Why do so many Japanese resist baptism? And what can Christian missionaries do about it?

Part 1. On Comparative theology as a missionary necessity

What might be baptised?

A plea to readers…

Many of you have kindly bought King Oswald’s Heirs, my meditation on the Prayer Book catechism through the lives of the English saints – thank you.

If you enjoyed it, please could you leave a review on Amazon? Even just some stars will help raise its profile.

Help me to keep the momentum going and sound the call for the restoration of the faith that build old England!

Over 150 years have passed since 1873, when Christianity was legalised in Japan after over two centuries of strict prohibition. Foreign missionaries were already at work even beforehand. Their legacy remains in the Christian universities, hospitals, schools and nurseries one can still find in every city. In church buildings, too. But the numbers of people in those buildings are less impressive. Despite intense missionary efforts both before and after the War, Christians make up around 1% of the Japanese population, and every denomination is showing numerical decline, with the possible exception of the Assemblies of God who may just be holding their numbers: but they make up only 0.01%, roughly in line with the Japanese Orthodox Church. None can boast growth.

Why might this be? The social historian can tell us that the fortunes of what Americans call “mainline Protestantism,” including the Anglicans, rose and fell with the respectability of those denominations in the West, particularly the US. Their membership, like that of the US Episcopal Church, tends to comprise upper middle-class professionals, and those of a certain and increasing age. Their rapid demise in the US is mirrored, if not overtaken, by that in Japan.

Assuming that people became Christian in Japan for something more than sheer accumulation of social capital, one is still left with the question why formerly prosperous and thriving denominations are now spiralling into the abyss. Not just Protestant ones, either: the descent for Roman Catholics is slower, but no less relentless.

Could it just be that Christianity is too foreign to take hold here? That somehow, despite spreading like wildfire in Korea, China, the Philippines, Burma, Singapore — all historically Buddhist countries with native shamanic and pagan traditions analogous to Japan’s Shinto — there is something so unique about Japan that this nation alone is peculiarly resistant? That is certainly a popular self-understanding among the Japanese, famously echoed by characters in Endo Shusaku’s Silence who compared their nation to a “swamp,” or a land with its own special soil in which no foreign plant can grow.

And yet, and yet... the Christian mustard seed did sprout here, and prodigiously, under the Jesuit missions which St Francis Xavier spearheaded. Within just fifty years, some three to five hundred thousand Japanese were baptised. That’s 2-4% of the population of the time. In purely numerical terms, the Jesuit missions achieved between two and four times what the modern missions have managed, in one third of the time. And even if those terms are admittedly unnuanced and reductionistic, nothing suggests that the growth would have stopped, had the Christian daimyos not been ruthlessly suppressed, tens of thousands publicly and brutally executed, and the religion banned on pain of death. The “swamp” only holds so much water.

Nor can one reasonably argue that Christianity struggles in the face of the strength of Japan’s home-grown religious traditions. First, Buddhism is no more natively Japanese than Christianity is natively English or American. It is an import which flourished, and it is interesting to think how and why, but for now we might note that adherents are also declining, having received little to no catechesis in its doctrine, and voting with their wallets against what — to the shame of faithful Buddhist clergy I know — for most households amounts to little more than a very expensive funeral scam. Second, Shinto, the truly native spiritual practice of Japan, is more a code of practice than a dogmatic system, with no formal rite of membership which might preclude a Japanese person from becoming Christian. The Japanese for the most part do Shinto and feel Shinto, but they do not become Shinto, as one might take refuge in the Dharma, recite the Shahaddah or be baptised.

The “competition,” as it were, does not come from the Buddhist or Shinto side. Unless, that is, one believes those spiritual systems to be entirely guided by demonic forces which are working malevolently against the propagation of the Christian faith. I have good, wise and faithful friends who do think that this is the case. And one must not discount the reality of antagonistic spiritual powers. However, from what I have studied of Buddhism and encountered among Shintoists, I do not find that I can paint the situation in such broad brushstrokes. And here I find myself in a dilemma which I want to share with you.

I have asked various missionaries the answer to the titular question of this essay. Based on their answers, and some I have gleaned in my own ministry here in Japan, here are three of the most common reasons for Japanese people, even those who attend church, not to receive baptism:

1. They want to be buried in their ancestral, most likely Buddhist, grave, along with their parents.

2. They want to be able to offer incense at Buddhist family funerals, fearing the offence that it will cause if they do not.

