I wonder if in a Islam wank scenario you can have what happened in Indonesia happen in Japan as well and if the local powers would react the same.
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WI: Europe More Successful in Spreading Christianity To Asia?
- Thread starter TickTock The Witch's Dead
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- asia christianity europe
I can understand why people are concerned about creating heretical versions of Christianity, but it flies in the face of historically successful models. The barbarian conversion to Christianity overlooked a lot of impure understandings and imperfect practices that were only very, very slowly corrected.
My guess, though, is that after the Reformation both sides of the resulting split were sensitized to doctrinal purity and were more concerned about accusations of being lax from the other side.
Faeelin
Banned
I'm not changing the subject, but the point is that China is seeing a huge resurgence in religion in general, and Christianity is only a small part of it. It doesn't mean that Christianity is going to convert all of China.
The whole doctrinal purity presents another problem -- the need for Roman approval for bishops, for Roman training for some priests... makes it easy to have Europeans go abroad, makes it hard to have a locally grown clergy that can preserve and grow a church, and that can use cultural competency to translate religious orthodoxy into local terms
Artaxerxes
Banned
More than that, after 1500 the centralisation and race issues come into matters. Particularly in the 18th to 20th century.
How dare these inferior cultures alter the religion, this is the way it is and no we're not altering it for a savage/decadent oriental/etc must have played a part.
It was more "we do it like that because we've always done like that and you don't do it like that you're wrong".
Also some concerns about paganism. If I remember, in Chinese there were some overlap between words like Emperor and God (or something like that, cannot remember the exact detail but I have it somewhere. So you couldn't be sure if they were praising God or still being pagan. Similar to the Roman cult of the Emperor
*Looks at Chinese gov't ban of Christian churches except for two extremely State controlled and state filled Churches* Gee wonder why.
Hm. On the question itself, maybe have more Nisrani (Indian Christians) come into the Roman fold, or have a fledgling Nisrani kingdom be pumped full of support by Europe because something something trade.
Really, the farther back you get, the more likely you can get Christianity to spread farther. Assuming that, say, a Nisrani empire in the 500's or Nestorian Mongols establishing themselves in China do not meet this question, the best thing you can do is mess around with the theology of the Protestant Reformation. Create a Protestant baseline that is extremely evangelistic (think "the only way you can go to heaven is if you take a soul you converted with you), and then have more nations embrace it. Then you'll get a lot of really evangelistic Empires just around the time of the discovery of Asia.
Well, we do have the case of Korea, where Christianity gained a significant foothold (about 30% of the population of South Korea) despite no European colonization.
Portugal had a trading empire in Asia, but actual colonies were very few. There was what - Goa, Macau, and East Timor? Not much else except a few more port cities and such.
That European colonialism caused resentment against Christianity is a totally different thing than the claim that they were "forcing down conversions down people's throats". The Opium Wars certainly weren't about that. Certainly the most obvious examples of Christian missionaries in Asia (the Jesuit missions in China and Japan in the 17th century; the American missionary efforts in the 19th and early 20th century) did not fit your scenario at all. The other example of Christian missionary efforts were the Philippines. However, it was successful so doesn't fit your scenario. Furthermore, despite some violence accompanying it, I would disagree that it was primarily due to "forcing down conversions down people's throats".
I've said that in my first post for sure. If it weren't for the that obstacle Christianity would have a better reputation for sure.
They were still extremely influential in the region. They even held a few other cities at one point.
Both the shoving down the throats and the European colonialism issues are two different things for sure. But both did give Christianity a bad reputation for sure.
No one ever said it would. I know when there is some pet peeve that bothers you its hard not to see it everywhere, but its important not to.
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You are generalizing too much. There was a secular sinophile vogue during the 17th and 18th C. I don't think that sort of attitude either way, though, had much to do with the Chinese rites controversy.
One of the reasons why Christianity was so successful in Korea was the Jesuit's integration of Confucian/Buddhist customs into Korean-rite Catholicism (mainly ancestor worship). This allowed for early Jesuit missionaries to adapt the faith to their Korean believers, in a similar way Wulfila preached a particular form of Christianity to the Goths.
Interestingly enough, the success of Protestantism in the Northern half of Korea during the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be traced mainly due to the Western knowledge shared by missionaries (medicine, engineering, etc.), and the sending of sons to Protestant schools in the United States. Furthermore, the North was more lax in its Buddhist/Confucian religiosity than the South, lacking long-standing religious institutions due to a sudden population influx seeking new industrial jobs where there had previously been very few. Therefore, this hypothetical theological gap was able to be quickly filled by ambitious missionaries.
Protestant Christianity also became a rallying point against colonialism, especially against the Japanese, who the Christian Koreans saw as an overtly Shinto-Buddhist invader, forcing the worship of the Japanese Emperor and the destruction of traditional shrines and sacred places.
Modern Chinese conversions to American Protestant sects can be traced back to similar phenomena in regards to American missionary work and charity programs.
Interestingly enough, the success of Protestantism in the Northern half of Korea during the late 19th and early 20th centuries can be traced mainly due to the Western knowledge shared by missionaries (medicine, engineering, etc.), and the sending of sons to Protestant schools in the United States. Furthermore, the North was more lax in its Buddhist/Confucian religiosity than the South, lacking long-standing religious institutions due to a sudden population influx seeking new industrial jobs where there had previously been very few. Therefore, this hypothetical theological gap was able to be quickly filled by ambitious missionaries.
Protestant Christianity also became a rallying point against colonialism, especially against the Japanese, who the Christian Koreans saw as an overtly Shinto-Buddhist invader, forcing the worship of the Japanese Emperor and the destruction of traditional shrines and sacred places.
Modern Chinese conversions to American Protestant sects can be traced back to similar phenomena in regards to American missionary work and charity programs.
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I never knew Spain tried to invade Kampuchea.
Anyways assuming Europeans did adopt better policies would Christianity have become a dominant religion in most of Asia?
I really didn't want to spend more time on this... But in a word, no. First, consider Alan Strathern's theory of transcendentalist intransigence. Fancy name, but what it states is fairly simple. All it means is that rulers of a society dominated by exclusivist organized religions, such as Christianity, Islam, and Theravada Buddhism, will almost never convert to a foreign faith. This means that by 1400, Christianity has little chance in the entire Middle East and most of Southeast Asia without conquest and violence. I don't think I need to explain how difficult it is to convince a Muslim sultan to convert to Christianity and lose the support of his subjects. As to the latter, only two rulers - Dharmapala of Sri Lanka and Ramadhipati of Cambodia - apostatized from Theravada Buddhism in all of Early Modern history (technically one other was baptized, but he was a nicodemite Buddhist). Both were in extreme circumstances; Dharmapala was basically coerced by the Portuguese to convert and Ramadhipati's only base of support was Muslim. After their conversion, Dharmapala's subjects deserted en masse to his Buddhist rival while Ramadhipati was eventually kicked out by angry nobles who asked Vietnam for help. Note that Dharmapala failed catastrophically even with a European military presence to back him up.
That leaves South Asia and East Asia. Let's look at the former first. Despite almost a thousand years of Muslim rule, the majority of the Aryavarta remains almost entirely Hindu. In fact, per Eaton ("Approaches to to the Study of Conversion to Islam in India"), Islam never attracted much more than 10% of the population in most parts of India where a Hindu social order was established. Why exactly do you expect Christianity to do better, considering that Islam had state support and the key tenets between Islam and Christianity are relatively similar (at least compared to Hinduism)?
In East Asia, sure, Christianity (a very heterodox strain of it) might have done better. East Asia is not, however, "most of Asia."
Or just look at Islam in much of the Indian Ocean world, where people did "decide to go for better tactics like not forcing conversions down people's throats or commit too many acts ignore violence that would turn Asians away from" Islam. Yet South India is majority Hindu, Islam in Sri Lanka is a small minority religion, and those areas of Southeast Asia that converted never had a proper Hindu or Buddhist social order in the first place.
That is a very tall order. Dominant as in "majority demographically" is a low probability outcome, even with an optimized approach.
Europeans could get conversions from state leaders in exchange for benefiting them in return.
Look at what happened to Dharmapala. His subjects renounced him because he was, in their eyes, a heretic apostate and not a Buddhist like a Sri Lankan king should be. The political costs are significantly greater than the benefits of allying with Europeans via conversion.
Or maybe the Europeans held foreign leaders out in taking control AND THEN convert them?