This is a wonderful topic to me because I've agonized over the issue of missionaries and evangelizing in general for years. I have too much to say on the topic so will try to be organized:

1) The essence of evangelizing is the proposition that the one doing the evangelizing has a 'better way' than the one being evangelized.

2) Thus there can be good evangelizing (such as when I talk to my Baptist neighbors about the improvements made by Charles Darwin to the theory of Natural Selection).

And bad evangelizing (where a couple of sportsjacketed LDS missionaries knock on my door to let me know that there's a whole nother book I've got to read to ensure the safe transition of my soul to the afterlife).

3) Some peoples clearly are worse off due to the influence of the most self righteous among the prosylitizzers . I would certainly include the Yanomanos and the bulk of the Polynesians. On the other hand I once heard a native Hawaiian bemoan the malign influence of the American missionaries on her islands, who taught that the Hula tradition was lustful hence evil, but she said that the introduction of the printed word more than made up for it.

4) If you extend the evangelizing idea to include the cultural expansion of the European nations around the world, the following subjects have been evangelized:

Language
Economic Systems
Technologies
Mathematics
Science
Art

5) Some evangelizing goes two ways: Adoption of customs, expressions, ideas, and especially cuisine gathered from abroad.

6) Bad evangelizing to me is hypocritical. It comes under the forced grin of the promise of eternal bliss, not right now but in the indefinite future. Beneath it lies the subtext: "I'm so screwed up in my philosophical approach to life that I finally accepted a narrow band of belief among the smargasboard that is out there, and in order to reinforce my wafer-thin metaphysical confidence in these beliefs I have chosen to inflict them on everyone I meet to convince myself of their merit."

7) Good evangelizing to me: "I am in your neighborhood to investigate your life and beliefs and also to explain to you, if you are interested, my life and beliefs in the object of improving both our understandings and ways of life. If you find my world-view worth adopting, then let's find a way to relate it to the real world in which you life.

I used to be dead-set against missionaries, but as I thought about it and met a few, and investigated my own tendency to pontificate, I came to my current opinion that it's more of a case-by-case affair.

Quote:
"What a terrible thing it is to think of all the people who lived out their lives on those beautiful islands (Hawaii) and never knew there was a Hell"
Mark Twain