All Protestants Now

Charles Keyes writes of the imposition of Western conceptions of “religion”on Asia: “In pursuit of ‘progress’ free from primordial attachments the rulers of [the] modern states[s] of East and South East Asia have all instituted policies toward religious institutions.  These policies have been predicated on the adoption of official definitions of ‘religion,’ definitions that (again) have tended to be derived from the West.  Indeed, in most Asian cultures prior to the modern period, there was no indigenous terminology corresponding to the ideas of ‘religion’ held by Christians or Jews.  Complex predispositions about the nature of religion – the primacy of texts; creeds pledging exclusive allegiance to a single deity; ethics; and a personal, privatized relation to a deity, all originating in the theologically unadorned varieties of Protestantism – were brought to Asia by missionaries in the nineteenth century.  When these predispositions came to inform official discourse on religion, they were often used to devalue other aspects of religious life such as festivals, rituals and communal observances – precisely those aspects that were at the heart of popular religious life in East and South East Asia.”