Missionary Ironies

Abstract How did evangelical missionaries come to make sense of the paradoxical political and economic effects of their work in the Ecuadorian Amazon? I argue that, as part of their religious practice and theology, they developed a hermeneutics of history that foregrounds unexpected ironies and open-endedness and undermines their own intentionality. Such a hermeneutics enabled them – and through them the analyst – to remain attuned to historical ironies – for example to the possibility that the missionaries, against their wishes to promote capitalism and fight Marxist materialism, might have instead opened the way for the far-Left in the region.