on? Is it based on the experience of one person, or is it one person only? Can this be corroborated by others? Is it a question that's even answerable? Is it knowable? Is somebody claiming to know something that you really can't even answer? These are some of those kinds of questions.

Speaker 2:

And, of course, if someone and now you do not need a college degree to do this, but for me, this is one of the greatest benefits of a college degree was becoming proficient at reading what experts have written. Now, that doesn't mean I'm an expert in all these subjects, far from that but it means that I have a rudimentary understanding of why they are writing these articles, sharing their scientific discoveries or their sociological discoveries or their literary readings, and I understand the perspective they're coming from and I know that at least there is some kind of system to try to sort out fact from fiction. And this is not a perfect system, so stuff happens, and that's definitely true, but at least there's a system to try to distinguish between fact and fiction.

Speaker 3:

So would it be fair to say that the biggest difference is that we were raised to search for absolutes? I often think of the way I had people in my past who would like pound the table and quote the verse. Now the verse is leaving my mind. When you search for the truth, you will find it. How is that? What is that verse?

Speaker 2:

Yes, there were lots of verses that were pounded into the table and into our heads, and I really like that point you made about absolutes, because I think you're right that that's the difference here is absolute versus contingent truth, and that sometimes gets interpreted as there are no absolutes and the only people who are interested in that conversation are people who are interested in absolutes. The folks who don't believe in absolutes actually aren't even talking about that.

Speaker 3:

Right, because I think so much of good academia is based in curiosity. Yes, yes, and again, like you mentioned earlier, there is a bad side to it, so the curiosity doesn't always, always hold.

Speaker 3:

It's not foolproof, it is not perfect Absolutely, but there is good studies done, based on good curiosity, truly trying to figure out what is happening, as opposed to the verse that was so embedded, and I mean like pounding the table, insistent that you shall know the truth and the truth will set you free John 8, 31 to 32, I think something like that but that dogma of having to know the truth and if you did not know the truth, capital, t-r-u-t-h, then you would never be free, and I think that type of ideology so quickly takes away the curiosity and the wonder that is in our world and we can't possibly know everything. Know everything, right? Oh, so my point was I would. I think that maybe the biggest difference in how we were raised is that search for absolute, that search for truth, whereas good academia has a basis of curiosity, a basis of discovery, a basis of what, if yes?

Speaker 2:

yes, inquiry, wanting to know, genuinely wanting to understand, right, yeah, yeah. So when I bring that lens, when I bring that set of lenses to read the story, to read the story, I'm seeing that it is not just the story of a missionary learning to manage his anger, but it's also the story of a white man on a hero's journey to impose capitalist labor practices on indigenous tribes of Papua, this Pacific island nation north of Australia. And what the story is doing because that's what I'm really interested in is what is a story, a narrative, a text doing? And I think what we're picking up on here is that it depoliticizes, erases those power dynamics of the colonialist relationship between the missionary and the people that he's encountering. And, rather than being transparent about those political power structures that he was part of and that he represented, the narrative suggests that it was just an interpersonal conflict, it was just his personal growth story.

Speaker 3:

It goes back to the thing of if you do the right thing, it allows God to work in the other people's lives so they too can do the right thing.

Speaker 2:

That's right. It goes back to that narrative of if it's not working out, it's because you're doing something wrong, and if you just would get in line, then God will be able to figure things out.

Speaker 3:

Typically this narrative is given to people who come from a position of not having power and the narrative is you know what, if you just submit, if you just do what God wants you to do, then that will open up the pathway for God to work in other people's lives so they also can get in line. In this case, interestingly enough, it was a man with power who came to this conclusion, but from my experience that was unusual, that it was a man with power, right To believe that he needed to do the right thing for God to work.

Speaker 2:

That, yes, I agree. Yes, it's a concept that's usually told to women children Right, Right, yeah. Employees, yeah, don't, don't rebel, yeah. So, as you mentioned earlier, he was bringing these ideas, of these Western European ideas, to Papua. And I think what's so important here and I think this is representative of a lot of American fundamentalist evangelical propaganda that there's this implicit denial of unjust power structures on which a society is based and rather intercultural conflict is, you know, it's just this individualized kind of moral problem. The problem is not that the missionary is perpetuating colonizing relations between himself and the tribe, the problem is that they're thieves and he's angry about it.

Speaker 3:

And rascals. He always refers to them as these rascals. My gosh, it's embarrassing.

Speaker 2:

It is. It is so cringy, oh my. And you know what's also cringy is the laughter of the audience. The audience loved, loved his talk.

Speaker 2:

So you know he is seeing himself as being the upright person who is bringing the concept of private property and and labor for payment to these tribal communities, but never considering that private property itself is a cultural construct. And if they didn't see him as owning the land that he was planting on and they say in the story too that they planted it they planted the plants, so therefore they should also be eating the plants. And it wasn't that they were trying to keep them from him, it was just that was their cultural concept. And just because their cultural concept of what constituted theft was different than his didn't make them thieves and it didn't make him the good guy. I mean, in virtually any culture thieves are not looked upon. Well, it's just that different cultures define theft differently, and so that really suggests how they saw him and what kind of credibility he had with them for his concept of what was his and what was theirs.

