Category Archives: religion

by | 15 June 2004 · 5:22 pm

Conservative Pyongyang vs. Liberal Seoul

New missionaries learned many of their most useful lessons about Korea from their seniors within the mission rather than from Koreans. The seniority system had its advantages. The senior missionaries in P’yôngyang were gifted leaders and planners whose skills had everything to do with the spectacular success of the Presbyterians as a mission. Their character and commitment inspired fierce loyalty in their understudies….

The P’yôngyang “team’s” strict conservatism, however, sometimes led to conflicts with other missionaries. A prime area of disagreement was the Presbyterian Mission’s educational policy. A working document entitled “Our Educational Policy” had been adopted by a majority vote of the mission in 1890, defining the purpose of missionary education as “the gospel for the heathen and education for the Christians.” The mission agreed to support schools for the children of Christian parents, to train them as the church’s next generation of leaders and to give them the social advantage of a modern education. The policy explicitly rejected “general education” as a means of attracting non-Christians to the atmosphere of Christian schools. As the paper’s author put it, “The missionary teacher should be primarily a manufacturer of evangelists, and in so far as he has failed to do this he has failed as a missionary teacher, however successful he may be as an educator.”

This was the policy that was challenged in 1915 when the Government-General of Chosen excluded religious instruction from the curriculum of any school that wanted its graduates’ diplomas recognized by the government for purposes of future employment. At that time, the Northern Presbyterians had voted to close their schools rather than give up religious instruction (a step that turned out to be unnecessary because of the subsequent liberalization of the rule under Governor-General Saito). The vote came in the midst of a bitter dispute between “conservatives” in P’yôngyang and “liberals” in Seoul over what kind of postsecondary education was appropriate in the mission’s program of Christian schooling….

The Seoul faction, led by Horace G. Underwood (Won Du-woo), argued that by maintaining a single college exclusively for pastoral training in P’yôngyang, the mission was neglecting its responsibility to reach the Korean upper crust in the capital. If the brightest young Koreans were so hungry for a modem education that they were willing to leave home, where there was as yet no college, in order to study in Japan, then the church in Korea should take the opportunity to offer instruction in modern subjects under a Christian faculty in the context of Christian college life. If these were to be Korea’s future leaders in secular occupations, Underwood argued, it was important that they be offered Christian college educations. Severance Union Medical College, an institution that taught science, had already succeeded in attracting top Korean students to study medicine in preparation for careers in the Christian occupation of healing. Why not a college to train Korea’s future Christian professionals in other areas as well?

The Seoul college proposal threatened the P’yôngyang missionaries for political reasons as well. As a union institution run by a combination of the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian missions, the new college would be beyond their control. This was clear from the way Horace Underwood was going about promoting his project. His brother John was a member of the Board of Foreign Missions in New York, and between them the Underwood brothers had many powerful friends in the homeland’s church hierarchy: Having made a fortune in the typewriter business, John Underwood was dangling before the Board a designated gift of $25,000 of his own money to purchase the college campus in the Seoul suburb of Yônhi Village. He had recruited allies on the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Canadian mission boards in North America to form an interdenominational consortium that would oversee the Seoul college through an interdenominational Field Board of Managers would answer to New York and not to the missions in Korea.

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 128-132

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by | 14 June 2004 · 1:31 pm

Pyongyang, "Jerusalem of the East"

By the 1920s, the Presbyterian Mission station in P’yôngyang had become the most conspicuous Western installation on the Korean peninsula. The city, which had been called “pagan” and “filthy” by the earliest Western travelers thirty years earlier, had become a beloved hometown for more than a hundred foreigners, from pioneer missionaries to children in the dormitory at Pyeng Yang Foreign School. To the Presbyterians it was a new “Jerusalem,” the queen city of Christianity in Korea. Some of the greatest triumphs of the missionary effort were associated with P’yôngyang. It had been a center of the Great Revival of 1907 that is said to have set the tone for Korean Protestantism for the rest of the century; and by 1925 it was the center of the fastest-growing Christian community in all of East Asia and, some said, the whole world.

