SIL missionaries do not preach or baptize. They avoid pastorlike roles. Rather, SIL believes that the most effective way to evangelize indigenous peoples is to translate the New Testament into their language. Since SIL also believes that the Bible is literally the word of God, then, it is reasoned, the Bible should be able to speak for itself. So my daily activities among the Pirahãs were mainly linguistic, trying to figure out the language well enough to do a good translation of the New Testament. As I progressed, I would work on translating sections and test my translations with different people in the village. In free times during the day, I would often talk to people about my faith and why it was important to me. There was no more to my missionary activity than this, typical for SIL members.
One morning in November 1983, after I had spent about fourteen months off and on living among the Pirahãs, I was sitting in the front room of our house in the village drinking coffee with several Pirahã men. It was about ten o’clock and the day was getting hot, a heat that would intensify until about 4 p.m., when it would gradually begin to relent. I was facing the river and enjoying a midmorning breeze on my face as I talked to the fellows about boats they had heard going down the Marmelos River, a mile or so from the village. Kóhoibiíihíai entered and I got up and poured him a cup of coffee—we had an assortment of nonmatching cheap plastic cups in our kitchen. The coffee was weak and very sweet.
As he took the cup from me, Kóhoi said, “Ko Xoogiái, ti gi xahoaisoogabagai” (Hey Dan, I want to talk to you). He continued, “The Pirahãs know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahãs do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don’t want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don’t want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?”+++(5)+++
Although SIL never allows its members to preach among indigenous peoples like the Pirahãs, Kóhoi had heard of my faith many times in conversations with me and in helping me translate small portions of the New Testament.
Then, referring to the previous American missionaries among them, he added, “Arlo told us about Jesus. Steve told us about Jesus. But we don’t want Jesus.”+++(5)+++
The other men present seemed to agree with him.
I replied, “If you don’t want Jesus, you don’t want us. My family is only here to tell you about Jesus.”
I said I had to study. The men rose and left to take their turns fishing as other men arrived back in the village, making canoes available.
This information shocked me. And it presented me with a clear moral choice. I had gone to the Pirahãs to tell them about Jesus and, in my opinion at that time, to give them an opportunity to choose purpose over pointlessness, to choose life over death, to choose joy and faith over despair and fear, to choose heaven over hell.
If the Pirahãs had understood the gospel and were nevertheless rejecting it, that was one thing. But perhaps they had not understood it. This was a strong possibility, since my speaking ability in the Pirahã language was still far from native.
On another occasion during that first period with the Pirahãs, I felt I understood their language well enough to give my own story about why I accepted Jesus as my savior. This is a common practice among evangelical Christians, called “giving your testimony.” The idea is that the worse your life was before you accepted Jesus, the greater the miracle of your salvation and the greater the motive of unbelievers in the audience to accept Jesus too.
It was in the evening, just after my family had finished dinner, about seven o’clock. We were still cool from our baths in the Maici. This was when we made coffee for the people and they would come sit with us in the house and just visit. During these times I would talk about my faith in God and why I believed that the Pirahãs should want God too, as I did. Because the Pirahãs had no word for God, I used a term that Steve Sheldon had suggested to me, Baíxi Hioóxio (Up-high Father).
I said that our up-high father had made my life better. Once, I said, I used to drink like the Pirahãs. I had many women (exaggerating somewhat here), and I was unhappy. Then the up-high father came into my heart and made me happy and made my life better. I gave no thought to whether all these new concepts, metaphors, and names that I was inventing on the fly were actually intelligible to the Pirahãs. They made sense to me. This night, I decided to tell them something very personal about myself—something that I thought would make them understand how important God can be in our lives. So I told the Pirahãs how my stepmother committed suicide and how this led me to Jesus and how my life got better after I stopped drinking and doing drugs and accepted Jesus. I told this as a very serious story.
When I concluded, the Pirahãs burst into laughter.+++(5)+++ This was un expected, to put it mildly. I was used to reactions like “Praise God!”with my audience genuinely impressed by the great hardships I had been through and how God had pulled me out of them.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked.
