Transcending the Ethical Dilemma of Christian Humanitarianism: American Medical Missionaries at a Hospital in Rural Zambia

Abstract

ABSTRACT After arriving to volunteer at a rural hospital in Zambia, many short-term American missionaries began to doubt whether the Christian character of their work was recognisable to Zambian patients and health professionals. In this article, I argue that these missionary doubts were a result of what Webb Keane has recently called ‘the ethical dilemma of humanitarianism’, a term he uses to describe the lack of mutual ethical recognition in humanitarian encounters. After showing how missionaries experienced and articulated a distinctively Christian version of this ‘dilemma’, I demonstrate how they were able to transcend it by identifying other people who could properly recognise the Christian character of their work: namely, their families, friends and church members back ‘at home’ in the United States. In conclusion, I suggest that more attention should be paid to the political importance of various forms of domestic ethical recognition in sustaining humanitarianism in practice.