Situated on a majestic S-curve of the Taedong River halfway between Seoul and the Manchurian border, P’yôngyang had a distinguished history. Korea Kids at Pyeng Yang Foreign School grew up hearing that it had been founded in the time of Israel’s King David by the Chinese nobleman Kija (Chinese: Ch’i-tzu), whose temple and tomb were among P’yongyang’s prime historical sites and a favorite spot for picnics…. With nearly a hundred men, women, and children, the P’yôngyang Presbyterians outnumbered the city’s Methodists and Catholics and completely overshadowed the city’s foreign business contingent comprised of Russian merchants, a Portuguese trader and his family, and the American employees of the Corn Products Company’s beet sugar refinery across the river.

The story of P’yôngyang as a missionary station began in 1890, when the newly arrived Samuel A. Moffett paid a two-week visit to investigate the possibility of opening evangelistic work there. The following spring, Moffett and his colleague James Scarth Gale visited P’yôngyang again while on a three-month exploratory journey by foot and horseback. They held services in the city but found that people were still “suspicious of foreigners and afraid of Christian books” because of the government’s recently lifted prohibition against Christianity. P’yôngyang remained impenetrable for several years, receiving occasional visits from Seoul-based missionaries who invariably found the local authorities inhospitable. The Presbyterian Mission assigned Samuel Moffett to P’yôngyang as a full-time missionary in November 1893, and, after a rocky beginning that included attempts on his life by neighbors intent on killing the “foreign devil,” he succeeded in buying property and founding a proper mission station in January 1895.

Forty years later, near the end of Moffett’s distinguished career, the 120-acre Presbyterian campus in P’yôngyang boasted a formidable array of modern institutions. These included Sungsil College (also called Union Christian College) and the Anna Davis Industrial Shops where Sungsil College students worked to pay their tuition; the Lula Wells Industrial School for vocational training of abandoned wives and widows; the Presbyterian Theological Seminary training the denomination’ s pastorate for all Korea; Bible institutes for women and men in the laity; secondary academies for boys and girls; Pyeng Yang Foreign School (PYFS), the Union Christian Hospital, and the West Gate Presbyterian Church. Interspersed throughout the compound were Westem-style residences, the homes of the missionaries themselves. Each day; hundreds of people, foreigners and Koreans, worked and studied in the various mission buildings. At intervals, hundreds more converged from the countryside to participate in special meetings, conventions, and church services. All year long, P’yôngyang station teemed with energy; and in many years the entire Northern Presbyterian Mission converged on P’yôngyang from the faraway stations of Taegu, Andong, Ch’ôngju, and Seoul, and the nearer-by stations of Chaeryông, Sônch’ôn, and Kanggye, to have their annual Mission Meeting and, incidentally, to admire the formidable successes of their P’yôngyang brethren.

The vitality of the missionary establishment in P’yôngyang, a medium-sized city of no more than 180,000, made the missionary campus a most conspicuous feature. For the missionaries, life revolved around “the Work,” and everyone in sight was somehow related to it, whether as co-workers, servants, and employees, or potential converts. P’yôngyang was different from Seoul, where there was social contact outside the missionary and church circles. It had fewer diversions, and people tended to talk to each other. The station’s early arrivals had brought theological and cultural beliefs that were part of the revival sweeping American Protestantism in the late nineteenth century. These became the basis for their own teaching and example for the Koreans. And inasmuch as the missionary calling was the ultimate expression of those beliefs, they understood that their own work was of earthshaking importance. As one missionary put it, “Among the full-time professions, the missionary call was often viewed as the highest. This related in part to the degree of personal sacrifice: anyone who would leave home, family, friends, and country to go to a ‘heathen’ country to serve Christ was looked upon with a kind of holy awe usually reserved for saints.”

SOURCE: Living Dangerously in Korea: The Western Experience 1900-1950, by Donald N. Clark (Eastbridge, 2003), pp. 121-125

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by | 20 May 2004 · 8:22 pm

India, Religiously Profligate Secular State

Josh Chafetz on OxBlog comments on the aftermath of India’s recent elections:

KINDA COOL: India is over 80% Hindu. Last week, they kicked a Hindu nationalist party out of power. A plurality was won by the party led by an Italian-born Catholic. She then stepped aside in favor of a Sikh (who happens to be largely responsible for instigating the economic reforms that have made the Indian economy take off the last few years). The new Prime Minister was officially appointed by India’s President, who is Muslim.