“She killed herself? Ha ha ha. How stupid. Pirahãs don’t kill themselves,” they answered.
They were utterly unimpressed. It was clear to them that the fact that someone I had loved had committed suicide was no reason at all for the Pirahãs to believe in my God. Indeed, it had the opposite effect, highlighting our differences. This was a setback for my missionary objectives. Days went by after this in which I thought long and hard about my purpose among the Pirahãs.
Part of the difficulty of my task began to become clear to me. I communicated more or less correctly to the Pirahãs about my Christian beliefs. The men listening to me understood that there was a man named Hisó, Jesus, and that he wanted others to do what he told them.
The Pirahã men then asked, “Hey Dan, what does Jesus look like? Is he dark like us or light like you?”
I said, “Well, I have never actually seen him. He lived a long time ago. But I do have his words.”
“Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?”
They then made it clear that if I had not actually seen this guy (and not in any metaphorical sense, but literally), they weren’t interested in any stories I had to tell about him. Period. This is because, as I now knew, the Pirahãs believe only what they see. Sometimes they also believe in things that someone else has told them, so long as that person has personally witnessed what he or she is reporting.
I decided that part of the difficulty for receptivity to the gospel was that the Pirahãs at the village of Posto Novo where we currently worked had too much contact with caboclo culture and had come to see that culture as more compatible with their way of life than American culture, which is how they perceived the source of the gospel. I reasoned that if I moved to another village beyond the reach of the river traders, the gospel would have more success. There were two such villages that I knew of, one next to the Transamazon Highway and another more isolated yet, perhaps a day’s trip downriver from the Transamazon and three days upriver by motorboat from where we now lived.
I talked this over with Keren. We decided that before we made any decision we would take our first “furlough,” our first trip back to the United States in over five years. This was a time to report to our financial supporters, to rest, and to assess our progress as missionaries.
On our furlough, I thought again of the challenge of the missionary:to convince a happy, satisfied people that they are lost and need Jesus as their personal savior. My evangelism professor at Biola University, Dr. Curtis Mitchell, used to say, “You’ve gotta get ’em lost before you can get ’em saved.” If people don’t perceive a serious lack of some sort in their lives, they are less likely to embrace new beliefs, especially about God and salvation.+++(5)+++ The linguistic and cultural challenges are enormous. I didn’t even speak Pirahã well yet and was certainly unaware that it had characteristics that almost guaranteed that no message from the first century could be communicated.
We decided to move to another village, the more isolated one. We moved upriver about 150 miles to the village of Xagíopai, six hours downriver from the Transamazon Highway. The Pirahãs of this new village welcomed us warmly. For the first few years in this new location, we slept in tents and reached the village by taking the Transamazon, either by hitchhiking, renting a mission vehicle, or traveling on our own small off-road motorcycle, then taking our motorboat down the Maici to the village. Our supplies were carried to the river by pickup truck from the SIL missionary compound.
We had something to offer this group of Pirahãs that was new: the just-translated Gospel of Mark in Pirahã. I had worked very hard on this; it was finished a few weeks before our definitive move to the upriver village.
Before releasing the translation for use among the Pirahãs, however, SIL required me to schedule what it calls a translation “checking session.” I persuaded Xisaóoxoi (his Portuguese name is Doutor) to come to Pôrto Velho and spend a couple of weeks at the missionary compound to work on checking the quality of my translation. Wycliffe Bible Translators’ director, John Taylor, who had studied classical languages at Oxford, agreed to check my efforts. In our first session, John held his Greek New Testament in front of him and asked me to ask Doutor, in Pirahã, how he understood particular sections of Mark’s gospel. Doutor listened to my first question, but barely looked up at me, focusing instead on picking at a callus on his heel. The air conditioner was on. When he lost interest in his callus, Doutor pointed at the air conditioner with his lower lip and asked, “What’s that?” Then he repeated the question for the doorknobs, the desk, and just about every other object in the room. John was at first worried that Doutor didn’t understand my translation.
