Professor Dan Everett Featured in New Nat Geo Documentary
A former Christian missionary turned unapologetic atheist, Dan Everett — longtime Bentley Sociology and Global Studies professor and internationally recognized linguist, anthropologist and author — is uniquely qualified to comment on the ethical implications of evangelism.
Small wonder then, that the directors of “The Mission” — a new documentary from National Geographic that explores the fate of John Chau, the young American missionary killed in 2018 during an attempt to convert the isolated, Indigenous residents of remote North Sentinel Island, part of the Indian Ocean’s Andaman archipelago — rely heavily on Everett’s insights to contextualize Chau’s fatal journey.
Everett was just 26 when he set off for Brazil in 1977 with his wife and three young children to bring the gospel to the Pirahã [pee-dah-HAN], a small community of Indigenous hunter-gatherers living deep in the Amazon rainforest jungle. Charged with translating the New Testament for the Pirahã, Everett first had to learn their native language — a formidable task, given that it’s a tonal language (like Mandarin Chinese, the speaker’s pitch and intonation changes the meaning of the word) consisting of just three vowels and eight consonants, with no equivalent terms for colors, numbers or relating historic events that predate the speaker’s lived experiences.
Despite these challenges, Everett successfully learned the language, and today is one of only a handful of Westerners fluent in Pirahã. However, as he recounts in his book, “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle,” his gain in fluency was offset by a loss of faith. “I had gone to the Pirahã 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,” Everett shares. But he soon understood that the Pirahã, a people who “believe only what they see,” had no interest in stories that couldn’t be substantiated. As he later told The Guardian, Everett realized “they were already living life the way I’m saying it ought to be lived, they just don’t fear heaven and hell.” And by 1985, neither did he.
Everett’s experience of “deconversion,” as he terms it, gives him a nuanced understanding of Christian missionary work, allowing him to simultaneously respect Chau’s unwavering commitment to his faith yet condemn the folly of his actions; as he told the LA Times, “When I was his age, I would have thought very similarly.”
Since its August 31 premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, “The Mission” has been hailed by critics (see highlights below) for exploring this cognitive dissonance, with ScreenDaily lauding the film for its “thoughtful, fair-minded exploration” of Chau’s motivations, while “confront[ing] bigger questions on the legacy of colonialism, the delusions of white savior narratives and the thin line between faith and fantasy.”
“The Mission” is now available for streaming on Disney+.
What Critics Are Saying About “The Mission”
“Refreshingly eloquent former missionary Dan Everett … reveal[s] how missionaries differ from anthropologists: The former tend to see other cultures as empty vessels waiting to be filled with the ‘good news’ of Jesus Christ, but often lack a reciprocal curiosity about what they can learn from isolated people and their customs.”
“The doc is equally a high-stakes adventure, a tale of the power of faith, and an ethical inquiry into the questions raised by the gap between modernity and those who reject it.... Whether Chau’s cause was righteous, destructive or crazy will give viewers much to ponder in this thought-provoking film.”
“An emotionally intense and thematically nuanced exploration of a young man’s extremist faith that doubles as a broader investigation of the historically fraught encounters between Westerners and Indigenous communities.”
“As a counternarrative, the movie introduces linguist and former missionary Dan Everett … [who] ultimately abandoned not only his mission but also his religion. Everett’s descriptions of the Pirahã’s utter mystification at the idea of Jesus suggest what Chau’s conversations on North Sentinel might have been like.”