As Lewis Carroll might have put it, the story of the ten Americans detained in Haiti while attempting to leave the country with thirty-three Haitian children keeps getting “curiouser” and curiouser.”

Mind you, it was more than a little curious from the start: ten American evangelicals from Idaho, according to their stated plans, intended to fly to the Dominican Republic; hire a bus; gather up 100 Haitian orphans; take them back to the DR, and house them in a leased hotel pending the construction of a permanent facility.

They got as far as gathering up thirty-three Haitian children, reportedly with the assistance of “Jean Sainyil, a Haitian who pastors Gospel Assembly Church in Gwinnett, Georgia and [who] returns to Haiti regularly as a missionary.” Then things went south: traveling without proper documentation or written permission to take the children out of the country, they were stopped at the Haitian-Dominican border; and upon their return to Port-au-Prince, they were arrested and charged with kidnapping and criminal association.

Then things got more-than-slightly surreal: the New York Times, among others, reported that their Dominican attorney was, in fact, “a con man with an extensive rap sheet and arrest warrants in several countries.” Jorge Puello, a.k.a. Jorge Torres Orellana and Jorge Anibal Torres Puello, who told the Idahoans that he was “a leader among the Dominican Jewish community,” has been accused of “luring young women in Central America and the Caribbean with promises of making them models, then forcing them into a life of prostitution.” Not surprisingly, he’s nowhere to be found.

While no seriously thinks that these folks had anything like that in mind, their actions were so ill-conceived and so badly-executed that you can’t help but wonder “what were they thinking?” My friend Terry Mattingly wrote that it is “clear that the religious tensions in Haiti between Protestants and Catholics, especially Catholics who have blended Voodoo practices into their daily lives, are at the heart of this story.”

Add Terry’s take to the story of the Dominican con-man and the word that comes to mind

Another friend (and my former boss), Jim Tonkowich, called them “naïve” and (gently) chided them for their lack of wisdom.

To “dupes” and “naïve,” you can add “Americans.”

From the moment I first heard the story I was struck by the presumption of the folks from Idaho. There was no indication that they knew anything about Haiti, its people or what Haitians might think is best for themselves and their children. It apparently never occurred to them that a nation that had been devastated and reduced to a ward of the rest of the world might be more, not less, inclined to, as the Times pointed out, safeguard what was left of its national sovereignty. (If that strikes you as misguided, imagine the reaction here if we had learned that, in the aftermath of Katrina, foreigners were gathering up kids from the streets of New Orleans and taking them to improvised orphanages in Mexico.)

All they needed to know is that “God wanted us to come here to help children” and that “our hearts were in the right place.”

One hundred and eighty-six years of experience has taught Latin Americans that this kind of belief in divinely-ordained mission and the rectitude of one’s intentions is often the prelude to unwelcome attention from their neighbors north of the Rio Bravo del Norte.

In the nineteenth century, “manifest destiny,” which was rooted in the United States’ view of itself as a new “chosen people,” led to an invasion of Mexico. The resulting war of conquest reduced that country by half and would have reduced it by more had the U.S. negotiator, Nicholas Trist, not disregarded the fact that James K. Polk had fired him for, in effect, having a conscience. (As Trist put it, “my feeling of shame as an American was far stronger than the Mexicans’ could be.”)

That was merely the opening act. After having won Cuba in the Spanish-American War (a war whose jus ad bellum credentials made the war in Iraq look like our response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor), the U.S. enacted the Platt Amendment, which gave Cubans the “choice” between being a de jure colony or just a de facto one.

In the first three decades of the 20^th century, the U.S. occupied or intervened militarily in, to name but a few, Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. By calling his Latin America policy the “Good Neighbor Policy,” FDR acknowledged that we hadn’t been one previously. Regrettably, the most enduring legacy of the “Good Neighbor Policy” was arguably the 1944 Disney feature, The Three Caballeros, as events in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic (again), and, to a certain extent, Chile, tell us. (The list is by no means exhaustive.)

Things are better now, maybe even a lot better, but that’s not the same thing as Americans actually caring what the people of Latin America need or want.

Then there’s the historic tendency of would-be missionaries to “leverage” the might of the extant imperium. The Requerimiento read by the conquistadores demanded that the locals “consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to you” the Catholic faith. What the Indians heard was “you are now our slaves and everything you possess of value is now ours.”

Three centuries later, British Christians rallied to David Livingston’s call to bring “Christianity, commerce and civilization” to Africa. (A similar call went out on “behalf” of India earlier that century.) However well-intentioned, this call and the response, every bit as much as the Requerimiento, made the proclamation of the Gospel part of a larger imperial endeavor. (Not surprisingly, conversions in former British, and other European, colonies took off after independence.)

You don’t even need an emperor to make missionary work part of an imperial endeavor. President William McKinley justified the annexation of the Philippines by saying that, after prayerful consideration, he had decided that God wanted the United States to “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them . . . as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died.”

American Christians bought it. It helped that neither they nor McKinley knew anything about the Philippines. If they did they might have known that the Philippines had been “Christianized” for three centuries before McKinley’s “revelation.” (Filipinos describe their colonial history as “three hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood.”) And while Christ may have died for them, this didn’t stop us from directly or indirectly killing more than 200,000 of them in our efforts to pacify our “fellowmen.”

Then there’s Hawaii where the children of missionaries were behind the plot that overthrew the Christian monarchy and resulted in the islands’ annexation by the United States.

Obviously, the perfidious children of Hawaiian missionaries were outliers; and the vast majority of missionaries – in fact, nearly every last one – are motivated by a desire to do good. But even today some of us can’t resist the temptation to leverage American power: the invasion of Iraq was followed by an incursion of American missionaries. Arguably the most enduring achievement of what Lawrence Kaplan, writing in the New Republic, called the “infusion of pamphlets and missionaries” was causing Iraqi Muslims to “conflate [indigenous Iraqi Christians] with ‘the crusaders’ – and, too often, treat them as such.” In an echo of what happened a century before in the Philippines, the President of Open Doors, USA told Kaplan that “the denominations in Iraq aren’t recognized by Americans . . . The underlying attitude is, ‘They’re not us.’”

Like Tonkowich, I am “am in awe of people who drop whatever else they’re doing and rush across the world to jump in and help those in need.” Still, part of the wisdom Jim writes about is an understanding of something besides our intentions and our beliefs about what is that God is calling us to do.

The “something” includes an appreciation for how our well-intentioned actions are likely to be perceived by the proposed beneficiaries and why “we’re American missionaries and we’re here to help you” isn’t always greeted with enthusiasm by the natives.

That requires doing something that most Americans are terrible at: seeing ourselves and our history as the rest of the world sees it, never mind taking it seriously. Those who can do real and lasting good, both by the people they serve and the Kingdom they represent. Those who can’t sometimes wind up cooling their heels in a disaster zone. Or worse.

For more information on this topic, get the book, The Imperial Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880-1914, by A. N. Porter. Or read the article, “On the Road with Christianity” by Donald A. Yerxa.