Harvesting souls a sensitive business in Asia
By John Chalmers
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010815/3/1byts.html
NEW DELHI, Aug 16 (Reuters) - When Pope John Paul II visited Asia in 1999, he
prayed that a "great harvest of faith will be reaped in this vast and vital
continent".
But planting the cross in Asia will take more than prayer in a region where
the missionary movement is viewed with deep suspicion -- by many as a threat to
purist ideological regimes, by others as a modern and more pernicious form of
colonialism.
Twenty-four staff from the German-based relief agency Shelter Now
International were arrested in Afghanistan on August 5 on charges of trying to
convert Afghans to Christianity.
Those charges are punishable by death under the austere Islamic law
implemented by the ruling Taliban, whose foreign minister says material seized
showed the aid workers were trying to proselytise Afghan Muslims.
"To convert us, missionaries have worked for 500 years to undermine our
reverence for our gods and scriptures," said Arun Shourie, once a
journalist and now a minister in India's Hindu nationalist-led government.
"Till the early 1950s the denunciations used to be open, shrill,
abusive. Today the slander is sophisticated, the untruths are spoken rather than
written," Shourie wrote in a recent book on missionaries' objectives and
claims, "Harvesting our Souls".
But China, not India, was the country the Pope mentioned most in a paper he
released to prepare the Roman Catholic Church in Asia for a millennium of
conversion.
CHINA FERTILE GROUND
China has become fertile ground for Christian missionaries as the Communist
Party struggles to fill an ideological vacuum.
Drastic economic reforms have undermined the socialist values which once
underpinned society and many Chinese are turning to traditional faiths or
new-fangled quasi-religious groups in search of spiritual sustenance.
Worship is still officially confined to five state-controlled religions and
proselytising is strictly banned.
China has 10 million registered Protestants and four million members of the
official Chinese Catholic church, which does not recognise the Pope. But
millions more worship in underground churches and prayer meetings, often with
the help of overseas missionaries posing as teachers or tourists.
Last year, Chinese police briefly detained three Taiwan-born U.S.
missionaries for attending a secret meeting of a banned evangelical Christian
group.
The Fang-cheng church, with about 500,000 followers, was one of at least 14
Chinese Christian sects the authorities have labelled "evil cults",
according to the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and
Democracy.
That groups them with the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, allowing
tough penalties for followers and organisers.
In mainly Muslim but multi-racial Malaysia, the constitution guarantees the
freedom to profess, practise and propagate religion albeit with restrictions as
to how that affects Muslims.
But even there, state and federal law may control or restrict propagation of
religious doctrine among Muslims which can jar otherwise tolerant inter-faith
relations.
LONG HISTORY OF MISSIONARIES IN INDONESIA
Missionaries followed Dutch and Portuguese spice traders into the eastern
part of what is now Indonesia in the 16th century, long after Arab traders took
Islam to parts of the archipelago, and they are still most active in those poor
and remote areas.
In Irian Jaya, also known as West Papua, missionaries provide a valuable
supplement to the government's poor infrastructure and services, running an air
system that takes supplies to isolated districts and operating schools and
clinics.
Some foreign Christian groups have poured Bibles and support into the
Moluccas, where thousands of people have died in a religious war between
Christians and Muslims.
This has triggered accusations of foreign interference.
Although the world's largest Muslim nation -- about 90 percent of its 210
million people follow Islam -- Indonesia officially recognises and ostensibly
protects other religions.
India's constitution treats all religions equally.
But political liberals and church activists point to a series of grisly
attacks on Christian clergy and missionaries in recent years as evidence that
the secular nature of the Hindu-majority country is under threat.
Christians trace the surge in antagonism to the ascendancy of the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has led coalition governments
since early 1998.
"There are no missionaries in India doing religious work, that is to say
people involved in conversion," said Ipe Joseph, general secretary of the
National Council of Churches in India.
"Foreign missionaries as in the British days do not exist today...to the
best of my knowledge it is nil, zero."
"FORCIBLE CONVERSION"
He said non-governmental organisation workers with Christian names, many of
whom work in education or poverty alleviation, are these days glibly branded as
missionaries.
Meanwhile, there are more than 1,000 Hindu missionaries working in the
northeastern states of India, where violent separatist movements have raged in
Christian-majority states.
Father Dominic Emmanuel, director of communication for the Delhi Catholic
Archdiocese, rejected allegations that Christians use allurements -- such as
schools and health care -- to drive poor people, particularly tribal people,
into their faith's net.
He pointed out that if that was the case the proportion of Christians in the
population of one billion would have risen. On the contrary, in the 40 years
since the 1951 national census it fell to 2.34 percent from 2.8 percent.
Emmanuel said a "lunatic fringe" wanted to prevent those on the
lowest rungs of Hinduism's caste ladder, the landless and bonded labourers, from
getting education, standing up for their rights and escaping lives of grinding
poverty and enslavement.
A member of the Hindu-revivalist Shiv Sena party, an ultra-nationalist ally
of the BJP, has introduced a bill in parliament seeking a ban on forcible
religious conversions, and the government is plannning to tighten the law
regulating the flow of donations from abroad to organisations in the country.
Shourie, who like millions of India's elite was educated in a church school,
says "a mighty reaction" is building in the country against
conversion.
"...few developments have alarmed citizens as the systematic targeting
by Christian missionaries of people in the northeast, and in our tribal
areas," he said.
"Conversion is the main activity of church groups, it is their principal
business."
**
|