Speaker 3:

Right, because in any culture like that, it's rarely okay to rob the good guy, right.

Speaker 2:

Right, and it seems that it never occurred to him that he should win their trust, right. I think it's interesting how he's offended that they didn't just automatically trust him and the system he's trying to impose on them.

Speaker 3:

Right, like the trust and the respect is assumed Right, which is just odd to me. Right, he was literally the visitor going in on someone else's territory.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's the way we see it. That's one way to see it.

Speaker 3:

Oh, and that's not how we would have seen it when we went to Paraguay either. So I'm guilty here. I am guilty.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, absolutely. Speaking of different influences that we're not aware of, different influences on our lives are kind of mishmash of influences. I think one of those influences that's important here, that we often don't think about, is what's known as the doctrine of discovery, and this is something I myself learned about fairly recently. I was very familiar with the effects of it, but this is something that has really organized the way that we see the world, and so, if anybody is curious, I encourage you to Google it, but I'm going to give just a quick overview here.

Speaker 3:

It was actually based out of the Catholic Church. Right, Right, right.

Speaker 2:

So this doctrine was laid out in a series of papal decrees. The first one is issued in 1452. So that would have been before Columbus landed in the Americas. But these papal decrees authorized colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal to seize lands and subjugate people in Africa and the New World, as long as people on the lands were not Christians. So basically, this was permission that was given to explorers to go out. If you encountered a land that's uninhabited, you can claim it. If there are people there, you can enslave them, you can kill them and claim the land. And you can do this because you are Christians and the good guys. And this doctrine of discovery, as it was known, was only repudiated, officially repudiated, by the Catholic.

Speaker 3:

Church in 2023.

Speaker 2:

Now that's not to say that the church was actively teaching this, in fact, because I think actually the church kind of stepped away from this. Then, within a few years, let's see here the papal bulls and the reading here from this NPR article. Papal bulls were not considered valid just 30 to 40 years after they were first issued. They were in fact abrogated legally and nullified by the Vatican by the late 1530s, but not officially rescinded, I guess withdrawn. But those 30 or 40 years when they were the official doctrine was long enough for them to become normalized and it became the basis of international law as recently as 2005,. They were referenced as a basis for legal decisions in the United States.

Speaker 2:

So this piece of history shaped the relationships between European explorers and people that they encountered in other parts of the world, and it's easy to see how this paved the way for the transatlantic slave trade, how it paved the way for the kind of genocide that happened here in what is now the United States, and other parts of the Americas as well.

Speaker 2:

It provided this, what is now kind of an invisible infrastructure for the way that we see these countries and we can even think about politicians who in recent years have talked about some of these countries as being sh**hole countries. Well, they're sh**holes because we made them that way, and so, if they are, we made them that way because of these kinds of legal doctrines. And I think what's interesting is to think about how these legal doctrines also influence missionary work, and you do not have to look far to find where the work that the missionaries were doing whether we're talking India or Papua New Guinea or South America, or wherever the missionaries' work was, in part, to teach the morality, to impose the morality. That said, we have a right to conquer this land. We have a right to claim it as our own. We have a right to do whatever we want to do here.

Speaker 3:

And we have that right because we have God on our side. And I think that is so deeply embedded in so much of our culture, in the way we think and even the way we navigate life, because if someone has God on their side, it's like you can't argue with it Right right, when maybe we need to start arguing with it, and maybe the louder someone insists they have God on their side, the more cautious we should be regarding that individual.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and what their agenda might be. When we were preparing for this, I couldn't help but think about Barbara Kingsolver's the Poisonwood Bible and we should start a summer book club, because I need to get this book read Like.

Speaker 3:

I really want to read this.

Speaker 2:

It's a project, it's a long book. I could not believe that it was not autobiographical when I read it. It reads like someone who has lived that experience, but Barbara Kingsolver has not. But it demonstrates so many of these dynamics that we're talking about here and I think it would be interesting to read other missionary stories. I mean think of all the missionary stories we read for school and it would be interesting to read more of those through this lens. And it would be interesting to read more of those through this lens.

Speaker 3:

And I wonder how that would change our perspective on these heroes of the faith as they were known. You know, talking about this made me think about how uncomfortable it is to challenge narratives that we've been given we've been given. This weekend I was having a conversation with someone about the whole Butker situation, which should have its own podcast, because I could vent about that one for a long time. But this individual was also harmed by the narrative, but she was so uncomfortable acknowledging it. She almost felt like she needed to protect the narrative and even defend the narrative.

Speaker 2:

Because it was so closely tied up with her identity, Like her identity is based on that narrative and so it would be really. It would be really hard to say I've made a mistake.

