How People From an Uncontacted Island Tribe Made Me Doubt My Faith
“Satan’s last stronghold” lies around 700km west of the Southern tip of Myanmar.
American ‘killed in India by endangered Andaman tribe’
Hah, so an uncontacted tribe killed an American trying to contact them, right?
Poor guy… but what did he expect?
I still remember the headline, and my reaction to it.
That BBC news article was a novelty and a curiosity for me… as most news is, when you don’t actually live the headline.
My curiosity dragged me into the article, raising questions as it did so: Who was this ‘endangered Andaman tribe’? Why are they endangered? Who was the American? And what were they doing that ended in their death?
For four quick questions, I found four quick answers.
- The tribespeople were the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island, one of an island group south-east of India — closer to Myanmar, if anything. Technically, the islands are Indian.
- The Sentinelese are endangered because they live on a tiny island that is not large enough to support a population of more than about 200. Furthermore, they have been there and remained uncontacted for so long that they are essentially uncontacted — they don’t have relationships with any other surrounding islands. Nobody leaves, and nobody enters. That’s just the way things are, and have been for thousands of years — around ten thousand, to be exact.
- John Allen Chau. Chau was an American evangelical Christian and an experienced missionary, having preached the Bible in Mexico, Iraq, and South Africa.
- At the time that he died, Chau was obsessed with making it to the North Sentinel Island to teach the word of God to the Sentinelese. He had paid fisherman to take him to the waters around the island, and then he canoed over to it. Twice he was forced to retreat by hostile islanders, and on the third time, he was killed.
Thankfully, Chau kept a diary — though in places it reads more like a prayer journal — through which we can read his thoughts, feelings, and fears in the buildup to his would-be magnum opus of evangelizing.
In it, he gives clues as to why he was so set on getting to the North Sentinel Island.
“Lord, is this island Satan’s last stronghold, where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?”
Satan’s last stronghold. The words reverberated around my head. What does that even mean?
I was raised in a Christian household in the knowledge that it was pointless trying to describe God because there weren’t enough superlatives in the dictionary to adequately describe his greatness. Satan existed, but Satan was a side-character — a joke. My family weren’t afraid of Satan because Satan could be banished by God as easily as a horse swats a fly.
Why, then, in all Gods greatness, had he created a tribe of people that were doomed to live out their lives in unwavering ignorance of the Bible — indeed, of any sort of Abrahamic religion? If they have been cut off for ten millennia, there is no hope of them having any culturally-transmitted artefacts that resemble anything like the religions and doctrines of the world today.
It is not only that the Sentinelese have been ignorant of the Bible and other religious texts all this time — it is that they must remain so. You see, ten thousand years is a long time not only for religion, language, and culture, but also for the immune system. The Sentinelese have never had any strain of any of the most common diseases in the rest of the world.
They might have their own particular strains in circulation to which they have built up immunity, and they almost certainly will suffer from diseases relating to malnutrition, lack of genetic diversity, and tropical parasite-borne diseases — but they will not have had the common cold.
This means that anyone going to the island from outside has a significant chance of passing on a disease to the population that could easily prove fatal — not just to individuals, but to everyone there. Any living non-Sentinelese human making contact after 10,000 years is incredibly dangerous. This is exactly why the Indian government have made it illegal to visit the island for any reason, hence why Chau had to be so secretive about his intentions, and why the fishermen who took him to the island have since been arrested and prosecuted for their involvement in the unfortunate scheme.
So let me reiterate the issue:
God created an island where people have lived for around 10,000 years. They have never seen a Bible (except for when Chau waved one at them, which they shot with an arrow and impaled). They cannot be evangelized to and converted to Christianity, because there is a high chance that to try to do so, we would kill them with our diseases. They are in a Catch-22 where they can only ever die and go to Hell for having not believed in the word of God. They are un-Christianizable, and every Sentinelese person who has ever lived or will ever live must necessarily have gone to Hell, unless God had to create a loophole in his own afterlife system to account for such people.
It was this realization — that some people are un-Christianizable — that shook the faith in Christianity with which I had grown up. It doesn’t just apply to Christianity, but to any religion where people need to believe it to reap some sort of divine reward, like Heaven, or spiritual bliss. None of those religions could possibly be the case in a world with uncontacted and epidemiologically uncontactable tribes.
Chau had very similar thinking to me on this, actually, though we reached starkly different conclusions. Chau thought it was worth his life to try and save these people from their inevitable eternities in Hell. Where there was an entire afterlife at stake, he would take any risk to ensure their passage into Heaven. It makes perfect sense, if you believe as Chau did in the truth of the Bible.
What he ignored was the fact that he’d likely kill them with diseases he didn’t even know he carried — and that’s where my faith in Chau’s worldview started to shake.
To close, I present to you the last words that Chau ever wrote:
“You guys might think I’m crazy in all this but I think it’s worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed — rather please live your lives in obedience to whatever He has called you to and I’ll see you again when you pass through the veil. Don’t retrieve my body. This is not a pointless thing — the eternal lives of this tribe is at hand and I can’t wait to see them around the throne of God worshipping in their own language as Revelation 7:9–10 states.
I love you all and I pray none of you love anything in this world more than Jesus Christ.
Soli Deo Gloria [Glory to God Alone],
John Chau
11/16/18 06:20
Written from the cove on the southwest-ish (more like west) of North Sentinel Island.”
He was killed by an arrow later that day. The fisherman watched the Sentinelese bury him on the beach as they rowed away.