Father Of Missionary Killed By Remote Tribe Blames Evangelicals’ “Extreme Christianity” For Son’s Death

The Guardian reports:

Like his son, Dr Patrick Chau is a graduate of Oral Roberts, an evangelical university in Oklahoma. I had thought he might want to defend evangelical doctrines against the unsympathetic media coverage sparked by his son’s death. In an email, however, he called religion “the opium of the mass[es]”.

“If you have [anything] positive to say about religion,” he told me, “l wish not to see or hear” it. He said his son’s zeal was a longstanding point of contention and that they’d agreed not to talk about John’s missionary work.

“John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” he said. He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his child to a “not unexpected end”, and he referred with particular bitterness to the Great Commission, Jesus’s injunction that Christians spread the gospel to all peoples.

John Chau had once toured with hate group leader Mat Staver, who now calls him a “Christian martyr.”