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Being Protestant Christians in Southeast Asian Worlds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 August 2011

Charles F. Keyes
Charles F. Keyes
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Abstract

The five cases of Protestant Christian practice in Indonesia and Thailand presented in this symposium are used to develop a sociology of Protestantism in Southeast Asia. A review is first undertaken of the history of Protestant missionary activity in Southeast Asia. Protestantism, it is observed, insists on the ultimate authority of the Bible. This authority has not been accepted by Southeast Asians until they have access to the Christian message in their own languages and they are motivated to adopt Christian practices as a means to confront deep crises in their lives. The establishment of Protestant Christianity has entailed the interpreting of the Christian message with reference to the non-Christian contexts in which Protestants in Southeast Asia live.

Type
Symposium: Protestants and Tradition in Southeast Asia
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , September 1996 , pp. 280 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1996

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References

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16 Brumberg, Joan Jacobs, in Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson, the Dramatic Events of the First American Foreign Mission, and the Course of Evangelical Religion in the Nineteenth Century (New York: The Free Press and London: Collier Macmillan, 1980)Google Scholar, traces the roots of the first American foreign missions to the “Second Awakening” of the early nineteenth century. This biography is excellent both for its study of the American social context which supported the foreign missions of the period and for its critique of missionary hagiography.

17 I use the name Burma in preference to Myanmar, the current official name of the country, because my references are to the country at a period when it was known by the former name.

18 One would like to see a study of translation by Protestants comparable to Rafael's Contracting Colonialism, which examines the consequences of translation (and mis-translation) of Catholic liturgies into Tagalog by Spanish friars.

19 See Keyes, “Why the Thai Are Not Christians”.

20 See Bentley, G. Carter, “Implicit Evangelism: American Education among the Muslim Maranao”, Filipinos 12 (1989): 73–96Google Scholar.

21 See, in this regard, Watson, Keith, “The Contribution of Mission Schools to Educational Development in Southeast Asia”, in Education in the Third World, ed. Watson, Keith (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 71–87Google Scholar, and Keyes, Charles F., “State Schools in Rural Communities: Reflections on Rural Education and Cultural Change in Southeast Asia”, in Reshaping Local Worlds: Formal Education and Cultural Change in Rural Southeast Asia, ed. Keyes, Charles F. (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Monograph 36, 1991), pp. 1–18Google Scholar.

22 Starling, Lucy, Dawn over Temple Roofs (New York: World Horizons, 1960), p. 179Google Scholar. A handbook on Thailand published in 1974, but drawing on data from the 1960s, estimated that the total Christian population of Thailand was 100,000. See Moore, Frank J., Thailand: Its People, Its Society, Its Culture (New Haven: HRAF Press, 1974), p. 216Google Scholar.

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24 These figures are calculated from statistical tables given in Rauws, et al., The Netherlands Indies.

25 Statistics again calculated from data in ibid.

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27 Ibid., p. 25.

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32 This and the following statistical data are taken from Barnett, David B. (ed.), World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, AD 1900–2000 (London: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

33 If Khmer who had been converted while living in refugee camps inside Thailand were taken into account, the percentage of Christians in the Cambodian population may be larger than that in Thailand. The percentage of Protestants in Laos in the mid-1980s appears to have been roughly equal to that of Thailand.

34 I have elaborated on the idea of “crisis of order” in other papers dealing with Buddhist movements in Thailand. See my “Millennialism, Theravada Buddhism, and Thai Society”, Journal of Asian Studies 36,2 (1977): 283–302Google Scholar; “Political Crisis and Militant Buddhism in Contemporary Thailand”, in Religion and Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Burma, and Laos, ed. Smith, Bardwell (Chambersburg, Pa.: Anima Books, 1978), pp. 147–64Google Scholar; and “Buddhist Politics and Their Revolutionary Origins in Thailand”, in Eisenstadt, S.N. (ed.), “Structure and History”, International Political Science Review 10,2 (1989): 121–42Google Scholar.

35 See Aragon's paper in this issue of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies; cf. Tapp, Nicholas, Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 85Google Scholar, and Tapp, “The Impact of Missionary Christianity upon Marginalized Ethnic Minorities”.

36 See Joseph A. Weinstock, “Kaharingan: Life and Death in Southern Borneo”, pp. 98–112, and Jane Monnig Atkinson, “Religions in Dialogue: The Construction of an Indonesian Minority Religion”, pp. 171–86, both in Indonesian Religions in Transition, ed. Kipp and Rogers.

37 See, in this regard, my “Millennialism, Theravāda Buddhism, and Thai Society” and my “Buddhist Politics and Their Revolutionary Origins in Thailand”.

38 Wolters, O.W., History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), pp. 6ffGoogle Scholar; also see my “Christianity as an Indigenous Religion in Southeast Asia”, p. 179.

39 In 1988, Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, reported that since 1980 the percentage of Christians in the Singaporean population had grown from 10.3 per cent to 18.7 per cent (N. Balakrishnan, “The Gospel According to an Agnostic Lee”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 Dec. 1988). This remarkable growth was almost entirely accounted for by the success of evangelical Protestants. See Lincoln Kaye and V.G. Kulkarni, “A Queue of Christians”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 12 Jan. 1984, and Margaret Scott, “Halting the Crusade”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 Jul. 1987. This success stimulated protests by Malay Muslims and led to controls being placed on proselytization. Government efforts to control religion can, in some cases, enhance rather than detract from the charisma of evangelists. In Vietnam between 1974 and 1986, during a period when joining either Catholic or Protestant churches was viewed as an act hostile to national interests, evangelical Protestants more than doubled in number, from 140,000 in 1974 to around 300,000 in 1986. See Reimer, Reg, “Evangelicals in Vietnam”, Indochina Issues 74 (1987): 8–9Google Scholar.

40 Cf. Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, ch. 6.

41 See Horton, Robin, “African Conversion”, Africa 41,2 (1971): 85–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “On the Rationality of Conversion”, Africa 45,3 (1975): 219–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “On the Rationality of Conversion, Part II”, Africa 45,4 (1975): 73–99Google Scholar. Also see Hefner's discussion of Horton in “World Building and the Rationality of Conversion”, pp. 200–222.

42 See Stern, Theodore, “Ariya and the Golden Book: A Millenarian Buddhist Sect among the Karen”, Journal of Asian Studies 27,2 (1968): 297–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Tapp, Sovereignty and Rebellion, ch. 7.

43 The development of reformed Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia and the transformation of Theravada Buddhism in Burma and Thailand were, however, influenced to some extent by the rationalist approach of Christian missionaries. As noted above, missionary-established schools paved the way for modern state-sponsored secular education.