Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (152 page)

Chinese cultural misapprehensions were equalled by those of many missionaries who began work after 1842. Like Catholics before them, they mostly found the basic task of mastering the fearful complexity of the Chinese language humiliatingly difficult, and often their reaction was to externalize their own shortcomings. When they were not blaming the workings of Satan in Chinese culture, they were prone to deplore the inadequacies of Chinese languages to express subtle abstract concepts, rather than their own inability to do so in Chinese. More than Catholics, Protestant missionaries took a very negative view of the religion which Chinese culture had bred, so full of ritual and idolatry (just as bad as the papists, indeed). When the missionaries encountered Buddhism in China, with its rules on vegetarian diet and its monastic celibacy, they were especially reminded of the false vows with which the Catholic Church tyrannized its adherents. Heroic Western men battling with very real dangers in mission, they were comforted by the male stereotypes of their own world, taking great satisfaction in the eating of meat, which contrasted satisfyingly for them with feminized vegetarianism.
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Yet from the beginning, some missionaries did try to learn from earlier Catholic successes and failures, or discovered for themselves the same problems of working in a vastly alien culture. An early arrival in the British-occupied city of Amoy in the south-west coastal province of Fujian was the American Reformed minister John Talmage. He and a few like-minded colleagues created one of the earliest fully fledged Chinese Protestant Churches, including the first Protestant church building in China - but there was more than the accumulation of 'firsts' in Talmage's work. From as early as 1848 he determined to make foreign missionaries redundant and his congregations indigenous: at the same time as Henry Venn was not very successfully propagating the 'three-self' goal in West Africa (see pp. 884-6), Talmage was without fuss putting the principle into effect in Amoy. That was made easier by the openness of locals to outsiders: Amoy had been one of the earliest entry points for Europeans three centuries before, and now it was one of the treaty ports opened up by the Nanjing Treaty in 1847. Soon his congregations, fortified by a sensible amalgamation of American and English Presbyterian foundations, were electing Chinese elders in classic Presbyterian style, struggling towards self-support and taking on themselves the founding of new congregations.
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Talmage's indigenization strategy was repeated in much more publicized form by the Englishman Hudson Taylor, whom no Church missionary structure could control until he had created his own, not beholden to any Church - a creative reinterpretation of the zestfully schism-prone English Methodism of his youth. Breaking with the floundering Christian missionary society which had brought him to China, in 1865 he set up his own, the China Inland Mission, which would be based in China and seek no support but that of God himself. Taylor declared his organization's uncompromising hostility to the opium trade. His Mission would not allow itself to drift into debt, but neither would it campaign for funds through collections or appeals. Its missionaries would wear Chinese dress - including the women, a difficult matter for Europeans at the time - and its schools alongside its hospitals at Yantai (Chefoo) were designed to produce a new generation of children from Mission families who were to receive their education in China, rather than as was otherwise almost universally the norm, being sent back to Europe.
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In practice, the ideals were rather difficult to sustain. Such institutions as the Chefoo schools naturally require an infrastructure not that different in nature from other missionary societies, particularly when in later years the CIM claimed with some plausibility to be the largest missionary organization in the world - and it was odd that the Chefoo schools did not offer instruction in Chinese until 1917.
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Taylor spent much of his time on publicity tours in Britain, somehow producing both missionaries and money despite himself. Yet the rhetoric was important. Behind it was Taylor's generosity of spirit: for instance, when his Mission suffered alongside others in the next great outburst of Chinese fury against foreigners, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he refused the compensation extorted from the imperial government for European organizations. And his missionaries followed Catholics into the expanses of China's countryside, rather than targeting cities, the scene of most Protestant missionary activity. His organization did maintain the distinctive feature that its workers could not expect to get a regular salary, and it continued to be good at enrolling those who were not by temperament natural team players.
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Beyond China were two kingdoms which had retreated into deliberate isolation during the seventeenth century, but were now forced to open their borders: Korea and Japan. Their relationship had always been tense, and Korea's experience of Japan was from repeated invasion; yet even given that history, the contrast in their reception of Christianity is extraordinary. When the American Commodore Perry brought his naval squadron to force openness on Japan in 1853, it was the beginning of a revolution in Japanese society which led to the restoration of imperial government in 1868, the end of two centuries of the Tokugawa shoguns' monopoly on real power. The arrival of the Americans was also followed by the surprised recognition that against all the odds, in quiet corners, a form of Christianity had survived the repression of the once flourishing Catholic Church in the archipelago (see pp. 707-9). Yet this revelation did not lead and has never yet led to a new flowering of Christianity in Japan. When the Japanese enthusiastically made selections from the Protestant West, those included their purchase of Japanese-language Bibles in very large quantities, which nevertheless inspired very few to make the leap into Christian conversion. A clue to the popularity of Bibles is to be found in the fact that Samuel Smiles's famous
Self-Help
also sold a million copies in its Japanese edition in the same period, far outclassing its sales in Britain and the USA. These books were part of a crash-course in the useful aspects of modernity, just as Japanese bureaucrats adopted Western dress when they went to work, and as Buddhist vegetarianism was violated by a fashion for eating beef, since beef seemed to have done so much good for the building up of empires by Westerners.
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Christian origins in Korea are a curious sport from the worldwide Christian expansion in the Counter-Reformation, which was experienced here remarkably late, just when elsewhere the Catholic tide had ebbed, and a mere decade before the great Protestant 'take-off' of the 1790s. Christianity was indigenously propagated in Korea from the unlikely base of the struggling and only semi-legal Catholic mission in the Chinese imperial capital, Beijing.
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It experienced intense suffering and persecution such as Christianity had not known since the Japanese and Canadian missions of the seventeenth century; in the same decade that French Revolutionaries committed atrocities against Catholic Christians, Catholics were here pitted also against a hostile state. The Korean monarchy patronized a native shamanism much cross-fertilized by Buddhism and its guiding philosophy was a form of Confucianism long ago imported from China. By the late eighteenth century, the Korean state was in trouble, and seemed to be incapable of reconstruction after a series of natural disasters which, in combination with chronic misgovernment, saw the population actually falling. What did that say about Korean religion's capacity to protect this inward-looking kingdom? The question much perplexed reformist-minded members of Korea's scholar-bureaucrat elite (
yangban
), who, in Confucian fashion, regarded themselves as the divinely appointed guides of the realm.

