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earth, there is or might be brought into being a place with salvific
power. The Crusaders looked to
outremer
as such a place, though its
salvific status was obviously dependent on the success of the
crusading enterprise. Centuries later, Enlightenment philosophers,
notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, looked to the "noble savage" as the
bearer of redeeming wisdom or ways of life . The difference is
important: In the first instance, it is Westerners who go out to bring
redemption to lands far beyond the sea; in the second case, the
redeeming traits are already out there, and Westerners go to them to
admire, to learn, and to emulate . The two stances persist in the
prototypical figures of the missionary and the pilgrim. In recent
times, both figures have been prominent in the relation of
Westerners to the countries now subsumed under the category Third
World.
For the missionary, these countries challenge the validity of his
own faith. This faith is reaffirmed, revalidated, by bringing light to
these putatively dark regions. There was often a wild romanticism to
this sense of mission. In the words of Reginald Heber's famous
missionary hymn of 1819: "From Greenland's icy mountains, from
India's coral strand, where Afric's sunny fountains roll down their
golden sand, from many an ancient river, from many a palmy plain,
they call us to deliver their land from error's chain . "
It
was such
sentiments that inspired the tremendous energy of the Protestant
missionary enterprise in the nineteenth century. As is now
abundantly clear, the same sentiments were highly susceptible to
politicization, to being used to legitimate the imperial power and the
"civilizing mission" of Western nations-" from the hills of
Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." In more contemporary
parlance, then, the Third World becomes the arena for the
missionary outreach of Western religious or political values, and it is
in this capacity that it has a redemptive status.
This stance has not been popular in the last decade or so.
Perhaps its latest moments of glory were in the 1950s and early
1960s, with, for example, the creation of the Peace Corps or the
Alliance for Progress. Since then, the stance of the admiring
expatriate has become more common: the crusader has given way to
the pilgrim. This stance too has antecedents going back quite far.
The destination of the pilgrims varied, of course. Some sought out
places that they deemed to be authentically "savage," and thereby
"noble" -Africa, or the Pacific, or the wilder regions of South or
