Papua New Guinea is seeing a revival of sanguma, the belief that witches send evil spirits to cause illness and bad fortune, whereupon accused women are tortured and killed, usually by being burned alive. Now a Lutheran missionary is being hailed for battling this belief and saving the lives of women accused of witchcraft.
Anton Lutz is a lay-missionary in Papua New Guinea as part of the mission work of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. He grew up there, being the son of the late long-time medical missionary Dr. Stephen Lutz.
Anton recently helped save the life of a six-year-old girl who was accused of being a witch. Her mother had also been accused of witchcraft and had murdered by burning. Sanguma includes the belief that sorcery can be passed down from mother to daughter. The little girl had been tortured by being cut with hot knives.
Some 30 women are killed each year, though Lutz says he has dealt with 30 attacks in a single month. For an in-depth account of saguma, which the Papua New Guinea government is trying to stamp out, read this story. The author says that after the women are cut and burned, the perpetrators post the pictures on social media. (The various links have videos that are informative, but they have some gruesome and heart-rending images.)
Read this account of Anton’s work, published in the Huffington Post, no less.
From Eoin Blackwell, This U.S. Missionary Is Fighting To Save Women In Papua New Guinea From Being Killed For ‘Sorcery’ | HuffPost
A U.S. missionary in Papua New Guinea is on a desperate bid to save women and girls from being tortured and murdered in their communities because they’ve been accused of witchcraft.
Iowa-born Lutheran missionary Anton Lutz, 36, has been living in PNG for the past 30 years and has become a well-recognized figure in PNG’s ongoing battle against belief in sanguma, or sorcery, a belief used to explain away mysterious illnesses or deaths.
Last month, Lutz helped save a 6-year-old girl who had been horribly burned after the she was accused of using magic to cause “bad things” to happen in her village in Enga Province, in the center of the country.
It was one of several recent attacks that has forced Lutz to act, with the missionary often traveling through the infrastructure-poor countryside on daylong trips — sometimes in the cover of darkness — to rescue victims. . . .
Lutz had a personal stake, too, in helping the 6-year-old victim.
The girl’s mother, Kepari Leniata, was burned alive in a public market in 2013, and Lutz helped organize the burial of her body afterward.
He’s formed other sorrowful bonds too. Lutz sat beside a young mother named Shirley as she was dying after she was attacked on allegations of sorcery.
“I drove back over the mountain and picked her up — it was about 15 hours of driving,” he said.
“She was horrifically burned. It was another four or five days before she died of infections, but in that short amount of time, as a first responder type, you get emotionally bonded with the victim. . . .”
Lutz has said that between September and October there have been 30 attacks against women in Enga Province.
I’m glad that this is getting covered in the arch-liberal Huffington Post. It might cast doubt on the myth of multiculturalism that so many on the left have bought into, that all cultures are equally valid. It also casts doubt on the myth that Christianity is anti-woman. From ancient times, Christianity has liberated women from their brutal treatment in pagan cultures, and that has continued as the history of missionary work shows. (But haven’t Christians burned witches? Yes, but the mindset that did so is nevertheless essentially animistic, as we see here.)
This story also casts Christianity in a positive light, which has become rare in elite media circles. I think that as Christianity keeps being marginalized, the heroic-seeming Christian virtues will attract more attention. That was certainly the case during the Roman persecutions, when the persecutors began to ask themselves questions like, why are these Christians risking their lives to treat plague victims whom they do not even know?
Missionaries have to raise a good deal of their own support. To give money to help Anton Lutz in his work, go here.
HT: Mary Moerbe
Photo of woman from Papua New Guinea by panvorax [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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