This is the reference text (along with the elaborations that followed):
I said that to be successfully socialized into the organization, one probably had to be "caught up in the red scare mentality, being a rampant right-wing Moral Majority, card-carrying Republican (or the equivalent in whatever country the missionary comes from), and a sexist."
Using the categories used in my statement, I would say that first of all, that by then I had developed a fairly well developed opinion about the theory of Communism, and that was, in brief, that it didn't and couldn't work, primarily because it had an errant view of man. I mentioned earlier in my chronology about the economics comparison handout in my week-long mission's candidate course; even at that time I thought it out of place, and that would have been at least in part because it seemed irrelevant to mission work, and for our purposes, if there was anything better about the West compared to the USSR, it would have been freedom of religion. That's the kind of thing I'm referring to. I don't think the issue was my not understanding the issue and the implications of it; it's just that I didn't think that was cause for wholesale changing our approach to missions - which, I think is safe to say, included a sense of fear about it. Why else would they be willing to take such measures? II Timothy 1:7 comes to mind:
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” (NKJV)
I have many faults, but this isn't very often one of them (unless we're talking about really big spiders in close proximity). As I continue with my life story (including after I leave Vienna), I think you'll eventually see what I mean.
I have many faults, but this isn't very often one of them (unless we're talking about really big spiders in close proximity). As I continue with my life story (including after I leave Vienna), I think you'll eventually see what I mean.
As to being right-wing, etc., I wasn't very political and was actually somewhat naive / ignorant, especially regarding local and national politics which never particularly interested me until the 1990s, when I was living in Russia, when local events were interesting to me. Before that I was always, even from late elementary school, more interested in international news and issues. That being said, however, between 1982 and 1985, in the course of some education and also being influenced by the general climate of American Evangelical thinking of the time, there were some issues that are usually considered right-wing Republican, that I had grown to espouse. But I'd had a class in Bible school on modern Christian issues, and one of them handful of topics we covered was the Moral Majority; the professor thought it wasn't good for the Church (as in the church universal), and this topic, I think, had particular influence on me. So some of my beliefs might have been considered conservative, but I wasn't terribly politically oriented otherwise, and was leaning towards the belief that churches (and Christian organizations) should not be too involved in politics.
The sexist issue maybe isn't as central to socialization into the mission, but I think it was part of why I had a problem, in that I never before that saw myself as a "helper" of someone else but as being capable on my own to have a significant ministry. None of my East Europe ministry involvements before arriving in Vienna was structured in a gender-limiting hierarchy like that. But all of a sudden I was in a world where women pretty much existed to help men. Even the women's ministry, while led by women was about teaching women to have a ministry as a helpmate to their husbands (who were often pastors). I think that structural element contributed to my feeling stifled and unwilling to be content with limiting myself to how I perceived things were laid out for me, which was pretty well defined along gender lines.
So why do I say that these things might have been necessary to navigate the potentially treacherous socialization waters? Because if you were already emotionally committed to anti-Communism, pro-Westernism and a discriminatory gender social structure, it probably was just a small step to becoming emotionally committed to the mission's demands, and the mission might not even seem like such a total institution. Jerry Falwell and Dr. Dobson would probably have fit in very easily.
Also, I think getting emotionally riled up about something makes it easier to do things you might not be so prone to do if emotions weren't involved, and I wasn't terribly emotionally involved in the above political issues. It seems to me that in order to willingly participate in such personally invasive security measures one would need to see such measures as warranted, which I did not and do not to this day.
In any event, upon arrival in Vienna, apparently unknown to either myself or the mission, I did not have a mindset for being easily socialized into the Vienna mission. Taken by itself this is a significant enough barrier, let alone other possible contributing factors leading to how things turned out for me there.
I hope this makes it clearer what I'm trying to say here.
~Meg
