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 What
follows is an exhaustive analysis of data on northern Thai Protestant
attitudes towards other religions and their neighbors of others
faiths collected by means of a questionnaire entitled, "Questionnaire
About Christians and People of Other Faiths" (see Appendix).
In the process of writing a paper on the data gained from the questionnaire,
it became clear that I did not have a clear grasp of the data itself,
let alone what it all meant. I began this analysis as a way to better
understand the data itself, and it became quickly apparent that
I was actually writing up a larger report on the results of the
survey on northern Thai Protestant attitudes towards people of other
faiths. I decided to "kill two birds with one stone,"
as it were, and shape my analysis into a somewhat more formal report
for inclusion on this website. It is not my purpose here to place
this analysis in a larger scholarly context. There are no footnotes,
and I make many assertions of fact and interpretation that are not
documented, primarily because to engage in the process of doing
a larger academic analysis would turn this report into a task of
months rather than weeks. Readers, thus, may want to treat this
whole report as an academic resource rather than a scholarly piece
in and of itself, if such a distinction has any meaning. I, obviously,
believe that I have reason to make the assertions of fact and interpretation
contained in this report, the actual documentation of which mostly
appears in other things that I have written.
The
project behind the questionnaire had two main purposes: first, it
was a class exercise that intended to give the eight students enrolled
in the McGilvary Faculty of Theology course on research methods
for M.Div. students, second semester 2003-2204, (TS 571) practical
experience in quantitative research and analysis. Second, it was
part of a larger research project studying northern Thai Protestantism
in its Buddhist cultural setting, which project was headed up by
Dr. Donald Swearer and funded by the Luce Foundation.
The
purpose of this report, then, is to make available as much of the
data obtained by means of the questionnaire on northern Thai Protestant
attitudes towards people of other faiths as possible to those who
are interested in the subject of Christian-Buddhist relations in
Thailand or related topics.
The
survey instrument itself was developed by the eight M.Div. students
and myself with some input from Dr. Swearer. The eight students
are Boonrak Suriwong, Jureerut Saetang, Patompong Boonyakert, Ratsamee
Arkharasavast, Rungtiwa Mamo, Suradej Wisutichon, Teerakit Suesan,
and the Rev. Theerapan Khopchai. It was distributed by the students,
Dr. Swearer, members of the staff of the Office of History, and
myself (with the assistance of several members of local churches)
to some 17 churches in four districts of the CCT and to various
groups during the months of January to April 2004. We collected
a total of 726 returned forms.
This
report examines the data collected from each of the fifteen questions
individually and in sequence. I have tried to use a similar format
and set of tables for reporting the data for each question in what
I hope is a clear manner. The following two sections on "Background
and Issues" and "The Questionnaire" set the stage
for the actual presentation of the data.
I
designed the "Questionnaire About Christians and People of
Other Faiths" in conjunction with the McGilvary students in
order to discover how northern Thai local church people make sense
out of their dual religious heritage. Virtually all of the research
I do, qualitative or quantitative, is based on the assumption that
northern Thai Protestantism (meaning, here, the northern Thai churches
belonging to the Church of Christ in Thailand)
has grown out of two grand streams of religious tradition, namely
Theravada Buddhism and Protestant Christianity. There are many differences
as well as not a few similarities between the two, but they do come
out of very different historical backgrounds and each has its own
unique approach to the questions of faith and practice. Local northern
Thai Protestants encompass, that is, a unique blend of Buddhist
and Protestant, Asian and Western ways of thinking, values, attitudes,
and practices. They are both northern Thai and Protestant, which
means that they are not quite like other northern Thais and not
quite the same as other Protestants.
One of
the key issues that arises out of this dual heritage is the question
of how northern Thai Protestants relate to their Buddhist neighbors.
Briefly, the American Presbyterian missionaries who introduced the
Christian faith into northern Thailand in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries brought with them an extremely negative attitude
towards people of all other faiths than their own, including Catholics
as well as Buddhists. They were religious exclusivists who believed
that ultimate salvation is available only through the Christian
faith in its Protestant form. Crassly but accurately stated, they
believed that if you are not a Christian when you die you are going
to hell. Thai Buddhism makes no such exclusivist claims for itself
and, historically, has shown a large degree of tolerance for other
religions. The goodness of all religions is assumed, acknowledged,
and even celebrated—albeit in a rather passive manner. Thai
Buddhism is pluralistic not only in its willingness to borrow from
other religions what it finds useful in them, but also in its readiness
to accept other religions as legitimate in themselves.
This
dual Western Protestant-Asian Theravada heritage poses serious questions.
