'Savior Complex': There Can and Should Be No Redemption for Renee Bach

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 6, 2023 |

By Alison Lanier | TV | October 6, 2023 |

Renee Bach killed Ugandan children. A lot of children. Children who came to her for help, and whose parents trusted them to her care because she was a “doctor” who focused on malnutrition. And to this day, she’s clearly in denial. She still thinks that being called by her version of God is an excuse—in fact, a justification—for the horrific things that she did. She says the death rate at her clinic was actually very good. She says the children who died in her care would have died anyway, and she was the only care provider who actually gave a shit.

She also has absolutely no medical training and thought God was telling her what dosages to give for medicines she didn’t understand.

Savior Complex is a documentary now streaming on Max, detailing in three hour-long episodes how Bach’s crimes unfolded and the people who battled—sometimes amongst themselves, and often not in the best ways—to hold her accountable. This is not a sympathetic documentary. It’s sickening. Bach tells her life story to soft instrumental music, relaying what she clearly feels is an inspirational story of being “called to serve.” But the docu-series doesn’t tell you how deluded Bach’s version is: it lets Bach hang herself by her own self-righteous denialism. Bach is the documentary’s focal point, but the series makes clear that the problems that created her do not begin and end with the harm she caused.

Bach grew up as a religious homeschooled kid riding horses on the East Coast of the United States. As a recent high school graduate, Bach went to Uganda at nineteen as a missionary in 2007. There, she eventually started a nonprofit called “Serving His Children.” In Jinja, Uganda—among several hundred missionary orphanages, clinics, and schools—she began gaining momentum. Bach’s missionary work was a part of a massive industry of evangelicals in Africa: Conventionally good-looking American white girls going on a glorified vacation and being patted on the back for “service” … It’s all very transparent. And Bach still doesn’t see it.

I’m not going to speak broadly about the truly fucked up industry of white people doing missionary “aid” in Africa. It’s messy, especially because the people who engage in it are so far from malevolent in their own minds. There are those who do tangible good simply by bringing resources and money to bear on the symptoms of widespread social issues. But suffice it to say Bach is a product of an evangelical mechanism, a kind of ideology descended directly from colonialism. She’s part of a program to “help” children to believe in the missionary’s god, based on a whole set of assumptions that her god has sent her to be a light and support in the lives of these poor, suffering Africans.

Never mind a lack of training or expertise or willingness to learn. God is going to provide all the knowledge she’ll need, right?

Bach set up her nonprofit in Masese, a local “slum.” It started with a feeding program, where her mother, Lauri, says she “blossomed” into what she was meant to be doing. (Her mother is a true class act of denialism and blind self-righteousness, which is saying something in a documentary where there’s plenty of that to go around.)

Bach then worked with doctors in local, underserved hospitals to help malnourished children to gain weight while having a place to stay. That was all she was asked to do. Literally. If she had just stuck with feeding local children or just meeting the mandate from the local hospital, that would have been fine.

Fast-forward: Within a short period of time, Bach began performing medical procedures, giving IVs, messing with dosages … In an echo chamber of being told she was special, inspired, called by God, she began gathering children who were not referred by the hospital. She called it “word of mouth.” She admits to being unprepared. That she got sucked in by the urgency and danger of the medical conditions she was faced with.

Almost as if she shouldn’t actually be asking people to rely on her for medical care. She admits, between the lines, that she put herself in the position of a savior—she saw suffering in a “strange country” where she had been “called by God.” She put herself in competition with the local hospitals, in a fantasy world where that was any kind of sane.

The hospital who initially asked for her help says she crossed a line. Good intentions don’t excuse hoarding the hundreds of thousands she fundraised—using dramatic images of sick Black children suffering and ill—instead of supporting the medical community who were qualified to provide care.

Then Bach, in 2011, accepted an actual nurse, Jackie Kramlich, as a missionary volunteer for Serving His Children. Whoops. It’s almost like Bach didn’t realize there was a person who would know a grotesquely messed up NICU when she saw it. Kramlich, with a nursing degree, knew she wasn’t qualified to provide this care, much like Bach, who had taken a two-week course in missionary medicine.

“The more ill they were, the more she took over,” reported the nurse, even when more medically trained volunteers came to the nonprofit, Renee had to be the one who “saved” the suffering children.

Kramlich asked Bach very, very basic medical questions. Bach had no idea of the answers. She gave massive dosages of medications to children, killing them by overdose or by refeeding syndrome.

This nurse was the first whistleblower—and the first of many people whom Bach and her mother would in turn vilify for pointing out the incredible harm their mission of aid was actually doing. One of their rationalizations was that Kramlich was only there for three months, so it isn’t “fair” for her to make these characterizations. As opposed to the more obvious and reasonable explanation that Kramlich, as she says, couldn’t be a part of what she saw in the clinic, after she realized she couldn’t put a stop to it.

