7 - Christianity in the Other Countries of Southeast Asia: Brunei, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam

Summary

There is clearly a great range in terms of the strength of Christianity in the different countries in Southeast Asia. One need only consider the startling contrast between the Philippines, where Christianity is part of everyday life and plays a powerful sociopolitical role, and countries like Laos where Christians worship almost in secret and constitute a miniscule portion of the population. These differences might play a bigger role in the relationships between the countries in Southeast Asia, except that Christianity today is a minority religion in the region as a whole, which is dominated by Islam and Buddhism. Yet while nations are obviously keen to keep religious sensitivities out of their official dealings with each other, the fact that religion is so closely intertwined with socio-political forces means that changes in the religious landscape of the region may also exert pressure on domestic and international arrangements. Christianity, as the more recent arrival among religions in Southeast Asia, and the one with the greatest amount of input and influence from far-off foreign organizations, is the logical candidate to be regarded with suspicion as the agent of change and destabilization.

Thus any consideration of Christianity in Southeast Asia, despite the relatively small number of Christians in most of the countries in this region, needs to consider a number of issues. The first is what might be called the cultural politics of Christianity in this region: the inevitable association of Christianity with European, North American (and to a lesser extent, anglophone Pacific) countries. Although developments over the latter part of the twentieth century, and especially in the last three decades or so, have moved Christianity away from merely being a colonial legacy to a religion with deep local involvement (for example, in the phenomenon of large and rapidly-growing independent churches, or in the rise of mission-sending countries in Southeast Asia), there is still the persistent conception of Christianity as being inextricably bound to the cultural and political beliefs of European, North American and other countries.