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by | 10 May 2004 · 5:47 pm

Anti-Vaccination Fever

The January 2004 issue of Skeptical Inquirer ran a report by William John Hoyt, Jr., under the title “Anti-Vaccination Fever: The Shot Hurt Around the World”:

Sensationalist media, religious fanatics, and alternative medical practitioners fanned the fires created by questionable research to spawn worldwide epidemics of a disease that had almost been forgotten.

“A poignant television story of a victim of a rare reaction to a vaccine can render invisible the vast good brought about by this same vaccine.” — John Allen Paulos

When pertussis takes hold, the infected person makes horrid, whooping sounds as he inhales. When he gets a chance to inhale. Which isn’t often during the torturous “paroxysmal phase,” characterized by sudden attacks of repetitive, severe coughing. The disease’s Latin name, pertussis, translates as “intensive cough.” But whooping cough, the common name, does a far better job of describing the unique whooping sound the disease’s victim makes when, finally, he gets a chance to breathe….

You have probably imagined an adult victim while reading thus far. In fact, before an effective vaccine became available, pertussis had been a worldwide leading cause of infant deaths. Before the 1940s, it was a major cause of infant and child morbidity and mortality in the U.S. (CDC 2002). From 1890 to 1940, in New South Wales, whooping cough killed more children under five than diphtheria. It was second only to gastroenteritis as a cause of infant deaths (Hamilton 1979)….

Fear and Loathing on the Vaccine Trail

In 1906, researchers discovered that the Bordatela pertussis bacterium caused pertussis. Within twenty years of that discovery, the first whole-cell pertussis vaccine was developed (Research Defence Society 1999). After two decades of testing and refinement, many countries accepted varying versions of a whole-cell pertussis vaccine, established vaccination protocols, and began to vaccinate their citizens. Many of the vaccine manufacturers produced a combined diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis (DTP) vaccine.

For most countries, as vaccination coverage increased, both the frequency and severity of pertussis epidemics markedly declined. Ironically, this success actually may have been the vaccine’s undoing, as presaged in this pointed 1960 British Medical Journal commentary: “When immunization results in the virtual elimination of a disease it is inevitable that some will question the continued need for routine inoculation of all infants” (Editors 1960).

The first hint of a problem came from Sweden in 1960, less than ten years into its vaccination program. Sweden had previously seen pertussis incidence rates as high as nearly 300 per 100,000. By 1960, the incidence rates were merely a third of that and falling (Gangarosa et al. 1998). It was at this time that Justus Ström, an influential Swedish medical leader, questioned the continuing need for pertussis vaccines. In his British Medical Journal paper, he claimed pertussis was no longer a serious disease because of economic, social, and general medical progress. Furthermore, he cited thirty-six cases of neurological conditions that he attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine, calculating an alarming neurological complication rate of 1 in 6,000 (Ström 1960)….

Then in the United Kingdom, in 1974, Kulenkampff and his colleagues published a paper citing another thirty-six cases of neurological reactions that they attributed to the whole cell pertussis vaccine. The paper’s evidence was weak on several fronts acknowledged by the authors. They clearly stated they “do not know either the prevalence of natural infection or the frequency of inoculation encephalopathy (brain diseases resulting from vaccination) in the population we serve” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974). And they noted that “in as many as a third of our patients there were contraindications to inoculation with pertussis vaccine, in that there was a previous history of fits, or family history of seizures in a first-degree relative; reaction to previous inoculation; recent intercurrent infection; or presumed neurodevelopmental defect” (Kulenkampff et al. 1974).

Despite the authors’ appropriately cautious approach to their paper, the anti-vaccination advocates seized upon it, and the media ran with it. Soon after the paper’s publication, British television aired a program on the whooping cough vaccine. Focusing on the anecdotal evidence of terrible adverse reactions supposedly caused by the vaccine, it presented little of the clear good the vaccine had done historically.