3. They are hesitant to commit to a foreign religion which they feel will detract from their Japaneseness.

The objections I hear tend towards social and national belonging rather than to matters of belief. What I have heard only once, from a university student having difficulty with the divinity of Christ, is a considered rejection of Christian doctrine. The reasons are overwhelmingly to do with a perceived inability to participate in the social norms which constitute Japanese identity, especially around death and remembrance. One might reasonably surmise that this constitutes a breach of the treasured Japanese virtue of wa, the harmony after which their country was antiquely named and persists in certain forms of speech today (Japanese style, for example, is wa-fū; a Japanese room, a wa-shitsu).

Many Japanese are under the impression that to become a baptised Christian will prevent them from taking part fully in the life of their family and nation, and that Christianity is therefore a foreign religion, incompatible with being Japanese. But where does this impression come from? Not from Buddhism, except perhaps for the tiny minority of Japanese who are anything other than nominal adherents to one of the stricter schools, such as Nichiren-shū or its Sōka Gakkai offshoot. Nor, indeed, from any Shintō teachings. Rather, it is Christian pastors who teach them these things. At least, that is so in more conservative churches. The liberal mainstream at the other end of the spectrum seem to have stopped worrying about such things completely. But they bring with them a whole extra level of un-Japaneseness, serving as Trojan horses for Western liberal values in which the majority of Japanese are at least uninterested, and in many cases quietly but forcibly reject. And that surely contributes to some extent to their decline.

To navigate between this Scylla and Charibdis, we are going to need some intellectual rigging, before we come home to the question at hand. In the 1980s, theologian Alan Race concocted a threefold typology which has become a textbook standard in the categorisation of inter-religious relations. In regard to other religions, he said, all positions fall into one of the following three camps: exclusivist, inclusivist, or pluralist. The exclusivist holds that his own religion alone is true and capable of offering salvation (however that may be construed). The inclusivist holds that his own religion alone is wholly true, but that other religions may to varying extents participate in that truth, and so have the potential to be vehicles of salvation to some degree. The pluralist holds that no religion has exclusive access to truth claims or to salvation, that all are different paths up the same mountain, and that all reveal aspects of truth and give access to salvation.

This is a neat model with certain intuitive advantages, and is easy to teach and remember. Look a little closer, though, and cracks start to emerge. Is it not possible to be an exclusivist regarding truth claims, but a universalist regarding salvation (yes: q.v. Karl Barth)? And how different really is an exclusivist from an inclusivist, if the inclusivist ultimately makes an exclusive truth claim about his own religion? But if these two questions are merely surface fractures, my MPhil supervisor, the Catholic Professor Gavin D’Costa, exposed the gaping fissure. Influenced by Alistair MacIntyre and John Milbank’s criticism of secularism, he was prompted to ask: isn’t pluralism just another form of exclusivism? And isn’t that exclusivism at heart just another mask for secular totalitarianism?

Think about it: the claim that all religions are equally true and salvific is itself an exclusive truth claim — and a remarkably sweeping one at that. Consider what it actually demands: that we accept that God is the same as the Dharma, that Resurrection is the same as nirvana, that Jesus is no more or less a revealer of truth than Siddhartha Gautama or the Prophet Muhammad. A truth claim, moreover, which excludes by far the majority of theologians of all religions throughout time, let alone in the present. Most will not teach that all religious truth claims, however conflicting they may seem, ultimately resolve into some superior truth which supersedes the revelation, intuition or reasoning on which their own religious tradition is based. It demands the conceit of saying that all religions are fundamentally the same, and that anyone who disagrees is — excluded. Why? Because they are blinded by their stubborn dogmatism against the new and enlightened view which the pluralists share. Which, you must admit, sounds rather a lot like what secular atheists like to say against religion as a whole. The message is: “we understand your religion better than you ever did!”