And I was nervous because I so wanted this translation checking to be a success. I pressed Doutor until he finally responded directly to a question. We quickly got into a routine of a couple of hours per day. By the end of two weeks, John was convinced that Doutor understood Mark’s gospel. One of WBT’s checking requirements is that the native-speaker helper must not have played any role in the actual translation, that is, that they come to the checking “cold,” with no vested interest (as a helper might) in the outcome.
But Doutor’s understanding bothered me more than it pleased me. If he understood as well as he seemed to, why did it have so little impact on him? Doutor could not have been less interested in or affected by the “message” of Mark’s gospel. When we returned to the village, I recorded Mark’s gospel in my own voice for the Pirahãs to listen to. I then brought in a wind-up tape recorder to play the recording, and I taught the Pirahãs how to use it, which, surprisingly enough, some of the children did. Keren and I left the village and returned a few weeks later. The people were still listening to the gospel, with children cranking the recorder. I was initially quite excited about this, until it became clear that the only part of the book that they paid attention to was the beheading of John the Baptist. “Wow, they cut off his head. Play that again!”+++(5)+++
Perhaps they weren’t listening to the whole gospel because of my accent, I thought. To solve this problem, we decided to have a Pirahã man record the translation on tape. I would say a line and then he would repeat after me, as naturally as possible. When it was all done we had a studio add music and sound effects, in addition to professionally editing the tape. We thought it sounded great.
We had multiple copies made and purchased more hand-cranked cassette players. Within a few days Pirahãs were playing the translation several hours a day. We were sure that with this new tool we would now be successful in converting the Pirahãs.
The recorders had hard green plastic cases with yellow handles. The first time I showed a Pirahã how to use one, I sat by Xaoóopisi, whom I was just getting to know, and showed him how to crank slowly to keep the electric power steady. We listened. He smiled and said that he liked it. I felt good and got up and left him to listen alone.
The next evening I saw a group of men sitting by a fire at a beach on the other side of the river from the main village, eating fish and laughing. I paddled my boat over to them, with a recorder. I asked them if they wanted to listen. “Sure,” they all said enthusiastically in unison. I knew that they liked new things to break the monotony. And they did not disappoint me.
I cranked a bit and listened to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. I asked them if they could understand it. They answered yes, they could understand it, and paraphrased it back to me so that I could see that they did understand it. Night had fallen and we were sitting on the sand by the light of their fire talking about the gospel. It was what I had always dreamed of.
But suddenly, Doutor, one of the four men, asked me a question.
“Hey Dan, who is that on the tape? It sounds like Piihoatai.”
“It is Piihoatai,” I answered.
“Well, he has never seen Jesus. He told us that he doesn’t know Jesus and that he doesn’t want Jesus.”
And with this simple observation, the Pirahãs signaled that these tapes would have little or no spiritual influence. They had no epistemological grip on their minds.+++(5)+++
But rather than give up, we supplemented audio recordings of Mark’s gospel with a slide show of commercially produced pictures of New Testament scenes—Jesus, the apostles, and so on.
The morning after one evening’s “show” an older Pirahã man, Kaaxaóoi, came to work with me on the language. As we were working, he startled me by suddenly saying, “The women are afraid of Jesus. We do not want him.”
“Why not?” I asked, wondering what had triggered this declaration.
“Because last night he came to our village and tried to have sex with our women. He chased them around the village, trying to stick his large penis into them.”
Kaaxaóoi proceeded to show me with his two hands held far apart how long Jesus’s penis was—a good three feet.+++(5)+++
I didn’t know what to say to this. I had no idea whether a Pirahã male had pretended to be Jesus and pretended to have a long penis, faking it in some way, or what else could be behind this report. Clearly Kaaxaóoi wasn’t making this up. He was reporting it as a fact that he was concerned about. Later, when I questioned two other men from his village, they confirmed his story.
The difficulty at the core of my reason for being among the Pirahãs was that the message that I had staked my life and career on did not fit the Pirahãs’ culture. At the very least, one lesson to draw here was that my confidence in the universal appeal of the spiritual message I was bringing was ill-founded. The Pirahãs were not in the market for a new worldview. And they could defend their own just fine. Had I taken the time to read about the Pirahãs before visiting them the first time, I would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years. From the first record of contact with the Pirahãs and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century, they had developed a reputation for “recalcitrance”—no Pirahãs are known to have “converted” at any period of their history. Not that this knowledge would have dissuaded me. Like all new missionaries, I was prepared to sweep aside mere facts and believe that my faith would ultimately overcome any obstacles. But the Pirahãs did not feel lost, so they didn’t feel a need to be “saved” either.
The immediacy of experience principle means that if you haven’t experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant. This renders them relatively impermeable to missionary efforts based on stories of the long-ago past that no one alive has witnessed.+++(5)+++ And this explains why they have resisted missionaries for so long. Creation myths are no match for this demand for evidence.
Surprisingly, this all resonated with me. The Pirahãs’ refusal to believe something just because I said they should was not completely unexpected. I never believed that missionary work would be easy. But there was more to the reaction I was having than this. The Pirahãs’ rejection of the gospel caused me to question my own faith. This surprised me. I was no novice, after all. I had graduated at the top of my class from Moody Bible Institute. I had preached on the streets of Chicago, spoken in rescue missions, gone door-to-door, and debated atheists and agnostics in my own culture. I was well trained in apologetics and personal evangelism.
But I had now also been trained as a scientist, where evidence was crucial, where I would demand for any claim evidence similar to what the Pirahãs were now requesting of me. I did not have the evidence that they wanted. I only had subjective support for what I was saying, my own feelings.
Another edge to the Pirahãs’ challenge was my growing respect for them. There was so much about them that I admired. They were a sovereign people. And they were in effect telling me to peddle my goods elsewhere. They were telling me that my message had no purchase among them.
All the doctrines and faith I had held dear were a glaring irrelevancy in this culture. They were superstition to the Pirahãs. And they began to seem more and more like superstition to me.
I began to seriously question the nature of faith, the act of believing in something unseen. Religious books like the Bible and the Koran glorified this kind of faith in the nonobjective and counterintuitive—life after death, virgin birth, angels, miracles, and so on. The Pirahãs’ values of immediacy of experience and demand for evidence made all of this seem deeply dubious. Their own beliefs were not in the fantastic and miraculous but in spirits that were in fact creatures of their environment, creatures that did normal kinds of things (whether or not I thought they were real). There was no sense of sin among the Pirahãs, no need to “fix” mankind or even themselves. There was acceptance for things the way they are, by and large.+++(5)+++ No fear of death. Their faith was in themselves. This was not the first time I had questioned my faith. Brazilian intellectuals, my own hippie background, and a lot of reading had already raised doubts. But the Pirahãs were the last straw.
So, sometime in the late 1980s, I came to admit to myself alone that I no longer believed in any article of faith or in anything supernatural. I was a closet atheist. And I was not proud of it. I was terrified that someone I loved might find out. I knew that eventually I must tell them. But in the meantime, I feared the consequences.
There is a sense among missionaries and their financial backers that missionary work is a noble challenge—a feeling that you are putting your money where your mouth is when you volunteer to go to dangerous and difficult parts of the world in order to serve Jesus. And when the missionary arrives, he or she usually is able to begin right away a life that at once combines adventure with altruism. Obviously, this is tempered by the missionary’s desire to convert people to his or her own concept of truth, but worse things are known and the relative effect of proselytizing varies from people to people.
When I reached the place where I was finally prepared to take the consequences and let someone else know about my “deconversion,”some two decades had elapsed since my initial doubts. And, as I expected, when I finally announced my change of belief, it had severe consequences for me personally. It’s a difficult decision for anyone to tell his closest friends and family that he no longer shares their foundational beliefs—the beliefs that make them who they are. It must be something like coming out as gay to unsuspecting close friends and family.
