Dear Christians, It’s Time We Dealt With Religious Intolerance

Mark 16:15–16

And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Passages like Mark 16:15–16, excitedly calling upon followers of Christ to spread the gospel they believe in, can be found all throughout the Bible. For 27 year old American tourist John Allen Chau, this call-to-action led him to the Andaman Islands, a remote destination off the coast of India. There he believed he’d find a protected indigenous population known as the Sentinelese, a group he referred to as “Satan’s last stronghold”. When Chau embarked on this mission to save souls, he likely did so with the best of intentions. Unfortunately for Chau, the journey would end 7,838 miles from home with a stern reminder that not all souls are up for sale.

Chau believed that the message he intended to share with the Sentinelese was far more sacred than any belief system they had established over the course of their 60,000 years on the island, and for that reason he ignored every regulation put in place to protect the uncontacted tribe from the outside world. Even in the face of his own death and the untimely deaths of others, Chau persisted, unwilling to consider that he was the threat the…