Having a problem getting a character motivated

So I have a mildly Christian character who I need to get on a spaceship to an alien planet, on a mission to investigate the native Humanoid Aliens while interacting with them under a Masquerade. There is a reason for him to go, but it's entirely self-centred and greedy.

So that the character can lie to himself, I'd like to be able to have a religiously-motivated, "noble" reason for this character to go. The obvious - evangelizing - doesn't work, because this is 20 Minutes in the Future and religion has fallen out of fashion and would be very hard under the Masquerade anyway. The issue is further complicated by the fact that most of the rest of the crew are Transhuman, and so better at, e.g. negotiations than this character would be. (However, they do evoke Uncanny Valley occasionally, which causes problems.)

Does anyone have any ideas how he could be convinced he should go there? (And, later, convince himself that he's there to do something noble, in contrast to what he ends up actually doing.)

Maybe he treats it like visiting Africa, but at a much, much different scale?

Basically, he's going to the alien planet as a way to find himself, and to escape a shabby life on Earth. Maybe he left a spouse recently, or is otherwise out of the job, or just plain old having a quarter-life/mid-life crisis.

Escaping a shitty life does add to it, but I think I have a solution now:

One of the people playing Xanatos Speed Chess convince him that the transhumans who are on the mission with him are trying to make friends with the natives, so that the natives can then be leveraged into a similarly insanely technologically advanced lifestyle, and asks the religious character to help them disrupt that by reporting back confidential details. The character, considering this a chance to avoid the mistakes of the 19th century missionaries, agrees, possibly going as far as to jeopardize human relations with the aliens.

edited 5th Oct '12 4:01:38 PM by Yej