Speaker 3:

And I think we've been taught to read discomfort as the Holy Spirit convicting you. We've been taught that discomfort is your conscience. And what if discomfort is actually a sign that you're getting really close to discovery? And to being able to do some self-reflection.

Speaker 2:

Yes, what if that discomfort is a sign that some of your cultural biases are being disrupted, that you're about to get a whole new perspective on what has seemed very certain up to this point? That's an exciting thing If you can see it as discovery rather than as oh I'm wrong, it really can. It makes it a lot less scary.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, because I think so much of our privilege has allowed us to be comfortable. I mean, it's kind of like our life's goal is to be comfortable. And what if that goal is actually horribly misguided or limiting, or, and limiting Well, and I would even go as far as to say damaging?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

And I think if we can learn to become comfortable with discomfort, kind of like what if the feeling of discomfort allows you to pause and say, oh, what's really going on here? Kind of like the feeling of anger, what's really going on? Or resentment, what's really going on? Is there something deeper? And obviously it takes time and it takes opportunity to learn about all of this stuff, but I think it's worth the time and I think it's worth searching out opportunities to ask more questions and to be curious.

Speaker 2:

Right. And then I think there's another level of discomfort when it comes to verbalizing these kinds of questions. Because how can we criticize a story of this missionary's inner growth, their personal growth? How can? In a Christian context, how can we criticize someone who's spreading the word of God? Even once we've worked past our own initial discomfort at having our ideas, our beliefs challenged, then turning around and challenging other's beliefs is also a lot of discomfort.

Speaker 3:

Right, because what if I am wrong? Sure, like, what if I am wrong? And what if what it feels like you're challenging the truth? Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2:

And I think we can accept that we will be wrong. And so what? We'll learn from it. And I think when we get over the fear of being wrong, when we embrace learning and curiosity, then being wrong is just a path, part of the path to greater learning.

Speaker 3:

You know, I know Bible verses and I can pull them out of thin air like no one I know. It's almost embarrassing to this day A verse I did not know until in my 40s and I am still puzzled how it's possible I did not know this verse. Matthew 23, 15 says Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much of a child of hell as you are. If this doesn't describe the doctrine of discovery, what does and in many ways.

Speaker 3:

if this doesn't describe my experience in Paraguay, I don't know what does, and I think we need to be really careful the way we expound on our truth. I think we need to be really careful the ways we declare our truth, as if we have a pipeline to God.

Speaker 2:

And how we expect to impose them on others or how we accept those from others. Right, I do think, when we are engaging in these conversations, one thing that can be helpful is, instead of making declarative statements, which can really be off-putting to true believers it can really shut down a conversation. I've learned that when I feel my blood pressure rising, when I feel my heart rate going up, that is a signal. I need to take a deep breath and ask a question, instead of making a statement and asking questions about broader material conditions right around a story, around a narrative. I think can really be enlightening for everybody.

Speaker 2:

It may not be quite as off-putting, but also I think it's good to think about what are the kind of questions that we could ask that will keep the conversation going. So when we read, when we think of a story like this, we think about what is the agenda? What's the motive of the person writing the story? What are they trying to do? There's always something that they're trying to accomplish and it could be a good thing, it could be nefarious, but what is it? And in this book there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes, but there's a lot of jokes that are punching down and punching down is like the first sign that it's time to leave the discussion.

Speaker 3:

It is time to leave the room.

Speaker 2:

It's no longer a good faith conversation Right.

Speaker 3:

And are they being clueless or are they being cruel? I mean either way, yeah. Either way it's problematic Right, and what role does that humor play? Are we laughing at ourselves? Are we laughing at others?

Speaker 2:

Right, and I think we could also ask what if the story were written from another person's perspective, Like in this case? What if it had been written by this missionary's wife, who was a nurse? I believe she was a medical professional anyway. What if the locals had written the story? How would they tell the story? What if the locals were hearing the retelling of the story? How would it come off to them? I think thinking about it through another person's eyes can be really enlightening as well. And then, finally, what parts were left out? Obviously, we can't include everything, but when you have Bill Gothard as your editor, I can't help but wonder what parts were left out. So I'm curious for those of you listening, if you've read the Pineapple Story. Text us, tell us what your thoughts are about the Pineapple Story. What did we miss? And are there other books like this from our background, maybe from childhood, that we need to take a fresh look at? What would you recommend? Click the link in the show notes and let us know. We would love to hear from you.

Speaker 1:

We can't wait to hear from you guys. See you next time. Thank you for spending time with us today. The resources and materials we've mentioned are linked in the show notes and on Facebook at Uncovered Life Beyond.

Speaker 2:

What are your thoughts about college and recovery from high demand religion? We know you have your own questions and experiences and we want to talk about the topics that matter to you. Share them with us at Uncoveredbeyond at gmailcom. That's uncoveredlifebeyond at gmailcom.

Speaker 1:

If you enjoyed today's show and found value in it, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app. This helps others find the show While you're there. Subscribe to our podcast so you never miss an episode.

Speaker 2:

Until next time stay brave, stay bold, stay awkward.

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