One
yangban
, Yi Sung-hun, provided a new answer to this crisis of authority: while in Beijing serving as a diplomat, he was baptized a Catholic Christian and went home to propagate his faith. He was met with outrage (including from his father), accused of betraying his social position and proper respect for his ancestors, but it was by using family connections and social links with other reformists that he spread his faith.
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At first the government regarded Catholicism as 'no more than a collateral sect of Buddha' and merely burned its books. 'Alas!' it lamented, in a fashion that later Korean Protestants might have found congenial. 'How could one replicate so easily the form of the Divine Being that is so far away and silent and orderless? What other crime could be more desecrating than the crime of worshipping a portrait of another human being in place of the Divine Being and calling it "Jesus"?'
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The authorities were soon forced into more drastic action. From Yi Sung-hun's return in 1784 to the first great persecution of 1801, Korean Catholicism spread beyond its elite
yangban
origins to gain around ten thousand adherents - this with the help of just one resident Chinese priest from 1795, martyred in 1801. It was a distinctively lay beginning for a branch of the Church. The next priest did not surmount the formidable problems of entry to Korea till 1833; by now Rome had placed Korea under the auspices of the French Missions Etrangeres de Paris, and it may have helped the acceptability of Catholic Christianity that France had no great military presence in East Asia. The contrast with the power of the Chinese and Japanese empires which had threatened to annihilate Korea for centuries was significant.

