Christianity and Law in Southeast Asia Today

Abstract

Abstract Christianity is a minority religion in Southeast Asia as a whole, albeit a significant and influential one. It is professed by a majority of the population only in the Philippines and Timor Leste. Historically, the spread of Christianity and Christian values is closely linked with European colonialism in the region. Christian morality and ideas of law were introduced via legal transplants by the European colonials. The most evident example is the criminal codes that the British enacted in their colonies, which are still being administered today in Malaysia, Singapore, Myanmar, and, to some extent, Brunei. Within colonial Indochina, French civil, penal, and commercial codes interacted with local legal systems and customs. This chapter examines the influence of Christianity on laws in Southeast Asia through three lenses. The first is the Christian foundations of the legal categories of the individual and the family, highlighting tensions between local customs and modernizing developments but also intrinsic tensions between individual rights and familial traditions. The second discusses Christian influences on the law through the ongoing shaping of public morality by Christian institutions and actors, especially in the modern arena of abortion rights, reproductive health, and homosexuality but also in the traditional fields of family reforms. The third analyzes how Christianity has influenced the very conception of religion, privileging Catholicism through canon law concepts in the Philippines but also posing specific problems for arguably the most secularist state in the region, Vietnam.