The negative press and television coverage persisted for years….

Brief summaries and graphs then detail how pertussis infection rates spiked to epidemic levels in countries where panicked medical establishments abandoned or severely cut back on vaccination programs.

Returning to the Status Quo Ante Botchum

The epidemics shocked many of the nations that experienced them, although official and public responses have varied. Many countries introduced acellular pertussis vaccine as a “safer” alternative to the whole-cell vaccine. Some have also tried to control the problem by introducing more vaccination boosters to the protocol. But other countries, those whose vaccination programs were unaffected by anti-vaccination movements, haven’t experienced these epidemics at all. These countries include Portugal, Hungary, Norway, the former East Germany, Poland, and, until recently, the U.S.

Japan’s reaction to its epidemic was swiftest and strongest. By 1981, Japan resumed vaccination with an acellular pertussis vaccine and pertussis incidence rates returned to their pre-fiasco levels. The United Kingdom’s vaccine uptake rate began slowly climbing, and by the 1990s reached levels exceeding those prior to the hysteria. English and Welsh pertussis incidence rates declined accordingly.

Sweden, however, remains plagued with high pertussis rates. As recently as 1996, and despite continuing epidemics, Sweden had yet to resume vaccinations (Cherry 1996). Australia’s efforts to halt pertussis continue to be thwarted by a passive anti-vaccination movement. The 2001-2002 epidemic bears witness to that. The Russian Federation has also failed to regain control and today has one of the highest pertussis incidence rates in the developed world.

Distorted numbers, confusion of correlation with causation, and statistical innumeracy certainly played roles in this sad story. Sensationalist media campaigns fanned the glowing embers. But in each of the countries that experienced the raging fires of epidemics there were other forces at work. Most prominent in passive anti-vaccination movements were religious groups whose opposition was based on religious or moral grounds. Prominent in both passive and active anti-vaccination movements are followers and practitioners of homeopathy, chiropractic, and natural and alternative medicine (Gangarosa et al. 1998)….

When anti-vaccination alarm takes hold–characterized by sudden attacks of the media, mistaken researchers, fervent religious groups, and alternative medicine quacks–the infected society begins to make horrid, whoppingly bad decisions. There is, as yet, no Latin name for this peculiar social disease.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 9 May 2004 · 8:18 am

Orthodox Old Believer Occidentalism

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit’s new book on Occidentalism stretches the label to cover an awfully wide range of phenomena. (One could no doubt make a similar claim about the range of phenomena to which the label “Orientalism” has been applied since the appearance of Edward Said’s book by that name in 1978.)

In the words of reviewer Daniel Moran in Strategic Insights (May 2004):

The real subject of the authors’ reflections is not the West as a historical reality but modernity as a complex of ideas, attitudes, and practices. For them the “West” is any place where modernity–here broadly synonymous with limited, responsible government and a respect for individual rights and scientific rationality–has prevailed. Occidentalists are those, wherever situated, who have found the modern to be intolerably corrosive of traditional values: decadent, rootless, alienated, materialist, morally soft, and spiritually bereft. Such people arose first in the West, because it was there that the challenges of modernity were first experienced.

The following passage from Occidentalism illustrates how Buruma and Margalit seek to lump Russian Orthodox “Old Believers” into the Occidentalist camp.

The standard theological bone of contention in the Greek Orthodox Church was the nature of the Godhead. Theology was taken very seriously in Roman Catholicism as well. Its various schisms came from theological debates about the nature of man. To be sure, there is always something else involved in a split besides the declared religious issues, but it is a serious mistake to deny that there are true believers, and moreover believers who are willing to fight and die for their beliefs.