For northern Thai Protestants, the most important questions have
to do with behavior. Basically, the missionaries taught the church
to reject Buddhism, which has meant rejecting the heart and soul
of their mother culture and, specifically, breaking away from the
religiously grounded life ways of their communities. Northern Thai
culture, on the other hand, gives high valuation to communal unity
and overtly smooth interpersonal relations; it does not matter what
religion other people are, but they must show unity and respect
for the religion of their neighbors and relatives. Over the decades,
this difference in attitude towards people of other faiths has been
a source of ongoing, sometimes intense tension between Buddhists
and Christians. The question before us here is how do the people
in the pews resolve this tension?
What
we might call "mainline" scholarship has made some progress
over the last quarter of a century or so in describing the relationship
of Thai and northern Thai Protestantism to their cultures. Beginning
with Maen Pongudom's doctoral thesis in 1979, followed by the work
of Philip Hughes and myself in the early 1980s, scholars have identified
the tensions inherent in the historical context of the Thai and
northern Thai churches and have shown that culture plays a very
important role in the thought and practice of Protestant churches
in Thailand. That scholarship, however, has largely labored under
a "unilateral" model of the relationship of culture to
the church that sees culture as the context for the church. This
model has at least two important implications. First, it assigns
great power to Thai and northern Thai culture, seeing culture as
being almost acidic-like in its ability to transform imported Western
Protestantism. Second, there is an unspoken tendency to see Protestantism
in a negative light, as if it is "the problem" or the
"bad guy" in the relationship. Protestantism is assumed
to pose the problem that Thai culture must solve. Evangelical researchers,
mostly missionaries, who have studied the question of church and
culture in Thailand, accept this model just as much as the mainline
scholars, but they put a different twist to it. From their perspective
it is culture that is the "bad guy." The encounter of
the Christian faith with Thai culture, they feel, poses the theologically
life-threatening danger of syncretism, which is any adaptation to
culture that corrupts the purity of the Gospel. They still assume
the unilateral model, the only difference being a different valuation
of Thai culture as opposed to Western Protestantism. (I have borrowed
the term "unilateral model" in the sense I am using it
here from Boyung Lee, "From a Margin Within the Margin: Rethinking
the Dynamics of Christianity and Culture From a Post-Colonial Feminist
Perspective," JTCA: The Journal of Theologies and Cultures
in Asia 3 (2004): 12.)
By
and large, so far as I know, this model for conceptualizing the
relationship of indigenous Thai Buddhist culture to imported Western
Protestantism has gone unchallenged among scholars and researchers.
Mainline or evangelical, we have all (including myself) worked on
the problem of how the imported foreign faith fits into the indigenous
culture. My sense now is that the unilateral model obscures as much
as it explains. However much, northern Thai Protestants share in
the larger culture of their region, they are not like other northern
Thais in many important respects. As one simple but highly important
example, women in most Protestant churches play a much more important
leadership role in the life of the church than do Buddhist women
in the life of their local temples. Or, again, Protestant "monks"
marry and, especially in urban churches, do not even live in the
church compound, which compound is not conceived of as being sacred
ground as are various precincts within Buddhist temples. The unilateral
model can account for these differences only by positing an incomplete
or a failed indigenization of the Christian faith into Thai culture.
The acids of culture have either failed to dissolve certain aspects
of Western Protestantism or, perhaps, are still quietly eating away
at those aspects. The fact, however, that, to return to our original
example, women's leadership is, if anything, growing in northern
Thai churches, suggests that the unilateral model is perhaps inadequate
to explain at least some developments in the relationship of the
Asian and Western elements found in northern Thai Protestantism.
The model
assumed in this study is different and is taken from recent research
done into the relationship between "globalization" and
"localization." Students of the process of globalization
have increasingly discovered that globalization is not a single
process by which global forces invade and overwhelm local culture.
There is a flip side to globalization, which is usually termed
"localization." Even as global forces reshape local
culture, so local forces also give a distinctive shape to global
themes in a two-way process that creates something new out the
interaction between global and local elements. What is important
in this globalization-localization model so far as we are concerned
here is not to identify culture with localization and Protestantism
with globalization, which we could arguably do. What is important
is the model of two previously independent cultural agencies,
Theravada-based northern Thai culture and Western-based Protestant
culture, influencing each other in a process of mutual accommodation.
The perspective
taken in this article, then, is that northern Thai Protestants
are engaged in an on-going process of accommodating northern Thai
Buddhist and Western Protestant religious cultures and consciousness
to each other. The process is a complex one that involves choices,
compromises, and conscious rationalization. While it surely has
sub-conscious or semi-conscious elements to it, the process of
accommodation is assumed here to be very much a conscious and
rational one.