The liberal-pluralist approach, analogous to secular modernity, denies its peculiarity and errs in declaring its particularity universal; the radical-exclusivist approach, though, is analogous to the postmodern in refusing any common universal ground on which particulars might find common cause. Both have totalising tendencies. The liberal uses social capital to beat the world into conformity with his own image; the radical wants to bulldoze the local culture and replace it with his. The former wants to eliminate aspects of local tradition which do not conform to his ideal of progress; the latter peddles the faith like a product, wrapping it in whatever glossy packaging will best boost sales, adopting music, aesthetics and language suspiciously redolent of an American marketing campaign, with no concern for the beauty of the local tradition that the latest thing replaced. Neither the liberal-pluralist approach nor the radical-exclusivist one has yet proven successful in Japan. Both approaches foster resentment and resistance. Nor, frankly, is either desirable, given the state of Western societies. Why would the Japanese want to be like us? And why would we leave those societies behind only to replicate them here? Are we here because we love Japan as Japan, and see something of value here already in the culture which has made the people who they are, or are we just travelling salesmen after all? Well, that approach hasn’t worked so far and shows no sign of doing so. This alone might suggest that God is pointing us to some other way. Either that, or against all reason, He has chosen what is possibly the most civilised and harmonious society on earth for what — damnation? Does that seem likely?

What I am looking for is a way which neither assumes, with the confidence of secular modernity in its presumed “neutral” status, that we are all pilgrims up one mountain, which I, in my wisdom, have identified; nor yet, with the postmodernist, that we are all up our own individual mountains, shouting across to one another in mutually incomprehensible tongues. A way in which I can hold without qualification or compromise to the immutable and unbending demands of the Christian faith, and yet, on that very basis, seek out how God’s providence has bestowed upon the Japanese people the spiritual means to form their society, so exemplary and humbling to us who wander forlorn in the ruins of Christendom.

The way I have learned and found fruitful is that of “comparative theology.” Among its greatest exemplars is Fr F.X. Clooney, who championed the approach with his work on Hinduism. This is a way which assumes the necessity and priority of the particular. One is inescapably formed in a certain tradition, whatever that may be. One can know universal truth only through that particular tradition, though not confined to it. But this does not necessarily preclude the pursuit of truth, to some degree, through another tradition. To test the possibility, it is not enough to stand outside and look in. One must enter as far as one can into that tradition; learn its language, literally and metaphorically; study its texts and let them form you. The caveat “as far as one can” is important. You don’t go in so deep that you break from your own tradition. And the limitation of the method to textual comparison is artificial, especially when text is not the primary medium of the “target” tradition. But once you do plunge into that other tradition, get into its way of thinking and debate, you start to find points not just of comparison, but of conceptual overlap. You find that texts from your own tradition address comparable intra-traditional controversies (you didn’t think that all Buddhists agree with one another, did you? No more than Christians do!). And you start reading the texts side by side, not drawing in broad strokes, but putting the specific, particular interlocutors together in dialogue to see if they mediate anything common, and potentially universal.

This is an approach I would commend going forward for Christians who are serious about understanding Japan’s religious culture. Christianity and Buddhism have such intra-traditional variation that simplistic responses from either side are not going to get us far. “Christianity and all monotheistic religions are dualistic, lead to violence, and tend to cultish demands which pull you away from your family and your nation” is one such broad-brush stroke which typifies a Japanese response to missionary activity, its correlating assumption being that Buddhist non-dualism gives the Japanese a greater respect for nature, love of peace, and open-mindedness towards religious syncretism. That is a sweeping assumption which does not take seriously the many kinds of Christianity, and the different objections to that thesis which different schools of Christian thought might yield. But equal and opposite is the Christian caricature of Buddhism as an idolatrous, man-made natural religion which inherently denies personality and creative agency to God, reducing reality to the outworking of an impersonal and depersonalising force. Again, it does not take the particularities of that tradition seriously.

I do not know much about Shintō, but there is no a priori reason to suggest that some kinds of Shintō thought might not be as analogous to some kinds of Christian thought as those of, say, the ancient Greek pagan philosophers whose influence on Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity, Scripture included, is hard to deny. If we look, then like wise bishops of old, we may find aspects of the pagan culture and its assumptions that can be baptised.

In the next post in this series, I intend to outline a traditional and apostolic reading of Scripture that might form one particular Christian approach to certain facets of Japanese spiritual identity: one which does not compromise the truth of the Gospel, but remains open to the possibility of finding grounds for reception of that truth providentially prepared by God through the spirits honoured in this land.