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Asia in the Making of Christianity
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Social Sciences in Asia

Edited by
Vineeta Sinha
Syed Farid Alatas
Kelvin Low
volume 35
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ssa

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Asia in the Making of Christianity

Conversion, Agency, and Indigeneity,
1600s to the Present
Edited by
Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz
Leidenboston
2013
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Cover illustration: Scottish Presbyterian missionary Alexander Duff (18061878) arriving in Calcutta
and opening his first school under a banyan tree (scroll painting [patachitra], by Gurupda
Chitrakr, Naya Village, Pingla, Midnapore, West Bengal, 2011).
From the collection of Richard Fox Young.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Asia in the making of Christianity : conversion, agency, and indigeneity, 1600s to the present / Edited
by Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz.
pages cm. (Social sciences in Asia, ISSN 1567-2794 ; Volume 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-23662-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-90-04-25129-8 (e-book)1.AsiaChurch
history.2.Christian convertsAsiaBiography.I. Young, Richard Fox. II. Seitz, Jonathan A.
BR1065.A8525 2013
275dc23

2013005143
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual Brill typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
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ISSN 1567-2794
ISBN 978-90-04-23662-2 (paperback)
ISBN 978-90-04-25129-8 (e-book)
Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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Contents
Acknowledgements.........................................................................................
List of Contributors.........................................................................................
List of Illustrations...........................................................................................
ix
xiii
xix
Introduction......................................................................................................
part I
Continuity in Change, Change in Continuity

Early Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-Century
Cochinchina................................................................................................
Nola Cooke
29
Translating Spirits: Protestants, Possessions, and the Grammars

of Conversion in Shandong Province...................................................
Richard Burden
53
Preaching ( chuan), Worshipping ( bai), and Believing

( xin): Recasting the Conversionary Process in South China....
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee
81
Conversion to Mission Christianity among the Kachin of

Upper Burma 18771972............................................................................ 109
La Seng Dingrin
Have the Mitdes Gone Silent? Conversion, Rhetoric, and the
Continuing Importance of the Lower Deities in Northeast
India................................................................................................................ 135
Erik de Maaker
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contents
part II
Conflicted Meanings, Meaningful Conflicts

Is Conversion to Christianity Pantheon Theocide? Fragility and
Durability in Early Diasporic Chinese Protestantism...................... 163
Jonathan A. Seitz
Conversion without Commotion: Rev. Lal Behari Days
Candramukhr Upkhyn (Story of Candramukh).......................... 189
Sipra Mukherjee
Loss and Gain: An Intellectualist Conversion and Its
Socio-Cognitive Calculus in the Hindu-Christian Life of
Nehemiah Goreh......................................................................................... 213
Richard Fox Young
The Enigma of Christian Conversion in Modern Japan:
The Case of Two Buddhist Priests......................................................... 241
Gregory Vanderbilt
Becoming Faithful: Conversion, Syncretism, and the
Interreligious Hermeneutical Strategies of the Faithful of Jesus
(s mndrs) in Todays Bangladesh.................................................. 269
Jonas Adelin Jrgensen
part III
The Politics of Conversion and the Conversion

of Politics
Does the Divine Physician Have an Unfair Advantage? Healing
and the Politics of Conversion in Twentieth-Century India......... 297
Chad M. Bauman
Conversion and Moral Ambiguity: An Chunggn, Nationalism
and the Catholic Church in Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century Korea......................................................................... 323
Franklin Rausch
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vii
Connecting Disconnections: Troubling Meanings of Christian

Conversion in Imperial North India..................................................... 347
Rhonda Semple
The Illusion of Conversion: iva Meets Mary at Vkai in
Southern India............................................................................................. 373
Matthias Frenz
Conversion to Christianity among the Thai and Sino-Thai of
Modern Thailand: Growth, Experimentation, and Networking
in the Contemporary Context................................................................. 403
Edwin Zehner
Select Bibliography.......................................................................................... 427
Index.................................................................................................................... 435
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Acknowledgements
The genesis of a fairly major project, like the one that resulted in the collection of essays contained in this volume, is not always an easy thing to
trace. A number of people are involved, without whom we could not have
done as much as we didor as well. Each has a story to tell, of how they
came to have an interest in the topic, and of the years and tears of developing the skills they brought to their respective contributions. Besides the
two of us, Richard and Jonathan, thirteen others have collaborated, and to
each one we owe a debt of gratitude for their dedication to the task. Part
of the satisfaction of working together over a rather longish period of time
(three years, roughly) has been that our academic ties and common interests have grown personal as well, and that we count each other as friends
and fellow travelers. Though we started our journeys in different places
(Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, India, Myanmar, the Netherlands,
the United States), we have all been on a journey to the same place (more
or less), and in having different kinds of interlocutors to work with our
perspectives have been enriched.
In retrospect, the precipitating factor that probably got the whole thing
going was that the two of us who edited the book have between us accumulated quite a few years of affectionate memories of Asia as a lived experience in our lives. For one of usRichardAsia was home for more than
twenty years (India, Sri Lanka, and Japan, in that order), and in the case
of the otherJonathanit may turn out to be that long, or longer (now
with a home and family in Taiwan). Academically, our training was Asiaoriented in that each of us worked at acquiring a linguistic proficiency
adequate for reading texts in at least one Asian language and for working in the field (South and East Asia in the case of Richard, East Asia in
the case of Jonathan). Both of our doctoral dissertations (Richards at the
University of Pennsylvania, Jonathans at Princeton Theological Seminary)
had to do with aspects of Christianity in Asia. Though we have both had
a special focus on the nineteenth century, our years abroad have diversified our interests and made them more contemporaneous, and so have
teaching responsibilities at our respective institutions. While a truly panAsian outlook is probably a human impossibility, we have tried to keep up
with a broad range of scholarship on Christianity outside of our regional
specializations.
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acknowledgements
On being invited in 2000 to the Timby Chair in the History of Religions

at Princeton Theological Seminary, Richard returned from Asia (Tokyo)
and soon afterward had to make a crucial decision about the kind of
doctoral seminar he would offer. Had it not been for the seminar students he had on the topic he settled onCritical Issues in the History of
Religions, with Conversion and Christianization as its on-going topic for
studythis current volume might not have been envisioned. Nor, such
as it is, could it have been as good. Jonathan, a co-editor, was there, as
were several others included in this collection, now graduated and active
in academe (among us were also some aspiring Africanists, Americanists,
and Europeanists to stir things up). As every graduate student knows, and
every faculty person who learns with them and from them, some of the
finest, most illuminating (if also terrifying) moments of a scholars lifetime
occur around a table in the library, books piled high, the air heavy with
lucubration. For the ones of us who were there, this volume is a kind of
testament to what we did in the seminar for over a decade, along with
other students who have come and gone, each with an angle on the topic
that broadened our horizons. Jason Bruner is one whom we single out
for special thanks, for playing an enormously helpful role throughout the
project as our indefatigable and sagacious editorial assistant.
In having an interest in conversion as a subject of research, we are far
from being alone; a burgeoning of scholarship has occurred across the
disciplines, output is prodigious, and keeping current entails a major
investment of time. With much to read and a constantly-lengthening bibliography, one of the greatest of our satisfactions is to have been able to
draft a few of the authors into the project whom we had learned of in
our quest for the best writing now being done on the topic. And for a
forum to use as a testing ground for his approach with like-minded scholars from Europe, America, and Asia, Richard is grateful to have been able,
for a number of years, to convene panels on Christians, Cultural Interactions, and South Asias Religious Traditions at meetings of the European
Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (Lund, Leiden, Manchester,
Bonn, and elsewhere, more recently co-convened with Chad M. Bauman,
another participant in the doctoral seminar at the Seminary and a contributor to this volume). From that circle of scholarship as well, several
friends have joined us.
Happily, despite late nights and early mornings at the keyboard, drafting, emailing, and editing, we have had supportive spousesAlison and
Emilywho have shared the experience with us and are lively interlocutors in their own right. Thanks, too, go to our children and (in Richards
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acknowledgements
xi
case) grandchildren. Two in particular deserve special mention, Eli and

Eva, born in Taiwan to Jonathan and Emily, who are not yet quite as old
as this book was in the making.
January 1, 2013
Richard Fox Young
Princeton
Jonathan A. Seitz
Taipei
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list of Contributors
Chad M. Bauman is Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University,
in Indianapolis, Indiana (USA). His research focuses on the interaction of
Hindus and Christians in colonial and postcolonial India. His first book,
Christian Identity and Dalit Religion in Hindu India, 18681947 was named
Best Book in Hindu-Christian Studies, 20062008, by the Society for
Hindu-Christian Studies. In 2008, he was given the New Scholar Award by
the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion for an article he published in the
journal, Redeeming Indian Christian Womanhood? Missionaries, Dalits,
and Agency in Colonial India. He is currently conducting research for a
second book on conversion controversies and Hindu-Christian conflict in
contemporary India with support from the John Templeton Foundation
and the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California.
Richard Burden earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of
Chicago in 2006. He spent 20012002 at Shandong University as a recipient of a Fulbright IIE scholarship. He also received the Charlotte W.
Newcombe Fellowship for his work on Christian conversion in China.
After completing his Ph.D., he earned an M.Div. from The Church Divinity
School of the Pacific, part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley,
California, and was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2009. Since then he
has served as Priest in charge of the Episcopal Church of Our Saviour in
Madison County, Kentucky.
Nola Cooke is an independent scholar who specializes in the history of
Vietnam and southern Indochina, mainly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. While a researcher in the Pacific and Asian History division of The Australian National University, she explored the rich archival
holdings of the Missions-Etrangres de Paris in regard to the Cochinchina
mission (covering most of modern central and southern Vietnam). Her
ongoing research goal is to combine these materials with indigenous and
other sources, where available, to illuminate the development of Catholicism there. The first fruits of this project can be found in the Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies: Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Catholics
and Others in the Pages of the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, 35
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list of contributors
(2004); and Strange Brew: Global, Regional and Local Factors behind the
1690 Prohibition of Christian Practice in Nguyn Cochinchina, 39 (2008).
Erik de Maaker studied anthropology in Amsterdam and Leiden and
wrote a Ph.D. dissertation that takes the conduct of mortuary rites as a
starting point for the analysis of the social structure of a community of
upland Northeastern India. His present research in South Asia focuses on
the material and ritual dimensions of religious practices, and the politicization of ethnicity and indigenous identity. Working with qualitative
research methods, including video and photography, one of his specialties
is visual anthropology. He has produced several ethnographic films, such
as the award winning Teyyam: The Annual Visit of the God Vishnumurti
(Award for Excellence, American Anthropological Society, 1998). He has
also published several articles in academic journals and edited volumes,
and is preparing a monograph on the transformation of Garo social structure. De Maaker is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Cultural
Anthropology and Development Psychology of Leiden University in the
Netherlands.
La Seng Dingrin, a Kachin pastor of the Philadelphia Burmese Baptist
Church, holds a Th.M. and Ph.D. in Mission, Ecumenics, and the History
of Religions, both from Princeton Theological Seminary (New Jersey).
Before commencing his studies in the United States, he taught theology
as a member of the faculty of the Myanmar Institute of Theology, Myanmar, for several years. His area of specialization is the Buddhist-Christian
encounter in Theravada Southeast Asia, and his published work on this
subject has appeared in Missiology and Buddhist-Christian Studies.
Matthias Frenz is an Indologist and anthropologist. Trained at Heidelberg and Pondicherry, he received his doctorate from the University of
Heidelberg in Religious Studies. The focus of his research is the interaction between Christians, Hindus and Muslims in southern India from the
eighteenth century to the present. Based on extensive archival and field
research in India, his publications examine both Catholic and Protestant
missions and their relationship to Hindus and Muslims. He addresses general issues of popular religiosity, cultural dynamics, rituals, and healing. In
his monograph Gottes-Mutter-Gttin [Beitrge zur Sdasienforschung 195]
(Wrtzberg: Ergon, 2004), he explores the devotion to the Virgin Mary in
the religiously heterogeneous arena of south-east India. His most recent
publication is an edition of Manikkavacakars Tiruvacakam in German
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translationa significant text of the Tamil aiva tradition. Matthias Frenz

currently works in academic management.
Jonas Adelin Jrgensen holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from
the University of Copenhagen (2006). He has published Jesus mndrs
and Christ Bhaktas: Two Case Studies of Interreligious Hermeneutics and
Identity in Global Christianity [Studien zur interkulturellen Geschichte
des Christentums 146] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008). Jrgensen
serves as a lecturer in the Theological Faculty at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, where he teaches intercultural theology, missiology, and
theology of religions.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee is Professor of History at Pace University in New York
City, USA. He is the author of The Bible and the Gun: Christianity in South
China, 18601900 (New York: Routledge, 2003; Chinese edition:
: 18601900, Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2010), and the co-editor of Marginalization in China: Recasting
Minority Politics (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009) and Chinas Rise to
Power: Conceptions of State Governance (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan,
2012). His special interests include the history of Christianity in China,
religion and politics in the Maoist era, U.S.-China relations, and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.
Sipra Mukherjee is Associate Professor at West Bengal State University, India. Her current research focuses on the literature produced by
religious sects of the lower caste groups in East India. She has published
several articles and book chapters on religion and socio-linguistics in
East India, including An Exploration of Multi-religiosity within India:
The Sahebdhani and the Matua Sects, in Multiculturalism and Religious
Identity (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, forthcoming); The
Politics of Language and Dialect in Colonial India: The Case of Asamiya,
in The Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and The Curious Case of the Ramakrishna Mission,
in Minority Studies [Oxford India Series on Contemporary Society] (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). Additionally, she has co-edited The
Calcutta Mosaic: Minority Communities of Calcutta (New York: Anthem
Publishers, 2010) and A Time Chart of Events and Publications of the 20th
Century (Calcutta: Jadavpur University, 1999) and is the guest editor of the
forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Sociology of Language on
the theme of Religion and Language.
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Franklin Rausch earned his doctoral degree at the University of British

Columbia where he wrote his dissertation under Professor Don Baker on
the relationship between violence, nation, state, and religion in the late
Chosn dynasty, focusing on the lives and times of two Korean Catholics,
Hwang Sayng (17751801) and An Chunggn (18791910). He is currently
collaborating on translations of historical documents related to these two
men and has just written an article on how the Chosn state publicly
justified the use of violence against Catholics. Rauschs research interests
include Korean religious history, hagiography, martyrdom, nationalism,
and violence. He is currently an assistant professor of history at Lander
University, located in Greenwood, South Carolina.
Jonathan A. Seitz is Assistant Professor at Taiwan Theological Seminary
in Taipei, Taiwan, where he works through the Presbyterian Church USA.
His Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton Seminary studied the generation of
Chinese Protestants prior to the Opium Wars. He previously taught world
history at Centenary College in New Jersey.
Rhonda Semple completed her Ph.D. work on gender, missions, and
empire under the supervision of Professor Andrew Porter at Kings College
London in 2000. She produced Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism
and the Victorian Idea of Christian Mission (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell &
Brewer, 2003), as well as articles in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth
History and Womens History Review, and a chapter in an edited collection
on Women and Religious Cultures in Britain, 18001940 (New York: Routledge, 2010). She was awarded a SSHRC Standard Research Grant in 2004
which has enabled her to extend her study of gender in missions to British Methodists, and to focus on gender in Indian Christian communities,
and the impact of mission infrastructure in Indian communities, Christian
and otherwise. Semple is an Associate Professor in History at Saint Francis
Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she is also
Coordinator of the Women and Gender Studies Program.
Gregory Vanderbilt earned a Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 2005. He
is the translator of a study by the Japanese Christian intellectual Miyata
Mitsuo, Authority and Obedience: Romans 13:17 in Modern Japan (New
York: Peter Lang, 2009) and is completing a book on the Omi Mission and
Christianity in modern Japan.
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Richard Fox Young holds the Timby Chair in History of Religions at

Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, New Jersey). An Indologist
by training, he works in mission studies, world Christianity, and contiguous areas. Resistant Hinduism (1981), The Bible Trembled (1995), and
Vain Debates (1996) (all in Sammlung de Nobili, Vienna) are several of his
most widely-cited monographs on the encounter of Hindus and Buddhists
with Christian missions in nineteenth-century South Asia. Of his other
edited works, the most recent is India and the Indianness of Christianity
(Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009). And of essays contributed to other collections,
Hortons Intellectualist Theory of Conversion, Reflected on by a South
Asianist, is the latest, in Beyond Conversion and Syncretism, edited by
David Lindenfeld and Miles Richardson (Berghahn Books, 2011).
Edwin Zehner, an anthropologist and Southeast Asia specialist, has been
a personal and professional observer of Thailands Protestant communities for more than 30 years. His Ph.D. dissertation (anthropology, Cornell
University, 2003) analyzed conversion stories told him by former Thai and
Sino-Thai Buddhists. He has also published articles concerning Thailands
Protestants and Christian conversions in Missiology, Social Compass,
International Journal of Frontier Missiology, Anthropological Quarterly,
and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. In addition, he has published
on Thailands Dhammakaya Buddhist meditation movement in Journal of
Southeast Asian Studies and The Encyclopedia of Religion. In 2009 he coedited (with Brian Howell) Power and Identity in the Global Church: Six
Contemporary Churches (Pasadena: William Carey Library), to which he
also contributed a chapter on cognitive processes in Thai conversions. In
20112012 he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California.
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List of Illustrations
Maps
Map of Asia indicating the locations discussed in this volume........
xx
Figures
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee
1. A Chaozhou Presbyterian preachers family (ca. 1865)..................
93
La Seng Dingrin
1. Karen missionaries to the Kachins: Maukeh and wife, with
Shwe Gyaw (ca. 1840)................................................................................ 127
2. Ceremonial removal of animist sacred objects at conversion
of a chief (ca. 1965).................................................................................... 132
Erik de Maaker
1. An uja grinding ingredients for herbal medicine (2007)............... 153
Sipra Mukherjee
1. Scottish missionary Alexander Duff (18061878) arriving in
Calcutta (2011)............................................................................................. 191
Richard Fox Young
1. The Annaprachtrlaya, on the Ganges at Benares
(ivla Gh, 2002)..................................................................................... 220
2. Eve of an Eclipse of the Moon, Benares, November 25, 1825...... 223
3. Nehemiah Goreh, on a visit to England, still unordained
(ca. 1855)........................................................................................................ 235
Gregory Vanderbilt
1. Our Ex-priests. From the Omi Mustard Seed (Feb., 1918)............ 242
2. Smith Memorial Chapel, built in 1931, Hikone, Shiga
Prefecture, Japan........................................................................................ 267
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list of illustrations
Franklin Rausch
1. An Chunggn, visited in prison for confession by
Fr. Joseph Wilhelm (1910)........................................................................ 341
Rhonda Semple
1. A group of Indian women teachers from the LMS school in
Almora (ca. 1895)........................................................................................ 352
2. A group of itinerant Bhotia catechists from the LMS mission
in Almora (ca. 1895)................................................................................... 360
Matthias Frenz
1. Temple of Veimalaintar (iva) and Periyanyaki (Prvati)
at Vkai (1999).................................................................................. 379
2. Our Lady of Health (rkkiyamt), venerated at Vkai
(1999).............................................................................................................. 390
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Asia in the Making

of Christianity
Seitz
(Malacca and Canton,
19th century)
Cooke
(Cochinchina,
17th century)
Lee
(Chaozhoufu,
19th century)
Map of Asia indicating the locations discussed in this volume
Frenz
(Vakai, 20th century)
Zehner
(Thailand, 20th century)
Dingrin
(Upper Burma, 19th and
20th centuries)
Jrgensen
(Bangladesh, 20th century)
de Maaker
(Garo Hills, 19th
& 20th centuries)
Mukherjee
(Bengal, 19th
century)
Bauman
(Central India, 20th century)
Young
(Benares, 19th century)
Semple
(Kumaon, 19th and
20th centuries)
Burden
(Shandong Province,
19th and 20th centuries)
Rausch
(Korea, 20th Century)
Vanderbilt
(Omi Hachiman,
19th and 20th
centuries)
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Introduction
Whether to Christianity or from Christianity (or, as the case may be,
another religion), conversiona lexically ambiguous term pre-loaded
with a good deal of Western baggage and of uncertain analytical utility for
the study of religious change in Asia (or anywhere else, for that matter)
has in recent years become the subject of a lively debate throughout the
academy and of a burgeoning research literature. While Asia figures in
that literature, creatively and constructively, alongside studies from other
contiguous regions, as in Washburn and Reinharts Converting Cultures
(2007),1 or with a sustained focus on a specific nation within Asia, as
in Robinson and Clarkes Religious Conversion in India (2003),2 a more
wide-angled approach with broader coverage has yet to be attempted.
Undoubtedly, this can be attributed to the diversity of actors and contexts
involved, as well as the daunting number of research languages for which
a facility would be needed, making a collaborative effort indispensible.
Accordingly, we have envisioned a multi-authored book that includes a
range of case studies (from Bangladesh, China, India, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam) without pretending to be exhaustive overall
or even comprehensive with respect to any particular sub-region. Instead,
we showcase multiple instances of Christian conversion from one side of
Asia to the other (from South to East Asia, via Southeast Asia), beginning
from the era of European overseas expansion but mainly with a temporal
concentration on more recent times as well as the near present. Depending on the Asia under discussion, our authors situate conversion within
larger processes of change and thus avoid the cardinal sin of isolating the
subject from its meso- or macrocontext, socially and politically.
Most distinctively of all, our essays pay special attention to local ecologies, microcontexually, and place a high premium on emic approaches
that reveal in the idiom of believers, orally or textually (insofar as possible,
1 Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis

Washburn and A. Kevin Reinhart (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007).
2Religious Conversion in India: Modes, Motivations, and Meanings, ed. Rowena Robinson and Sathianathan Clarke (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
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richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz
in each ones respective vernacular, whether Bengali or Vietnamese,

among the many represented), the meaning(s) of conversion, from the
inside out. And while our methodologies (archival research, oral histories,
participant-observation ethnography, and textual analysis, to mention but
a few) are as diverse as our academic backgrounds (from anthropology
to religious studies, and from Indology to Sinology), the prerequisite for
admission to the project was an authors willingness to address and assess
one or another of the many models for understanding conversion now
under debate in the academy. Most often, such models emanate from the
social sciences and eventually influence scholarship more broadly. And
so, throughout this volume, one will also find a good deal of etic scholarship, couched in the language of analytical abstraction, as our authors
ponder a variety of explanatory and interpretive models for understanding conversion from the outside in (as it were). Chiefly, these are either
the Intellectualist or Cognitive, theorized by social anthropologist Robin
Horton (an Africanist), or its more Weberian opposite, associated with
anthropologist Robert W. Hefner (a Southeast Asianist) and based on a
theory of Reference Group formation.
And so, although one could read through this volume andwe hazard
to hopegain from it a higher degree of literacy in theory and methodology for the study of conversion, that would not be all that we provide (or
attempt to). Thematically, what gets us most excited about conversion
are the endless possibilities we find in it for exploring perennial questions having to do with agency and self-definition, at the same time that
it also affords ample scope for thinking about indigeneityabout Christianitys own conversion into an Asian religion. And that, of course, opens
up a conversation about the cross-cultural diffusion of religion(s) more
generally.
Ahead, then, as our Introduction unfolds, readers will be taken on a
survey of the current state of the field where studies of conversion are
concerned, ending with an overall orientation, analytically, for the essays
of Parts One, Two, and Three that follow. First, though, a preamble to
explain why a title such as Christianity in the Making of Asia was best
avoided.
Hints from Historiography
At the outset of his monumental, multivolume opus Asia in the Making of
Europe, University of Chicago historian Donald Lach wrote that scholars
of Asia often write as if the entire history of the intercourse between
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introduction
East and West is simply the story of how the Westerners got to the East,
how they maintained themselves there, and how they contributed to the
modernization, Westernization, and transformation of Asias traditional
cultures and modes of life. Much dismayed by his contemporaries historiography, Lach set himself the task of rectifying the imbalance by asking how such interaction might have looked the other way around, from
Asia to Europe. Even worse was how historians represented Christianitys
Asianness. For him, the Eurocentricity was all the more apparent, since
researchers of mission history were really only interested in tracing, with
a superfluity of detail, the attempt to transplant Christian institutions
and ideas to the pagan world.3 If scholarship was truly of that kind, bereft
of any reciprocal interest in the dialectics of what is surely one of the most
consequential encounters of all human history, cross-culturally and interreligiously, then it was entirely appropriate for Lach to dismiss all such
historiography as being about transplantation, which implies a lopsidedly
European replication of Christianity, regardless of its Asian context.
Transplantationor Transformation?
All too easily, one can adduce from Lachs era instances of dauntingly
erudite scholarship of the kind he laments, written as though (to reword
his own sentence) the history of Christianity in Asia were simply the story
of how the missionaries got there, how they introduced a ready-made religion, opened churches, and went about catalyzing and galvanizing Asias
modernization and Westernization. A History of Christian Missions in
China, the great opus of 1929 by Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette
(d. 1968), a generation earlier than Lach, would be a case in point. To him,
the churchand, of course, its impressive array of educational institutionswas the accelerator of far-reaching changes in the new China of
the fledgling Republican Era (inaugurated in 1912); Christianity in China
radiated out from Euro-American centers such as these, he thought,
and caught his eye most often when it was missionary-initiated.4 While
Latourette was never singled out by Lach, he might as well have been;
and while Lach never spoke (as one does these days, more commonly) of
3Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, book 1, The Age of Discovery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. xixii (emphasis added).
4For additional critique of Latourette along similar lines, see Richard Fox Young, East
Asia, in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities, c. 1914c. 2000,
ed. Hugh McCleod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 45052.
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indigenously-initiated Christianity, that may well have been the direction

in which he was moving, albeit allusively and tentatively. In the volume
here assembled, we cannot pretend to be talking about a Christianity
made in Asia; at a minimum, however, readers will be introduced to an
Asian Christianity with the Asia put back into it: that is, conceptualized
and discussedphenomenologicallynot so much as a chapter in Western church history but more as a development emerging from and within
a distinctively and specifically Asian matrix of religions. Accordingly,
and self-consciously, the studies in this volume seek to describe insider
accounts of Christian conversion in Asian contexts, without abstracting
those accounts from their social contexts.
Before moving on to talk about conversion as a way of understanding
the Christianity that has emerged in Asiaor, better yet, Christianities in
the pluralsome attention has to be given to the location of the there
that we are calling Asia. Here also, Lach is of help, reminding us of its
ambiguity and amorphousness in the imagination of Europe, geographically, culturally, and religiouslyor, as he calls it, a constantly changing
concept, either undifferentiated from or synonymous with India, say, or
China.5 While the same could be said of Europe or America in the Asian
imagination over the same stretch of history, it may help to pause a moment
and ponder the fuzziness of Asia, locationally, andto go through each
of the cardinal directionsask about its edges, which are not necessarily where they once were, as Lach reminds us. How far west, for instance,
would one have to go to reach the Middle East, or east or north or south to
get outside of Asia? A further level of complexity comes from thinking of
Asia intra- and interregionally: how far into Southeast Asia, say, might one
have to go before arriving at Oceania? Technically, some might answer, as
far as Papua New Guinea (demographically, a Christian nation nowadays),
since Irian Jaya, which occupies the western half of the same island in the
same archipelago, belongs to Indonesia, which is predominantly Muslim
and considered a part of Southeast Asia. Often overlooked is that some of
Asias highest density Christian population pockets are often tucked away
in remote, in-between kinds of interstitial spaces. The Highlands of South
Asia are a prime example. Located in rugged terrain in Northeast India and
Northwest Myanmar, they are a place where the idea of India as Hindu or
Myanmar as Buddhist describes a world remote from the lived reality of
the tribal minorities who reside there.
5Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, pp. 34.
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Not only is the idea of Asia hedged in by age-old geographical conundrums that cannot be brushed aside by simply referring to multiple
Asias, so many accretions overlay itracially and civilizationally, to
name but a few of the more prominent offendersthat the unpacking
of them is a harder task than even Lach imagined.6 Here, although we
run the risk of making Asia sound like a thing (as it were), invariable
over time and space, and in so doing inadvertently commit the error of
essentialization, the effect of talking about Christianity the way we do in
this volume may actually contribute to the disaggregation of a reified Asia,
something we hope will happen. Accordingly, but without pretending to
be more comprehensive in our coverage than we actually are, the pages
ahead will be peopled with Catholics and Protestants (along with some
who are Pentecostal) of a broad assortment, ethnolinguistically: Bengalis,
Chinese, Garo, Japanese, Kachin, Koreans, Marathas, Tamils, Thais, and
Vietnamese, among others. Despite an obvious degree of inclusivity, what
has had to be omittedregrettablyfrom our overview altogether is
Central Asia. Not only that, despite the demographic fact that substantial
cohorts of certain populations in Southeast Asia are Christian already,
and in some cases have been so almost from the beginning of European
overseas expansion (the Philippines would be an obvious instance), we
simply could not bring anyone on board to contribute a case study comparable to the others in this volume. And, to underscore the obvious, the
complexity of conversion is hardly exhausted even when multiple essays
were easier of inclusion, as was the case with India and China on which
the scholarship being done is currently more abundant.
Still, in order to enhance the stereoscopic effect of the essays we offer,
we group them thematically, so that one can read laterally across Asia (as
it were), from South to Southeast to East (or the other way around). This,
we hope, highlights both the heterogeneity of Asia and its Christianities
as well as the salience of the contrasts and commonalities as one essay is
read off the next.7
6Kuan-hsing Chens Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), a work from the field of Asian Studies, is a much discussed, groundbreaking effort at identifying the full repertoire of historical essentializations.
7Given the ambiguities of Asia as a geographical construct, it will be self-evident why
histories of Christianity generally eschew a pan-Asian approach. Of the latter, however, a
few are found. An omnibus work, meticulously researched but grounded in a Latourettean vision of Christianitydiverse in accidents, singular in substanceis Samuel A. Moffetts two-volume work, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1500, vol. 2,
15001900, 2nd rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998, 2005). More recently, the old-school
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Having clarified (at least for the general purposes of an introduction)

which Asia we are talking about and, within that Asia, whose Christianities we have singled out, it would be well for us to disavow any hidden,
undisclosed normativity behind the choices we made. None of the Christianities included here were chosen because they seemed more authentically Christian than the others we excluded. In our view, Christianity
(like any religion) exists only in the concrete, not the abstract (or, to say it
another way, in terms of species, not genus); just as we have no argument
to make in favor of Asia becoming Christian, we harbor no teleological
assumptions of the kind that make Christianity (or, a Christianity) into
Asias final goal and destination.
Empirically, however, Christianitys growth in Asia is demonstrable
(unevenly, for sure, as we shall see, momentarily). Though less dramatic,
overall, than Christianitys growth in Africa (leaving Latin America and
Oceania aside, where that kind of wholesale change occurred earlier and
faster than elsewhere), Asia has also been affected by the shift in Christianitys center of gravity from the global North to the global South (making
do with the inadequate terminology in common use). As the demographers of World Christianity are wont to say, a change of Copernican magnitude has occurred, largely unnoticed (and on which our scholarship
has a great deal of catching up to do). Today, in the early twenty-first
century, a lopsided 60% of the worlds Christian population resides in the
global South, compared with two centuries earlier (roughly 1800) when
the global North accounted for an asymmetrical 90%. And while there
are no grounds for projecting a burgeoning of the total Christian population, worldwide, above its current ratio, which has long been static (1 in
3, or thereabouts), one simply cannot discount the fact that conversion
formulaic approach has been abandoned for one that speaks of multiple Christianities, so
disparate, sometimes, that problems of recognizability arise, phenomenologically (what,
for instance, are the family traits, if any, of the many Asian Christianties discussed in
this volume, and what, moreover, have they in common with those of Europe and North
America?). See, for example, Christianities in Asia, edited by Peter C. Phan (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2011). The first in the Wiley-Blackwell Global Christianity Series, this was quickly
followed by a more regionally-specific volume: Daniel H. Bays A New History of Christianity
in China (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), which is arguably the first academic history of
Christianity in China since Latourettes volume more than eighty years earlier. Besides
China, India and Korea garner a good deal of attention for full-length, large-market publications. See, for example, Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to
the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Christianity in Korea, ed. Robert E.
Buswell, Jr., and Timothy S. Lee (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). On each of
the smaller Christianities included in this volume, a specialist literature exists; each essay
provides the relevant bibliography.
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(variously understood, as this volume testifies) is a factor among others

(most notably, fertility rates and biological reproduction) transforming
Christianity into a predominantly post-Northern (or, post-Western) religion of the global South, growing in Asia and not only in Africa.8
As the saying goes, truth lies in the telling, and when statistics are used
to tell it, that may be doubly true. Who decides what and who a Christian
is? And when, one wonders, did Christian (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim,
Traditional Religionist, etc.) become a countable unit, and how? Heatedly
and interminably debated, theologically, the question is receiving welcome attention of a more neutral kind, evident in the burgeoning interest among social scientists in the cross-cultural study of Christianity, long
eschewed by anthropologists and sociologists who wrongly assumed that
a necessary and inevitable entailment of conversion is that a believer (or,
believing community) rejects his or her (or its) natal religion and replaces
it with another.9 In our essays, insofar as possible (scholars, like most
8On demographic trends and trajectories, a helpful summary, including graphs, can
be found in Wilbert R. Shenks introduction to his edited volume, Enlarging the Story:
Perspectives on Writing World Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002), pp. xixvii.
One of the most reliable sources for religiometrics (as the demography of religion is now
denominated), not only of Christianity but more broadly, is the World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, ed. David Barrett, et al., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). For detailed analysis
of the last century (dated to correspond to and coincide with a landmark event in the
modern missionary movement, the Edinburgh Conference of 1910), see the Atlas of Global
Christianity, 19102010, ed. Todd M. Johnson and Kenneth R. Ross (Edinburgh: University
of Edinburgh Press, 2009). The demographics are regularly updated on the web site of The
World Christian Database, maintained by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity
(Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the United States). Here, note should be made
of Robert Wuthnows trenchant criticism of the shifting center paradigm of World (or
Global) Christian Studies in Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). While Wuthnows concern
is that the paradigm appears to trivialize the continuing worldwide influence of Americas
Christians (presumably, also of Europes), it is basically the power of the wallet that he has
in mind. Our interest in Christianitys transformation into an Asian religion is not a denial
of a continuing Euro-American involvement in Asia, missionary or otherwise.
9See, for instance, Joel Robbins, What is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of
Religion, Religion 33 (2003): pp. 19199. As a prominent social science theorist in the newlyemerging Anthropology of Christianity, Robbins has attempted to open up a conversation
with Christian theologians on this kind of question. Though the initial steps have been tentative and inconclusive, a rapprochement of sorts is at least envisioned without confusion
of the one with the other. See Joel Robbins, Anthropology and Theology: An Awkward
Relationship? Anthropological Quarterly 79, no. 2 (2006): pp. 28594. From the religious
academy, a worthwhile response to the question of what and who a Christian is, comes
from Yale historian Lamin Sannehs Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the
West (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), a pointedly theological broadside aimed
at Eurocentric definitions (which are characteristically cognitive or creedal).
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eople, never being fully transparent, even to themselves), we remain

p
neutral, phenomenologically. What we do not do is subject a believers
(or, believing communitys) Christian self-identification to the test of an
alien, exogenous norm. Nor will any derogatory hint be heard here, of
Asian Christianities being denominated ethno-Christianities, as if European Christianities were any different (Anglicanism, Irish Catholicism,
Swedish Lutheranism, etc., to name but a few).
And just as we abjure teleology, so also we have a keen sense of the contingent nature of Christianitys emergence in Asia, of its ebb and flow, and
of its growth as anything but unstoppably linear (spiraling might be more
accurately descriptive). One only has to think, for instance, of the lost
(Nestorian) churches of 7th-century Tang Dynasty China, or of Japans
Christian Century (commencing with the arrival of Francis Xavier in
Kagoshima in 1549), a time of phenomenal growth when, proportionately,
more Christians could be found in Kyushu than in the whole of Japan at
present, to have a healthy respect for the macro-contextual factors that
studies of conversion need to take into realistic account (merchants, for
example, missionaries and militaries). Whether any such factors were ever
sufficient in and of themselves to account for conversion, might be arguable, but it most certainly looks that way sometimesenough to make the
argument for transplantation more attractive than it may have seemed at
first, given the criticism of it that we heard from Lach.
An editor of the present volume (Richard Fox Young) had this impressed
upon him in the mid-1980s when he lived in the rural hamlet of Batticotta
(Vaukkai) in the Jaffna Peninsula of northern Sri Lanka. The local
church, built in the mid 1500s and made of durable coral, was originally
Catholic. Under the Portuguese, certain rights (of inheritance, for example) could only be secured by those who identified themselves as Christian
(and, indeed, were counted as such). Virtually the entire Tamil population
was Catholic in that civic-rite sense; until, that is, the Dutch threw the
Portuguese out, dismantled Catholicism (unsuccessfully, it turned out),
and replaced it with Protestantism, with the bulk of the same population relabeled Dutch Reformed; until, that isand this would be the third
wave of colonially-assisted missionizationthe British stepped in, threw
out the Dutch, and (through American proxies) rededicated the Church
of Our Lady of the Assumption (as it was originally called in the mid1500s) as a church of the American Ceylon Mission, which was Presbyterian and Congregationalist. Under a more benign British colonial regime,
Tamils abandoned churches like Batticottas in droves. Then, in 1947, the
Jaffna hamlet saw its church incorporated into the Church of South India.
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While the structure remains, seemingly timeless, the diaspora of Tamil

Christians, driven abroad by Sri Lankas fratricidal ethnic conflict (only
recently ended), has scattered the churchs congregants all around the
world, from Melbourne to Montreal, leaving the Batticotta remnant with
an uncertain future (although a sudden demise is unlikely and a revitalization possible).10
Instances like the above, from Sri Lanka, could be adduced from elsewhere in Asia, illustrating and confirming, from a diachronic perspective,
the point we made about the non-linearity of Christianitys growth trajectory. Throughout this volume, each of our case studies will intersect
with that history at one point or another. Whether the macro-contextual
factors (merchants, missionaries, militaries, etc.) need a good deal of foregrounding, or hardly any at all and whether they recede into the background, replaced by their micro-contextual counterparts, they are always
somehow there. That they cannot be ignored, ever, means, of course,
that conversion is never unicausal and should not be approached reductionistically. A volume like ours, however, cannot espouse a consensus
on matters of causality (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.); nor can it be
expected to agree on what a reductive analysis might always look like.
Knowing that macro-causal factors cannot be discounted, we are nonetheless unsure of the premium to place upon them, and each case study
will therefore weigh such factors in its own way. After all, the roughly four
centuries of history that frame our fifteen essays commence with earlier
translocal initiatives emanating out of Europe in the era of its overseas
expansion (earlier than which, we do not go). Large populations at a number of intercultural contact points in South, Southeast, and East Asia were
affected. Not only that, we have, inter alia, such things as Japanese colonial and wartime expansion into greater Asia to keep in mind (which
provides, specifically, the context for Franklin Rauschs essay on a Korean
convert to Catholicism in Part Three). To top it all off, we have a series
of international and interregional geopolitical contests going on concurrently, plus postcolonial globalization processes, not to mention contemporary Euro-American neo-colonialism.
10On the vagaries of the Batticotta church and others of the Jaffna Peninsula, see Richard Fox Young and Subramaniam Jebanesan, The Bible Trembled: The Hindu-Christian Controversies of Nineteenth-Century Ceylon (Vienna: Institut fr indologie der Universitt Wien,
Sammlung de Nobili, 1995), passim.
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10
Despite all this, one can safely extrapolate from our studies a healthy
and countervailingrespect for the durability and indomitability of
human agency. Whether evident in the actions of individuals, kinship
groups, or of whole societies, converts rarely speak of themselves as the
hapless victims of forces altogether beyond their control (an observation, obviously, just as pertinent to converts from Christianity as to it).
Exceptions occur, and the Sri Lankan case, adduced above, seems a likely
candidate. But we largely concur in granting to converts the validity of
their own self-understanding, that instead of being acted upon, manipulatively, in (ostensibly) the worst interests of alien outsiders, they act in
their own best interests (however understood or misunderstood). And so,
even though agency is never unencumbered or isolated from the interplay of power and politics or uninfluenced by authority, indigenous or
exogenous,11 converts often talk of conversion as a site for self-definition
and the exercise of choice. Unanimous on this, by and large at least, we
hope to correct the commonplace (mis)perception of conversion as an
imposition upon converts from above (as it were).12 That is why, as our
essays will show, the action most worth watching is not invariably macrocontextual but also meso- and micro-contextual, occurring on the ground
or close to it, often (but not always) in surprisingly self-initiated ways.
Identity, that is to say, can be negotiated, but always within constraints
and never as if there had not been a degree of deep-time conditioning,
functioning a priori, in effect, and making certain kinds of choices more
likely than others.13
11 And so, in speaking of human agency as durable and indomitable, we do not mean
to construe its exercise as anything approaching absolute; in this, our view is broadly
congruent with contemporary social theory. See, for instance, Sherry Ortner, Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006). On the question of whether and how human beings can be considered the
cause of their own actions, Irving Thalbergs Enigmas of Agency: Studies in the Philosophy of
Human Action (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1972) is illuminating. And for a helpful diachronic study of agency and its various academic permutations, see Julia Adams
1-800-How-Am-I-Driving? Agency in Social Science History, Social Science History 35,
no. 1 (2011): pp. 117.
12Here, on the (mis)perception of conversion as an imposition upon converts, our
analysis draws in part on Chad M. Bauman and Richard Fox Young, Minorities and the
Politics of Conversion: With Special Attention to Indian Christianity, in Minority Studies,
ed. Rowena Robinson (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 185203.
13Anthropologist Robert W. Hefner, whose contribution to the study of conversion we
discuss at some length under the following heading, helps us put a finer point on our
understanding of agency. Drawing on the idiom of Anthony Giddens, who speaks of religion as dually-constructed, Hefner envisions it as a social phenomenon emerging both
from the ideas and intentions of individuals and from the institutions and circumstances
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11
ConversioCulturally Conditioned, or Culture Bound?