While Christianity expanded into the wider population still seeking deliverance from Korea's ongoing deprivations, the monarchy continued to pursue the total destruction of the alien religion. Thousands died or were tortured, the worst phase being the latest, in 1866-71. The many who faced suffering with extraordinary bravery had available to them the heritage of Tridentine Catholicism, with its stories of earlier martyrdoms and its world-denying ethos, but it is interesting to look past the emphases in contemporary Catholic accounts of persecutions to see what Christian activists did not take from the Tridentine heritage. Lifelong celibacy was not high among their goals; as in Africa, Korea's social structure made it both unacceptable and difficult to practise. For instance, only nine female virgins can be counted among the stories of sixty-three adult women martyrs and confessors gathered from the persecution of the Korean year
Kihae
(1839-40).
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Given that clergy normally had to remain completely hidden before 1871, most of the burden of teaching fell on Catholic laity. This was a Catholicism in which the Latin Mass was necessarily an infrequent experience. The practice of lay baptism, which the Church has not always treated with much enthusiasm despite its theoretical acceptability, now became essential and common. Some lay baptizers also became preoccupied with baptizing the babies of non-Christian parents who were expected to die soon: not a matter which the Church authorities had urged on them.

Very early, Korean Christians showed a pride in their own cultural heritage, which they could contrast with the imported Chinese culture dominating the royal Court. To spread their message as widely as possible, they championed the use of the distinctive
han'gul
alphabetic script, invented in Korean Court circles in the fifteenth century, and they developed their own literature in this alphabet, so different from the Chinese pictogrammic system and long despised by the Korean elite. Christian vernacular use was the prelude to the general revival of
han'gul
in twentieth-century Korea. When (mainly American) Protestants arrived in the aftermath of the monarchy's belated and reluctant decision in the 1870s to open Korea's borders, they learned from the Catholic example, and emphasized local people's part in building the Church; in 1907 Presbyterians united to form a single national Presbytery, independent and self-governing. Christianity might have been associated, as in China, with the humiliation of a decaying and ineptly Westernizing monarchy by Western powers, but already it had established its indigenous character. It is not surprising that both Catholics and Protestants were significant in maintaining Korean national identity in the decades after Japanese armies had seized their country in 1910. Their defiance brought them new persecution before the liberation of 1945 and Koreans did not forget that. Christianity's place in Korean life and its capacity to reflect the nation's suffering and pride contrasted with the faith's lack of penetration in the culture of the occupying power, Japan. Here, then, Christianity was a symbol of resistance to colonialism, not its accompaniment. That consciousness has shaped the extraordinary dynamism of Korean Christianity in the last half-century.

AMERICA: THE NEW PROTESTANT EMPIRE

In visiting the Christian experiences of East Asia, we have been exchanging the dominance of British activity for intervention by the new world Protestant power, the United States of America. Struggling at the beginning of the nineteenth century to the extent that the British dealt a humiliating defeat in the war of 1812 (with surprisingly little long-term repercussion), by the century's end the USA had spanned its own continent and was becoming a trans-Pacific power, on the verge of still greater things. As Federal government expanded west, Christianity experienced growth as vigorous as any in the nineteenth century. At the time of the Revolution, despite all the bustle of the Great Awakenings, only around 10 per cent of the American population were formal Church members, and a majority had no significant involvement in Church activities.
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In 1815 active Church membership had grown to around a quarter of the population; by 1914 it was approaching half - this in a country which in the same period through immigration and natural growth had seen its numbers balloon from 8.4 million to 100 million. That growth reflected the dynamism, freedom, high literacy rates and opportunity available in this society, and the Christian religion seemed to owe its success to a competitive and innovative spirit as much as did American commerce and industry.
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Americans were justifiably proud of themselves. It was easy to cast their pride in the language of their religion (and all the more reason to ignore the feelings of the Native Americans who stood in the way of further achievement blessed by providence). Even the laying down of the railroad could be part of God's grand design - witness a paean to its providential character in 1850 from a Yankee revivalist turned Episcopalian, Calvin Colton: