There are many things about the Church here in Southeast Asia that are surprising to me, and quite different from my Northeast United States of American context back home. I expected that. I did not expect what those things would be.
I of course knew that Asia has a wonderful, deep set of resources for music and hymnody that would so enrich my worship life here. After all, a few of those songs have made it into my own American hymnal. True, there are more from northern Asia than from the south, but I suspected that this place would have its own music too, music that would make my heart soar and give me new lenses through which to see God.
No Asian-heritage music exists in churches here. A few songs we sing are from the British/American evangelical heritage, usually with a contemporary feel in their style. The rest are all from contemporary evangelical megachurches in Australia and America.
The voices are few, but in Asia there are wonderful theological ideas being brought forward that are characterized by their context. In most parts of the East, culture is shame-based instead of guilt-based. Social hierarchies are maintained in very different ways than in the West, and filial relationships are treasured with a much greater depth—and obligation. When Jesus talks about hating your father and mother and brothers, when Paul proclaims that we are adopted as God’s own children, these things will clearly ring differently in Asia than in Europe.
The theology I hear preached is a personal piety that sounds very much like America in the 1940s. Perhaps without the World War-oriented focus. Perhaps.
It is very jarring. The primary characteristic of Christians here is what feels to me (and I will correct that in a moment) to be an overinflated sense of adherence to the Law. Anathema, I say. The New Testament clearly tells us that in Jesus, the Law has been fulfilled. We are no longer slaves to the Law. We are freed from it. We may be freed from it by becoming slaves to God instead, but this is an altogether different—and at least from my perspective, non-legalistic—sort of thing. In any case, I struggle to force myself to go to worship here, because the sermons are never about what Jesus has done for us. They are always and only about what we must do for Jesus. (Again, a caricature.)
At first I suspected that this was connected to the majority-Muslim context in which the Church here is situated. Perhaps the Church has accidentally become Islamicized because of its surrounding culture? The word “Islam” means simply “submission,” and that is a wonderful description for the religious tradition. In broad strokes, Islam is about submitting to God’s will. It’s a beautiful idea that you’ll find buried in Christianity as well—but not at its center. There are plenty of Christians in the US who have incorrectly moved it to the center, but I have always maintained that while most of them profess to hate Islam with their lips, they are actually Muslims in their hearts. Well, except for the hate. There are plenty of hateful Muslim fundamentalists in this world, too, but a true Muslim doesn’t carry hate in their hearts any more than a true Christian does.
In any case, as my friend Julianne likes to remind me, “Not everyone who says to Jesus, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of Heaven.” Yes, we have that mark by doing the will of our Father in Heaven. But we can also see that taking another religion and putting Jesus’ name on it does not make it Christianity. Islam in the name of Christ is still Islam. Personally, while I’m no syncretist, I am okay with that. Islam is not my religion, but it gets at who God is, and I think Muslims are great. Would that I were so good at caring about God’s will in my life! But let’s call it what it is.
But as I have lived in this community for four months now, I have come to see something slightly different. I’m not surprised by it, but these wonderful people really do love Jesus. They have a connection to God, and are filled with the Holy Spirit, and sometimes in ways I’ve never seen before. (Again, not better, just different. The Spirit pours out different gifts on different cultures for obvious reasons.) I never thought I would find otherwise, but I do have confirmation that this is truly Christianity, and not something else in disguise. And yet, from my progressive American perspective, the witness of Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is practically ignored. What could be going on?
I wondered, briefly, if it might be the force of colonialism rearing its ugly head. The ways it does so, even decades after the country declared its independence, are visible everywhere. Christianity arrived in force with the British, Dutch, and Portugeese who declared that this land belonged to them, even though clearly it already belonged to somebody else. They converted that “somebody else” to Christianity for the “salvation of their souls.” But in the process, they also found that this new “better” religion could be useful for the subjugation of their bodies. Emphasizing the legal and behavioral sides of religion, rather than the freedom and abundant life we have in Christ, was a way that the European colonizers could keep the local population under their thumb. “Do what Jesus wants, or you’ll go to hell,” they’d say. And then quietly replace what Jesus wants with what they wanted instead.
I do suspect, highly, that this is part of the story, at least on a small scale. But there are a few problems with the idea as well. The obvious one is that the converts to Christianity were few. Islam arrived in the twelfth century, if I have my dates right. It stuck. The Europeans may have tried to bring people to Christianity, but they didn’t try very hard. And their failed efforts have doubtlessly helped to create the tight legal strictures against evangelism to Muslims in this country. (I’d say, “Thank God,” but most Christian readers would either condemn me for it or say I was just trying to avoid government trouble, so I won’t.) But whoever the missionaries were that came to this land to preach Christ, they weren’t very convincing.
The other big, obvious problem with this postcolonialist theory is that many of the forms of Christianity that are here arrived long before the Europeans did. One of the states on Borneo—Sabah or Sarawak, I can never remember which—is predominantly Christian. I haven’t studied this much, but it looks like Europeans did bring the faith there—but a few generations before the colonial movement. And one of the expressions of my own Lutheran Church here had little to do with Europe, but arrived through Tamil-speaking migrants from India. The colonists could certainly have influenced them, but they were already well-established long before they arrived, and we all know how easy it is for the Church to embrace change. No, European colonization was A problem, but it wasn’t THIS problem.
My current theory is, I think, a pretty good one. It germinated from a conversation with a Muslim here who was speaking about his own adherence to God’s Law. “There are some things we do because it’s enforced. Eating Halal, or fasting during Ramadan. But most things, in progressive Islam like this, we observe the way that we want.” Another conversation, this one with some thoughtful Christian students, confirmed it. “We focus on our behavior so much because it’s important for us to be different from everyone else. We need to understand our own identity as Christians.”