Basically, everything that we said under the previous heading amounted to
a kind of exegesis of our volumes eponymous title, which we hope is resonant of Donald Lachs pioneering historiography. The difference between
us may lie in our more formalized advocacy of anti-essentialism (not
Lachs idiom in the 1960s when he began his series, although it was in the
air, academically). That said, as there is a pedantry in always talking about
multiple Asias and Christianities (besides a grammatical awkwardness),
we will fall back on the older vocabulary of a singular-sounding Asia
and Christianity, trusting that the foregoing discussion clarified why we
are uneasy with habits of mind that confuse an abstraction with a thing.
Alas, we simply do not have the time or the space to sort out, name, and
identify the wealth of diversity concealed by either one of these totalizing
terms. Moreover, to avoid ambiguity about the word making, the third
term borrowed from Lach for our title, we clarified (albeit briefly) that we
mean by it that Christians (no less than others) are the ones who make
themselves Christians, althoughnot wanting to either trivialize or privilege macro-contextual factorsthere are always grounds to argue that in
some sense, unspecifiable apart from a concrete context, Christians are
also made into Christians. Here, our concern has been to steer a middle
course between the active and the passive, between the utterly unpredictable and the already predetermined.
That may all be well and good but only scratches the surface, and we
could of course go on to reprise the routine warnings and disclaimers about
the whole gamut of vocabulary that scholars of religion ordinarily rely
upon, not least of all the ones associated with the word religion. In that
connection, one can hardly turn a page of our volume without noticing
how very evident the asymmetries are, beginning with the most rudimentary vocabulary for talking about Christianity. In the South Asian context,
to call it a dharma confuses orthodoxy with orthopraxy, and to give it a
namethe Khyadharmaalso engenders its (supposed) opposite, the
hindudharma, a name for which there was hardly any historical precedent
prior to the encounter with Christianity in the era of Europes overseas
expansion (on this, see Richard Fox Youngs essay in Part Two). For the
that constrain and routinize the world in which people act, often outside their full awareness. World Building and the Rationality of Conversion, in Conversion to Christianity:
Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. Robert W.
Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 27 (emphasis added).
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12
character-based languages of East Asia (and of the Chinese Diaspora),

the problem was especially acute. In Japanese, for instance, shky
, the word for religion, literally had to be invented under duress in
the early Meiji Era. With Japans equal-nation treaty status made dependent by America and Europe on a constitutional guarantee of the freedom of religion, a genus-like abstraction had to be coined (even though,
ironically, it was really Christianitys freedom of propagation in Japan that
was at issue).14 While the crisis was defused, lexicographically, there is no
denying that one encounters a widespread conviction that Asias indigenous religions are something else altogether, if Christianity is the one
among the many that best exemplifies what religion is all about (in the
cases alluded to, from India and Japan, this comes down to being about
things that are taught, cognitively appropriated, and believed; on Japan,
see Gregory Vanderbilts essay in Part Two).
Of all vocabulary problems, however, the greatest of all (for present purposes) concerns conversion and whether it has been compromised, culturally, and what kind of analytical utility it might possibly have. Here,
it cannot be gainsaid that talk of conversion may seem out of place in
Asia altogether. That conversion has in fact been advocated from the earliest encounters with Christianity in ways that were obviously risible to
the audiences who heard missionaries talk about it, we know from the
essay in this volume on Catholicism in early seventeenth-century Vietnam by Nola Cooke. There, in the public market of Da Nang, an entrept
frequented by Europeans, the Jesuit Christoforo Borri witnessed a parody
of missionaries exhorting people to convert. While that anecdote is best
retold by the author herself, what matters here is that whatever the actual
term used (from a coastal pidgin, perhaps), the meaning conveyed was
that of entering into the belly of the Portuguese (which, we are told, a
mimic acted out). At several steps removed, what was going on that day
in Da Nang may be lost in translation, tempting though it is to imagine
14Prior to its coinage, religion was referred to in the concrete, as if a species without a genus, each one discrete and distinct; thus was it possible to talk about Buddhism,
Confucianism, Shinto, Taoism, etc., without employing an abstraction defined in terms
of an essence. For Anglophone scholarship, the pioneering study was Helen Hardacres
Shinto and the State, 18681988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). See especially
pp. 3436, 6365, 7678. For another, more recent perspective, see Jason nanda Josephsons The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012),
pp. 121, 22445.
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13
this as having something to do with the familiar trope of conversion as a

form of deculturizing betrayal.
Not that impulses comparable to Borris are utterly and absolutely alien
from a Buddhist perspective. The Pali Canon, for instance, has the Buddha
exhort his companions to Go forth and walk, [...] out of compassion for the
world. In antiquity, those who did were called dhammabhakas, reciters, repeaters, or preachers of the Dhamma; nowadays, dhammadta
(lit., messenger of the Dhamma) is more often used, a well-researched
instance of which is the on-going effort of Sinhalese missionary monks to
(re)introduce Theravada into Nepal.15 Again, despite the well-known formalities of becoming a Buddhist (by taking refuge in the Triple Gem, the
Buddha, Dharma/Dhamma, and Sangha, along with the Five Precepts
the pacalathat a lay person undertakes), conversion still seems
somehow alien, culturally. That impression could be reinforced if for reasons of space we did not have to limit our discussion to the regions of
Asia where Buddhism has a place.16 The much-discussed phenomenon of
multiple religious affinitiesof being Buddhist, say, or Hindu, or Taoist,
or even Christian on occasions such as weddings or Christmas, situationally or contextuallycould be invoked to account for this, and yet Asia
(Buddhist Asia, Hindu Asia, etc.) is no stranger to sectarianism, which is
often rife.
Apart from the established formalities of switching one religious label
for another (as one does when becoming a Buddhist, as discussed above),
which anyway only tell us about the how of conversion (to mention only
the formalities of one religion) but nothing about the why, it remains to
be asked how much help we can expect to get out of the word conversion.
A word without obvious equivalents in Asian languages (but, then, which
of the critical words in religious studies scholarship do?), it obviously carries a good deal of alien baggage to weigh it down. To the question of
utility, some would say it has none at all or hardly any. One of the most
15For the Buddhas exhortation, see tienne Lamotte, History of Indian Buddhism from
the Origins to the aka Era (Louvain: University of Louvain, 1988), p. 297. And on the Theravada mission to Nepal, see Sarah Levine and David N. Gellner, Rebuilding Buddhism: The
Theravada Movement in Twentieth Century Nepal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2005).
16Arvind Sharmas Hinduism as a Missionary Religion (Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2011) addresses questions similar to the ones we have asked about conversion in relation to Buddhism. Where Hinduism (in its diverse forms) is concerned, the
issues seem more vexed and are generally answered in the negative. Sharmas discussion
is helpfully nuanced, finding similarities with, and dissimilarities from, the three religions
classically thought of as missionaryBuddhism, Christianity, and Islam.
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14
formidable critics is Rutgers historian Karl Morrison, who specializes in

medieval Christianity. With wonderful philological acumen, Understanding Conversion explores the Latin term in the background of the one we
use todayconversioand scrapes off its accretions to retrieve its medieval meaning of a turn to piety (often, specifically, in the sense of entering a religious or monastic order). Relentlessly chipping away at the term
conversion, Morrison subverts any illusion of its being readily portable,
cross-culturally, outside the world of Europe, and concludes:
Perhaps too self-evident is that the word conversion is not a reliable tool of
analysis. Far from being (so to speak) clinically sterile, it comes laden with
connotations rooted in Christian history that transmit their coloration on
contact to materials under investigation. There is reason to assume that the
word has no equivalent in major languages outside Europe. The question
is certainly worth considering whether applying the word conversion can
impose Western conceptions on non-Western experiences and ideas.17
That sounds close to a categorical argument in favor of the cultural boundedness of the wordand it isbut Morrison helps out in other, unexpected ways (despite his declared position) when he talks about conversio
as a turning point and illuminates its medieval meaning by invoking
an English word derived from Greek, peripety. Here, ironically betraying
his best instincts in an unsuspecting act of cross-cultural, interlinguistic
comparison of the very kind he protests against, Morrison explains what
it originally meant: a sudden change (as in drama).18
Actually, in another respect, Morrisons philological ruminations seem
to us extraordinarily insightfulappropriate adjustments considered
and momentarily we will say more about why. For the time being, we
simply note that medievalists nowadays seem to have less of a quarrel
with conversios contemporary avatar, regard it with less suspicion, and
increasingly employ it as a transcultural concept to draw on cross-cultural studies of Christianity in Asia and elsewhere for the enrichment of
their own respective research methodologies.19 That, likewise, would be
our position. Until the cultural conditioning of the word is recognized, and
its unarguable origins in a distinctively Christian matrix acknowledged,
17Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville and London: University

Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 18586.
18Morrison, Understanding Conversion, p. 3.
19From the Introduction by Monica Juneja and Kim Siebenhner in an issue of The
Medieval History Journal 12, no. 2 (2009) dedicated to the topic of conversion, p. 171.
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inverted commas ought to be placed around itconversion. Once those

conditions have been satisfied, they can surely be removed.
Overall, then, less resistance is evinced among medievalists nowadays,
and Morrisons approach may seem more lopsidedly interioristic than it
used to (in, for instance, his emphasis on experience). Such scholars
have also learned from extra-European, extra-Christian studies that two
commonplace assumptions can be called into question: 1) that conversion
necessarily involves a change of belief (from polytheism to monotheism,
for instance); and 2) most surprisingly, in light of how thoroughly subjectivistic the reigning paradigms have been, that conversion need have
nothing at all to do with an experience of any kind, much less of finding
Jesus, being reborn, saved, etc.20 With this, our essays have no quarrel at
all. On the contrary, we would probably all concur that conversion is not
an ecstatic, visionary event, or an aoristic, once-and-forever incandescent
moment like the one that is supposed to have happened to the Apostle
Paul on the road to Damascus. However stirring and unforgettable a story,
the scholarship now being done would be more likely to agree that conversion is most definitely more than what the New Testament Book of
Acts describes, although it might also be argued in certain cases (fewer
than previously imagined) that it could not be anything less.21 In short,
peripety might be a usable synonym, as Morrison suggests, but shorn of
its suddenness and interiority.
Happily, on shifting over to the social sciences, one finds several areas
of newly-recognized compatibility. One notable nexus of convergence can
be seen in how little emphasis now gets placed on conversion as a change
of belief. Intellectualist models of conversionusually involving a mentalistic, cognitive reconfiguration of belief, wherein one set is exchanged for
another, believed to be more trueisolate individuals from their social
contexts, and in so doing send up a red flag. Having an exteriorist bias
may in fact be on the way to becoming more acceptable among historians
20Juneja and Siebenhner, Introduction, pp. 171, 173.
21 By and large, conversion studies, past and present, whether Christian, as such, or
not, have been held in thrall by the born again Pauline model. Biblical scholarship itself,
Jewish and Christian, has doubted the validity of the paradigm, not only on the basis of the
New Testament sources themselves, but with due attention to intertestamental literatures
as well. Best, but also helpfully contrastive in their approaches, are Beverly Roberts Gaventas From Darkness to Light: Aspects of Conversion in the New Testament (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1986) and Alan F. Segals Paul the Convert: The Apostolate and Apostasy of
Saul the Pharisee (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Where the two differ is on their
attitude toward social science perspectives. Gaventa thinks they lack emic verisimilitude;
Segal regards them as opening up a new horizon for biblical scholarship.
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and other scholars of the humanities (as we saw above, in our overview
of medievalist scholarship). And though it may be called a bias, it will be
one that is held more often than not in dialectical tension with its opposite, the interiorist, which at least has the advantage of taking the emic
dimension of a converts subjectivity into serious account. When testifying
to the changes they undergoor, undertakein their lives, new believers almost always place the accent on their felt conviction of discontinuity with the past, despite evidence of continuity to the contrary that may
seem undeniable to outside observers. Of those who were involved in the
present volume, most would agreewe venture to saythat an exteriorist bias, in and of itself, hardly does justice to the phenomenon of conversion, nor the interiorist alone. To state the matter axiomatically, the more
we have of bothexteriocentrism and interiocentrismthe more fruitful
our analysis may become, provided the one becomes less interio-exclusive
and the other more exterio-inclusive (to highlight with a new vocabulary
the importance of a forthrightly dialectical methodology).
Genealogically, a number of our volumes authors (though by no means
all), trace the theoretical orientation of their work back to Boston University anthropologist Robert W. Hefner, editor of a thoughtful collection
of essays called Conversion to Christianity (1993; vide n. 13) who got it off
the ground with an introduction so seminal that it almost overshadows
the whole of the book thereafter. Looking for an analytical minimum,
a sine qua nonthat without which, conversion would not be conversionHefner took issue with social anthropologist Robin Horton, whose
Intellectualist Model of conversion made commitment contingent upon
a prior change of belief. Turning that around, Hefner argued the reverse:
that commitment precedes intellectualization (who, for instance, would
imagine that the Apostle Paul set out for Damascus only after deciding to
exchange his old religion for the newer model?).22 Here, then, is the bare
minimum he zeroes in on:
22When reading Hefner, one should keep in mind that his rejection of Horton was so
unconditional that we are left, inadvertently and unnecessarily, with a kind of polarization
between the two. For a different way of reading Horton, see Richard Fox Young, Hortons Intellectualist Theory of Conversion, Reflected on by a South Asianist, in Beyond
Conversion and Syncretism: Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 18002000,
ed. David Lindenfeld and Miles Richardson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 115
36. Hortonesque analyses, variously modified, remain attractive, and a helpful one is by
London School of Economics and Political Science anthropologist Michael W. Scott, who
specializes on Oceania. [F]rom whatever points of entre people engage and re-engage
with Christianity, they aspire to systematicity by following through the implications of
Christian language, truth claims, and values. Once acknowledged, even such a limited
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The most necessary feature of religious conversion, it turns out, is not a

deeply systematic reorganization of personal meanings but an adjustment
in self-identification through the at least nominal acceptance of religious
actions deemed more fitting, useful, or true. In other words, at the very
leastan analytic minimumconversion implies the acceptance of a new
locus of self-identification, a new, though not necessarily exclusive, reference point for ones identity.23
In all likelihood, a new locus of self-identification does entail a peripety of

some kind (hearkening back to the vocabulary of pre-Christian antiquity
and medieval Christendom); that it does not have to be sudden, however,
goes without saying, it having been established that conversion is not an
event but a process. Nor does it materially affect the workability of the
analysis that the process looks quite different when kinship groups, ethnolinguistic communities, or whole societies are involved. And for individuals (always rare) who do actually step back from their pre-conversion
beliefs and undergo a time of rethinking their faith (here, in the sense
of belief) before they convert, formally and publicly, allowances must be
made. Such an analysis, however, will err when individuals are abstracted
from their surroundings (for cases less susceptible of a Hefner-like analysis, see Part Two).24
Despite the caveat above (about allowances that need to be made), we
basically concur with Hefner that [c]onversion is rarely the outcome
of intellectual appeal alone.25 To put a finer point on it, we would only
insist on giving up the notion that conversions are ever only that and
role for systematicity precludes the idea that people can appropriate portions of Christianity expediently and transiently without far-reaching consequences for their indigenous models of reality and moral order. Michael W. Scott, I was Like Abraham: Notes
on the Anthropology of Christianity from the Solomon Islands, Ethnos 70, no. 1 (2005):
pp. 102, 117. It may not sound so, but the Christianity Scott speaks of being appropriated
has no European template; it is a Solomon Islands Christianity that he, as an ethnographer,
reconstructs.
23Hefner, Conversion to Christianity, p. 17.
24So as not to hold the Book of Acts alone responsible for the interiorism we criticize,
there is also the locus classicus in the work of Harvard psychologist William James (d. 1910):
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an
assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a
self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong[,] inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and
consciously right[,] superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious
realities. Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern
Library, 2002 [1902]), p. 210.
25Robert W. Hefner, Of Faith and Commitment: Christian Conversion in Muslim
Java, in Hefner, Conversion to Christianity, p. 110.
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nothing more. Almost always, the hearts needs trump those of the minds;
often, they are simply the fiercely urgent needs of body and spirit: rest
on the Sabbath, say, from agricultural labor, from the crippling expense
of initiation and ritual sacrifice (perhaps requiring a frequent outlay of
fowl), relief from social degradation or a new sense of personal worth
(see, for example, La Seng Dingrins essay in Part One). Here, questions
of motivationoften perceived, disparagingly, as utilitarianneed to be
addressed. Years ago, Harvards Arthur Darby Nock (d. 1963), a historian of
the early Christian Church, drawing on his studies of religion in the Mediterranean world of antiquity, concluded that conversion could be contrasted with adhesion. While conversion was once and for all, a crossing
of religious frontiers from which there was no turning back, adhesion
fell far short: the adherent of a Mystery Religion (Mithraism, for instance)
did not belong to it body and soul.26 Nock may have thought of adhesion as conversions binary opposite, but a bigger lexicon is sorely needed
in view of the argument we have made that conversion is not an event
but a process, and a rehabilitation of the word is surely not impossible or
impracticable. University of California anthropologist of Christianity Joel
Robbins is one who has tried, proposing a dtente of sorts in terms of
two approaches, one more utilitarian in orientation and the other more
cognitive:
[The cognitive approach] has a difficult time accounting for the very early
stages of conversion, those in which people first engage the new religion
with very little sense of what it might provide them by way of intellectual resources. Since Christianity is unlikely to appear as fully coherent on
peoples first encounter with it, one imagines that other than strictly sensemaking ones probably sustain those early contacts....Good at explaining
the initial impetus toward conversion, the utilitarian approach gives way
to the intellectualist one when it comes time to explain why in some cases
people stay with the new religion and come to engage it deeply.27
26Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the
Great to Augustine of Hippo (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 [1933]),
pp. 7, 14. The classic passage would be this (p. 7): By conversion we mean the reorientation of the soul of an individual, his deliberate turning from indifference or from an earlier
form of piety to another, a turning which implies a consciousness that a great change is
involved, that the old was wrong and the new is right. In this, we see a modified Jamesianism (n. 24, supra). An (unacknowledged) influence from Max Weber is also evident
in Nocks insistence that true conversion can only occur in a so-called prophetic religion
(here, the Weberian idea of transcendental tension as the prime determinant of religious
change is most evident).
27Joel Robbins, Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New
Guinea Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 8687. For additional
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Or, one might say, adhesion and conversion are to be located on a continuum; they do not have to be pitted against each other in a relationship
of antithesis. Our essays all bear this out, and in them one will find a good
deal of adhesion occurring; for, as it turns out, churches quite often function as a space-in-between (as it were), ideal for trying a Christian identity
on to see how it might look. And, in the final analysis, one simply has
to allow for the possibilityor the likelihoodthat motivations change
over time and that the ones that keep a person (or a people) in the fold
(as Christians say) may not be the same ones that brought them there
in the first place. Like persons who fall in love (or out of it, since every
conversion is also an apostasy), the reasons they marry (or, perchance,
divorce) may change along the wayor willand differ at the end from
their beginning.28
We began our introduction with a claimthat the emergence of Christianity in Asia should be seen not so much as a chapter in Western church
history as a development from and within a distinctively and specifically
Asian matrix of religionsand it remains to be asked whether the language of transformation is adequate or appropriate for describing this
kind of process. We have made a robust argument in favor of indigenous
agency, and have talked of exogenous agency (merchants, missionaries,
militaries, etc.) as a generally insufficient cause of conversion (although
cases can be adduced where it was, Jaffna in Sri Lanka during the Portuguese and Dutch occupations, for instance). Overall, as editors, our
approach has been that a person (kinship group or other kinds of collectivities) adapt what they adopt. As the religions of Asia are Asian
Christianitys dominant ambient context, it seems only natural to us that
questions of recognizability will be asked (if the doubts be raised from
a Eurocentric perspective, of, say, Rome, Geneva, or Canterbury). Were
it not for pre-Christian, Kachin traditional religion, to name but a single
example from our collection, and the indispensible vocabulary it provides
for prayer and theological reflection in the mother-tongue vernacular,
the Kachin Christians of Myanmars Northwestern Highlands might be a
discussion of the issues involved, see Young, Hortons Intellectualist Theory of Conversion, pp. 12021.
28The variation is ours, but the love analogy we owe to Lewis Rambo, heard while
being interviewed about his book, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993). Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (Nov. 10, 2000), http://www.pbs
.org/wnet/religionandethics/week411/rambo.html (accessed, December 5, 2012).
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perfect match for the American Baptist template of Christianity to which

they were originally introduced. Whether they actually are a match or not
is of no concern to us, eschewing, as we do, any and all normativity in our
work as phenomenologists.
What we can do, drawing on Hefners analytical minimum, about conversion involving a new locus of self-identification, is to acknowledge
that the Kachin might not have envisioned theirs apart from American
Baptist missionary intervention. We should, however, also underscore
what might otherwise be overlooked about Hefners argument: that Christianity (in whichever form, American Baptist or another) as a new locus
of identity will in all probability fail to crowd out all the other loci crucial
to Kachin identity, despite the exclusivistic theologies of replacement and
substitution to which most missionaries of the early era subscribed. While
the language of rupture is commonplace in conversion stories (whether
told by missionaries or converts), the studies in our collection emphasize
that the primary rupture is one of affiliation (the pre-conversion locus or
loci of identity) rather than of culture (language, ethnicity, etc.). And for
that, the language of transformation seems to do a certain amount of justice. Conversion, as our essays demonstrate, entails a process that leaves
some things the way they were, changes others, and makes the whole into
a new or different form of what it was already.29
Previews on Three Fronts
In an often-cited study of how the Highland Nagas of Northeastern India
became Christian (a reconfiguration of identity that was virtually complete within a century, demographically), University of Arizona historian
Richard Eaton asks a question of the kind this volume addresses, or tries
to: [W]ho, in the meeting of two cultures, he asks, is actually changing
whom? And what, in the end, is actually changing?30 At this point, our
efforts will have been of no avail, should our way of formulating answers
29Matthew Engelkes Discontinuity and the Discourse of Conversion, Journal of Religion in Africa 34, nos. 12 (2004): pp. 82109 makes good background reading on the lively
debate over rupture in Anthropology of Christianity circles. In holding that conversion
involves a rupture of affiliation more than of continuity with the past, our position may
be closer to that of Fenella Cannell, Introduction, in The Anthropology of Christianity,
ed. Fenella Cannell (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 1422.
30Richard M. Eaton, Comparative History as World History: Religious Conversion in
Modern India, Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): p. 244.
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to the first of Eatons questions still seem unclear or unconvincing. As for

the second, still unanswered question, a good way to round off our Introduction will be to offer a quick inventory of the kinds of change on three
fronts that our essays identify and explore.
Accordingly, Part One, Continuity in Change, Change in Continuity,
focuses in a special way on cosmology (worldview, as some might prefer
to say, or ontology). Here, we see a good deal of action worth watching,
despite much that remains the same, ostensibly (transformation, the way
we think of it, allows for both). Or, as University of Pittsburgh anthropologists Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern have said of Christianity in Oceania and elsewhere, from whom our subject heading derives its
inspiration: Continuity hides in change, as though in plain sight, and
change hides in continuity.31 Here, then, we open a conversation on the
conversion of deities and divinities (as it were)a change that occurs in
tandem with a recalibration of the recognition they receive (in worship,
veneration, pacification rituals, etc.).
The idiom is ours, not that of our contributors (and derives from Jonathan
Seitz, one of the editors of this volume), but each of the essays in Part
One looks at the encounter with exogenous varieties of Christianity as
catalytic of a change, cosmologically, that we call pantheon simplification,
as opposed to pantheon substitution or pantheon liquidation. That is, the
lesser beings (ancestors, spirits of one kind or another, malign or benign
or both) appear to undergo a demotion or an inferiorization but not an
abolitionthey do not disappear, they recede into the background, disempowered, without becoming, strictly speaking, powerless. In that light,
the trajectory of change that our essays discern can be helpfully described
as monolatric (neither polytheistic nor monotheistic). Whether the context is that of Chinese or Vietnamese folk religion (the essays of Richard
Burden, Joseph Tse-hei Lee, and Nola Cooke) or that of traditional (primal
or animistic) religion (the essays of La Seng Dingrin on the Kachin and of
Erik de Maaker on the Garo), the change that happens will happen within
the indigenous cosmology, analytically. That indigenous cosmologies do
31Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Woven Histories and Inter-Denominational Anthropology (Series Editors Preface), in Jacqueline L. Ryle, My God, My Land:
Interwoven Paths of Christianity and Tradition in Fiji (Farnham, England, and Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2010), p. x. The subject is much-discussed by the same authors and others in
Religious and Ritual Change: Cosmology and Histories, ed. Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew
Strathern (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009).
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not leap to monotheism from polytheism (among various possibilities in

