Christianity and Religious Freedom in the Asian Context

Abstract

Abstract The continent of Asia may be the cradle of Christianity and other religious faiths, although Asian Christians have largely forgotten or ignored this. Many Asians view Christianity, more frequently associated with Western colonialism, as an invasive, foreign, missionary religion, even if Christianity’s encounter with Asia predates Western Christendom and colonialism; the center of Christianity has shifted to the Global South, and some of the world’s largest mission-sending churches are in Asia in the Global South. In many Asian contexts, Christianity has been a force for religious and political freedoms. Although Christians in Asia are generally minorities, they have played an outsized role in promoting religious freedom, two facets of which this chapter focuses upon. First, the individual right of religious conversion and corollary freedom of religious propagation is based on freedom of conscience. The Indian Constituent Assembly has debated the inclusion of propagation as part of the religious freedom guarantee; this chapter discusses how these influenced developments in South and Southeast Asia. Second, at the collective level, religious freedom opposes political absolutism, particularly in Asian socialist regimes. The fear that communism was incompatible with religious freedom drove Christians in South Korea to embrace a vision of a democratic nation that safeguarded political and religious liberties. That fear manifested in the repressive treatment of Christian minorities in North Korea and China, where the hegemonic state subordinates individuals and groups to its totalizing agenda, contrary to Christian values of human dignity and the differentiation of religious and political power.