And that really is it. In the United States, the majority religion is Christianity. It shapes the ideal of our whole culture. And in doing so, it is pretty weak. Because the culture is identified with Christianity, Christianity, in some ways, has to conform to the culture. It is difficult to tell the difference, in the US, between a faithful Christian and a principled atheist. Not because our beliefs aren’t different; of course they are. But we generally expect “Americans” and “Christians” to act in about the same way. And except for subtleties, we usually do.
And at the same time, it is often quite easy to pick out a Muslim in a crowd in the United States. That’s obviously true for many women who wear the hijab, and it doesn’t hurt that it is often related to ethnicity in America as well. But if you know a few simple things to look for, you could spot a white, male Muslim without too much difficulty. Muslim faithful in the United States do adapt their faith to the culture in some ways. But they also purposefully live differently than the culture. This is part of their faith, but it gains importance because it also helps them to maintain their identity.
The opposite is of course true here. Muslims behave the same way everyone else does in the culture, since the culture is generally Muslim. Christians seek to understand themselves as different from that Muslim culture, and so they emphasize their religiously-motivated behaviors in order to help them construct an identity.
Everything must adapt to the culture. Even Church’s Chicken, which in this Muslim country might not be very successful with the name “Church.”
So here they call it “Texas” Chicken. And the place is always full.
Now that I’ve been able to name it, it is pretty obvious, and easy to see. But the reason it was so jarring, and so difficult to find in the first place, is the real insight here: To my American eyes, this culture doesn’t look Muslim, aside from the ubiquitous masjidin and the five-times-daily call to prayer. It looks very American. Or to put it another way, it looks Christian, since my social constructs say that American and Christian are pretty much the same.
The necessary shift of attention, then, is away from the Church here, and instead to both the Mosque here and to the Church back home. If American Christianity and Malaysian Islam look so much the same, one has to wonder if Malaysian Islam is really faithful to the foundational tenets of Islam—and much more importantly for me, if American Christianity is really faithful to the foundational tenets of Christianity. I’m not a Muslim scholar, so I am not qualified to answer the first question. But the answer to the second is relatively obvious. Christianity in America is failing to be Christian.
Not that this should surprise anyone either, particularly. After all, we’ve long been talking about the slow decline and death of the mainline Church. And the fundamentalists may seem to be going strong, but popularity and success aren’t the same thing when you measure success by “faithfulness to Jesus.” No, we accuse them of being not really Christian, and they accuse us of being not really Christian, and it turns out that we both are right. We’ve both conformed ourselves to the world in very different ways, and it’s led to apathy in the mainline and zealotry in the rest. And real love in almost nobody.
So what do we do? First, of course, we trust that death always leads to resurrection. That was true for Jesus, and it will be true for his beloved bride, the Church, as well. This is my refrain. Always resurrection.
Second, we do need to look at our own behavioral norms and question them. Is this Christian or is this cultural? Or is it one of those things that can be legitimately both? Or is it neither, because it doesn’t really matter? I suspect different forms of Christianity will come up with different answers to those questions. But they do need to be asked.
And since I’m a Bible person, I think most important thing we need to do is look at what happened in the Bible. In the sixth century B.C.E., a Hebrew priest, trained as a scribe, stood in his home and looked at the window as the parade went by. It was the festival of Marduk, the strong and terrible chief god of the Babylonians, in whose land he was now being forced to live. The parade was heading to the ziggurat at the center of town, where there would be a public festival at which the great story of creation would be told. Enuma Elish, it began. “When the sky above had no name, and the name of the earth below was not spoken, then Apsu, the ancient one, the begetter, and Tiamat, the maker, the one who gave birth to everything, mixed their waters together.” The earth, the offspring of two sea gods. Ridiculous. And dangerous, for many reasons.
And then he watched, as children from some of the Hebrew homes nearby went running after the parade. Some parents had lost control of their children. But others clearly were allowing it, condoning it. After all, it was just a parade, a community celebration. This was home now. We had to live like it. This priest could see where this was headed. Over a few generations, they would become like Babylonians themselves. They would lose their identity, and conform to the culture around them. They would cease to be God’s people. But what could he do? Just one person against the force of an entire culture?
He did not give in, and take the culture on as his own, as if they were just the same—although we can clearly see differences between the lives of the Israelites before the exile and after. He also did not dig in his heels and insist on a legalism that would root their identity in a behavior apart from the culture. Instead, he did something very strange. He thought of an old, old story, one that his own people told about how the world was created. And over the course of a few days, he reworked it so it was still the same old story, but the shape of it was new. He talked about the great sea, the Tiamat, that was no god at all, but only the waters above and the waters below. He looked on high to the council of the gods and saw that they were only stars, and sun, and moon, things that God created, that had no divinity of their own. He heard how Marduk had shaped humans out of mud made with the blood of slain gods, and enslaved them to serve the gods forever; and he told instead of how humanity was formed in God’s own image, and placed as the crowning jewel on the top of creation.
When God was beginning to create the heavens and the earth, and the earth was a deserted wasteland, and darkness hung over the great sea—not “sea god,” but just “sea”—and a great tempest from God hovered over the waters, then God did not slaughter, or war, or do terrible things like the Babylonians think their fake gods did. No, God simply spoke, and creation leapt into being. And it was very good.
Our identity is not founded in behavior or culture or even opposition. It is founded in our baptism, our rebirth as Children of God. Oh my people, how do we become Christian again? How do we reclaim our identity? We must begin by telling our stories. Without them, we cannot know whose people we are.