the contexts under review) should come as no surprise, given the things
we learn from these essays. Arguably, even the most Protestantized varieties of Christianity (not to mention European Catholicism of the seventeenth-century of the kind that Nola Cooke addresses, or contemporary
Pentecostalism) wereand remainless severely monotheistic (in the
sense of being utterly and absolutely disenchanted) than simply monolatric: that is, one God affirmed, without other gods, spirits, etc., denied.
To some readers, the contrast between Parts One and Two, Conflicted
Meanings and Meaningful Conflicts, may seem comparable to the one
that social scientists used to speak of, between a religions Little and
Great Traditions (here, though, we eschew any notions of inferiority and
superiority, that either one can be found in isolation from the other, or that
the Little Tradition is smaller than the Great Tradition, demographically).
Instead of kinship groups, ethnolinguistic communities, or whole societies, the subjects of our essays in all five cases are individuals (a word we
use with caution, given the variety of ways in which the selfor selves
can be individuated): a Chinese religionist (Jonathan Seitzs essay), two
North Indian Hindus (Sipra Mukherjees and Richard Fox Youngs), two
Japanese Buddhists (Gregory Vanderbilts), and a final essay (Jonas Adelin
Jrgensens) on the Faithful of Jesus, the self-chosen name of Bangladeshis who cherish their liminality but also chafe under it (being recognized neither as Muslims nor as Christians). What makes it helpful to read
these essays in juxtaposition, laterally, from one to the other, is that the
subject(s) of each one underwent (over time, not all at once) a deeply
systematic reorganization of personal meanings, often agonistically: that
is to say, the very thing that the essays in Part One may have appeared to
preclude, framed as they were by the Hefner dictum about commitment
being prior to intellectualization. That intellectualization can and does
occur over long or longish periods of time, well in advance of a formal
(public) change of religion, seems readily evident from these essays.
Back in our discussion of Hefner, we mentioned that allowances would
have to be made for cases of this kind, and Part Two is where we put
them under the spotlight. Among them are persons who were profoundly
learned, scripturally (in a Buddhist sutra, say, the Veda, or the Quran),
and others who were less impressively grounded in a theological discipline. Without saying of them that their only world was that of a textualized, cognitive religion, neither would we say that any of them lived
entirely outside of one. In finding a new locus of self-identification (to
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invoke Hefner again), such individuals first of all had to step back, noetically, from their beliefs. In so doing (precipitated by an encounter with
an advocate of Christianity, in most cases a missionary), they may have
found themselves thinking thoughts they had never imagined possible
before, triggering a prolonged struggle of cognitive dissonance. Speaking
of such individuals (and including himself among them), Sun Yuanhua
, a Ming Dynasty Chinese Catholic, drew upon one of Natures
odder genetic anomaliesthe two-headed snakefor an analogy
intended to arouse empathy and epitomize the lived experience of being
pulled in two directions. In his own case, a perpetual need was felt for
reconciliation of the seeming incongruity between being both a Chinese
who happened to be a Christian and a Christian who happened to be
a Chinese.32 From this perspective, the finale of Part Two (notably the
Jrgensen essay) helps a great deal. In and of itself, the essay makes a
notable contribution on Muslim-Christian interactions in the Asian context, reminding us that Asian, as a category, has to be broad enough to
include religions of exogenous origini.e., the same case we have made
for Christianity. More to the point, the Faithful of Jesus exemplify for us,
with more than a little poignancy, that a new locus of self-identification
need not entail a formal affiliation, a conversion from Islam to Christianity. Better said, their quest is for a conversion of the past, without which
their conversion in the present would remain incomplete, or so they seem
to say. And to reconcile the experience of two-headed hyphenatedness
(of not yet having a primary identity), they re-read the Quran in tandem
with the Bible and thus remain largely (but not exclusively) within a
world of texts.
Moving on to Part Three, The Politics of Conversion and the Conversion of Politics, its subset of essays once again makes crystal clear why it
would have been a mistake to saddle our volume with a title along the lines
of Christianity in the Making of Asia. Though not a negligible factor (thinking, again, of the merchants, missionaries, and militaries of the colonial
era, as in Sri Lanka, which had them for upwards of half a millennium),
one could still get by in writing a history of modern Asia (or, say, of India
or China) without reference to Christianity (or much, anyway). Were that
32From Huang Yinong, Liangtou she: Mingmo Qingchu de diyi dai Tianzhujiaotu
[Two-Headed Snakes: The First Generation of
Catholics in the Late Ming and Early Ching Periods] (Xinzhu: Guoli Qinghua Daxue chubanshe, 2005). A review by Eugenio Menegon is found in Journal of Chinese Religions 34
(2006): pp. 10709.
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to happen in a work on sub-Saharan Africa, such an omission would be

unimaginable, historiographically. Here, although our authors think of politics in a variety of ways (including constraints on the exercise of choice),
we start with an essay (Franklin Rauschs) to counteract any impression,
garnered from Part Two, that Christians had their heads buried in texts.
On the contrary, we learn from the life of An Chunggn how a convert to
Catholicism could get out of his books and into the trenches, literally. An
was an activist who resisted Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula
and chose political martyrdom in a final act of violent protest, condemned
by the Church but justified by conscience. While that story is best told
by its author, we want to underscore Ans triumph over two-headedness,
his Christian and Korean identities reconciled. From An, a larger-thanlife heroic figure mentioned in the footnotes of historians, we go to the
extremes of obscurity and marginality in another of the Part Three essays
(Rhonda Semples). To break the archival stranglehold, she draws on field
research among third and fourth-generation Christian women of families
living high in the foothills of Indias Himalayas, at Almora, a popular hill
station which had a prominent missionary presence throughout the High
Imperial Era. Here, voices from the margins, seldom heard, in a process of
(re)membering, recall the stories of their forebears conversions, subverting the stereotype of passive and hapless victims acted upon, manipulatively, in the worst interests of alien outsiders.
Be that as it may, in much of Asia and elsewhere around the world conversion continues to bear the stigma of colonialism. Part Three, therefore,
faces up to the fact that Christianity remains a site of contestation, its
Asianness (Indianness, etc.) in doubt and its alienness considered indelible and insuperable. Images of conversion as something transgressive
and deculturizing (such as the comic image from seventeenth-century Da
Nang, discussed above, about entering into the belly of the Portuguese)
enjoy a remarkable durability (naturally, in varying degrees, depending on
a variety of macro- and meso- and microcontextual factors). Not only that,
fears of political betrayal are perpetuated (by some, for political gain), as
though each convert lost to Christianity were potentially a quisling and
the churches a proverbial third-column, most particularly in postcolonial
India where restrictions on conversion have been debated, interminably
(on which, see Chad Baumans essay). More politically benign, although
intended as a prophylactic against apostasy from Hinduism, are the
locally-initiated cases of pantheon fusionVirgin Mary, for instance, with
Prvat, Consort of iva, at a popular site of Catholic pilgrimage in Tamil
South India (discussed by Matthias Frenz). Despite the amalgamation, few
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are deterred from joining in (and because of it, more may be involved),
pilgrimage being a time when Hindus and Christians meld together most
imperceptibly. For contrast, and to top things off, we close with another
essay (Edwin Zehners), also about a people on the move (as it were), the
Thai. Although year after year the Thai churches have grown inured to dismal membership statistics, internal migration (rural to urban) appears to
be loosening the traditional constraints on choice, enhancing the appeal
of the churches as spaces-in-between, ideal (as mentioned earlier) for trying a Christian identity on to see how it might look. Overall, then, a lesson we learn from Part Three is that questions of the Richard Eaton sort,
about cross-cultural and interreligious encounterswho changes whom?
and what actually changes?ought not to be abstracted from the Gestalt
of which they are a part.
While certain regions of Asia today most definitely manifest an uptick
in their rates of urbanization, we hesitate (as Edwin Zehner likewise does,
in his essay) to identify this kind of changeor any otheras the determinant of conversion or treat it as a dependent variable in the absence
of which conversion could not occur.33 A reductionism of that kind in a
project like ours would sound its death-knell and is therefore the reason
why our contributors approach their respective case studies as if each
one had an ecology all its own, with a specific set of variables. Of these,
one (or more) will be independent, behaving like a wild card (as it were).
Accordingly, we have left it to our collaborators to navigate the best way
they know how, between the utterly unpredictable and the already predetermined, to recall the language we adopted under our third heading.
Here, in review, it may help to note what a wide variety of methodologies are used in their essays for the identification of these variablesthe
most elusive ones of all. To hypothesize what they most likely are, each
part of our volume includes essays that work best, analytically, at one of
three levels: the microcontextual (Erik de Maakers on the Garo of India,
for instance), the mesocontextual (such as La Seng Dingrins, which situates the Kachin more broadly in terms of their interactions with the Burmese, an adjacent ethnolinguistic community), and the macrocontextual
(Frederick Rauschs, for instance, on An Chunggn, Catholic convert and
33Factors such as urbanization are, however, occasionally invoked to explain (as if
to account for) Christianitys growth earlier and elsewhere, most famously in the Roman
empire of European antiquity. Here, we have in mind sociologist Rodney Starks Cities of
God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).
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Korean patriot, whose post-conversion trajectory would remain inexplicable were reference not made to Japanese colonialism).
When, then, one goes on from here to read laterally across our volume, from one side of Asia to the other and back again, it may seem in
the end more self-evident why our Introduction began where it did, with
an argument for Asias disaggregation, coupled with an insistence upon
its irreducible geocultural multiplicity, about which one should shrink
from making facile generalizations. And, unless our discussion lacks the
salience it ought to have, it will also be obvious that similar observations
could be made, caveats added, and reservations voiced, about conversion and the kind of role it has had and continues to have in bringing
a pluriform Christianity into existenceone that is so internally diverse
that about it, too, we only feel comfortable speaking of Asian Christianities in the plural. With all due deliberation, therefore, our authors refrain
from advocating a single theory or methodology, as if any one among the
many under debate could possibly fit the extraordinarily diverse contexts
of Asia in which conversion occurs, sometimes of individuals, sometimes
of kinship groups, and sometimes of entire (ethnolinguistic) societies.
That said, and notwithstanding our overall preference for an (apophatic)
approach more inclined to deny the conventional claims made about conversion (that it is, say, an aoristic event in ones past, or a sudden, ecstatic,
and visionary experience, etc., etc.) than to nail it down to what it must
be, invariably and necessarily, we generally concur in thinking of conversion in terms of Hefners analytical minimum (discussed above, under
our third heading), as a process that entails a new locus of identity.
Beyond that, one would mainly want to underscore how the determinants
of conversion are never singular or lopsidedly locatable either within the
human psyche or without, and that all such determinants converge at
someoften annoyingly or tantalizingly uncertainpoint of tangency in
a variety of ways to engender a multiplicity of Christianities. As Asia has
been involved in the making of so many, a dedicated volume on the subject, deserving a gravity and density of its own, became for us a project we
consider eminently worthwhile as an intellectual investment.
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Part I
Continuity in Change, Change in Continuity
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Early Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-Century

Cochinchina
Nola Cooke1
Our historical understanding of Vietnamese Catholicism has long been
clouded by Catholic apologetics, twentieth-century political polemics,
and a tendency to project nineteenth-century issues back over time. As
a result, we still lack a nuanced and properly historicized grasp of the
250-year experience of Catholicism before French colonialism, although
two recent Western language studies have begun to fill some gaps in our
knowledge of Vietnamese Catholic history (as opposed to the story of missions or missionaries) in this lengthy period.2 Much remains to be done,
however, especially for the very early period where historians must perforce rely on edited texts, often produced with a deliberately edifying purpose, which contain little or no candid commentary. For Vietnam, unlike
China, few indigenous primary sources from this era exist to balance and
inform our view.
Yet within these constraints it still seems possible to historicize the
early decades of Catholic conversion in Vietnam far more than has yet
occurred. At the individual level conversion is, of course, a process which
historians can only ever assess from the outside, even where people have
left written descriptions of inner experiences. But successful conversion
to a new religion is also a socially-rooted collective process: as Andrew
1 My thanks to the Australian Research Council for funding this research, and to
the late Father Gerard Moussay, former archivist at the Socit des Missions trangres
de Paris (MEP), and to the current archivist, Brigitte Appavou, for their help and many
kindnesses.
2See Alain Forest, Missionnaires franais au Tonkin et au Siam, XVIIeXVIIIe, 3 vols.
(Paris and Montreal: LHarmattan, 1998) and Jacob Ramsay, Mandarins and Martyrs. The
Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2008), which is the first to draw on both French missionary and Vietnamese primary sources. The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies has also supported this
research: see Nola Cooke, Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Catholics and Others
in the Pages of the Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, 35, no. 2 (2004): pp. 261286;
Jacob Ramsay, Extortion and Exploitation in the Nguyn Campaign against Catholicism in
1830s1840s Vietnam, 35, no. 2 (2004): pp. 311328; and Nola Cooke, Strange Brew: Global,
Regional and Local Factors behind the 1690 Prohibition of Christian Practice in Nguyn
Cochinchina, 39 (2008): pp. 383409.
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Walls has noted, conversion is about turning what is already there, it is

more about direction than about content.3 This suggests we might be
able to analyze early Catholic conversion as a collective experience by
reconsidering long-published documents in the light of archival materials
from the Missions trangres de Paris (MEP), of recent scholarship on the
Vietnamese past, especially for the south, and of a century of research into
Vietnamese popular religion. This essay uses these tools to explore early
Catholic conversion in Cochinchina, the first Vietnamese mission.
Although the Cochinchina mission spread after the creation of apostolic vicariates in the mid-century to reach from modern Qung Bnh
Province south to the Mekong Delta and west to encompass Cambodia,
in the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the focus of this essay,
it effectively covered the same area as the Nguyn state, known to its own
people as ThunQung and to Europeans as Cochinchina. This area corresponds to the region of modern central Vietnam from Qung Bnh to
Ph Yn, and is roughly the central third of modern Vietnam. We begin
with an overview of the time and place.
Early Seventeenth-Century ThunQung: An Introductory Overview
In the seventeenth century, ThunQung, a thin coastal strip of land
squashed between mountains and sea, was a new state in the process of
formation. Shortly after the first Jesuit missionaries arrived in 1615, its ruling Nguyn family and their elite supporters had began a 50-year struggle
to win independence from the northern kingdom of i Vit, ruled by
the Trnh family in the name of a powerless L emperor. The Trnh and
Nguyn had previously been allies in a half-century campaign to restore
the usurped L throne, but the death of the original restoration leader
had transferred leadership of the movement to Trnh control. In 1558 the
legendary founder of the Nguyn dynasty, Nguyn Hong, had gone south
with a large contingent of supporters from his home province of Thanh
Ha, to govern the Thun Ha protectorate (from modern Hue north to
Quang Bnh). In 1570 his jurisdiction was extended to the southern frontier protectorate of Qung Nam. While Vietnamese people had been settling in upper Thun Ha from the thirteenth century, they had only really
moved further south about a century before Nguyn Hong assumed the
3Andrew Walls, The Ephesian Moment. At a Crossroads in Christian History, in The
Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002): p. 79.
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administration of Qung Nam, after the L had destroyed a Cham principality there in the early 1470s and pushed Vietnamese rule to modern
Ph Yn.4 Over the following century, however, political upheavals in the
north had seen this region largely neglected, so Vietnamese settlers had
freely intermarried or interbred with local peoples and adapted themselves to local customs.5 So suspect was this semi-autonomous area that
when Nguyn Hong first went south L restoration leaders suspected it
of verging on disloyalty.6 Nguyn Hong may have agreed, or perhaps he
was shocked by the hybrid Vietnamese society he found, in Qung Nam
especially, because he went on to lay the foundations here of a colonialstyle military and governmental regime unique in Vietnamese history,
one which relied heavily on families descended from the same northern
district, state, or region as his own. This basic system would persist until
the 1770s overthrow of the state by the Ty Sn rebellion.7 Members of
these elite families were those whom missionaries later described, with
real justification, as nobles.
Restoration forces were victorious in 1592, but Nguyn Hong proved
unable to restore his familys former pre-eminence at court. In 1600, he
returned south permanently and, in 1601, he began the process of symbolically breaking from the Trnh with a religious gesture. He erected a
Buddhist pagoda (Thin M, at modern Hue) on a site locally famous for
its linh kh (supernatural influence), where dragon-vein geomantic energy
combined with the supernatural potency of the great Cham goddess, Po
Nagar, whose ancient temple the pagoda incorporated.8 The L court
had never recognized these autochthonous spirit forces,9 whose support
Nguyn Hong now enlisted as the legitimate lord of ThunQung. From
4For this earlier period, see Li Tana, Nguyn Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 2224.
5Lopold Cadire, Ethnographie (Populations-langues-religions), Bulletin des Amis du
Vieux Hu 18 (1931): pp. 7174, provides evidence from physical anthropology and from
linguistics, while Li, Nguyn Cochinchina, pp. 1057, 11215 discusses cultural adaptations.
6i Nam thc lc Tin bin [Veritable records of i Nam, early compilation], trans.
Nguyn Ngc Tnh (Hanoi, 1962), p. 31.
7Nola Cooke, Regionalism and the Nature of Nguyen Rule in Seventeenth-Century
ang Trong (Cochinchina), Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 29 (1998): pp. 12539, and
Li, Nguyn Cochinchina, ch. 2.
8Tin bin, p. 42.
9Lopold Cadire, La Merveilleuse capital, in Croyances et pratiques religieuse des
Vitnamiens, 3 vols. (1944, 1955, 1956, reprint; Paris: cole franaise dExtrme-Orient, 1992),
1: p. 303; Nguyn Th Anh, The Vietnamization of the Cham Deity Po Nagar, in Essays
into Vietnamese Pasts, ed. K. W. Taylor and John K. Whitmore (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995), p. 49.
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then on, Nguyn rulers actively pursued localization and legitimization by

patronizing whatever spiritually responsive supernatural forces revealed
themselves in their realm, as did their subjects.
ThunQung Vietnamese were primarily animists, and the allenveloping cult of the spiritswhether their own ancestors, wandering
ghosts, great or beneficial figures from the past, natural forces, aweinspiring animals like tigers or whales, trees, rocks, mountains, and so
forthwove indelibly through the everyday fabric of their lives.10 Although
Vietnamese had been settling this area since the fifteenth century, like
Nguyn Hong, many were very aware that their territory was old Cham
land, and that it hosted innumerable unknown, unpredictable, and often
hostile spirit forces that needed to be identified and placated if they hoped
to prosper here. So they readily adapted indigenous beliefs or customs of
all sorts, from human sacrifice through to worshipping powerful Vietnamized Cham goddesses or co-opting local rituals to honor indigenous spirit
forces that might otherwise cause economic activities to fail.11 When local
spirits were identified they had to be appeased, if necessary with human
victims, as Jean-Baptiste Ausis reported in 1689. Two French missionaries had been poisoned at different times in Ph Yn province because
some people there believed the devil would not kill them or their parents
when they were sick if they caused other unknown people to die in their
place.12 This belief existed elsewhere on the frontier, as another French
priest attested in 1716.13 Less drastic measures might suffice in other cases.
In the 1740s, for instance, travelers so feared the evil spirit of the high
mountain between Ph Yn and Nha Ru that they always sacrificed to it
before setting off, scattered gilded paper along the road as they went, and
venerated it at several small altars while en route.14 Such precautionary
customs might last for centuries. In the late colonial era, people in Ph
Yn still placed carved stele in their gardens, or beneath large trees, to
10For various cults, see Lopold Cadire, Croyances et pratiques religieuses des Vitnamiens dans les environs de Hu, 2: pp. 9197.
11 Li, Nguyn Cochinchina, pp. 10112, 125; Thien Do, Vietnamese Supernaturalism. Views
from the Southern Region (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 10510.
12Jean-Baptiste Ausis, Journal de lanne 1689, in a letter of April 6, 1701, Paris,
archives of the Missions Etrangres de Paris [hereafter AMEP], volume 725, fols. 13435;
quote fol. 135.
13See Godefroy, letter of November 9, 1716, AMEP, vol. 726, fol. 437.
14Edmond Bennetat, undated letter (1747?), AMEP, vol. 742, fol. 847.
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placate the first owners of the soil and to banish the demons of sickness
and of bad fate.15
These elementsthe newness of the ruling regime, recurrent warfare, the diversity and shallowness of Vietnamese localization, and the
quest for political and personal security in a world of largely hostile spirit
forcesformed the permanent background to early Christian conversions here, although they are usually ignored in standard accounts of the
Cochinchina mission.16 It was into this militarized but insecure polity, and
into a spiritual landscape already teeming with competing spirit potencies
and supernatural brokers, that Catholic missionaries brought their religion; and it was from within this environment and its own cultural logic
that local people assessed and reacted to it.
Catholicism in the Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Landscape
In 1907, after fifteen years residence in Quang Binh and Quang Tri Provinces, Father Lopold Cadire sought to catch the totalizing nature of the
spirit religion that enveloped his non-Christian neighbors from birth to
death, and beyond the grave. He wrote:
The Vietnamese lives, as it were, in the supernatural. Everywhere he sees
the influence of occult powers that act on his life, for good or ill. [Whatever
their social background] all are preoccupied with the influence of the Spirits
on whatever action they are engaged in, everything indicates to them that
alongside [or] above them others act with them, more powerful than they,
and that on these invisible collaborators depends the success or failure of
their efforts.17
15A. Laborde, La Province de Phu-Yn, Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hu 16 (1929): p. 205.
Local people also venerated a Cham goddess of great spiritual responsiveness, known as
the Iron Princess. Idem, pp. 22425.
16Catholic apologists like E.-L. Louvet [La Cochinchine religeuse, 2 vols. (Paris, 1885)]
had no interest in such matters. For them, the story of Catholicism in Cochinchina was
basically a Eurocentric endeavor that formed one episode in the divinely ordained, cosmic
drama of human redemption. There is less excuse for contemporary authors like Catherine
Marin to ignore local realities. See Le Role des missionnaires franais en Cochinchine aux
XVIIe et XVIIIe sicles (Paris: glises dAsie, DL, 1999), pp. 4349.
17Cadire, Philosophie populaire Vitnamienne: Cosmologie, in Croyances et pratiques, 3: p. 68. Cf. the contemporary anthropologist Philip Taylor: Among the most pervasive beliefs in Vietnam is the view that spirits co-habit alongside the living [and] have
the power to influence the course of life. See Modernity and Re-enchantment in PostRevolutionary Vietnam, in Modernity and Re-enchantment: Religion in Post-Revolutionary
Vietnam, ed. Philip Taylor (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), p. 15.
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If, as Cadire argued, we understand by religion the belief in a supernatural world, [a] practical belief influencing the conduct of life,18 then Vietnamese everyday existence in the early twentieth century was saturated
with religious impulses and actions. Spirits resided everywhere; the spirit
and human worlds intersected and influenced all aspects of life, especially illness. That most peoples goals were material in their interactions
with spirits, rather than spiritual in any western religious sense, did not
diminish the religious content, Cadire argued. If this preoccupation with
intangible powers still persists in southern Vietnam,19 how much more
pervasive must it have been centuries ago, when the consciousness of
mainly benevolent genies (thn), needy dead souls (ma), malign demons
(qui), and every other sort of supernatural potency saturated daily life.
The Nguyn realm consequently swarmed with monks, sorcerers, diviners,
fortune-tellers, mediums, and all sorts of self-proclaimed experts making a
living as supernatural brokers and healers. Everyone from the ruler down
patronized such individuals and sought their advice about, or intercession
with, the manifold unseen powers responsible for all human mischance,
from disease to disaster.20 In such an environment, people were quickly
attracted to any new spiritual force or cult that promised what all Vietnamese desired: efficacious supernatural responsiveness to their material
needs in the world.21
The first resident Jesuits were unaware of this Vietnamese spiritual
landscape when they arrived in Cochinchina in 1615, just as the Societys
Japan mission was disintegrating under Tokugawa persecution. Their East
Asian experience was of Japan and, more recently, of China, where Italian
Jesuits from the 1570s had begun to evolve new methods of evangelism
based on the recognition that in such advanced civilizations missionaries
would have to understand long-descended classical cultures, with their
strict moral codes and rational philosophical systems derived from centuries of Confucian influence, if they hoped to be taken seriously by local
elites. Experience in China also showed that Christianity would have to
adapt to local cultural imperatives or fail to impress Chinese people at any
18 Ibid., p. 68.
19 Do, Vietnamese Supernaturalism, p. 1.
20See Mmoire de Bnigne Vachet sur la Cochinchine, ed. Lopold Cadire, Bulletin
de la Commission Archologique de lIndochine 1 (1913): pp. 5859; or Jean-Baptiste de Cappony, letter of December 8, 1701, AMEP, vol. 728, fols. 16676.
21 For linh, or supernatural effectiveness in the world, see Do, Vietnamese Supernaturalism, pp. 913.
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level of society.22 Fundamental to this new approach, too, was an emphasis on translation and on vernacular preaching by men specially trained
as catechists. The first Jesuits in Vietnam, a mixed group of Portuguese,
Italian, and Japanese, may have disagreed over the extent of accommodation necessary to local culture,23 but by 1621 they had produced a catechism written in the local language which was available for catechumens
to memorize.24 This vital tool provided enough basic knowledge of the
religion for ordinary believers to propagandize others on its behalf.
Although the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, who evangelized in
Tonkin for a few years after a brief stint in mid-1620s Cochinchina, would
later assert that Vietnam had the same laws and religions as China,25 where
Confucianism was concerned this was hardly true for ThunQung. In
the late fourteenth-century, the new L dynastys Confucianizing revolution from abovethanks to which Neo-Confucianism would imprint
its influence on the northern Vietnamese cultural elite via a prestigious
triennial Chinese-style examination systemhad largely by-passed this
area, and the Nguyn home province, as well. Nguyn Hongs forebears
had been national political figures at that time, but as soldiers with Buddhist inclinations not examination-formed officials. Their descendants
22Andrew C. Ross, Alessandro Valignano: The Jesuits and Culture in the East, and
Nicolas Standaert, S. J., Jesuit Corporate Culture as Shaped by the Chinese, both in The
Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 15401773, ed. John W. OMalley, S. J. et al. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 33651 and 35263, respectively.
23Alexandre de Rhodes reported that the imprudent zeal of someone who wanted
to abolish all the ceremonies for the dead nearly caused the religion to be banned in the
mid-1620s. As the initial edict was drawn up against the missionaries, it is likely that the
imprudent person in question was a Portuguese Jesuit. Alexandre de Rhodes, Voyages et
missions du Pre Alexandre de Rhodes de la Compagnie de Jsus en la Chine et autres royaumes de lorient. (1653; Paris, 1854), p. 93.
24For this very early period the best source is the Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS sur
la Concincina, reprinted by photographic reproduction from a 1628 volume in Bulletin
des Amis du Vieux Hu 18 (1931): pp. 12247 (although the letter and its annotations cover
pp. 40728, page numbers of the reprinted letter are those of the original text). Cadire,
who annotated this letter, believed this catechism (see p. 127) was the foundational text
for de Rhodes later, more refined version (n. 14, pp. 41920), as does Roland Jacques in Les
Missionnaires portugais et les dbuts de lglise catholique au Vit-nam, 2 vols. (Reichstett,
2004), pp. 16872. That a Vietnamese language catechism was in use in Cochinchina by
1621 has been surprisingly overlooked in Peter C. Phan, Mission and Catechesis: Alexandre
de Rhodes & Inculturation in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1998). Cristoforo Borris 1631 account covers much the same period but for reasons shown
later it seems less trustworthy. See the eighteenth-century English translation of the Italian original in Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina and
Samuel Baron on Tonkin, ed. and introduced by Olga Dror and K. W. Taylor (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006), pp. 13780.
25De Rhodes, Voyages et missions, pp. 7778.
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remained Buddhist patrons in ThunQung, where educated men studied the classical canon but where the political elite never sponsored it
as the normative ideology of government and society, as was the case in
late Ming China and Trnh i Vit from the mid-seventeenth century.26
(This is not surprising since the Trinh enlisted canonical Confucian concepts to brand the Nguyn as traitors to the L.)27 In religious terms, the
strongest effect of Confucianism here was to confirm the primacy of the
ancestral cult and to endow elite men with an appreciation of rationality,
the obverse of which was a distrust of excessive religious fervor, which
was regarded as the product of sorcery or magic potions. Given the degree
to which Christians would suffer from this conviction in later centuries, it
is ironic that the first reference to it in Cochinchina was by Gaspar Luis,
who advanced it in 1621 to explain why a Buddhist couple who later converted had been so devoted to their former master.28
Unlike in Ming China, the socially- and culturally-diffused basic religious
imperative to which Catholicism needed to accommodate in the Nguyn
realm, or by which it would fail, was the ubiquitous cult of the spirits.
Because of this, the growth of Catholicism here most closely resembled its
development in Chinese villages far from the court, where Jesuits practiced rituals, performed exorcisms, engaged in the pastoral of fear [...]
and spread tales of the supernatural that were little different from tales
in the Taoist and Buddhist popular traditions, to quote the Jesuit historian Nicolas Standaert. In these rural communities, Jesuits competed with
local Taoist masters, sorcerers, and faith healers [and they...] engaged in
practices that, at least in the eyes of the Chinese authorities, fully belonged
to the realm of popular magic, sorcery, and potentially subversive cults.29
They had little choice, however, because local Christians, mostly poor and
illiterate, required these sorts of spiritual services from them.
26Nola Cooke, Nineteenth-Century Vietnamese Confucianization in Historical Perspective: Evidence from the Palace Examinations (14631883), Journal of Southeast Asian
Studies 25 (1994): pp. 27585, and K. W. Taylor, The Literati Revival in SeventeenthCentury Vietnam, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 18 (1987): pp. 122.
27K. W. Taylor, Nguyen Hoang and the Beginning of Vietnams Southward Expansion, in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era. Trade, Power, and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 4265.
28The followers of this monk supposedly drank a potion that made them lose affection
for all people but him and believe everything he told them. The Jesuits may have picked
up this idea locally. Fear of comparable sorcery on de Rhodes part caused his banishment
from Tonkin in 1630. Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS, p. 136, and de Rhodes, Voyages et missions, pp. 12829.
29Standaert, Jesuit Corporate Culture, p. 359.
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Ordinary ThunQung Vietnamese required the same services from

