It’s never appropriate to criticize another’s religion. Each of our faiths represent a personalized fusion of our family influences, how we were educated, the social, abstract and spacial conditions of our upbringing, and what we in all our autonomy have chosen to believe in. To criticize that is to throw into question the core of our existence. Religion in the private sphere must always remain sacred, unconditionally unquestionable. This is how we show respect to one another, live and let live.
On the other hand, when religion enters the public sphere, establishing institutions that become political, then it must, must, must be critiqued and scrutinized because, by its nature, when one religious faith dominates, others will feel or even be persecuted. Enter now a long, deeply-infiltrated history of Western imperialism in East Asia where Whites paraded through our motherlands waving Christianity like a banner symbolic of cultural superiority, and it becomes obligatory for self-respecting Asian Christians to interrogate themselves on how and why they are Christian.
Religion, like matters of love and personal relationships, cannot be interpreted solely through the lens of race politics. But when institutionalized religions break into the public sphere, religion, specifically Christianity, which is what this post will focus on, not only can but should be interpreted through this lens because if we don’t, we risk white-washing ourselves (often hypocritically as we proclaim “Asian Pride”).
Once upon a time, White Christian missionaries, good intentions and all, visited famine-torn villages in Asia, bearing conditional gifts of food and sustenance, which were given to the hungry villagers only after they agreed to convert from their native religions to Christianity. This not-so-holy seed then sprouted a score of Christian churches in Asia, many opting to merely mimic the Christian practices of White Westerners instead of fusing and adapting it to traditional Eastern culture.
Often, Asian cultures include a tradition of kow-towing or bowing in respect to deceased parents. This is not a form of worship, but a display of respect for our elders. White missionaries saw this and, in complete ignorance of Asian culture, interpreted it through Western culture as a form of worship. These White missionaries advised Asian Christians against kow-towing at funerals, who obeyed the White missionaries and stood arrogantly, declaring at these funeral ceremonies, “I worship only one God.” Nothing breaks my heart more than to witness such an unapologetic rejection of one’s own heritage.
If only it stopped there, but no: what’s more, Asian Christians are notorious for going out of their way to ostracize and even demonize Asian non-Christians, further implying that Eastern religions integral to our heritage are inferior to the White Western religion of Christianity. Asian Christians, even more zealously than White Christians, impose Western ideologies on East Asia, name-calling any Asian non-Christian who refuses to be indoctrinated a pagan doomed for hell. In effect we create amongst ourselves yet another fissure to Asian Unity. How, in God’s name, could we exploit our free will in such a way as to wield religion as a means of hurting ourselves and others instead of seeking it for private spiritual guidance?
No matter what our denomination, as Asians we need to look hard at how and why any of us came to be Christian in the first place. We need to integrate Christian religion, if that is our faith of choice, with Asian tradition in a way that does not betray our heritage. We do not and in fact must refuse to carry the White Man’s Burden. We should educate ourselves and our peers on the historical conspiracy between Christianity and Western imperialism. Above all else, we should never let our differences in faith divide us, which is exactly what too many Asian Christians do.
I’ll end this comment with a quote from David Park of Next Gener.Asian Church (though admittedly, I’ve taken this quote out of context):
“So many of us have been slaves for so long, we’ll take any master as long as he doesn’t look like us because we can hardly stand to be ourselves, much less to be concerned for ourselves. Why? Because every good slave knows that a child of the master is more valuable than the child of another slave.”
(hat tip to DJ Chuang for the topic suggestion, even though he will very likely disagree with this comment. Photo credit via Flickr: Aaron Olaf.)
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