This guest post is by Obbie Tyler Todd, who originally published a longer version of this review at the Journal of Religious History.
The history of missionary movements has long been an inspiration to Christians of all kinds. Themes of faith, courage, sacrifice, and soul-winning can all be found in the accounts of men and women traveling to distant lands to proclaim the salvation of Jesus Christ. In particular, the story of Adoniram and Ann Judson, the first American Baptist overseas missionaries, is immortalized in evangelical lore. Courtney Anderson’s To the Golden Shore: The Life of Adoniram Judson is well-known in many Baptist seminaries today because it chronicles the extraordinary lengths to which Judson went to deliver the saving gospel.
For this reason, Alexandra Kaloyanides’s Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom is a significant contribution not only to Burmese history but to American religious history as well. Winner of the 2020 Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion at Columbia University, Baptizing Burma presents a much more “complicated” and unsuccessful Baptist mission to the Burmese people. Just as nineteenth century Burma was a religiously divided nation, so too were the missionaries themselves at times. And just as British colonialism was guilty of co-opting Protestant religion for its own gain, so too were Buddhist kings in the wake of the first Anglo-Burmese War.
While Baptists did not succeed in converting the Buddhist majority, their success among the Kachin, Chin, and particularly the Karen people was indicative of the marginalization and vassalage in the country itself. As Kaloyanides explains, the Christian conversions seen among certain minority groups were a partial reflection of the social disparity that already existed in Burma. The Karen were illiterate and longing for access to the kinds of holy books that Baptist missionaries possessed (i.e. the Bible).
A significant contribution of Baptizing Burma is its attention to the religious material culture of Burma. According to the author, “Buddhism and Christianity do not march through nineteenth-century Burma separately and unchanged; rather, they change significantly as various communities collide, converse, compete, and categorize” (p. 12). Tracing the origins of a Karen legend that prophesied that a white foreigner would deliver a sacred book and redeem their people, Kaloyanides contends that this myth, the same that inspired Adoniram Judson to leave for Burma, was actually a product of the Baptist missionaries themselves and of Burmese religious book practices.
In the early nineteenth century, some Westerners believed that Sanskrit writings shared a linguistic relationship with Latin and Greek, revealing a common Indo-European language and the possibility of a mutual Christian past. This became part of the impetus that compelled missionaries like Judson to Burma once they were denied entrance into India (p. 64).
However, as Kaloyanides shows, the similarities between Karen legends and the incarnation of Jesus Christ were in fact not rooted in a once-Christian history of Burma. Rather, they were engineered over time by Baptists who identified certain themes already existent among the Karen, chiefly their thirst for books, as they were denied them by the hegemony of the Burmese majority. In response to the Christianization of the Karen and the proximity of the British empire, the Burmese royal lineage effectively militarized Buddhism against British colonialism and branded their Burmese kingdom as the purest form of Buddhism.
Still, the most controversial point of Baptizing Burma is its contention that Baptist Christianity itself was subject to change. Kaloyanides argues, “Since the beginning of the American mission, the Burmese cultural context demanded a material means for exploring Baptist Christianity” (p. 84). Kaloyanides suggests that Baptist experiences in Burma changed the way they viewed idolatry itself, from a more static concept to an educational framework. This was a great insight in the book. Pure and undefiled worship of God included more than just tearing down idols; it was about tearing down systems of Buddhist indoctrination and superstition that permeated indigenous minds.
Still, Kaloyanides goes even further than this when she suggests that a female missionary attempted to position herself “as a kind of holy woman with extraordinary powers” by using a shrine tree to explain the Christian God (p. 105). While missions history testifies greatly to the use of contextualization, whether or not the Baptist use of objects like statues and trees to illustrate biblical truths was a kind of priestly power play to attract local audiences is not clear. There is a large difference between using objects to explain the gospel in an animistic culture and using them to elevate oneself. While not accusing Baptists of syncretism, Kaloyanides does, at times, conjecture.
Nevertheless, the author discerns how Baptists were forced to navigate Burmese material culture to effectively communicate old truths in new ways. Kaloyanides also demonstrates how many of the supposed Protestant successes in the nation of Burma were actually part of a larger socio-religious war taking place during a time of tremendous reform. These are details that evangelical hagiography might overlook. From mapmaking to telescopes to teaching English, there were cultural factors that affected how Karen received the gospel, and these factors at times splintered the unity of the missionaries themselves. The ministries of Lydia Lillybridge, Ellen Mason, and Marilla Baker Ingalls present a complex picture of the situation on the ground in Burma in stark contrast to the sometimes idyllic portrait of Adoniram Judson’s wives.
From pagodas to portraits, Baptists were forced to re-think their own philosophies of ministry in order to contextualize for a hyper-material religious world. As Kaloyanides argues, “the communities who converted to Christianity found both material and immaterial power in their participation in the American Baptist mission” (p. 210). While not completely interested in economic or political gain, groups like the Karen did have a tangible motivation for looking into the Baptist faith. Such is the complex history of human spirituality, and Kaloyanides does an excellent job of neither naturalizing religion nor overlooking the self-interest that can sometimes color the Christian movements of the past.
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