The Myth of the Noble Savage

By Audrey Stallsmith

Conversations around the table at Thanksgiving can be tricky, especially when they concern current events! This year, members of my family were talking about the case of John Chau, the would-be missionary who was killed by reclusive natives in the Andaman Islands whom he was attempting to reach with the gospel.

My youngest brother said something to the effect that native peoples should be left to their own cultures. To which I responded that some of those cultures aren’t worth keeping.

Can anybody, after all, truly believe that the cannibals, still so prevalent in many island countries during the 1800s, should have been allowed to continue their brutal ways? In their world, after all, craftiness and betrayal were glorified. Many of our own modern business men exhibit such traitorous traits as well, but at least the literal eating of one’s former friends is now prohibited.  

In many other tribal cultures, the older and wealthier men tended to get all of the wives, meaning girls in their early teens had nothing more to look forward to than being married off to men aged enough to be their grandfathers. Not to mention that, when those old chiefs died, their wives often would be killed and buried with them. 

Such cultures also were pervaded by fear of witchcraft, magic, and capricious gods. Twin infants often were killed or left to die because they were considered cursed. People who perished of perfectly natural causes still were considered to have been hexed, meaning that their relatives would have to find somebody to punish. Generally, the only way missionaries could convince such tribes to abandon their endless circle of violent retribution was by educating them.

That would, of course, destroy their culture, which wasn’t always a bad thing. The myth of the noble savage is just that—a myth. As the scriptures put it so bluntly, all of mankind is rotten at the core. (“The heart is the most deceitful thing there is, and desperately wicked. No one can really know how bad it is.” Jeremiah 17:9) 

None of us are naturally noble, and we can only be redeemed with the help of a God who ended the necessity for blood sacrifices by sacrificing Himself. Granted, people from the so-called “Christian” nations often behaved just as badly as the “heathen.” For example, native Americans frequently practiced torture on their captives, but so did the supposedly “Christian” inquisitors in Spain. However, that was due to those inquisitors not following the tenets of the religion they professed rather than to the religion itself.

What bothered me most about the Chau story was that many of the newscasts seemed to imply the Sentinelese should be left in their own habitat as if they were endangered animals. Endangered, they certainly could be, by our modern diseases. And they may actually have been justified in repelling what they saw as an invasion. But to imply that they somehow couldn’t help what they did is reducing them to the status of animals who act on instinct.

The Apostle Paul insisted that even people who have never been told about God still know right from wrong (Romans 1:19-21). As with the cannibals, some of them take a certain perverse pleasure in choosing the wrong instead of the right, but they still know the difference.     

Chau may have been rash in his approach, but he apparently had a genuine concern for the souls of the Sentinelese people. That, unfortunately, is more than the rest of the world seems to have.