the new religion, so while the first Jesuits were busy impressing elite individuals with their superior astronomical or mathematical skills,30 they
were also performing exorcisms and healing rituals to drive off demons.31
There was nothing unusual in this: these missionaries believed just as
unquestioningly as the Vietnamese in the reality of an enveloping supernatural sphere, intersecting the mundane human world, whose denizens
might freely interfere, for good or evil, in daily life and events. Missionaries understood this invisible world from within a Judeo-Christian tradition, but their bedrock acceptance that demons and devilry could and
did trouble everyday life in a pagan country precisely matched that of the
people they sought to convert. In my view, more than any other single
factor it was this shared conviction, and the missionary willingness to act
on it, which first enabled Christianity to put down roots in seventeenthcentury Vietnamese soil.
At this time, dealing with demonic forces formed a commonplace component of clerical faith, theology, and pastoral care, as well as being integral
to the Catholic (and indeed Protestant) reform agenda in Europe.32 While
all missionaries knew that devils originated from the expulsion of Lucifer
and his rebel angels from Heaven, conveying such commonplace JudeoChristian convictions in Vietnam was fraught with cross-cultural pitfalls.
Thus, for instance, to communicate the Christian concept of the devil in
his catechism, de Rhodes combined two local terms, ma and qu (ghost
and evil spirit, respectively) that usually referred to spirits of the dead,
of varying degrees of malevolence. But when Jesuits referred to devils as
ma qu, their Vietnamese audience would have applied their own cultural
understanding to the neologism. So while committed converts may have
conscientiously learned that ma qu only existed because the all-powerful
Lord of Heaven allowed them to,33 for ordinary Vietnamese this terminology ran the risk of inviting a reverse cross-cultural transference that
30Ironically, their superior ability to predict an eclipse made the first Jesuits complicit
in local religion as it enabled the ruler to correctly time his ceremony of supplication
on behalf of his country. It is clear from Luis description of this ritual that the king was
already acting as the earthly link between heaven and his realm, and also that the ritual
was a religious means of strengthening the hierarchical bonds of local society. Lettre du
Pre Gaspar LUIS, pp. 12425.
31 Ibid., pp. 14044.
32Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), Part 4.
33Phan, Mission and Catechesis, p. 238.
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turned God, or the Lord of Heaven (c chua tri), into no more than a
superior protective spirit (thn).
This transposition can be detected most clearly in the chasm between
missionary explanations for their successful struggles with demons and
evil spirits and the probable explanations that would have come from the
Vietnamese. For the Jesuits, faith healing and exorcism formed part of
Gods plan for the conversion of Cochinchina. As Borri wrote, it was common for local people to see phantoms, visions, and apparitions, [with] the
devil often appearing to them so that demons walked about the towns
so familiarly in human shapes, that they are not at all feared but admitted into company. God allowed all this so that ordinary people could be
called through healing miracles, to the end that declining in their opinion of diabolical prodigies, they might own the only Lord and singular
worker of true wonders.34 Yet, to the frustration of generations of missionaries, their provision of such religious services never resulted in mass
conversions. Instead of large numbers of Vietnamese embracing the truth
of the single Lord through such manifestations of his power, repeated
demonstrations that foreign missionaries implicitly accepted the reality of the Vietnamese spirit world seemed far more likely to confirm the
local belief system than challenge or transform it. We see this in the way
that Vietnamese cultural logic would have explained Christian healing. As
its power seemed to be imbued in cult objects, like holy water, rosaries,
candles, and so forth, or rituals like prayer, for ordinary people (and many
untutored converts) it would have appeared like magical instrumentality,
especially as it could work for anyone, without the need to convert. Father
Luis provided the earliest evidence of this when he noted that demons
ordinarily torment women in this Kingdom, but when people saw that
women who listened to the catechism were not troubled by them, others
attended on that account.35 In other words, the simple act of listening,
without any greater commitment, could provide a spiritual prophylaxis
34Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, p. 176.
35Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS, pp. 14546. Borri also referred to the phenomenon
of female possession, but his report lacks all credibility as he presented as fact a lurid
cautionary tale concerning the sexual predations of demons in human form which originated in an early sixteenth-century Fujianese Christian text. Compare Borri, Views of
Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, pp. 17677 with Joanna Waley-Cohen, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2000), pp. 8384.
In the Chinese original, holy water stopped the demon from entering the bedroom, where
he used to sleep in the same bed as the tormented husband and wife, but it required a
crucifix to make him to vanish. Subsequently the whole family converted. The story may
have originated with itinerant Fujianese Christian merchants.
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against demonic possession. In another case, a young possessed woman

was delivered after her Christian brother merely placed a rosary around
her neck. The whole family subsequently converted, but the magical cure
worked without it.36
As a result, although only a small number of Cochinchinese ever converted (perhaps 7080,000 at the most by the 1680s), many more people
at all levels of society recognized the Lord of Heaven was a potent thn
wielding effective therapeutic power. Even Cha Hin (ruled 16481687),
who ruthlessly presided over the execution of scores of ordinary Catholics in the 1660s, publicly acknowledged this supernatural specialty when
Christian faith healing cured two senior court figures in the 1670s, one
of whom had dispensed with the missionary and applied the holy water
personally to the afflicted part of his body.37 This broad acceptance, from
the highest levels down, ensured the new religion a place within the existing spectrum of popular cults, despite its foreign provenance. Indeed, the
numerous faith healings and exorcisms carried out by Catholic catechists
or priests probably made them seem, in many local eyes, more like successful competitors with Buddhist monks and other occult specialists than
masters of a suspect alien sect.
So despite the first Jesuits high repute as scientists in elite circles at
this time, and their stress on the rationality of Catholicism, it was the new
religions healing effectiveness that captured the popular imagination.
Healing was an important part of what local people hoped for from religion, including from Buddhism,38 and this expectation formed a natural
fit with Christianity, in which healing had always played a major role, as
36Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS, p. 142. For other examples, see pp. 13233, 13334, 144,
and 145. French missionaries realized this dilemma late in the century and tried to ensure
adults were adequately tested before baptism; but it was knowledge won by experience.
In the 1670s and 1680s, inexperienced MEP missionaries might believe God used the devil
as a catechist via possession to make up for the small number of apostolic workers in
the mission. See Ausis, letter of February 10, 1685, AMEP, vol. 736, fol. 15, or Guillaume
Mahots identical view on arrival in 1671, as recorded by Bnigne Vachet in Quelques
remarques sur la vie de Messire Guillaume Mahot, Evesque de Bide et vicaire apostolique
de Cochinchine, 1685, AMEP, vol. 735, fol. 613.
37Jean de Courtaulin, Relation de la Cochinchine faicte par un provicaire du feu Mgr
Levesque de Berythe depuis lan 1674 au mois de juin jusques en lan 1682, 1689 (?), AMEP,
vol. 735, fol. 112.
38Buddhist monks might also be effective faith healers. See, for instance, the story of
Huong Hai who, in mid-seventeenth-century Qung Nam, used his magic power to exorcise demons and to cure two elite individuals from disease or illness through meditation,
holy water, and prayer. The History of Buddhism in Vietnam, ed. Nguyn Ti Th (Washington, D.C.: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008), p. 189.
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Amanda Porterfield has amply shown.39 The readiness of local Christians

and missionaries to provide ritual services for the sick or emotionally disturbed, and the conviction with which they did so, repeatedly confirmed
the curative efficacy of the Lord of Heaven, even if it failed to convince
many people of his spiritual omnipotence. This successful record was nevertheless enough to provide Catholicism with a real degree of legitimacy
at all levels of society, however reluctantly or distastefully for some and
notwithstanding its official prohibition on several occasions. In the largely
instrumental cultural logic of Vietnamese animism, effectiveness in the
material world was the main measure of value for a spirit power; so long
as Christians and their religious paraphernalia channeled effective supernatural curing of illness and demonic possession, the infinitely elastic cult
of the spirits would find a place for the Lord of Heaven, albeit, as time
passed, a somewhat ambivalent one.
Now we consider what the earliest texts show or suggest about the
motives and processes involved in early Christian conversion.
Conversion to Christianity
In 1615 Francisco Buzomi and three lay brothers, two of them Japanese,
arrived on a Portuguese ship that dropped anchor in Tourane Bay (modern Nng), where Buzomi began his mission.40 From Borris rather
garbled account41 we know that Christianity had predated their arrival
here. In a famous vignette, Borri described Buzomi watching a comedy
performance in the Tourane market that satirized Christian conversion. A
comedian hid a child in a huge artificial stomach, turned him out to ask if
he wished to enter the belly of the Portuguese, and then swallowed him up
again, over and over. Buzomi recognized the words as the same ones his
interpreters used when asking if people wanted to convert. Realizing the
39Amanda Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
40A second Jesuit, Father Carvalho, came on the same ship but moved on soon after to
Japan, where he was martyred. Borri mentioned only one lay brother, but a Jesuit source
name two Japanese as well. See Voyages et travaux des Missionnaires de la Compagnie de
Jsus, ed. Fortun de Montzon and Edouard Estve, 2 vols. (Paris, 1858), 2: p. 386.
41 Borri began by denying ships chaplains had ever attempted to convert local people
but then said they had tried but their interpreters lacked a religious vocabulary so they
could only ask whether they wanted to become Portuguese. Cf. Borri, Views of SeventeenthCentury Vietnam, pp. 137 and 139. Unfortunately, much of Borris account of the early mission does not stand up to close scrutiny.
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mistake, Buzomi substituted a quite unfathomable wordChristiam

for Portuguese, taking particular care, Borri added, that the interpreters should be well informd in this particular so they might afterwards
serve faithfully in teaching of others.42 Since Borri had already mentioned that none of them spoke Vietnamese, we must assume bilingual
Japanese Christians from Faifo (modern Hi An) lent some assistance;43
how well it was done is another matter, since Luis acknowledged in 1621
that, as long as Jesuits had relied on interpreters, local converts did not
conceive very well what was being taught, and had embraced the faith
broadly speaking only because they believed [...] that the Portuguese
religion was better than theirs.44 In other words, Vietnamese in Tourane had for years been converting to Christianity, known at the time
as the Portuguese law (o hoa lan), without understanding anything
about its doctrine. How the Portuguese law was better than theirs was
illuminated by Alexander de Rhodes, who wrote that the Portuguese were
famous throughout the East both for their military glory and the wealth
of their merchandise.45 In Vietnamese eyes these highly desirable benefits derived as much from occult powers as from human efforts, meaning
the desire for the same supernatural support had prompted most early
conversions in Tourane and possibly Faifo, where people were familiar
with wealthy Japanese Christians. Right at the start, therefore, we find
an exceedingly pure example of the way pragmatic and instrumentalist
attitudes towards supernatural power, and its impact in the world, might
promote Christian conversion by people with no desire to know anything
more about the religion.
Apart from people who hoped for mundane material benefits, who
else was attracted to convert in the first decade? One important class of
early converts was men whose profession exposed them to danger, and
especially to the prospect of death far from home or by violence. Thus
soldiers were always attracted to Catholicism,46 as too were fishermen
or maritime travelers, who risked drowning or being killed by pirates.
Catholicism offered a hopeful alternative to the fearful fate which popular religion reserved for such lost souls, doomed to wander the earth as
42Borri, Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, pp. 13740.
43No doubt via the agency of the Japanese Jesuit lay brothers whose presence Borri
had failed to note.
44Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS, pp. 12829.
45Quoted in Forest, Missionnaires franais au Tonkin, 3: p. 294.
46That the Nguyn reserved polygamy for officers alone automatically removed one of
the great barriers to male conversion. Mmoire de Bnigne Vachet, p. 25.
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hungry ghosts, unsatisfied for eternity. A glimpse at the earliest Christian

converts in 1620s Nc Mn (modern Qui Nhn, in Bnh nh) provides
clues to the background of several others.
Nc Mn was a wealthy and populous port-city near the southern
frontier, with valuable commercial contacts with the mountainous hinterland of modern Kon Tum and Dar Lac. There is a hint in Borris account
that Europeans may have been there before,47 but if so they stimulated no
interest in conversion. Unlike in Faifo, with its established Japanese Christian community, or Tourane, where existing contacts with Portuguese
shipping stimulated an interest in their religion, conversion was slow
to begin here. In 1618, when drought had rendered the Jesuits position
difficult further north, its governor, already a friend of Buzomi, invited
him and the some other Jesuits (Francisco di Pina and Cristoforo Borri)
there as honored guests; but his death shortly after saw them languish
for three years, converting but very few according to Borri.48 Success
followed the conversion of a high-ranking couple, the Nguyn ambassador to Cambodia and his wife. Both were fervent Buddhists but friendly
towards the Jesuits. One day the wife decided to seek baptism, which she
received after hearing the catechism several times. She took the name of
Ursula. When her husband returned to Nc Mn from court, he too converted, as did a number of people from their households. Their example
then attracted many others, with Father Perez baptizing in all 118 adults
who became the first Vietnamese Christians in southern Cochinchina.49
Buzomi then established a residence in the far south, where by 1623 several former Buddhist monks had also convertedsome thanks to the fervent preaching of Master (omsaii or ng thy) Ly, whose own conversion
Borri related50and two had become Buzomis principal assistants and
main links with the local Christians after di Pina, the only Jesuit at the
time fluent in Vietnamese, returned to Faifo. In 1623, they were already
educating young Christian men in their national language, no doubt using
early written materials like the first catechism.51
47He says they were given a meal of dishes presented in the European fashion. Borri,
Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, p. 148.
48Ibid., p. 155.
49There are significant differences between Borri and Luis regarding these events, so
I have followed the earlier account. Cf. ibid., pp. 15661 with Lettre du Pre Gaspar LUIS,
pp. 13540.
50Borri, Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, pp. 16869.
51 See di Pinas 1623 letter in Jacques, Portuguese Pioneers, p. 45.
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Here we see several of the factors that facilitated the early spread of
Christianity. First, some of the most fervent early converts were people
with pre-existing religious interests, either as devout Buddhists or as religious specialists of some sort, including (from de Rhodes later account)
mediums and diviners, people who made their living by seeking supernatural guidance to uncover the spiritual causes of illness. De Rhodes
reported the same phenomenon in Tonkin when he evangelized there
in the late 1620s, underlining the characteristic openness of Vietnamese
people at the time to any efficacious new spiritual force. Even people with
a vested interest in the status quo, professional religious practitioners or
wealthy supernatural brokers, might jettison their existing divinities if a
superior one appeared.52 Second, people might be convinced to convert
by the example of others they respected or by witnessing others experience of the supernatural efficacy of the new religion. Traditional Vietnamese society was strongly hierarchical, so if elite individuals converted their
households often followed suit. Similarly, whole families, or even villages,
might convert en masse after witnessing a successful exorcism or instance
of faith healing.53
Third, and very important, it indicates the role of women in early Christianity, since it was Ursula who initiated the couples conversion. Women
often appear in Alexandre de Rhodes account of his mission here during
the early 1640s, especially two noblewomen whose protection sheltered
their respective Christian communities for some years. In the capital
was Minh c Vng Thi Phi, or Madame Marie, the mother of Nguyn
Hongs last son, Prince Kh, who was at the time the principal minister at his nephews court.54 Then in 1640 Ph Yn de Rhodes discovered
the stalwart of the Rn Rn church was another noblewoman, Madame
52This also occurred in Tonkin, where de Rhodes baptized 200 former monks who then
worked to convert their former co-religionists, with one monk alone reportedly bringing
him 500 for baptism. Voyages et missions, p. 115.
53When Mahot first arrived in Nha Ru in 1671, he was quickly presented with two
young possessed women to exorcise. This success brought him to the attention of the
local governor, whose daughter was similarly afflicted. When she was cured, her mother,
two brothers, and the entire household also converted. See Vachet, La vie de Guillaume
Mahot, AMEP, vol. 735, fols. 61415.
54All references to both women are conveniently assembled in Lopold Cadire, Une
Princess Chrtienne la Cour des premiers Nguyn: Madame Marie, Bulletin des Amis du
Vieux Hu 26 (1939): pp. 63130. For Marie-Madeleine, see pp. 11023. Cadire believed her
husband had been a lesser provincial official, but in 1664 she was spared the cangue and,
alone of all the confessors, sentenced not to be executed like a criminal but allowed to
starve to death, out of [royal] consideration for the memory of her husband (p. 122). This
indicates he had not been a mere provincial official.
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Marie-Madeleine. Apparently a fairly recent convert, she was the principal

