Studies of missionary martyrdom are legion, but relatively few focus on martyrdoms in the second half of the twentieth century. Of those few, I know of none that feature Protestant martyrs in Latin America. In the collective memory of many American Evangelicals, however, the deaths on 8 January 1956 of five young American male missionaries, speared by a group of the Waorani people in the depths of the Amazonian jungle of Ecuador, remains to this day the most prominent missionary martyrdom of the twentieth century. The Waorani people became known to the American (and British) Christian public by the derogatory name of Aucas (‘savages’) imposed on them by the neighbouring lowland Quichua people. Their remote location and complete isolation from Western civilisation made the initially tragic endeavour to reach them with the message of the Gospel a drama that symbolised the leadership that conservative Evangelicals and fundamentalists had assumed in the post-war missionary movement. The subsequent unfolding of the drama, which ten years later saw two Waorani men, neatly attired in Western dress, give their testimonies of faith on the platform of Billy Graham's Congress on World Evangelism in Berlin, appeared to the American Christian public as a narrative of miraculous redemption. The seed that had fallen to the ground and died had borne fruit in a church of some thirty baptised believers. The narrative was popularised through a variety of popular books, magazine articles, television programmes and films. Most influential was Through gates of splendour, the ‘multibiography’ of the five ‘martyrs’ by Elizabeth Elliot, widow of Jim Elliot, one of the five, which was published by the secular New York publisher Harper and Brothers, sold over 175,000 copies within eight months of its appearance in 1957, and was serialised in Reader's Digest.

Kathryn Long's book is an account, not so much of the martyrdoms in themselves, but of their long legacy, and of the more prosaic and often rather unedifying realities that lay concealed beneath the surface of this stirring tale of Evangelical heroism and achievement. Three dimensions to the narrative combine to constitute the fabric of her exhaustively researched and beautifully written book.

The first concerns the dysfunctional relationship between Elizabeth Elliott and Rachel Saint, sister of Nate Saint, another of the five martyrs, and the increasingly possessive attitude that Rachel adopted to ‘her’ Aucas, once they had begun to respond to Christianity. The two women had incompatible personalities, divergent theological perspectives (Saint thought Elliot unsound), and rival publications. Saint was a member of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), the professional arm of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, and an organisation that until 1981 enjoyed a close contractual relationship with the Ecuadorian government. Her close patronage of the first Waorani Christian, Dayomæ, was intrinsic to her attempt to reduce the language – Wao tededo – to writing with a view to the eventual translation of the New Testament. In practice, however, Saint appeared more interested in being the gatekeeper of the Waorani, keeping other missions out of their territory, and acting as a self-appointed mother of the tribe. She became an increasing embarrassment to her mission, yet was also indispensable to Wycliffe, for whom the project of the Wao tededo New Testament was the jewel in their public relations crown.

The second, and closely related, dimension of Long's tale is the extent to which this Evangelical Protestant mission venture began, consciously or unconsciously, to replicate some of the themes of earlier Jesuit missions in South America. From 1967 the ancestral lands of the Waorani came under increasing pressure from oil companies eager to harvest the vast resources of oil beneath the Ecuadorian jungle. Encouraged by Rachel Saint, the SIL began negotiating with Texaco to relocate the Waorani in protected reserves where they could be free to develop patterns of cultivation and ‘civilisation’. Dayomæ became the female boss, or patróna, of the main settlement at Tewæno, with Rachel as the white matriarch at her elbow. Many who relocated to Tewæno succumbed to influenza, and some fell victim to polio. It was not surprising that critics of Evangelical missions began to make comparisons with the Jesuit reduccións of an earlier century, and to allege that SIL was complicit with the exploitative designs of capitalism, and ultimately even with the anti-communist machinations of the CIA in Latin America. Later, such critiques acquired a green tinge, as environmentalists concerned for the future of the Amazonian forest forged alliances with defenders of indigenous peoples to contest all missionary efforts as alien invasions of a Latin American Garden of Eden. Mission supporters were not the only romantics in their views of the Waorani.

A third dimension to Long's account may surprise American Evangelical readers: Protestant missions were not alone in their efforts to reach the Waorani for Christ. A former Capuchin missionary to China, Alejandro Labaca Ugarte, inspired by the missionary ideals of the Second Vatican Council, initiated Catholic efforts to reach the Waorani, briefly from 1967 to 1968, and then on a more sustained basis from 1976. An innovative missionary who believed that he could discover the ‘seeds of the Word’ hidden within even the ‘primitive’ culture of the Waorani, Labaca took the principle of missionary identification to the extreme of frequently wearing as little clothing as did the Waorani themselves. The Capuchins were eager to collaborate with SIL on linguistic projects, but their ecumenical openness was not entirely reciprocated.

This is a very fine piece of historical writing. Long has trawled through a wide range of sources, many of them in Spanish, and conducted interviews with many of the surviving key figures in her story. As an Evangelical herself, she writes about them with obvious sympathy, but also with critical discernment and academic rigour. God in the rainforest is a model of mission history.