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Just how large a proportion of Christian religious workers fit that profile? One reason it is difficult to know is that zeal is often tempered after some time spent in-country. Two centuries ago, in a similar burst of enthusiasm, such mainline denominations as the Presbyterians and the Methodists sent thousands of missionaries to the Middle East. Like the current crop, they started eager for conversions. But over time they settled for a more modest agenda that obeyed local antiproselytizing laws and focused on building educational and charitable institutions and providing humanitarian aid. Such groups still constitute the major visible missionary presence in the area, and they enjoy fruitful and respectful, if circumscribed, relationships with local regimes and populations.
Even within the current evangelical wave, there is a broad range of methods and attitudes. Some missionaries, while maintaining the right to evangelize, primarily uphold the mainline tradition of funneling money and time to the Muslim needy. Others, from a distance, flood whole populations with Christian TV and radio, tracts by the tens of thousands and offers of correspondence courses, hoping that a few seeds will take root. In the dozens of Muslim countries that deny "religious worker" visas, ever more Evangelicals take secular jobs to enter less obtrusively. Many show exquisite sensitivity, sharing their Lord only with people whose intimate friendships they have earned.
But there remains a troubling contingent of indeterminate size that combines religious arrogance with political ignorance. Its activities would not necessarily raise eyebrows on the average American street corner: handing out cassettes or tracts, inviting passersby to a movie about Jesus' life (see box), talking about Christ to children while distributing toys. But in societies in which state and mosque are closely intertwined, in which defamation of Islam is a crime and conversion out of it can invite vigilante violence, the more audacious missionaries are engaged, intentionally or not, in provocation, and their actions are debated even within the evangelical community. Some experts see their clumsiness as the product of nondenominational churches lacking the resources for proper training programs. Others suggest that the culprits are "short termers" who don't stay in the region long enough to witness the cycles of retribution their confrontational styles can touch off. Says Robert Seiple, the State Department's Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom until 2000 and himself an Evangelical: "There is a lot more good than bad. The major denominations get it right more than wrong. But what I discovered is that well-intended people have in many, many cases eroded the message they were trying to communicate through inappropriate methodologies. Persecution results, and there are times you wish they had stayed home."