The Russian church, however, was not just relatively indifferent to theology; it actively resisted the idea of turning religion into a form of geometry. Religion, it maintained, was a spiritual enterprise, not an intellectual one. Devotion to icons should count more than a clever gloss of chapter and verse. There was, in fact, a major schism in the Russian church, but this did not come from any intellectual rift. In 1652, Nikon, the patriarch of Moscow, tried to reform the Russian church to bring it more in line with the Eastern Greek church. The reforms affected old customs: three hallelujahs instead of two, five consecrated loaves instead of seven, the procession against the sun rather than in the direction of the sun, and even a change of spelling of Jesus’ name. These examples show that the schism was not about creed, even though those who opposed the reforms are described as the Old Believers. It was about ritual customs. The Old Believers threw stones at an official church procession in the Kremlin for walking in the wrong direction, but not because the church was going astray in matters of dogma. Creed is associated with the Western church, but custom belongs to the East.

At least two elements of Russian religious culture anticipated Occidentalism. The stress on intellectual matters in the Catholic church was a sure sign, to Russian believers, that it was lacking in simple and pure-hearted faith. The other element, which was at the root of the schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, was a deep suspicion of any innovation. Novelty, to these believers, was always something that came from the outside. It was deemed to be inauthentic and humiliating, suggesting that there was something essentially lacking in the old ways. This religious sensibility cuts very deep. It views the church not as a source of new knowledge, but as the depository of collective memory, the memory of Rus as a holy community. Memory and simple faith are the main virtues of the human mind, not reason and the newfangled sophistry it produces. Mysticism, expressing a higher mode of existence, was valued much more than the exertions of a methodical mind.

The Old Believers sensed that behind Nikon’s reforms lay a host of Greek priests who had arrived from Kiev with the old strategy of domination by complication–that is, complicating beyond recognition the religious life of the true believers and thus taking charge of telling them what to do. Simple religious life was, to the Old Believers, something quintessentially Russian, whereas Nikon’s new manual of worship was foreign, artificial, and inauthentic.

SOURCE: Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 84-85

I wonder where Buruma and Margalit’s approach in Occidentalism intersects with that of Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, which I haven’t yet read. The title is certainly catchy.

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by | 3 May 2004 · 6:25 pm

Thailand: Dangers of Jihadi Reprisal

The South Asia Analysis Group has just posted an analysis of the recent clash between Muslim youth and Thai police in the Pattani area of southern Thailand.

3. The tactics adopted by the poorly-armed Muslim youth bring to mind more that of the LTTE in the early years of its struggle against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces or of the Maoists of Nepal or of the tribal insurgents of India’s North-East than that of the jihadi terrorists active in the South-East Asian and South Asian region. The LTTE, the Maoists and the Indian tribal insurgents used to adopt such tactics to replenish their stocks of arms and ammunition.

4. What these young Muslims have exhibited in common with their co-religionists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere is their fierce motivation and not the modus operandi adopted by them. They do not appear to be bandits or narcotics smugglers as projected by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand and his officials. They are politically and religiously motivated fighters, with no evidence so far of any external influence–either from the Jemaah Islamiyah of the South-East Asian region or the jihadi organisations of Pakistan and/or Bangladesh–on their mind.

5. Attacking in large numbers with machetes is not the known modus operandi of any of the identified jihadi organisations of the International Islamic Front (IIF). They do slit the throat of their victims with a knife just as they slit the throat of a sacrificial goat with one, but they do not indulge in massive attacks on posts of the security forces and the police carrying only machetes.

At the same time, Nirmal Ghosh in the Straits Times reports:

PATTANI – A top security adviser to the [Thai] government said yesterday that an underground shadowy movement that has been building its ranks for almost a decade was behind the recent spate of violence in the country’s restive south.

And the Weekend Australian reports:

SUSPECTED Islamic militants killed by security forces at a south Thailand mosque may have been trained abroad by the al-Qaeda linked South-east Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a news report said today.

Pattani is just across the piracy-plagued Straits of Malacca from Aceh.

Hat tip: Winds of Change

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by | 24 March 2004 · 8:27 pm

Religious Blogospheres

If the Jewish blogosphere is jBlog, and the Catholic blogosphere is St. Blog’s Parish, what does the Mormon blogosphere call itself? Over at the Mormon blog Times and Seasons, the Bloggernacle Choir seems to be carrying the day.

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by | 19 March 2004 · 9:43 pm

Medieval al-Maghreb and al-Murabitun and al-Muwahhidun in al-Andalus

Lee Smith’s backgrounder on Spain in Slate elaborates on al-Andalus mentioned in an earlier post.

