Christians have never been of one mind about the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT). Wycliffe aims to translate the Bible into every unreached language on earth, but it has always conducted its operations under the name of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Its linguists/translators have produced New Testaments in seven hundred languages and are involved in 1,700 languages around the world. They have published more linguistics research than anyone else. Although rarely recognized as such, they are the founders of the movement to save small, endangered indigenous languages from extinction.
These are astonishing accomplishments—what is the objection? From Wycliffe's origin in the United States during the 1930s, it has always been trailed by accusations of duplicity. Every such accusation has its origin, one way or another, in the strategic genius of SIL/WBT's founder William Cameron Townsend. A new history of the group by a member, Boone Aldridge, draws on its archives to shed light on Townsend as well as other formative leaders.
Townsend (1896–1982) grew up in Southern California when Anglo-Protestants still held sway. From its keen sunlight he learned the sky was the limit. In his first mission field, Guatemala, he realized that the indigenous Mayas could best be evangelized in their own languages. Without linguistics background, he trained native speakers to translate the New Testament into Kaqchikel Maya. He also learned how to impress enough new sponsors—a visiting revivalist here, a moneybags or politician there—to declare independence from disapproving mission elders and start his own faith mission.
Aldridge's discoveries in the SIL/WBT archives make him particularly informative on the controversies between Townsend, rival mission leaders, and the many doubting Thomases in his own ranks. Townsend's great discovery was that linguistics could open political as well as cultural doors to indigenous populations. His great demerit was that, whenever convenient, he became accustomed to denying that his linguists were missionaries.
Aldridge reports several instances of this. Oddly, in recounting a 1953 collision with a Roman Catholic bishop in Peru, he omits Townsend's most incriminating statement: “‘We do not carry out evangelist work because the Institute has a mission of scientific character and not a religious end.’ On the other hand,” reported the interviewer, “Dr. Townsend admitted that personally he is part of ‘Wicleffe Bible’ but advised that the Institute had nothing to do with it.”
In the early years, a succession of Townsend's followers resigned in disgust, including SIL/WBT's most accomplished translator, Eugene Nida, who went on to become executive secretary of the American Bible Society. Gradually Townsend's artful-dodger presentations became SIL/WBT's institutional norm. But the trouble that these caused never really ended.
The first objectors were fundamentalists who realized that, while Townsend echoed their core beliefs, at heart he was no fundamentalist. Townsend was far too optimistic and opportunistic for the stubborn dispensational premillennialism that shaped many of his peers and followers. Yet Townsend and the fundamentalists needed each other. He could find financial support for his endeavors—as well as thousands of young men and women bent on saving the unreached from hell—only on the fundamentalist side of the great split in American Protestantism during these decades.
What Townsend provided, besides the linguistic approach, were contracts with Latin American governments—typically with education ministries and without end-dates. These differed from Vatican concordats, in that their only references to religion were euphemistic, but they had the same effect of marrying Caesar and Christ.
Latin American educators, businessmen, and politicians were not the only ones impressed. So were Latin American military officers. They appreciated Townsend's argument that his linguists would teach Amazonians that they were now citizens of Ecuador or Peru. When push came to shove, Latin American military officers could be the decisive factor in SIL's survival.
Here Aldridge pays due homage to the charms of the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS), which Townsend organized to compete with the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) over the objections of his own board of directors. This is how American missionaries, of the kind who believe the world is about to end, became nation-builders from Mexico to Brazil.
What could possibly go wrong? If Aldridge is best at documenting the many internal rebellions against Townsend's stratagems, he also helps explain why, in the 1970s, SIL became controversial in one Latin American country after the other. What set off the chain of accusations was the CIA panic in reaction to the U.S. role in overthrowing President Salvador Allende of Chile.
SIL's history of equivocation now backfired. If linguistics had been a façade for evangelism, how could Latin Americans be sure that evangelism was not a facade for something more sinister? Why were so-called linguists studying all of a country's indigenous languages? Why did they have their own flight service in border regions? Why did they have more pull in government ministries than national anthropologists did? Conspiracy accusations came fast and furious, many of them false.
Aldridge is correct that anthropologists played a major role in stitching together nationalist coalitions against the Summer Institute. A frequent accusation was that SIL committed “ethnocide,” that is, the destruction of indigenous cultures. But as a concept, ethnocide has not held up as well as genocide. Many anthropologists now accept that no one has the right to label Christian converts as ”deculturated.” As SIL anthropologists argued, culture is not just a rampart to defend but our ability to imitate and experiment with new ideas.
The finer point against SIL is that it used its government contracts, medical, and educational services to pressure indigenous people to turn against their own religious traditions. Yet the era in which Townsend launched his venture now seems very distant. So do the 1970s when SIL lost its government contracts in Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Brazil.
The Amazonian bases that buzzed with aircraft to-and-from indigenous populations have been vacated. SIL's role as a crucial intermediary was undermined by the advance of jungle highways. Missionary impacts documented by anthropologists were drowned out, in the 1980s, by the cocaine industry and guerrilla warfare. Even in the languages where SIL had most influence, its hegemony was usually fleeting.
As the world changed, SIL realized that it should concentrate on Bible translation—to which few critics have ever objected. Nowadays the Summer Institute has renamed itself SIL International and Wycliffe has become the Wycliffe Global Alliance. Visiting their two websites is still a puzzling experience. However, this may not matter much anymore, except for those of us who are thinking of signing up.
