“We Have Come to Offer Something Which (They) Were Not Even Looking for”: U.S. Christian Conservative Evangelical Faith Missions in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon

At the end of the 19th century, U.S. Christians began to dramatically shift their Christian missionary focus from Asia and the South Pacific toward Latin America, launching what would become the most significant missionary movement of the 20th century (Bastian 1990; Walls 1991; Álvarez 2015; Kirkpatrick 2019). Various evangelical leaders and scholars have credited the U.S. missionaries in Latin America as modernizers who promoted literacy and installed U.S.-style institutions, such as healthcare facilities, schools, and radio stations (Knapp 1977; Brend and Pike 1977; Hartch 2006; Stoneman 2017; Feitoza 2024). More critical approaches, however, have denounced U.S. missionaries for their connection to the larger U.S. imperial agenda (e.g., Stoll 1990) and the inefficiency of their services (Montgomery 1993). Yet, a few of these analyses draw ideological differences between the variety of U.S. missionary groups that include traditional denominations (Bastian 2015), nondenominational Christian conservative evangelicals (Long 2003), Jehovah's Witnesses (Alston and Aguirre 1979), Seventh-day Adventists (Mabat 2022), The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) (Knowlton 1996), Catholics (Hartch 2009), and Pentecostals (Brahinsky 2020). In the specific case of Christian conservative evangelicals, there is a gap in understanding why those missionaries became interested in Latin America in the first place, and their missionary ideology underpinning their alleged cultural, racial, and moral superiority. To address these gaps, this article examines the factors that drove a group of U.S. conservative evangelicals to become missionaries among the Napo Runa and the Waorani indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon during the latter half of the 20th century. It argues that while Christian conservative evangelical missionaries positioned themselves as agents of spiritual enlightenment and modernity, they simultaneously upheld provincial worldviews rooted in premillennialist eschatology, white supremacy, and gender inequality. This analysis primarily aimed to “provincialize” (Chakrabarty 2000) the mid-20th century conservative evangelical missions in Ecuador by analyzing the provincial religious and social worldviews that shaped their supposedly universal and altruistic mission for salvation. The term “provincializing” draws from the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's work, which reveals how seemingly universal ideologies, such as “modern secularization” and “modern politics,” are products of Western particular historical and cultural circumstances (2000, 12–16). Like Chakrabarty, this article's primary intention is not to celebrate or criticize Western tradition, or more specifically in this case, the Christian conservative evangelical missions. Instead, its primary intention is to analyze how specific religious roots, cultural contexts, and political circumstances contributed to this missionary enterprise and shaped its missionary efforts. This provincialization—or demystification of this religious credo and moral ethos as universal, thus superior—exposes how parochial assumptions about race, gender, civilization, and divine order that missionaries often failed to acknowledge shape Christian conservative evangelical missions. By examining these hidden ideological foundations, we can gain a deeper understanding of the appeal and the contradictions within missionary movements that have profoundly transformed indigenous communities across Latin America. A pivotal moment in this conservative evangelical missionary history occurred on January 8, 1956, when Waorani warriors killed Jim Elliot (1927–1956), Nate Saint (1923–1956), Ed McCully (1927–1956), Peter Fleming (1928–1956), and Roger Youderian (1924–1956) while attempting to establish first missionary contact in what became known as “Operation Auca” (auca is a derogatory term in the Kichwa language meaning “savage” to refer to the Waorani people). Jim Elliot's subsequent transformation into a symbol of Christian martyrdom owes much to the literary work of his wife, Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015), whose bestselling books on Operation Auca, her missionary experience in Ecuador, and biographies of Jim Elliot cemented his place in 20th-century evangelical history. Paradoxically, these missionary killings ultimately facilitated the Christianization and settlement of a large segment of the previously semi-nomadic and autonomous Waorani population, fostering radical cultural transformation, dependency, territorial loss, and enabling oil drilling exploitation in Waorani lands (High 2009; Wasserstrom 2016; Nenquimo and Anderson 2024). Operation Auca involved various faith missionary organizations united by similar conservative evangelical beliefs. The Elliots, along with Ed McCully and Peter Fleming, belonged to the Christian Missions in Many Lands (CMML), a missionary agency of the Plymouth Brethren—a sectarian, conservative evangelical group. Nate Saint represented the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), and Roger Youderian the Gospel Missionary Union (GMU). The U.S. missionary radio station in Ecuador, HCJB, The Voice of the Andes, extensively reported on the fate of these five missionaries for several years, utilizing radio reports, print media, and films for informational, propaganda, and fundraising purposes. Additionally, the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Institute (SIL) played a significant role in the Christianization of the Waorani and other Amazonian indigenous groups. Its founder, William Cameron Townsend, branded these efforts as linguistic research among Latin Americans while he labeled them a religious mission among its Christian supporters in the United States. Scientific or religiously motivated, all these organizations shared a nondenominational, puritan, Bible-centric worldview characterized by premillennial dispensationalism. This eschatological (end-of-the-world) belief claims that the world is rushing toward apocalypse, motivating urgent evangelization efforts to fulfill the “Great Commission”—to share the gospel and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18–20). 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