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More from the Mother Jones article:

..."The issue is the disproportional power relationship," says Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works to promote a positive image of Muslims. "They use their resources to coerce people to do what they want them to do." Hooper remembers reviewing a proposal by a Christian agency to send veterinarians to help impoverished Fulani cattle herders in West Africa. But the plan had a caveat: "You don't get the veterinarian unless you take the missionary," he says. "When people are in desperate circumstances, they'll do things they otherwise wouldn't do."

Robert Macpherson, security director for the aid group care, remembers serving as a U.S. Marine in Somalia during the early 1990s, when some 200 organizations were working to stave off famine in the war-ravaged country. "It was dangerous, dangerous, dangerous," he recalls. Evangelicals only made matters worse, he says, by showing up at food-distribution sites and handing out Christian literature, giving the impression that food aid was contingent on conversion to Christianity. "The next thing we know, they got themselves in the middle of a riot," Macpherson recalls. Angered by the missionaries, Somalis climbed over one another to steal food and set trucks on fire. "They were desperate," he says. "They were dying. This was an emergency."...

...For Donna Derr, the honesty issue is not an abstract one. She's the associate director of international emergency response for Church World Service, which provides aid in more than 80 countries while barring outright proselytizing. From her perspective, Christian evangelizing-particularly by missionaries who masquerade as humanitarian workers-makes it harder for legitimate aid organizations to relieve poverty, malnutrition, and disease. "Groups that have the need to proselytize color us all with the same brush," says Derr. As a result, she says, it's harder to win the trust of those communities her group is trying to serve. She recalls one Southeast Asian nation where rural families suffer from debilitating diseases. "It was difficult to get the local governments to allow us to come in," Derr says, "because they had somebody in the past who tried to start a Christian church. They'd say, 'Oh, your name is Church World Service. You're going to do the same thing.'" In other cases, she adds, evangelicals provoked so much resentment "that the other groups doing aid had to pull out, simply because it was too dangerous." ...