The issue
of the relationship between culture and church in northern Thai
Protestant thinking and practice is impossible to encompass in
a single study. The approach to that relationship I have taken
here is to examine it in terms of Protestant attitudes towards
their Buddhist neighbors. As already stated, this is a key issue
for local church people because the great majority of them come
into frequent contact with Buddhist neighbors, cultural practices,
and rites. Individual Christians, for the most part, cannot avoid
making conscious decisions about their relationship with their
Buddhist neighbors, which decisions reflect their understanding
of their own faith. The problem they face, also as we have already
said, is that their Protestant heritage is "exclusivist"
and their Theravada heritage is "pluralist."
The concepts
of exclusivism and pluralism will be defined in a somewhat piecemeal
fashion in the commentary on the data obtained from the questionnaire.
In general, exclusivism is understood to be the Western Protestant
rejection of other religions and the insistence that only Christian
faith provides the means, by the grace of God, for salvation.
Pluralism is understood to be the Thai Buddhist acceptance of
the value of other religions and the understanding that there
are many paths to salvation. To the argument that ecclesiastical
pluralism could also be a result of the influence of Western Protestant
ecumenical ("liberal") thinking, I can own reply that
my own study of numerous local CCT churches in northern Thailand
suggests that Western ecumenical thinking has had little or no
impact on the local churches. One might expect, for example, that
theology students would be particularly exposed to ecumenical
thinking, but, as we will see in what follows, the pastors who
took part in this study tend to be more exclusivist than do church
members in general
The specific
purpose of the questionnaire is to distinguish pluralism from
exclusivism in the beliefs and attitudes of the respondents, to
see how they make use of each, and to discern the relationship
between exclusivism and pluralism in their thinking. I have consciously
tried to avoid assigning historical or cultural priority to either
Protestant exclusivism or Buddhist pluralism.
The eight
students in TS 571 initially constructed the questionnaire (see
the Appendix), and I added questions and rephrased some of their
questions in light of insights generated by a consultation with
northern Thai Protestant evangelists in February 2002 on the subject
of Christianity in Buddhist contexts that was sponsored by the
Luce Foundation. (See the article, "The Wiang Pa Pao Consultation
on Evangelism in the Northern Thai Context" in HeRB
11). Each student was asked to submit five questions for the
questionnaire, which we then went over in class and from which
we produced a preliminary questionnaire that I then revised. I
also added questions of my own, notably Question 13. The class
went over the revised instrument, and then each student submitted
it to two or more individuals outside of the class for their critical
comments. We discussed problems in class, and on the basis of
that discussion I again revised the questionnaire.
The
students distributed the questionnaire in a variety of settings,
including to local churches, to employees of church agencies,
among friends, and at church meetings and conferences. I also
distributed the questionnaire to more churches with the assistance
of the staff of the Office of History and others. In all, we received
726 returned questionnaires, not including a small number that
were so poorly filled out as to be useless.
The sample
is not scientific. It is, however, broadly inclusive of northern
Thai local church members in the Church of Christ in Thailand
(CCT). Only a small number of questionnaires were distributed
to members of one church outside of the CCT. The sample includes
respondents from four of the seven ethnic northern Thai districts
of the CCT, namely Districts One (Chiang Mai-Lamphun), Four (Phrae-Uttaradit),
Five (Nan), and Fifteen (Phayao). It includes members from at
least 17 CCT churches and the 1 non-CCT church. The sample comprises
a good mix of rural and urban church members as well as of women
and men, various age groups, and different educational backgrounds
(see Chapter 5).
Because
the sample is not scientific and the study itself is unique, so
far as I know, the data presented below must be taken as somewhat
preliminary and interpreted with some caution. In defense of the
data, I will say that it was clear from the first batch of forms
collected to the last, as I entered the data, that the percentages
were generally consistent throughout. There were no wild swings
or major discrepancies, and even in the case of two churches that
are distinctive (Chiang Mai Chinese Church and Suwanduangrit Church),
the differences are consistent within themselves and clearly parallel
to the over all figures. My sense is that the sample is adequately
representative of local church thinking, if interpreted with the
aforesaid degree of caution.
The questions
on the questionnaire are grouped in three general sections, and
the results of the data are reported here by section and question.
Section One, Questions 1 through 5, seeks to determine the respondent's
beliefs about people of other faiths, particularly whether or
not they can attain salvation within their own faith. Section
Two, Questions 6 through 10, seeks to determine the respondent's
attitudes towards people of other faiths. Section Three, Questions
11 through 15, seeks to determine the respondent's attitudes towards
participation in Buddhist rites. The Wiang Pa Pao consultation
mentioned in the Introduction particularly informed this last
section.
The
percentages presented throughout this report are "valid
percentages," that is they represent the total number
of people who responded to the particular question and not
the total number of all respondents. The number of respondents
answering each question is always indicated. |
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