SIDON, Lebanon, Nov. 24 With hymns and prayers, fellow missionaries eulogized Bonnie Penner Witherall today, grieving for the 31-year-old American who was killed by a gunman last week at the prenatal clinic here where she worked.
Lebanese authorities, who have yet to make an arrest, say they are looking at the case in the context of the anti-Americanism that is raging across Lebanon and much of the Middle East.
But her death exposes another trip wire involving religion in the Middle East, this time in the conflict that has arisen from a renewed effort by evangelical missionaries from the United States to spread the Christian Gospel to Muslims.
From the start, the question of conversions to Christianity was a potentially explosive issue in Lebanon, a country struggling to glue itself back together after fracturing along largely sectarian lines in the 15-year-long civil war that ended a decade ago.
Religious affiliations are more than a matter of personal faith here because they define political power, with specific posts reserved for the once-dominant Maronite Christians, then the Sunni and the Shiite Muslims. The system, constructed in 1943, emerged shaky but intact after the civil war. The fact that it no longer reflects demographic reality Muslims became the majority in Lebanon by the 1960's makes all groups even more sensitive about conversion. Changing someone's religious denomination affects factions' numbers and influence.
"I think she was killed because she was preaching Christianity to Muslims," said Bishop George Kwaiter, acting archbishop for the Roman Catholic diocese, who has criticized the evangelist movement's assertive efforts at conversion.
"She was in the habit of gathering the Muslim children of the quarter and preaching Christianity to them while dispensing food and toys and social assistance," he said, and her actions upset the city's Muslim hierarchy. "In these times, there are people in the Muslim community who don't even want to hear the word `conversion.' "
The Rev. Sami Dagher, regional leader of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, which ran the clinic where Mrs. Witherall volunteered, denies that she did any proselytizing outside the clinic. He sidesteps the general issue of conversion, however, saying the group merely seeks to expose people to the idea that Jesus Christ is their savior and let them decide for themselves.
But a somewhat more direct goal emerges amid the Web site postings of the previous pastor and his wife, Darrell and Cheryl Phenicie, who were here when Muslim resentment of missionary activities broke into the open last year, but have since moved back to the United States.
"Dramatic conversions are being reported," it says. "And nearly 600 women have received prenatal care and heard the good news of our compassionate Healer, Jesus Christ."
The Web site goes on to say that "new believers" are being persecuted and asks church members to "pray for a recent surge of persecution against the ministry in Sidon."
"The local `religious' leaders have written about us falsely in the newspapers and preached against us in the city mosques," it added.
American missionary work has a long history in Lebanon. Some of the country's most influential institutions, like the American University of Beirut and its hospital, were founded in the mid-19th century by Presbyterian missionaries. That first wave of American Protestant missionaries ultimately abandoned the idea of pushing conversion, concentrating instead on charitable works that would improve the lives of the recipients. But in the late 20th century, missionary work took on an increasingly evangelistic bent, and by the 1990's American fundamentalist Christians put a renewed emphasis on sending young missionaries overseas to preach. Operation Mobilization USA, the group that dispatched the Witheralls to Lebanon, as one such effort.
"In the U.S., they have had a lot of chances to hear the message, but here they have not had the chance," said Mark Meidlinger, 45, an American missionary who moved to southern Lebanon five years ago.
At the memorial service today, Garry Witherall, the victim's British husband, expressed a similar sense of mission before the spillover crowd of several hundred mourners. He said he understood how some people might consider his wife's death a "waste." But he said he would never see it that way because they had come to Lebanon to spread the love and hope of knowing Jesus.
"This is a message worth laying down our lives for," he said, before dissolving into sobs that spread though the crowd.
Before the civil war broke out in 1975, Lebanon was home to hundreds if not thousands of Christian missionaries. The freedom of religion enshrined in the Constitution, not to mention Christian dominance of the government, gave them plenty of range to operate. But the war altered that, with Christian dominance diluted and with both Sunni and Shiite Muslims demanding an increasing political voice. The Christian population of Sidon, estimated around 10 percent before the war, has dwindled to a few hundred families.
Some Muslim clerics also grew suspicious of American evangelists during Israel's occupation of south Lebanon, starting in 1982, when the missionaries used the area to set up a television broadcast that emphasized Christian proselytizing.
That suspicion grew into outright animosity this year with prominent evangelists in the United States voicing support for Israel and denigrating Islam.
This fall, when the United States Embassy in Beirut tried to organize an annual Iftar celebration, the meal breaking the Ramadan fast, it was politely told by Muslim religious leaders in Sidon that no one would attend. "We are not against the American people," said Sheik Maher Hammoud, a prominent Muslim prayer leader. "We are against the government of the United States and its policy in the region."
Sheik Hammoud said Muslim religious leaders grew wary of the Christian and Missionary Alliance because its members combined computer lessons, English instruction and gifts of toys and candy with Sunday school classes for hundreds of Muslim children. "It was upsetting to hear about this because they were trying to exploit their poverty to get them to change their religion," said the sheik, who began denouncing the missionary alliance last fall from the pulpit.
After the initial outcry last year, the church agreed to stop sending its vans out to collect children from poor neighborhoods and Palestinian refugee camps for Sunday school. It considered the matter settled.
But Muslims continued to protest. The missionary alliance remained the target of Friday sermons and last spring a small but influential Muslim monthly called "The Pulpit of the Calling" denounced the group as a Zionist organization.
"They destroy the fighting spirit of the children, especially of the Palestinian youth, by teaching them not to fight the Jews, for the Palestinians to forgive the Jews and leave them Jerusalem," the article said. It also said the group lured the children and young men with promises of an education in the United States, and then threatened to take it all away if they did not convert to Christianity.
Many foreign evangelists in Lebanon even with the post-civil war resurgence they are thought to be fewer than 100 now expressed bafflement that what they saw as good works are viewed by local religious establishments as another means for the United States to subvert the region. "I expect diplomats and people like that to be targets, not people doing this kind of work," said Grant Porter, a friend of Mrs. Witherall who delivered a eulogy at the memorial service today.
"She was a girl just working upstairs in the clinic and somebody decided to kill her," he said. "Sometimes there is friction, but to take it to that level?"