In the end, my loss of religion and the epistemological crisis that accompanied it led to the breakup of my family—what I most wanted to avoid.
The missionary martyr to the Huaorani people, Jim Elliot, said once, in a line that affected me for many years after I read it, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”+++(5)+++ He meant, of course, that giving up this world, which we cannot keep, is a small price to pay to know God and dwell in a heaven that we cannot lose.
I have given up what I could not keep, my faith, to gain what I cannot lose, freedom from what Thomas Jefferson called “tyranny of the mind”—following outside authorities rather than one’s own reason.+++(5)+++
The Pirahãs made me question concepts of truth that I had long adhered to and lived by. The questioning of my faith in God, coupled with life among the Pirahãs, led me to question what is perhaps an even more fundamental component of modern thought, the concept of truth itself. Indeed, I decided that I lived under a delusion—the delusion of truth. God and truth are two sides of the same coin. Life and mental well-being are hindered by both, at least if the Pirahãs are right. And their quality of inner life, their happiness and contentment, strongly supports their values.
From the time we are born we try to simplify the world around us. For it is too complicated for us to navigate; there are too many sounds, too many sights, too many stimuli for us to take even a single step unless we can decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore. In specific intellectual domains we call our attempts at simplification “hypotheses” and “theories.” Scientists invest their careers and energies in certain attempts at simplification. They request money from funding organizations to travel to or to build some new environment in which to test their simplifying scheme.
But this type of “elegance theorizing” (getting results that are “pretty” rather than particularly useful) began to satisfy me less and less. People who contribute to such programs usually see themselves as working toward a closer relationship to truth. But as the American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James reminded us, we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously. We are no more nor less than evolved primates. It is rather ridiculous to think that the universe is a virgin saving herself for us. We are all too often the three blind men describing an elephant; or the man who looks on the wrong side of the road for his keys, simply because the light is better there.
The Pirahãs are firmly committed to the pragmatic concept of utility. They don’t believe in a heaven above us, or a hell below us, or that any abstract cause is worth dying for. They give us an opportunity to consider what a life without absolutes, like righteousness or holiness and sin, could be like. And the vision is appealing.
Is it possible to live a life without the crutches of religion and truth? The Pirahãs do so live. They share some of our concerns, of course, since many of our concerns derive from our biology, independent of our culture (our cultures attribute meanings to otherwise ineffable, but no less real, concerns). But they live most of their lives outside these concerns because they have independently discovered the usefulness of living one day at a time. The Pirahãs simply make the immediate their focus of concentration, and thereby, at a single stroke, they eliminate huge sources of worry, fear, and despair that plague so many of us in Western societies.+++(5)+++
They have no craving for truth as a transcendental reality. Indeed, the concept has no place in their values. Truth to the Pirahãs is catching a fish, rowing a canoe, laughing with your children, loving your brother, dying of malaria. Does this make them more primitive? Many anthropologists have suggested so, which is why they are so concerned about finding out the Pirahãs’ notions about God, the world, and creation.
But there is an interesting alternative way to think about things. Perhaps it is the presence of these concerns that makes a culture more primitive, and their absence that renders a culture more sophisticated. If that is true, the Pirahãs are a very sophisticated people. Does this sound far-fetched? Let’s ask ourselves if it is more sophisticated to look at the universe with worry, concern, and a belief that we can understand it all, or to enjoy life as it comes, recognizing the likely futility of looking for truth or God?
The Pirahãs have built their culture around what is useful to their survival. They don’t worry about what they don’t know, nor do they think they can or do know it all. Likewise, they do not crave the products of others’ knowledge or solutions. Their views, not so much as I summarize them dryly here, but as they are lived out in the Pirahãs’ daily lives, have been extremely helpful to me and persuasive as I have looked at my own life and the beliefs that I held, many of them without warrant. Much of what I am today, including my nontheistic view of the world, I owe at least in part to the Pirahãs.