wife of the military governor. De Rhodes met the couple several times,
and from his comments we can almost certainly identify this governor
as Nguyn Phc Vinh, one of the most eminent officers of the realm,
who had been appointed to the post in 1629. If so, Marie-Madeleine was
the Nguyn princess Ngc Lin, the oldest daughter of Cha Si (ruled
16131635).55
What might have attracted these, and thousands of other women, to
Christianity? Unlike Madame Marie, Marie-Madeleines only surviving
child was a daughter, while Ursula in Nc Mn had had no children.
All three had been fervent Buddhists before conversion, but only one of
them had been rewarded for her devotion with a son, a matter of no small
significance at the time. Christianity spoke directly to women like them.
Whereas the Buddhist law of karma ultimately made each responsible
for her reproductive failure, as punishment for sins in previous lives, in
Christianity they could find validation of their personal worth through
venerating Jesus, a social outsider with no wife or children of his own
who had willingly suffered a terrible fate in order to save humanity from
demonic forces, before ascending to heaven and eternal felicity.56 This
story of redemption through suffering and service must have resonated
deeply for women in a society where the dominant gender construction
designated them as the principal props and eternal servants of their families, thus offering most of them little more than unending responsibilities
and incessant toil.57 The new Christian mythos sanctified such lives,58 so
it is hardly surprising that women responded to it and rapidly formed the
majority of the faithful, especially as their essentially domestic concerns
made it easier to avoid the culturally-sanctioned sacrifices to various
spirits that normally fell to men.
55His was a very illustrious family. For their official biographies, see ai Nam Lit
Truyn [Arranged biographies of ai Nam], trans. Mng Khng, 4 vols. (Hue, 1993),
1: pp. 67, 8182.
56Luis, for instance, related how moved the queens sister was at contemplating the life
of Jesus and, while not willing to convert, still worshipped his image on her knees. Lettre
du Pre Gaspar LUIS, p. 146.
57Borri remarked on this in the early 1620s (see Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam,
p. 126) as did Vachet in the 1670s (see Mmoire de Bnigne Vachet, p. 32). For a longer discussion, see Nola Cooke, Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Seventeenth-Century
Nguyn Cochinchina: New Light from Old Sources (paper presented at the 4th International Convention of Asia Scholars, Shanghai, August 2024, 2005).
58See, for instance, the approval given to menial labor and hard work as an imitation
of Jesus in de Rhodes catechism in Phan, Mission and Catechesis, pp. 27274.
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Philip Taylors recent findings in regard to popular goddess cults in

contemporary southern Vietnam can illuminate the diffuse cultural elements that likely drew women to early Christianity. Taylor argues for a
link between the efficacious repute of the goddesses he studied and their
needy lives of suffering and marginality, a connection which he believes
accords with a logic that pervades the folk religion of Vietnam: that the
more marginalized and socially excluded an entity, the more powerful
it may be. Most of those who propitiate these contemporary goddesses
are women who, Taylor believes, recognize in the biographies of exclusion [of these divinities] the high stakes they [themselves have to] negotiate to acquit themselves of [the] social expectations placed on them
by their families and by society in general. After describing the sacrifices
routinely expected of women for familys sake, Taylor concludes: Many
women find themselves in precarious positions in society, and for them
these tales of marginality resonate deeply.59 Much the same could be said
of many ordinary Cochinchinese women (and men) in the seventeenth
century, so it is particularly interesting, in the light of Taylors comments,
to hear what Jean de Courtaulin said most attracted people to Catholicism
in the 1670s. After eight years of regularly traversing the whole realm as
the apostolic vicars deputy, he wrote that local Christians were
very particularly devoted to the image of the crucifix, or of Christ crucified, with which they make daily miracles for the sick or those possessed by
demons (energumnes), quite different in this from the Chinese who, people
say, are quite shocked to see the image of the crucifix, our catechists on the
contrary only preach Jesus Christ crucified to the gentiles who have a great
appetite for it, they preach to them about the love of the eternal father who
gave up his only son for the redemption of slaves entrapped by the devil:
this is why all the Christians beg and ask me for images of Jesus Christ crucified or of the Holy Virgin for whom they also have a very special and tender
devotion.60
Without wanting to draw too close a parallel between such different times,
it nevertheless does seem to me that the aspects of the Christian story
which de Courtaulin said most appealed to ordinary people also resonate
59See Philip Taylor, Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), esp. pp. 26467; quotes pp. 266 and 267
respectively.
60Jean de Courtaulin, Relation de la Cochinchine, AMEP, vol. 735, fol. 125. He had
several times requested large numbers of such items but only ever got images of European saints, in whom local people had no interest and whose names they could rarely
pronounce.
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at a deep cultural level with Taylors analysis of contemporary southern

folk religion.
In addition to the foregoing groups, people also converted out of gratitude for Christian charity, although a significant proportion were probably
near death or deathbed conversions. Those who experienced conversion
as a personal process of growing towards Christ were often inspired by
the radical belief that all souls were of equal value to God, and by the
charitable ideal of Christian love towards others, especially the afflicted.
Conversion liberated new energies among such people which were often
turned to socially benevolent works like burying the dead or establishing
hospices where those suffering from incurable illnesses like leprosy could
be tended. The earliest reference to this in Cochinchina comes from 1640s
Rn Rn,61 where Marie-Madeleine had founded a hospital that accepted
lepers, among others, but it seems unlikely that it was the only such establishment at the time. By the early 1680s there would be at least three in
the Qui Ninh-Ph Yn region alone.62
One last but crucial factor needs to be considered here. The engine that
drove the spread of Christianity was Vietnamese preaching to and converting other Vietnamese. The importance of charismatic new Christians
for the spread of early Catholicism here thus cannot be overstated. Jean
de Courtaulin, who was active at the tail end of this early era, confirmed
this when he rejected the notion that missionaries had been responsible
for restoring Christian numbers after the savagery of the 1660s persecutions. Rather, it had been the catechists, after God, and their relatives
and friends, who go to [the gentiles] and urge [the religion] to them and
they bring them to us to baptize, when they are adequately instructed.
As far as de Courtaulin was aware, he had only ever converted one person
himself.63 The system of catechists was first instituted by Alexandre de
Rhodes in Tonkin, where he also founded a seminary to train them. By
mid-century, he reported there were more than 100 young men in this
seminary, which was funded by the Christian community.64 Nothing comparable happened in the Cochinchina mission. Although de Rhodes established catechists to preach and to prepare people for baptism, and then in
61 See de Rhodes, Voyages et missions, p. 169.
62See Ausis journal, AMEP, vol. 725, fols. 92, 94, and 115. Those who died there were
buried by the community.
63Ibid., fol. 8. Vachet confirms this for the 1670s in La vie de Guillaume Mahot, AMEP,
vol. 735, fols. 62022. The missionaries focused their attention on training the catechists,
he added.
64De Rhodes, Voyages et missions, pp. 12324.
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1642 selected ten unmarried men, later sworn to chastity and obedience,
to become principal catechists, no institution was established to train or
indoctrinate them further.65 By 1645, three had been martyred and by the
end of the 1660s virtually all were dead. As the Jesuit presence shrank to
Faifo in the 1650s, where the few remaining priests dared only administer
at night, responsibility for the everyday life of the new church fell almost
completely onto local Christians.66 Catechists would have been prominent; but given what de Rhodes account suggests (and de Courtaulin confirms) about the role of inspired local converts, including women, it seems
safe to assume that charismatic lay people remained at least as important
at the grassroots in the 1650s as they had been in the 1640s.
Most of our post-1620s evidence for the early church derives from de
Rhodes consciously edifying account of the early 1640s, with its heavy
emphasis on Cochinchinese Christians accomplishing the same continuous miracles that he had reported earlier in Tonkin: they raise the dead;
they repeatedly perform astonishing curative feats; in two cases they even
fall into ecstasies in which they receive a foretaste of Paradise and waste
away in longing afterwards.67 For de Rhodes all this was explained by reference to the primitive churchGod had granted these new Christians
the same graces he had allowed those of the first century68but for a
historian the explanation of such reports lies elsewhere. All these wonders suggest to me the speed and degree to which early Catholicism had
become naturalized into the Vietnamese spiritual landscape, thanks to its
reputation as a healing religion with special power over demons. For me,
the miracle stories also hint at the influence of charismatic but untrained
lay evangelists in spreading the news of this new spirit power in a language local people would respond to.
It seems unlikely that most converts could have known much more
of Christianity than what they had learned from catechism, in particular
from that later published by de Rhodes in 1653. This text presents Jesus as,
par excellence, the divine doctor and miracle worker able to control the
demonic powers that caused illness and human suffering. In Peter Phans
translation, eight of the eleven pages concerning Christs public ministry
deal with miracles, with seven out of ten specific episodes being devoted
to healing, including three cases of raising the dead. As all four Gospels
65Ibid., pp. 18788.
66For the 1640s, see Voyages et travaux des Missionnaires, 2: pp. 20715.
67Ibid., pp. 16269, 18991. Cf. pp. 11618.
68Ibid., p. 119.
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together only include 41 such specific healing episodes,69 the rate of transfer seems quite high, suggesting that the final printed catechism evolved
in response to the elements in the gospel story that resounded most with
Vietnamese listeners. Significantly, too, the catechism taught that Jesus
delegated similar healing powers to his disciples.70 New Christians thus
expected the most devout among them to share this divine healing power,
including the power to raise the dead, so we should not be surprised to see
instances of it reported to de Rhodes. Whatever the physical explanation
for these purported resurrections, what is significant is peoples implicit
belief that such things could happen. Conviction is the crucial element
here, just as in faith healing. As some modern research has shown, powerful curative results, for body or mind, can occur in situations where shared
convictions establish an intense therapeutic relationship between sufferer
and spiritual healer.71
To historicize the miracle stories that de Rhodes presents, however,
we need to consider them from within their own cultural context rather
than that of early Christian history. From a local perspective, they seem
like unremarkable manifestations of a far wider phenomenon: virtually
all popular religions in Vietnam, past and present, dispose of a treasury
of comparable tales of wonder, miraculous healing, and supernatural
responsiveness.72 Indeed, without such evidence of efficacy, no religion
would ever have taken root among ordinary people. In the historical context, therefore, these miracle stories seem more like evidence of an evolving oral tradition devoted to illuminating the supernatural effectiveness of
Catholicism. By extension, they undoubtedly played an important role in
helping to create and maintain a sense of shared community among Catholic groups otherwise scattered at considerable distances from each other.
ThunQung society was surprisingly mobile, and such stories would
have spread quickly, no doubt generating similar expectations and experiences in other places. The continual upwelling of these miracle stories in
the first century of Christian evangelism thus seems best understood as a
measure of the social vitality of the new religion and of its domestication
into the Vietnamese cultural imaginary, albeit at a margin.
Support for this last point comes from a story Borri related which, he
claimed, happened in my time. It concerned a woman of great quality,
69Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity, p. 21.
70Phan, Mission and Catechesis, p. 277. For the whole sixth day, see pp. 27582.
71 Porterfield, Healing in the History of Christianity, pp. 1418.
72For numerous examples, see Do, Vietnamese Supernaturalism, chap. 2.
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with two Christian sons who was sexually involved with a demon in
human form. She died in labor giving birth to two eggs. Afterwards, the
woman and her offspring were ceremonially cast into the river rather
than buried, on the basis that the river spirit had fathered her two eggs.73
Despite Borris treating all this as fact, the story was surely simply a reworking of two widespread folk tales involving dragon incubi and river spirits,74
which in his ignorance Borri had swallowed whole. The important point
here is that, almost from the start, we see people weaving together elements of existing folk religions and the new faith, a sure indicator that it
was capturing local imagination.
Overall, then, the nature of early Catholicism and Catholic conversion
here is well summed up by Brian Stanleys comment on the outcome of
a similar process of vernacular lay translation of the Christian message
elsewhere, in modern Africa. The resulting religious movement was not
simply a form of Christianity which had high potential for indigenity. It was
also an understanding of what faith in Christ means that may have been
closer to biblical norms than the [...] understanding held by European
missionaries.75 MEP archival documents repeatedly confirm the accuracy
of this insight for the second phase of Catholic historical development
here when, from the 1670s, French secular priests began an eighty-year
long, and arguably inconclusive, struggle against Jesuit and local opposition to move this domesticated form of Christianity closer to their own
post-Tridentine expectations of Catholicism. Before their arrival, however,
the insecurities of the times had driven the Nguyn state to try to contain,
and finally uproot, this new religion, ostensibly because of its increasingly
suspect connections with a foreign power. The chapter concludes with
this era of rolling persecutions, from 1643 to the 1670s, and what they suggest about the nature of early Catholicism here.
This era of persecution was unlike any other in Vietnamese history.
Although nineteenth-century events may be better known, those victims were overwhelmingly priests or catechists, as was also usually the
case in eighteenth-century Tonkin. In Cochinchina between 1643 and
1678, however, we know of 66 Vietnamese Christians martyred, eight of
them (or twelve percent) women, with the details of at least another 25
73Borri, Views of Seventeenth-Century Vietnam, p. 176.
74Ed. Bonifacy, Les Europens qui ont vu le vieux Hu: Cristoforo Borri, Bulletin des
Amis du Vieux Hu 18 (1931): p. 393, n. 147. Borri seems particularly credulous in chapter 9.
75Brian Stanley, Conversion to Christianity: The Colonization of the Mind? International Review of Mission 92, no. 366 (2003): p. 326.
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s ubsequently lost. Many more may have died anonymously as a consequence of mistreatment. Catechists formed only a handful and none were
priests. To put the known death toll into perspective, only one Christian
was ever martyred in seventeenth-century Tonkin, and no Vietnamese
Christian women were ever executed there, or even died in the hands of
the state before 1841, when two expired of exhaustion.76 Catholic historians have presented this early persecution as no different from any other,
yet it was an extraordinary event of real consequence. Although by the late
1660s there may have been no more than 5,000 self-proclaimed Christians
left in the country,77 people were still reportedly approaching the royal
residence offering to die for the faith, according to one MEP letter.78 It is
easy enough to chart the growing insecurity of the Nguyn state from its
1642 clash with the north, the first after a decade of peace, through to the
imposition of a curfew and additional coastal patrols in 1645,79 to the fullblown Trnh invasion of 1648, and the humiliating failure of the lengthy
Nguyn counter invasion (16551662) that was followed soon after by an
internal purge of Christians, beginning in the heavily militarized northern
zone and moving south over several years.80 One mid-1660s report suggests the persecution was partly a witch hunt against internal enemies,
with Christians suspected as the stalking horse of the Portuguese.81 In
light of the foregoing discussion, however, it seems to me that more was
involved.
From de Rhodes account, it appears that something akin to an eschatological undercurrent was running through local Catholicism from at least
the 1640s. After the martyrdom of Andr in 1643,82 for instance, others
sought to emulate him, including 35 arrested Qui Ninh Christians who
volunteered to die for Christ in order to win the eternal life of heavenly
felicity promised to his faithful followers.83 Thereafter, de Rhodes was
twice approached by groups of people seeking baptism in the hope of
76My calculations from Voyages et travaux des Missionnaires, 2: pp. 399407.
77That was the total quoted in the most sensible report of the time. See Marin Labbe,
letter of June 15, 1693, AMEP, vol. 737, fol. 533.
78Pierre Langlois in Siam, letter of August 28, 1671, AMEP, vol. 713, fol. 64.
79De Rhodes, Voyages et missions, pp. 303, 332.
80See Voyages et travaux des Missionnaires, 2: pp. 20542 for Jesuit accounts.
81 See Louis Chevreuil, Relation du premier voyage de M. Chevreuil en Cochinchine,
16641665, in Histoire de la Mission de la Cochinchine, 16581823, ed. Adrien Launay, 3 vols.
(1923, reprint; Paris: Missions trangres de Paris, 2000), 1: pp. 2526.
82He was executed in order to teach everyone the obedience they owed the king. De
Rhodes, Voyages et missions, p. 239.
83Ibid., pp. 24950.
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dying for the martyrs reward in heaven.84 (MEP documentation shows

that volunteering for martyrdom was rare in all later persecutions, and
never involved more than a few scattered individuals.) At the same time,
we see hints that the Nguyn court may have begun to promote a highly
inclusive, but otherwise fairly unimportant, ancient Vietnamese cult of
Daoist origin that venerated the original masters (Tin S) of all arts and
crafts, including the military, on a shelf-like altar called the tlan.85 In 1639,
resident Jesuits had been expelled, de Rhodes wrote, for causing people
to venerate the crucifix instead of the gods of the country.86 Had he
meant Buddhism, de Rhodes would have spoken of idols not gods, so who
might these gods be? We get a strong indication in the mid-1640s, when
two prospective elite converts withdrew when the Christian prohibition
on venerating idols was explained: from their comments, it is clear that
the tlan was the sole impediment to their conversion. As one explained,
removing it would put him in peril of being punished for deserting one
of the most beautiful customs of the kingdom.87
Twenty years later, the tlan would become the quintessential emblem
of Nguyn loyalty; without it, a person was automatically punished as a
Christian. The tlan made manifest the implicit opposition between the
Nguyn quest for localization and legitimization through religious means
and the high value committed converts placed on their faith. As noted
before, by the mid-1660s, simple catechists and lay Catholics had managed local religious life for many years. With no priests outside Faifo, their
knowledge of the faith must have derived from de Rhodes catechism,
which stressed that we must rather suffer death itself than deny God
or the Christian way. [...] Our saviour says: [...] everyone who denies
me before others, I will deny before the angels of God.88 For committed
Christians, apostasy as a display of political loyalty, or even showing the
tlan, risked forfeiting their chance at eternal felicity in Heaven, a place
whose material reality had been confirmed in the 1640s by two separate
84Ibid., pp. 256, 304.
85Or tran, meaning shelf. For details, see Mmoire de Vachet, pp. 5859. Father
Adriano di St Thecla considered it insignificant in his lengthy eighteenth-century enquiry
into religious sects in northern Vietnam. See Opusculum de Sectis apud Sinenses et Tunkinenses: A Small Treatise on the Sects among the Chinese and Tonkinese, trans. Olga Dror
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 147.
86De Rhodes, Voyages et missions, p. 143.
87The other was Marie-Madeleines husband. De Rhodes, Voyages et missions, pp. 226
28 and 23234; quote, p. 233.
88Phan, Mission and Catechesis, p. 307, but see also pp. 303, 308. For the majesty and
wealth awaiting the blessed in Paradise, see p. 303.
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nola cooke
visionary experiences. Thus, unlike the Japanese Christians in Faifo who

all recanted on demand, followed by repentance and absolution, scores of
ordinary believers chose death instead, a unique occurrence in Vietnamese Catholic history. Their choice provides an astonishing affirmation of
the transformative energy unleashed in people for whom conversion was
an ongoing process of turning towards Christ, and of the vitality of the lay
vernacular Catholicism of early seventeenth-century Cochinchina.
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Translating Spirits: Protestants, Possessions, and the

Grammars of Conversion in Shandong Province
Richard Burden
In the wake of the Taiping Rebellion a number of spiritual adepts proclaiming the truth of Christianity appeared throughout China. One such
person was Li Daduzi [Big-bellied Li]. H. D. Porter (18451916,
American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionaries) claimed to
be in possession of Lis sizijing or Four Character Classic, written
in 1861 as a brief catechism on Christian doctrine. Li inscribed a poem
on the front page that illustrates the blending of Christian doctrine and
popular religion that was so prevalent in the Shandong countryside:
()
()
Porter translates this to read:

The Jesus Chapel has the Truth
Making men praise its worth.
Think it real to the end
The eternal home with joy ascend.
Western men heaven-ward,
Happy ones hither come,
God they serve truth they preach
Urging men patient lives
Godliness and repentance1
I read Lis poem differently, and the differences are instructive:
1Henry D. Porter, A Modern Shandong Prophet, The Chinese Recorder 18, no. 1 (1887),
pp. 1221.
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Within the Jesus Chapel there is no error
It is universally praised
Believe the Truth and return home
Living there eternally with great joy
Western men [who know how to] return to the Pure Land
Fortunately, they have come here
Respect the true God and study the rituals
Common People live patiently
Do good works and repent and reform.
The Rev. Porters translation is more poetic, and glosses over several
overtly sectarian themes. Porter treats the line as Western Men/Heaven-ward, obscuring a non-Christian reference to Tiantai
; a common phrase referring to the zhenkong jiaxiang
[Homeland of True Emptiness] where wusheng laomu lives. The
phrase frequently appears in both bagua as well as shengxiandao texts.2 Likewise, his final line, Godliness and Repentance, neglects
the overtly Buddhist admonitions to do good works xingshan and
repent or reform huigai. Lis rhyme combined with Porters glossed
translation provides a glimpse at multiple interwoven tensions inherent
in any conversion. Lis verse demonstrates the inventive incorporation of
Christian themes into a localized Chinese idiom; simultaneously, Porters
revision reveals Western attempts to tame and retranslate this wonderful
inventiveness into something resembling Christian orthodoxy.
In this essay I want to throw into stark relief the dynamic encounter between experience and explanation, between local and universal.
I explore how possession by spirits (gods and demons) becomes retranslated, and how they become subjects of conversion themselves. Conversion is a process that weaves together multiple life-stories, metaphors, and
worlds and strives to create a meaningful tapestry out of these elements.
Here, I untangle a few of these strands, specifically the ones where doctrine becomes reworked through experience. What happens when various Chinese traditions run headlong into mainstream nineteenth-century
American Protestantism? How does a Protestant missionary explain a
local experience of spirit possession in ways that simultaneously buttress
and undermine Christian doctrine? How do the Chinese who experience spirit possession translate their experiences into new idioms that
2The shengxiandao was arguably the most popular sect in Shandong Province in the
middle of the nineteenth century. Lu, Yao , Shandong Minjian,
Mimi Jiaomen: Dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, (2000).
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s imultaneously assert their native Chinese and adopted Christian identities? These are the questions which frame this essay.
I examine conversion experiences in Shandong Province in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through multiple lenses, looking specifically at differing ways of framing conversion, the redefining
of possession, and the inventive, metonymic use of shen and gui
that shifted the meaning of each. By focusing on the particularity of how
beliefs and practices came to be understood and translated in northeast
Chinaand by treating Christianity as one religious alternative among
manyI hope to begin recalibrating our understanding of how faith functions in particular locations around the world and to move us away from
an insistence on incommensurable forms of religion and/or culture.
Translating Conversion
The context of any conversion is crucial.3 It includes both the micro and
macro levels of individuals, culture, and institutions. Both what the missionary says is happening (and why) and what the Chinese convert says
is happening (and why) need to be considered. Conversion has differing
frames in the West and in China. In the Western world the concept of
conversion developed out of biblical concepts of repentance and realignment. Both Hebrew and Greek terms for conversion cluster around roots
that mean to turn around, turn back, or return to the principles from
which one has strayed.4 Over time, the biblical notion of turning has
developed from a simple (but profound) and ongoing change, to one that
is unique, radical, and complete.5 And yet there is tremendous latitude
within this radical change; it can be sudden or incremental, experiential
or intellectualmore often it is some combination. Radical change was
the predominant frame for conversion from which missionaries such as
Jonathan Livingston Nevius (18291893) operated.
3My understanding of conversion as a process has been deeply informed by Lewis R.

Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
4David A. Snow and Richard Machalek, The Sociology of Conversion, Annual Review
of Sociology 10 (1984), p. 169.
5Snow and Machalek noted that the notion of radical change remains at the core
of all [Western] conceptions of conversion, whether theological or social scientific. Ibid.,
p. 169.
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Conversion in China has a different frame. In China, conversion is

more typically additive rather than radically transformative,6 again with
multiple variations. Switching from worshipping Mazu [Goddess of
the Sea] to worshipping Yesu [Jesus] might be quite transformative,
especially when all the interconnected relationships and networks are
brought into play and fundamentally reworked. However, the transformation may be seen as epiphenomenal rather than foundational.
Glyphomancy provides a glimpse of the rich ambiguity possible in
Chinese conversion, as Jordan notes. Glyphomancy is an ancient practice
where the glyphs of Chinese characters are read in highly specific ways
which reveal hidden meanings within their combination of strokes. For
example, the character chuan [boat] is made up of the components
zhou [boat] and the phonetic component yan. Yan itself is made up
of two components: ba [eight] and kou [mouth]. Chinese Christian
glyphomancy interprets the word boat (or more specifically ark) as a
graphic reference to eight mouths [people] on a boat, and it is therefore
interpreted as a reference to Noah, his three sons, and their wives.7 A similar slippage happens here as in the translation of Big-bellied Lis poem. On
one hand, Chinese Christians use glyphomancy to prove that Christian
symbols are present in the characters and, therefore, share, the same cosmological view esoterically enshrined in Chinese characters by the sages
of antiquity8i.e., they are deeply Chinese. On the other hand, Chinese
Christian glyphomancy simultaneously makes a claim that the truth of the
Christian scriptures remains atavistically buried within Chinese script
i.e., they are also deeply Christian.
Another quality of Chinese conversion Jordan identifies is pantheon
interchangeability, or the tendency to assert the equivalences of religious
elements.9 The Hebrew God may come to either represent or be equated
with wusheng laomu [the Eternal, Unborn Mother], Sakyamuni
[Gautama Buddha], or Laozi; Jesus might be conflated with Gautama Siddhartha, Laozi, or Milefo [the Maitreya Buddha]. The
additive character of Chinese Christian belief and the reality of pantheon
6David K. Jordan, The Glyphomancy Factor: Observations on Chinese Conversion, in
Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation, ed. R. W. Hefner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 29091.
7C. H. Kang and Ethel Nelson, The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of the Genesis
Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1979),
p. xii.
8Jordan, p. 287.
9Ibid., p. 290.
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interchangeability combine to allow for tremendous inventiveness on the

part of the Chinese Christians, as we shall see, but it also caused no end of
trouble to the missionaries who sought to contain this kind of promiscuous blending and fit it into a frame of radical conversion.
Translating Possession
Johnathan Livingston Nevius worked on Demon Possession and Allied
Themes for a decade before its publication in 1894. Like most missionaries,
Nevius came to China with a strong conviction that a belief in demons,
and communications with spiritual beings, belongs exclusively to a barbarous and superstitious age, and at present can consist only with mental
weakness and want of culture.10 This was typical of a mainstream Presbyterian minister who had been trained in theology at Princeton. It was a
theory learned at school, and belied his childhood experience.
Nevius was brought up in a world saturated with folk beliefs. He particularly remembered a cousin who filled his head with stories of witches
and goblins11 and his own experience of a call to the ministry emphasized
the existence of spiritual forces.12 Theological training increased his attention to the powerful and imperceptible forces guiding him. It also taught
him to explain the miracles of Jesus as providentially permitted in Apostolic times, and made to subserve important ends in the establishment of
the Christian church; but that they are events only of the past.13
The tension between mystical experience and possession has a long
history within Western Christianity, and is well beyond the scope of
this essay. However, it is worth noting that numerous struggles between
Church authorities, mystics, and those who revered them during the
medieval period resulted in a profound semantic shift from a neutral or
positive connotation for the term possession to a purely negative one.
Divine possession, as affective self-transformation (previously sought
after by many), lost its legitimacy and possession came to refer only to
10John L. Nevius, Demon Possession and Allied Themes: Being an Inductive Study of Phenomena of Our Own Times (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1894), p. 9.
11 Helen Nevius, The Life of John Livingston Neviusfor Forty Years a Missionary in
China (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1895), p. 29.
12Ibid., p. 58.
13J. Nevius, Demons, p. 134.
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demonic possession.14 By the early nineteenth century this legacy was

further encrusted with memories of Salem witch trials, and Puritan resistance to enthusiasm of any sort. It was this legacy that Protestant missionaries carried with them to China.
Also woven into nineteenth-century Protestantism was the experience of the Second Great Awakening and the popularity of mesmerism,
sances, and spiritualism. These swirled together offering innumerable
variations of mainstream Protestantism.15 Thus, most missionaries carried
a wide range of theological training and popular knowledge with them to
China. Upon arrival they were thrust into a Chinese religious world where
the existence of gods and demons and their ability to possess humans was
widely accepted as common knowledge. In this context Nevius translated
spirit possession into demon possession.
Neviuss first Chinese teacher introduced him to the arcane and chaotic world of Chinese spirits and told him many stories of demons and
possession.16 All of his native assistants expressed belief in spirit possession; many had firsthand experience. Most of them, he complained,
believed in the reality of these manifestations, and could give more or
less definite information of cases in their families, or among their neighbors, of which they had been eye-witnesses.17 He noted that as converts
became gradually disenthralled with other aspects of popular religion,
they still remained unshaken in their belief in the reality of demon
possession.18
Furthermore, it became clear that his assistants were performing exorcisms, and people were drawn to Christians because of their perceived
ability to cast out demons. Successful exorcisms allowed Christians (missionary and Chinese) to perceive a continuity between the ling [efficacy] of Jesus and the ling of their local gods.19 This encouraged a
perceived resemblance between the shen [gods] and gui [demons]
14Moshe Sluhovsky, Spirit Possession as Self-Transformative Experience in Late
Medieval Catholic Europe, in Self and Self-Transformation in the History of Religions, eds.
D. Shulman and G. Stroumsa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 151158.
15Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience
from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
16John L. Nevius, China and the Chinese (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1882), pp. 397398.
18Ibid., p. 141.
19A contemporary of Nevius, Timothy Richard [English Baptist] (18451919) admitted
that, both Roman Catholics and Protestant missionaries are in possession of a thousand
instances [of Christian exorcism] in J. Nevius, Demons, p. 71.
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of the Chinese cosmology and the zhenshen [God] and mogui

[devils] of the Christian supernatural realm. I use perceived resemblance
because, as I will argue, it is not clear that the entities described by the
Chinese are the same as those described by Western Christians.
The universality of belief in spirit possession, combined with the parallels that both Nevius and the Chinese were drawing between exorcisms in
the New Testament and exorcisms in Shandong, caused Nevius to reassess
his position that these superstitions were artifacts of the past. He came
to believe that understanding spirit possession would lead to a more effective evangelization strategy. He also recognized that this powerful tool
could open doors to heresy, heterodoxy, and occult practices. So he set
about trying to understand, codify, and transform the demonic possession
narratives that he had acquired and fit them into the frame of nineteenthcentury Protestant orthodoxy. The result was Demon Possession and Allied
Themes.
Neviuss primary concern was to demonstrate the truth of Christianity.
Perceiving evidence in the commonality of phenomena across time and
cultures, Nevius collapsed cross-cultural experiences and made the leap
to arguing that if the phenomena were the same, the cause must be identical as well. As Nevius states, Many persons while demon-possessed
give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for in ordinary
ways. They often appear to know of the Lord Jesus Christ as a Divine
Person, and show an aversion to, and fear of Him. They sometimes converse in foreign languages of which in their normal states they are entirely
ignorant.20 Nevius is making a theological point; speaking in tongues was
a well-established marker of possession, but an aversion to Jesus Christ,
he implies, points directly towards the entity doing the possessing, i.e.,
the Devil.
Of all the prevailing theories about possessionthat it is a delusion, an
Odic force, part of societal evolution, a pathology of the nervous system
Nevius concluded the only one that accounted for physical, psychological,
and theological evidence was the Biblical one.21 In other words, Nevius
dared to presume that the Bible was accurate in its portrayal of demon
possession, and that Satan remained a force in the modern world. This
opened a rupture allowing ambiguity to slip in.

21 Ibid., p. 146ff.
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The prolonged encounter between Chinese who affirmed the reality of

spiritual intervention and missionaries who struggled to make the Gospel relevant to the modernizing world provided an expanded lexicon for
narrating, describing, and theorizing religious experience. I want to shift
focus and look at how the language describing and framing the experiences of possession and exorcism flowed together and allowed for a subtle
blending of popular notions of possession with received Christian practices. This commingling of terms and ideas allowed Chinese converts to
accommodate a foreign, peripheral (and therefore heterodox) Christian
Holy Spirit (rendering it native, central, and zheng). It also allowed
them to consistently reaffirm their position as nativeinsiders allied
against the foreign outsiders.22
The process of peripheral possessions/spirits becoming central is evident
in the language Chinese Christians used to describe ecstatic experiences of
possession and later baptism of the Holy Spirit. Examples I will highlight
include a request for one spirit to drive out another, terms which distinguish between spirit possession ( fushen [attachment]) and filling by
the Holy Spirit ( chongman [permeation]), an ambiguous use of the
term bei, and the use of metonymy. The arrival of Christianity provided
layers of ambiguity and richness to an already saturated lexicon of spirit
possession. A fissure opened up which allowed Christian dogma and Chinese belief to blend freely. Occasionally, this blending was undertaken consciously; at other times the outcomes were completely unexpected.
Self-conscious blending of native and Christian terms had been
employed since the first Jesuit translations of Roman Catholic liturgy in
the sixteenth century. Father Ludovico Buglios liturgical work
Shengshi lidian [A manual of ritual holy matters] collapsed the Chinese
use of good spirits to drive away evil spirits with prayers for the Holy Spirit
to enter, guard, and protect a believer both in the rite of extreme unction
(in Chinese, zhongchuan [final transmission]) and in baptism. In
both instances the priest commands the evil spirits xieshen to depart
and the good spirits to [come upon] you.23 A reflection of this same
22The distinction of peripheral from central comes from I. M. Lewis. Peripheral
possessions cluster around elements from outside the family, clan, or locality; central possessions cluster around ancestors or priests. Peripheral possessions tend to undermine
societal norms, whereas central possessions tend to uphold them. See I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic
Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (London: Routledge, 1971).
23Quoted in Thomas H. Reilly, The Shang-Ti Hui and the Transformation of Chinese
Popular Society: The Impact of Taiping Christian Sectarianism (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Washington, 1997), p. 34.
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formula can be seen in the description of a conversion of a former spirit

medium given by her daughter. The daughter reported, As the Holy Spirit
entered my mothers heart the demon went out.24 In this case, just as
in the Roman rite of baptism, the Holy Spirit functioned as a peripheral
spirit driving out the first spirit.
Non-Christian Chinese naturally viewed the Holy Spirit as peripheral,
wai, and heterodox; it exists outside of any Chinese lineage, and acts
without regard to lineage values or Chinese customs. The trepidation (or
downright hostility) with which many Chinese viewed this potent foreign spirit can be detected in the accusations of witchcraft, magic, and
demonic activity leveled at missionaries and native Christians.25 Still, others actively sought out this puissant and promiscuous spirit, as in this
hymn sung by the Jesus Family:
I know how to pray, you must take all of your bottled up sin and pour it
out/You dont want even a tiny bit of filth to remain [so that] the Spirit can
come immediately and fill you.26
Through the process of conversion the divine spirit became central and
no longer peripheral.
The blurred lines between Chinese folk beliefs and Christian dogma are
revealed in a story told by Helen Nevius, Johns wife. Early in their mission
to Shandong, Helen taught a group of sectarian women. The women came
to Mrs. Nevius begging to be baptized. She refused, noting that they could
give little account of what they know, and had not met the requirement
of a years probation.27 Then they produced an argument that almost
swayed her. If you baptize us, and we receive the Holy Spirit, we shall
learn faster.28 The spirit these women sought was a powerful, peripheral
spirit that promised not only eternal life, but also uncanny earthly gifts.
Echoes of this belief can be heard in several Jesus Family hymns of
the 1930s. A good example is titled Shengling chongman [Spirit

25Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity; the Missionary Movement and the Growth of
Chinese Antiforeignism, 18601870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
26Jiating Yesu, Yesu Jiating Xiangcun Budao Shige
Shouju [Jesus Family Rural Preaching Hymnal]. Vol. 94. Taian:
Taian shi dangan guan, n.d., p. 30.
27Various missions had different requirements but most had at least some form of
waiting period.
28H. Nevius, Life, pp. 364365.
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Filled] in one hymnal, and Fangyan wei ping [Tongues as Proof]

in another:29
I will wait for the Fathers promise of receiving the baptism of the Spirit
[which I] must have to get the power to spread the Gospel.30
The influence of Pentecostalism that was so influential to the Jesus Family

is evident.31 However, we can also hear echoes of a request for supernatural intervention in order to obtain occult powers. Speaking in tongues,
gifts of prophesy, baptism of the Holy Spirit, and other special revelations
were elements of charismatic Christianity that many indigenous Christian
groups actively sought. Through the language of possession Christians in
China could manipulate the relative positions of numerous spirits.
One of the most common ways of describing possession, especially
one that is sought after, as in spirit mediumship, is fushenliterally
to enclose, or attach to a body. Conversely, the term most often used to
describe possession by a Christian spirit is chongman, which means
to be brimming or permeated with.32 Here, the spirit fills the whole self,
body and soul. Both fushen and chongman generally require
an invitation. Spirit mediums use an array of techniques to call down the
spirits, but Christians make a simple request, as shown in this Jesus Family hymn:
Fill me, fill me, [I] ask the Lord to immediately fill me/Reveal [yourself]
to me and fill me to capacity, [I] ask the Lord to immediately fill me33
29The first is found in Yesu n.d., p. 37; the second is from

Yesu Jiating Shige Shouju. Taian: Taian shi dangan guan,
n.d., p. 120.
30Yesu . Yesu Jiating Shige Shouju, n.d., p. 120.
31 The influence of early twentieth-century Pentecostalism on indigenous Christian
groups was profound; it is well beyond the scope of this essay, although I have built on
much of this scholarship; see Richard J. Burden, Reborn Chinese: Persistence, Transformation, and Religious Experience in North China, 18601937 (Ph.D dissertation, University
of Chicago, 2006).
32Fushen has a very narrow semantic range, and in Chinese is used only to
describe possession. Chongman has a much broader range and is used to describe
many ethereal things (e.g., happiness, qi [vapor], smoke) filling some vessel or area.
33Xipeng Wang, .. Yesu Jiating Shige Xuan.
Shanghai: Zhonghua quanguo
jidujiao xiejinhui xiangcun shiye weiyuanhui chuban, (1950).
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Physical manifestations of spirit possession and being convicted by the

Spirit are similar and may include being thrown to the ground, convulsing, vomiting, and/or feeling like one was bound in iron shackles.34 A
spirit medium is perceived as adopting the visage and personality of the
possessing deity. Christians perceive these graphic manifestations as
demons, sins, and other impediments being forced out of a persona
necessary process rendering them an empty vessel. A further range of
physical manifestations of the indwelling of the Spirit includes tongues,
spontaneous singing, uncontrollable laughing, prophecy, and so on.
Although there is a deep interpenetration of the human by the divine
in the processes of both fushen and chongman, there are profound theological differences between the two. For one thing, fushen
contains an understanding that the one possessed is not fully conscious
and is understood to be somehow absent.35 However, a fully conscious
subject is required when the Holy Spirit fills chongman, a person.
A second, and much more explicit distinction is embedded in the Christian glosses of these terms. Possession fushen, or more commonly,
fuzhuo, refers only to demons ( gui or mogui), whereas
chongman almost always refers to divine spirits ( shen, or the
glory of God, the Holy Spirit, the wisdom of God, etc.).36
In the 1919 [Chinese Union Version of the
Bible], the term chongman occurs 119 times. Over fifty percent of
those instances are either references to the glory of the Lord37 or a direct
reference to the actions of the Holy Spirit.38 Found exclusively in the New
Testament, the term fuzhuo appears a mere twenty-three times, and
only when referring to possession by a devil [ gui], an unclean spirit
[ wugui], or an evil spirit [ egui]. The popular Chinese word for
possession became biblically encoded as demonic.
34Baoluo Xie, , [Yunluo Yu Fuxing]. : (Qingdao tongwen yinshuju, 1935), p. 71.

35Donald S. Sutton, Steps of Perfection: Exorcistic Performers and Chinese Religion in
Twentieth-Century Taiwan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center: Distributed
by Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 25; Michel de Certeau also emphasizes the importance of unconsciousness on the part of the possessed subject for the discourse of spirit
possession to work. See Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. M. B. Smith
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
36It is also used in a more prosaic fashion in describing the filling of the sea with water,
mouths with air, buildings with smoke, etc.
37E.g., Isaiah 6:3.
38E.g., Acts 2:4 Chongman appears only once linked to Satan; Acts 5:3, where Peter asks
why Satan has filled Ananias heart.
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Protestant theology insisted that possession was a thing of the past.

Nevertheless, the translators of the scriptures, perhaps inadvertently, sustained the reality of possession, fuzhuo, while simultaneously inserting an alternative discourse, chongman. This distinction allowed
charismatic Chinese Christians to renarrate their experiences. The terminology allowed them to maintain that gui were evil, heterodox
[ xie] things that attached to ones body, while marking the Holy Spirit
as correct [ zheng], and similar to, yet profoundly different from the
orthodox, native shen. Native renarration and the deployment of an
alternative discourse can be clearly seen in how these phenomena are
describedspecifically in the ambiguous use of the bei construction.
Compare, for example, Mark 1:23,
[And there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit], with
Luke 4:1, [And Jesus being full of the
Holy Spirit returned from the Jordan]. The use of bei in these constructions tells us more than that they are simply parallel, passive constructions. The marker bei serves two related functions in Mandarin
grammar. The first is to mark an adverse situation.39 The second is as an
expression of disposal, i.e., bei describes an event in which an entity
or person is dealt with, handled, or manipulated in some way.40
The disposal function is clearly at work in both possession and permeation: in both cases the afflicted person is an object that is worked
upon, often violently, by the spirit. However, the primary function of
bei is as a marker of adversity. This makes sense in the case of someone
being possessed by an unclean spirit, and non-Christian Chinese would
view permeation by the Holy Spirit as undesirable, and downright fearful.
But why would a charismatic Chinese Christian who desires baptism of
the Holy Spirit retain this idiom and describe it in adverse terms?
It is possible, of course, that this formula is simply a case of what George
Lakoff, following Eleanor Rosch, describes as prototypical causation
clustering around interactional properties.41 In other words, it is simply
a matter of making new information fit into well-established frames
39E.g., [the bridge got washed away (by the flood)], in Charles N. Li
and Sandra A. Thompson, Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1981), p. 493.
40Ibid., p. 501.
41 George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About
the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 54; Eleanor Rosch, Principles of
Categorization, in Cognition and Categorization, eds. E. Rosch and B. Lloyd (Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978).
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new wine into old wineskins. According to this theory the basic-level prototype category of spirit contains any number of entities that are either
gui, shen, xie, or zheng, and they all have ling [power or
efficacy]. These entities interact with humans in certain predictable ways
( fu [attaching], mei [enchanting], ran [infecting], etc.). Furthermore, the grammars that emerge from this interaction encode bei as
the appropriate idiom for speaking of these things. When a new term is
introduced, for example shengling or chongman, speakers who
know implicitly how spirits, whether good or bad, interact with people
instantly employ this idiomatic pattern. Thus, , ta bei
wugui fuzhuo le [she was possessed by an unclean spirit] becomes,
, ta bei shengling chongman le [she was filled with the Holy
Spirit].
However, this raises questions about the use of bei as a marker of the
passive tense. Li and Thompson point out that there is a consensus among
grammarians that the use of bei in passive, non adversity constructions has been increasing over the past century. And, they stress, This
increase in the nonadversity usage of the bei construction...is clearly
due to the influence of the Indo-European languages, especially English.42
Specifically, when translating English passives into Chinese the use of bei
became de rigueur, and utilized to the point that it began showing up in
original Chinese writing where no translation was involved and no adversity was suggested.43
When this happens it results in a condition Chao Yuen-ren called
translatese, which, he complained in the late 1960s, is still unpalatable
to most people and no one talks in that way yet, but it is already common
in scientific writing, in newspapers, and in schools.44 However unpalatable, it appears that through the discourse of spirit possession translatese began working its way into charismatic Christian speech in the early
part of the twentieth century.45
During revivals in Qingdao in the 1930s, Liu Wenhui described his
transformation one evening like this: ...
[At that time I was moved by the Holy Spirit (bei shengling
42Li and Thompson, p. 496.
43E.g., shengcheng bei jiefang le [the provincial capital has been liberated], in Li and Thompson, p. 497.
44Quoted in Li and Thompson, p. 496.
45Grammarians such as Chao and Frank Kierman ascribe the phenomenon of translatese to the flood of quickly and often poorly translated Marxist material that infused
China between the 1920s and the 1960s, in Li and Thompson, pp. 496497.
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g andong)...and I was immediately filled with the Holy Spirit (bei shengling
chongman)].46 Adding this positive (to born-again Christians) dimension
to the function of the term bei did not entirely dilute its function as
either an adversarial marker or a marker of disposal. But it did allow for a
different type of spirit to be adopted into the Chinese cosmology.
Two things are important to notice here: first, the numerous mechanisms
(linguistic, psychological, and sociological) that facilitated the accommodation of Christian spirits into China, and second, the subtly subversive
aspect of all of them. While Chinese from every religious persuasion used
terms marking the differences between types and degrees of possession
these terms were mobilized in recognizable, yet substantially different,
ways in order to (re)create boundaries that had been transgressed during the drama of possession/conversion. This recreation of boundaries
affected the realms of the spirits as well.
Translating Boundaries
Distinguishing between shen and gui between gods and
ghostsis an ongoing process. Both terms have wide semantic ranges
with considerable overlap. Shen is a broader term than the English
God. In China, gods are beings who have died but remain indexed to
the human realm through worship and sacrifice. They are associated with
yang forces, in opposition to gui which are said to be yin.47 Anyone
can become a shen or a gui after death.48 Consequently, any mention of
either shen, or gui by a Chinese Christian is likely a metonymic
reference to an actual being. Keeping shen and gui separate has meant
policing these boundaries with rituals and other practices.49 Lines are also
drawn between those spirits that are welcomed upon their return and
those that simply return. In short, the barrier between the living and the
dead in China is not only permeable, but malleable.
46Xie, p. 79.
47Stephen F. Teiser, The Spirits of Chinese Religion, in Religions of China in Practice,
ed. D. S. Lopez (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 3435.
48Ter Haar argues that there is a definite pull to the dark side and really everyone
becomes gui when they die. In Barend J. Ter Haar, Chinas Inner Demons: The Political
Impact of the Demonological Paradigm, China Information 11, no. 3/4 (1996), pp. 5488,
there 56.
49E.g., funerals and rituals for feeding the dead reincorporate gui into the lineage
system.
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The potent use of metonymy is highly significant here. Karla Poewe,

drawing on work done originally by Edmund Leach, argues that metonymy is particularly attractive to charismatic Christians because it is a
speech act that combines sign, natural index, and signal. Poewe suggests
that what makes a metonymic operation so powerful is the fact that, in
practice, people do not carefully distinguish among sign, index, and signal, so that A stands for and indicates B while B is seen to trigger A.50
This can clearly be seen in the cases of baptism of the Holy Spirit. The
bodily manifestations are simultaneously signs of the Spirit and triggered
by the Spirit.
Poewe has noted the global increase in religious movements that stress
metonymy over metaphor, experience over cognition, and has traced an
arc from a broadly symbolic to a more sign-oriented religiosity.51 The
use of metonymy and metonymic thinking, she argues, has allowed the
blurring of ancestral spirits with the Spirit and the Holy Spirit of both
the Old and New Testament. Extending Poewes analysis, Gerard Roelofs,
(following Sapir and Soskice) argues that the use of metonymy by charismatic Christians is actually quite literal,52 and that charismatics possibly
interpret metaphorical statements quite literally, because their default
mode of thought is metonymical.53 If a charismatic Christian hears a
statement like the spirit moved me to do something or God called me
to China, they take it to be a literal statement of fact.
I am not suggesting that all Chinese Christians are metonymic and
literal thinkers, or that they are incapable of metaphoric thinking. What
interests me is how seamless the shift from metaphor to metonymfrom
symbolic to literalactually is. We have seen how, functionally and linguistically, a peripheral spirit becomes a central one. Consider a few other
questions: might not metonomy allow Christians who believe in the literal
presence of demons, gui, to understand literal Chinese gui as being
contained within the Christian metonym mogui? What would Jesus
look like to a person raised in the cultural world of late imperial China,
where the lines between shen and gui were often murky and permeable?
50Karla Poewe, On the Metonymic Structure of Religious Experiences: The Example of