The Arabic name for Morocco is al-Maghreb, the place where the sun set on the westernmost limit of the 8th-century Arab empire.

The Arabs conquered the Berbers, a general term encompassing numerous tribes throughout western North Africa, whose warrior ethos they put to good use. It was a largely Berber army, led by a Berber general, that conquered Spain in 711. The Berbers were, by and large, enthusiastic converts to Islam, perhaps a little too fervent for some of the ruling Arab elite. Unlike the Arabs, who fought just for plunder, the Berbers believed that they waged war to glorify Islam.

… when al-Qaida lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri referred to “the tragedy of al-Andalus,” he wasn’t pining for what the Spanish call the “convivencia,” when Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived together in relative harmony. That picture of Muslim Spain is undoubtedly a little over-gilded, but it’s good that the myth of al-Andalus continues to fund the world’s imagination. Without the legend of peaceful co-existence, a city like New York–where Muslims, Jews, Christians, and others get along handsomely–would’ve been much more difficult to conceive.

At any rate, there was trouble in al-Andalus long before Ferdinand and Isabella banished the Muslims and the Jews in 1492. Two of the more serious challenges came from Morocco in the late 11th and then 12th century, first the Almoravids and then the Almohads, both of them Berber dynasties and Muslim fundamentalists.

Almoravid is a Hispanicized version of the Arabic word “al-Murabitun,” or “those of the military encampment.” As Richard Fletcher writes in Moorish Spain, the Almoravids “saw their role as one of purifying religious observance by the re-imposition where necessary of the strictest canons of Islamic orthodoxy.” They came to redeem a weakened Muslim state against the Christians. Once the Almoravids got soft, the Almohads, still more theologically austere, came north to replace them. Almohad is a corruption of “al-Muwahhidun,” or “those who profess the oneness of God.” It is an Arabic word still in usage; in fact it is the other polite way [like Salafi] to say Wahabbi.

via Michael J. Totten

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by | 3 March 2004 · 9:32 pm

Melanesian Brotherhood wins Human Rights Awards

The General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada reports the winner of the 4th Pacific Human Rights Awards.

FEB. 27, 2004 – The Melanesian Brotherhood — the largest religious community in the Anglican Communion — was awarded the first prize in the regional category of the 4th Pacific Human Rights Awards, for its active role in peacemaking and reconciliation during the 1999 and 2000 ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands….

The ethnic conflict was between some of the indigenous people of the main island of Guadalcanal and settlers on Guadalcanal from the large neighbouring island of Malaita. The fighting broke out after about 20,000 Malaitans were driven out of Guadalcanal back to Malaita, resulting in the armed conflict between Isatabu (Guadalcanal) Freedom Movement (IFM) and the Malaita Eagle Force (MEF).

Last August, six brothers were killed by one of the rebel groups after going to the west coast of the island of Guadalcanal to retrieve the body of another member of the order who had also been killed.

That is the bravery and sacrifice that won the Brotherhood the human rights award, which was presented to them by the Prime Minister of Fiji, Laisenia Qarase. In 2001 the brothers were also awarded the Solomon Islands Medal for the same role.

Despite peace, the problems in the Solomon Islands still continue, and the Brotherhood still plays an important role in maintaining peace.

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by | 3 March 2004 · 9:09 pm

New Guinea Religion and Morality: John Barker Replies to Jared Diamond

John Barker replies to Jared Diamond in The New York Review of Books: LEARNING FROM NEW GUINEA.

In a lively review of David Sloan Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathedral [NYR, November 7, 2002], Jared Diamond writes: “It will surprise most Jews, Christians, and Muslims to learn that this link between religion and morality is entirely absent in the New Guinean societies of which I have experience.” I don’t think they will be nearly as surprised by this assertion as people familiar with New Guinea societies and religions…. Traditional religious beliefs and practices varied immensely throughout New Guinea, but nowhere was morality divorced from religion. Instead, the spiritual and the moral were deeply conjoined–even in the case of warfare, I might add–as has been documented in hundreds of articles and books.

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