The medical community knows how to treat malnutrition. And this is the age of Google. Bach could have just gone to the WHO website. But she didn’t. She thought God was literally telling her the dosages. She behaved as if her faith made her naturally a doctor. To be clear, there were actual doctors and nurses at Bach’s clinic…but they weren’t the ones calling the shots when it came to Bach. One dedicated head nurse, Constance Alonyo, didn’t see it that way—she saw herself as the medical “boss” of Bach. But Alonyo also can’t account for how Bach came to be doing so many procedures herself. The basic fact remains: Bach set herself up as an emergency medical provider and botched care when desperate people came to her.

Renee says she looked into the children’s eyes and saw people who were “so full of Jesus.” It’s how she apparently sees everything. And she can’t escape it. Lauri Bach, her mother and homeschooler, is fully immersed in the Kool-Aid, with an active hand in the disastrous nonprofit and contempt for anyone who challenged her daughter’s mission.

I cannot overstate how infuriating this documentary is to watch. Bach does not understand what white supremacy is. She pretends she doesn’t know how to pronounce “colonialism,” like it’s such a distant and esoteric concept activists are just making up to victimize her.

If she thought positioning herself in front of an HBO documentary crew was a surefire way to make people see her as she sees herself—-well, that shows just about as much judgment as all her other decisions. Instead, it simply becomes more and more horrific to look into the face of this banal monster.

One of the main whistleblower activist groups that took up the charge against Bach—and whom Bach in turn thinks are clueless bullies, of course—is an organization called No White Saviors, which challenges the impunity and ethos of white missionaries, like Bach, who come to Africa on some kind of self-actualization power trip to, in their view, help the poor unfortunates and bring them to Jesus. “Africa is not your playground,” says the group’s social media.

One co-founder, Kelsey Nielsen, who calls herself a “recovering White Savior,” also felt “called” by God to Uganda after high school. She knew Renee Bach, and speaks out vehemently against her. Other, active white missionaries raised alarmed about Bach’s behavior. Children were dying. It was one of their own causing those deaths. But bringing the law or even the health department to bear on Bach was shockingly difficult—well, not too shocking, when you tally up the amount of money that Bach and missionaries like her brought, and still bring, into the country. But the activists, missionaries, and lawyers pushed on, and eventually, Bach’s clinic was shut down.

No White Saviors has its own internal messes, and their methods were sometimes reckless and at odds with each other and with the legal team in Uganda painstakingly and slowly trying to bring Bach to justice. And while the documentary details those battles and fallings-out among the activists, it doesn’t lose sight of the real villain in all this: Bach, and the ideology/fantasy she subscribed to, where her very presence was an undeniable good and the children she killed with inept treatment were blessed to be in her care. There are bigger problems than Renee Bach, the documentary makes clear, but she’s a clear flashpoint of how not to address those problems.

Could she have done good? Yes. She actually did, to some degree—when she wasn’t playing doctor. Like I said: if she’d just continued using her resources to feed children, instead of jumping headfirst into a fantasy of divine intervention, none of this would have happened.

But it’s overwhelmingly clear Bach will never see the light. She’s a victim of outrageous charges, in her mind. She says that she desperately wants a judge to look at her and tell her she did nothing wrong…but settles the civil case against her instead. Her mother does nothing to disabuse her daughter of her savior complex. Lauri Bach ignored her legal obligations as a leader of the nonprofit and the clear ineptitude by her daughter. She obviously knew that her daughter messed up, but Lauri places blame everywhere but her daughter. Blind and desperate rationalization is a hell of a drug.

It’s hard to watch these people. It’s hard to watch them recounting what they did and still trying to paint themselves as the hero because Africa is just a tragedy anyway, right? They make themselves comfortable with fantastic versions of the obvious story.

It’s also hard to call Renee Bach an outright murderer because she went into her work with clearly benevolent intentions. She went off the deep end with how she went about trying to make those intentions a reality, though. It would have been so simple for her to listen when she was told: You are not qualified to be giving this treatment. But she didn’t. And that’s where she stops being an optimistic fool and begins to be a reckless killer. Hopefully her story and the legal action that was brought against her will enable local people in Uganda to challenge other white missionaries who abuse their positions and resources.

What the documentary does well, and what makes it worthwhile to watch, in my opinion, is not only showing a portrait of a destructive would-be martyr but in giving a depiction of ineffective activism. No White Saviors becomes a cautionary tale of activism that stokes outrage (and let’s be real, there was a lot of outrage to be had in Bach’s crimes) where it could be pursuing the meaningful justice that lawyers labor to achieve—lawyers like Primah Kwagala, the Ugandan civil rights attorney working on behalf of the mothers who lost children to Bach’s “care.” Kwagala becomes the primary voice of the series’ final episode, one of the only people in this whole snarl to keep her cool and see the full picture clearly.

I can’t recommend this documentary for anyone who wants to have a nice day. But it’s all streaming on Max if you want some horrific true crime to binge.