Charismatic Christianity, in Cultural Dynamics 2, no. (1989), pp. 361380, there, 370.
51 Ibid., p. 361.
52Roelofss study was of Flemish Catholics.
53Gerard Roelofs, Charismatic Christian Thought Experience, Metonymy, and Routinzation, in Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, ed. K. Poewe (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), p. 223.
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Wouldnt a literal belief in Chinese spirits translate to a literal belief in

Christian spirits?
The categories of shen and gui function not only as metonyms engaging a recognizable set of images and meanings, but also as markers of
local proclivities and prejudices. For the missionary establishment, and
for many Chinese Christians, gui were always evil, and whatever was evil
was always gui, or the devil, or (eventually) Satan. Shen, however, were
more problematic. In speaking and writing about conversion experiences
and/or encounters with supernatural forces, believers and commentators on every side gave voice to a range of explanatory commitments that
referenced their own cultural milieu and resonated within the others
culture. In short they had to translate, and in translating they expanded
categories and reworked content. While Nevius employed Protestant theology to comprehend and reshape the realm of Chinese demons, Chinese
Christians simultaneously reordered this world and these relationships
for themselves. The plasticity of these categories enabled many converts
to retain their congenital belief in the preponderance of spirits, and to
reorganize their relationships between themselves, the spirit world, and
their communities.
Translating Shen
Most converts have had to wrestle with the status of the Christian deity,
and the Protestant missionary community in the nineteenth century split
over whether God was best rendered as shangdi or shen.54 The
term shen is pregnant with possible meanings, not all of them consonant with Christian orthodoxy. Because shen is an elastic term, affixing
it to the Christian God allowed for an expansion of its metonymic potential. Two examples I will highlight come first from Nevius, and then from
the Jesus Family.
Leng Xianjin, one of Neviuss native assistants, performed numerous village exorcisms. In the spring of 1879, he was traveling through
the village of Tse-kia chwang [Zejiazhuang] in Shandong where he met
Ms. Guo. She had been possessed on and off for about eight years. Finally
her husband, convinced that the spirit would not bother her in a Christians
house, took her to his brother-in-law, a Mr. Sen, who had lately professed
54These debates are fascinating but well beyond the scope of this essay. For more see
Burden, Reborn Chinese, and Thomas H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion
and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).
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Christianity.55 When Leng arrived in the village the two men begged him
to perform an exorcism. Leng told them that he was powerless himself
and that they must rely on God. So the three of them knelt and prayed
while Ms. Guo lay unconscious on the kang.
When they finished she was still in a trance. Leng said to the spirit,
Have you no fear of God? Why do you come here to afflict this woman?
The spirit replied in verse: Tien-fu Yia-su puh kwan an,/Wo tsai che-li
tshi pa nian,/Ni iao nien wo, nan shang nan,/Pi iao keh wo pa-shan ngan.
[Translation] God and Christ will not interfere. I have been here seven
or eight years; and I claim this as my resting-place. You cannot get rid
of me, and then taunting, You are men, but I am shien [shen ].56
Ms. Guo remained possessed, and Leng left.57
This encounter is interesting in several ways. Leng primes the spirit
to express fear of the Christian God. It was taken as an article of faith by
Chinese Christians, and used by Nevius over and over to buttress his argument about the universality of demons, and that all demons were afraid of
the Christian God. However, despite Lengs priming question, this spirit is
not afraid and instead taunts, , [You are men, but I am
a god].58 Leng and Nevius assume this means that the spirit does know
about God and Christ, but is not afraid 1) because they wont interfere
and/or 2) because Leng doesn't have enough faith.
However, the translation of the spirits response provides some illuminating details that Nevius glossed over in his nonstandard romanized version of the response. I believe the Chinese text should read:
Therefore, a more revealing translation would be:

Heavenly Father [and?] Jesus have nothing to do with me59 /I have been
here for seven or eight years/You want to expel me but thats extremely difficult/You must accept me, and provide support.

56Ibid., p. 31.
57The first episode ended in failure. However, the second half of the narrative makes it
clear that Nevius and Leng were building a narrative structure that emphasized the power
of the Christian God who worked through human instruments even when they were fragile
and lacked faith.
58Ibid., p. 31.
59 an being a topolect for me especially in Shandong province. I am grateful to
Professor Su Jiu-Lung of the National University of Singapore for this insight.
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Reading it this way, the verse actually works against what Nevius wants
it to do. In this reading, the spirit doesnt necessarily imply knowledge of
Christ at all; rather it is saying, Heavenly Father [and?] Jesus (Are they
one and the same? The spirit doesnt seem to make a distinction) have no
relationship to me. They are not shen, or if they are, they are utterly
impotent. This is not a challenge to a Christian disciple to be stronger in
his faith, nor is it the bluster of a spirit who fears the power of another
deity. This is a denial of the Christian Gods status as shen.
This denial is reiterated in the final taunt: emphasizes
that I (the spirit) am the only shen around here. Nevius used this
piece to assert that Chinese demons must be the same as the demons in
the New Testament because they occasionally shared the same names,
had similar knowledge, and feared the Christian God.60 However, these
categories were by no means fixed, and the position of the Christian God
was often challenged.
The range of meanings that could be contained in the categories
shen and gui can also be seen in a Jesus Family hymn called
[Return to the Truth Song]. The first verse opens with some typical iconoclasm and asks, [Those gods in the temples,
how can they protect people?]. The third line then makes a very interesting equation between shen, gui, and ren, and reminds people that the
Gospel will enable you to distinguish them:
[Gods [shen], men, and demons [gui] are all one class,
fortunately, today [you can] hear the Gospel and then you will be able
to distinguish false from true].61 This resonates with the popular belief
that both shen and gui are of the same category, and that people have the
potential to become either shen or gui. However, it also redeploys these
categories with a Christian spinall of them are passing in the face of
the single Truth, i.e., the Gospel.
The second verse draws out and explains this Truth more fully. Nevertheless, the language remains ambiguous.
[...]
62
60See below.
61 Yesu Jiating Yesu Jiating Shige Shouju ( Taian:
Taian shi dangan guan, n.d.), p. 134.
62There is an interesting gloss on the first character of the verse: (pronounced zhi)
is a variant of zhi, meaning only, as in there is only one God. However, the character
can also be pronounced qi and means Earth Spirit, earth god, or deity.
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There is only one shen who created heaven and earth and people and everything that flies and swims and moves, and all the plants/[...] its a shame
that people have no self respect and worship clay gods [nisushen] on bended
knee./I have turned from my previous not trusting in the true God [zhenshen] I hope you will trust in the true God.63
The God that created heaven and earth is a shen; however, a distinction
must be made. Thus the True God zhenshen is contrasted to all the
false gods, nisu shen [clay gods].
The third and fourth verses continue this delineating process and
describe both shangdi and Jesus as merciful shen: and
. Thus, Jesus is clearly established as a shen, but is this
an orthodox reading of the Trinity? Or is the metonymic function of
shen allowing ambiguity to slip in?
By the end, Jesus sounds more like a Bodhisattva than a Jewish Messiahone who leads believers to a place of eternal bliss where they all put
on garments as white as geese, feast in halls of jade and towers of pearl,
sleep on beds of gold, and its always spring forever.64 This is not surprising as religious images often reflect the local culture. Christian translators
consciously adopted terms from Buddhism, Daoism, and concepts from
the popular sectarian faiths, most notably shen, and metaphorically
equating Jesus with shen ensured a quicker reception of the Christian
message. However, this equation was contested. The field was open for
other metaphoric equations to be calculated, and alternative metonymic
constructs to flourish.
For example, in 1869, Young J. Allen in his Jiaohui xinbao
[Church News] printed an essay by Zhi Zuizi65 titled
[The Only God of the Myriad Things Is the Lord]. In this
essay, Zhi somewhat obliquely places Jesus (or zhenshen) at the
apex of a neo-Confucian pyramid:
, the lord of a family is called chief/head [ zhang],
the lord of a country is called sovereign [ jun], the lord of the myriad
things is called God [ shen].66 The Jesus Family adapted this construct
and insisted that Jesus was the true jiazhang [head of the Family].
It resonates with metaphors of the bridegroom and the head of the
body in Christian orthodoxy. Another image is the one of the warrior god
63Ibid., p. 134.
64Ibid.
65Obviously not his real name; the name means Knowing Sin or one who knows sin.
66Zhi, . [Tiandi Wanwu Wei Shen Shi Zhu Lun], pp. 19b20.
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who receives a commission from the Father to expel demons. Are these
metaphor or metonymy? On the surface, these images are recognizable as
Christian images. Yet they are also uniquely ChineseChristianity with
Chinese characteristics.
Driving out demons and curing illness was precisely why people turned
to certain shen. By the early part of the twentieth century, among the
Christians in Shandong, there was no longer any question about Jesuss
position as a shen. He had been incorporated into the pantheon of Chinese gods and people called on Jesus to cure disease and exorcise demons.
Likewise, people called on the Holy Spirit to perform similar functions.
Both had been added to the pantheon of Chinese deities.
Western interpreters engaged metaphors to explain the Christian God
to the Chinese. The additive nature of conversion in China, glimpsed
through these plural images of Jesus, suggests that in many villages Jesus
was accepted as a zhenshen. However, a metaphor in translation
often became a metonym in practice. Jesus was accepted in the metonymic sense of being a true shen, yet whether he was accepted in a
metaphoric sense of being The True God ( Shen) remains an open question. This being the case, we must consider the other side of this equation,
which is equally robust and slippery.
Translating gui
Christian missionaries had much less trouble translating the Devil into
Chinese than they did God. After some initial attempts to transliterate
rather than translate, most Protestant translators settled on the terms
gui, mogui, and/or sadan [Satan],67 and the last only when
the original text specifically uses Satan. Functionally then, these have
become accepted as unproblematic terms for demons, whether they are
Christian, Chinese, local, or universal.
Most etymologists link the character mo with the importation of
Buddhist demonology during the fifth century of the common era when it
67Morrison used diyaboluo [Lat. Diabolo] and sadan [Satan] in his

1823 translation. Gutzlaff seems to have used gui and mogui more consistently.
By the 1919 version virtually all references to devils in the New Testament were rendered
as mogui. See Eugene Boardman, Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping
Rebellion, 18511864 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1952), p. 83.
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was used to translate the Sanskrit term Mara, the evil one of Buddhism.68
Over time Mara and his followers were all subsumed under the character
mo and came to be regarded as a group of pathological agents. The
term mo, in other words, became a metonym, a generic signifier for
multiple diseases and their underlying causes.69
Employing the term mo, which has both generic and specific referents, engaged a wide range of images that might change depending
on the context, and Christians have utilized the plasticity of this term in
ways that both reflect and refract the original Buddhist innovation. The
first character of The Devil moguiis occasionally explained in
gylphomantic terms as a gui [demon], undercover [secrecy] in a
place with two trees the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.
For some this is like seeing part of the Garden of Eden myth caught in
the amber of a Chinese ideograph.70 Its an inventive transformation of
the prince of darkness (Mara) in Buddhism, into the prince of darkness
(Satan) in Christian demonology. Nevius also took advantage of this metonymic slippage in his attempt to universalize all demons.
Nevius, and many of his native helpers, saw all gui as decidedly
evil. This agreed with popular belief; however, Chinese, who knew the
benefit of a good spirit medium, recognized some possessing spirits as
shen and possibly benevolent. Therefore, Christians shifted the discourse by insisting that any spirit that possessed a person was gui
and therefore evil.
Nevius presented his case for the reality of demons by ripping them out
of their local habitats and raising them to universal status. The spirits in
China were real, Nevius insisted, but they werent Chinese. At the primal
level, he argued, all gui were demons; not Chinese demons, but the
same demons that inhabited the New Testament.
Within the narrative of numerous exorcisms, Nevius makes some
obvious moves to establish the persistence of the universal demonic.
He reports, for example, on a spirit medium from Yangjialou in Shanghe
County who walked the streets proclaiming the truth of Christianity.
When asked whether or not the local mimijiao could get rid of the
68J. J. M. de Groot, The Religious System of China: Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History
and Present Aspect, Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith. Vol. 5.
(Taipei: Literature House, 1964), p. 466.
69Michel Strickmann and Bernard Faure, Chinese Magical Medicine (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2002), p. 63.
70Kang and Nelson, pp. 34.
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demon she claimed they could not because the mimijiao was a religion
of mogui [devils].71 This raises a question of whether she was possessed by a shen or not, but Nevius was not interested in that. When
three Chinese Christians arrived the spirit said, You are the disciples and
servants of the God whom I greatly fear. Fearing God was an attribute the
Chinese spirits shared with the demons of the New Testament; therefore
Nevius reasoned they must be demonic. When asked its name the demon
replied, My name is Kyuin (Legion).72 Nevius chooses to translate the
name Kyuin as Legion, an explicit reference to an episode from the
Gospels.73 According to Nevius, Legion has reappeared in Yangjialou.
Numerous testimonies in Nevius follow this pattern.
Nevius annotated this narrative with other examples drawn from
scripture,74 thereby making it possible to index all Chinese spirits to a
Western taxonomy. He claimed that the spirits guithat afflict
people in China were not the unattended dead of neighboring villages;
they were the same devils that tormented the people of the ancient
Middle East. Nevius uses metonymy to collapse these distinctions. This
agreed with contemporary Western psychological interpretations (following William James) which also rejected specificity of demons, and went
further in also rejecting the specificity of the religious experience itself.75
Neviuss procedure of universalizing is problematicespecially when
the spirits involved are clearly named and treated as recently deceased
Chinese. He relates one case where the women of the Zhu family were all
possessed by Ms. Li, the dead first wife of Zhu Wenfa, thus making Ms. Li
a true / gui/gui [returning/evil spirit]. Nevius is unable to reconcile
this very local spirit with the universality of gui and in the end concludes that this must have been a case of supposed possession.76
What did the Chinese make of all this? Many of these same threads
were woven into the Chinese Christian explanations of religious expe71 J. Nevius, Demons, p. 83.
72I have not been able to determine what kyuin signifies. It is possible that the
response was qun , meaning group. Qun is how legion is translated in Mark 3:23.
73Cf. Mark 5:119; Luke 8:2639. Legion in both these passages from Mark and Luke
is usually translated as qun in Chinese.
74Acts 16:1618, where Paul casts a demon out of a spirit medium, Mark 3:23, which
contains the question how can Satan cast out Satan? and 1 Corinthians 10:20, in which
Paul writes that the things gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to devils, not to God, (J. Nevius,
Demons, p. 82).
75Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, p. 271.
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rience, and a similar collapse of categories took place where all local
instances of gui came to be regarded as unique manifestations of the
more generic mogui. Nonetheless, it is far from clear that the more
generic demons were any less Chinese.
A reworking of these categories took place in numerous Jesus Family hymns. One in particular offers a standard narrative of conversion
bemoaning the terrible state of the world with the family functioning
as a metonym for all that is disharmonious. The last line of the first verse
says: [Its all because they dont
trust in Jesus, and the devil [ mogui] takes advantage of this to confuse them]. What kind of devil is this?
The second verse gets even more specific, and redraws the lines between
gui and shen.
...

In the past, when a family had a spirit [gui] troubling them,.../ The door
god, Guangong, and zaojun [the kitchen god], each of them sat there not at
all concerned./Later when this Family trusted in Jesus, the devil would hear
of it and run away./
In this verse, it is clear that gui (potentially plural) brought trouble.

The typical mediators for this kind of intruderthe door gods,
Guangong [Guan Yu], Zaojun [the kitchen god], and the various
pusa [Bodhisattvas]are present but unconcerned. The hymn does
not suggest that they are moguithey are not, they are shen. It does, however, question the efficacy, power, or ling of these beings. At worst,
the hymn insinuates that these pusa have no real authority over
troublesome gui; at best, it suggests they are capricious and stubborn. This situation is then contrasted with a Jesus Family who trusts in
Jesus.77
At this point the hymn begins to talk about mogui (generic devils or the
Devil?) rather than gui. It is an easy move from gui to mogui, and I do
not want to read too much into it, but the following verse suggests that
there is something more at work here than just a simple substitution of
77There is also an implication that guilike the door gods and Bodhisattvasare
things of the past. In the present (at least for Christians) there is only the Devil (mogui)
and Jesus.
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terms. Here the hymn claims the spiritual guardians of the home actually
invite in mogui.
Statues carved of wood, clay, stone, a painted picture or [things made] of

unshakable brass are all worthless junk/These idols will draw the Devil
[mogui] and all kinds of strange things into your home.78
The house gods are no longer capricious shen; they are highly dangerous, allowing mogui [the Devil?] and other evil things ( gui?) into
your house. This iconclastic hymn transforms the traditional guardians of
the home into conduits by which the forces of darkness enter.
In the late nineteenth century the term mogui was plastic enough
to encompass all manner of Chinese spirits (and some Western ones),
and functioned as a boundary marker of sorts. Many Chinese divided the
world into starkly contrasting camps of good and evil. Those spirits who
were central, aligned to help us (however that term was defined), were
shen, and those who were peripheral, and sought to do us harm were
some form of demon ( gui, mogui, yao, etc.). The boundaries
of these terms expanded to include certain experiences, including bona
fide ecstatic religious states, as well as physical or psychological illnesses,
manifestations of emotional disturbances, destructive behavior, or just
old-fashioned sin.79 By the mid-twentieth century, the field for potential
demonic activity had expanded to include emotional problems, sexual
problems, social problems, addictions, and even religious error.
Another Jesus Family hymn warned against numerous devils,
[Guard Against Mogui], and begins:
How often are there times when youre poor, be careful the devil [mogui]
comes and takes advantage of your poverty and seduces you to be sad,
depressed, cold, and indifferent so that you get lost
However, it is not just the poor who face demonic threats. The rich are
subject to them as well.
78Yesu , p. 4.
79Michael W. Cuneo, American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (New
York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 137.
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Copyright 2013. Brill. All rights reserved.

Asia in the Making of Christianity

Social Sciences in Asia

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ssa

Asia in the Making of Christianity

Richard Fox Young and Jonathan A. Seitz

Continuity in Change, Change in Continuity

Translating Spirits: Protestants, Possessions, and the Grammars

Preaching ( chuan), Worshipping ( bai), and Believing

Conversion to Mission Christianity among the Kachin of

Conflicted Meanings, Meaningful Conflicts

The Politics of Conversion and the Conversion

Connecting Disconnections: Troubling Meanings of Christian

On being invited in 2000 to the Timby Chair in the History of Religions

case) grandchildren. Two in particular deserve special mention, Eli and

translationa significant text of the Tamil aiva tradition. Matthias Frenz

Franklin Rausch earned his doctoral degree at the University of British

Richard Fox Young holds the Timby Chair in History of Religions at

Asia in the Making

Map of Asia indicating the locations discussed in this volume

1 Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

in each ones respective vernacular, whether Bengali or Vietnamese,

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

indigenously-initiated Christianity, that may well have been the direction

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

Having clarified (at least for the general purposes of an introduction)

(variously understood, as this volume testifies) is a factor among others

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

eople, never being fully transparent, even to themselves), we remain

While the structure remains, seemingly timeless, the diaspora of Tamil

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

ConversioCulturally Conditioned, or Culture Bound?

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

character-based languages of East Asia (and of the Chinese Diaspora),

this as having something to do with the familiar trope of conversion as a

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

formidable critics is Rutgers historian Karl Morrison, who specializes in

17Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville and London: University

inverted commas ought to be placed around itconversion. Once those

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

The most necessary feature of religious conversion, it turns out, is not a

In all likelihood, a new locus of self-identification does entail a peripety of

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

perfect match for the American Baptist template of Christianity to which

to the first of Eatons questions still seem unclear or unconvincing. As for

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

not leap to monotheism from polytheism (among various possibilities in

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

to happen in a work on sub-Saharan Africa, such an omission would be

richard fox young and jonathan a. seitz

Continuity in Change, Change in Continuity

Early Christian Conversion in Seventeenth-Century

Walls has noted, conversion is about turning what is already there, it is

christian conversion in cochinchina

then on, Nguyn rulers actively pursued localization and legitimization by

christian conversion in cochinchina

christian conversion in cochinchina

christian conversion in cochinchina

Ordinary ThunQung Vietnamese required the same services from

christian conversion in cochinchina

against demonic possession. In another case, a young possessed woman