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Herb Swanson
 Thai Protestantism is not just one thing, and there is not one "right" way to understand it. One intriguing and helpful way to view it is to see it as an exercise in problem solving. The challenge Thai Protestants have faced historically is how to combine international Protestantism, a product of the West, with a Thai religious consciousness. This is not to claim that Thai Protestant Christians spend their waking hours trying to work out their religious faith and cultural identity in light of their Protestant-Buddhist heritage. It is to maintain that many Thai Protestants realize to one degree or another that to be Thai and Protestant poses certain religious and cultural challenges to them especially in their relationships with their Buddhist relatives and neighbors.
Most Thai Protestants know, for example, that "traditional" Protestantism teaches that people who do not profess Christianity are condemned to eternal damnation. They also know that morally and behaviorally there isn't all that much difference between Buddhists and Christians apart from their religious allegiances. They know that they have been taught to refrain from participating in religious ceremonies that break the First Commandment, but they frequently are not sure precisely which ceremonies and what degree of participation is proscribed. They also realize that their Buddhist neighbors and relatives have no sympathy with those who refuse to take part in Buddhist ceremonial life. Some Thai church leaders realize that most missionaries think that the Thai churches flirt with syncretism too much, but they also know that missionary evangelism is markedly ineffective in bringing Thais to Christ in any numbers.
The problem that Thai Protestants have to solve, then, grows out of significant differences between their Western Protestant and Thai Buddhist-animist heritages. The matter is a complex one, to say the least. Protestantism, for example, values religious faith while Thai (Buddhist) religiosity mistrusts faith and values wisdom. Protestantism (at least in its missionary versions) is actively exclusivist in its attitudes towards people of other faiths while Thai religiosity is passively pluralistic. Protestantism demands loyalty and the worship of a personal deity, but Thai Buddhism primarily requires adherence to a set of teachings and practices. Thai Protestants have inherited apparently contradictory sets of values, beliefs, and practices from Thai religious consciousness and Protestantism and from them have been constructing distinctive religious consciousnesses of their own (see "Northern Thai Protestant Attitudes Towards Other Faiths").
If it is true that Thai Protestants are working out distinctive faiths of their own from their dual Western Protestant and Asian Buddhist (and animist) heritages, it is important to define each element of that heritage as clearly as possible. This descriptive task is itself difficult since the concepts of "Western Protestantism" and "Asian Buddhism" are massively diverse phenomena each in their own right. There is a vast literature related to each one, and even those mountains of material do not encompass the concepts.
My purpose here is to refine the concept of "Western Protestantism" in its Thai historical context. Until after World War II, "Protestantism" in Siam/Thailand largely meant American missionary Protestantism, most especially American Presbyterianism. Understanding the nature of both is, thus, of crucial importance to understanding the formation and development of Thai Protestantism. This is a point I have made repeatedly and suffuses the work found on this website (see, esp. "Prelude to Irony"). Much of that work, however, has focused on American religious institutions and especially American Presbyterian thought and praxis. There is another way to discover important insights into the role of American missionary Protestantism in Thailand, which is to look at other sectors of American culture.
Somewhat to my surprise, an article on American military operations in Iraq that I found on line some months ago provides one window for viewing the cultural sources of American missionary behavior and thinking in Thailand. The following sections of this essay first summarize that article and then look at a number of parallels between 21st century American military behavior in Iraq and 19th and 20th century American missionary behavior in Thailand. These parallels reveal some key American cultural themes that are part of the mosaic of American culture, which the missionaries took with them to Thailand.
Writing in the November-December edition of Military Review, Brigadier General Nigel Aylwin-Foster provides a penetrating analysis of certain doctrinal and operational weaknesses of the U. S. Army's occupation of Iraq in the years 2002-2004. His article is entitled "Changing the Army for Counterinsurgency Operations". The author is a British army officer who spent a year in Iraq working in close cooperation with the American army.
General Aylwin-Foster commends the U.S. Army for the way in which it swiftly defeated the Iraqi army and established control of the nation. He is much less complimentary of what has happened subsequently, arguing that the army has been "notably less proficient" at what American military officials term "Operations Other than War (OOTW)" (pp. 2-3). His paper is an attempt to come to grips with the "apparently paradoxical currents of strength and weakness" that he "witnessed at close hand over the course of a year" (p. 3). In coming to terms with the U.S. Army's failings in OOTW in Iraq, the author states,
My overriding impression was of an Army imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion, commitment, and determination, with plenty of talent, and in no way lacking in humanity or compassion. Yet it seemed weighed down by bureaucracy, a stiflingly hierarchical outlook, a predisposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on…Moreover, whilst they were almost unfailingly courteous and considerate, at times their cultural insensitivity, almost certainly inadvertent, arguably amounted to institutional racism. (p. 3)
With some minor changes in wording General Aylwin-Foster could just as well be describing the work of most of the American Protestant missionaries in Thailand from 1828 up to 1941—not all, certainly, but most—and many since.
The author points to several failures of the U. S. Army including the failure to implement an effective counterinsurgency [COIN] strategy that is, first, "able to see issues and actions from the perspective of the domestic populations" and, second, understands "the relative value of force and how easily excessive force…can undermine popular support" (p. 4). He feels that the American military in Iraq was too often too willing to use excessive force to destroy the insurgency and failed to see how such force undermined it ultimate goals. He charges the Americans with being too "offensively minded" (p. 4).
The General argues that the problem with the American army is partly a strategic one. He readily admits that individual American soldiers frequently display deep levels of compassion towards the Iraqi people even when it is dangerous for them to do so. The U. S. Army as an institution, however, follows a general strategic policy that renders their compassion ineffective because it is fixed on the use of violent means to destroy the enemy. In pursuit of the objective, American soldiers are frequently insensitive to Iraqi cultures, especially newly arrived troops that have not yet adjusted to Iraq's complex cultural landscape. Only 6% of American military operations in Iraq from May 2003 to May 2005 were involved in activities aimed at improving local Iraqi security. The author quotes a document from the U. S. Department of Defense, which states,
'There was a strong focus on raiding, cordon & search and sweep ops throughout; the one day brigade raid is the preferred tactic. There was a 'preference for large-scale kinetic maneuver' and 'focus on killing insurgents, not protecting the population.' (p. 5)
The American military focus, in sum, is on the use of force and the destruction of the enemy at the expense of local populations. It creates an environment of violence.
The American soldiers' sense of "moral righteousness" serves to reinforce their frequent insensitivity to Iraqi peoples. He writes, "This sense of moral righteousness combined with an emotivity that was rarely far from the surface, and in extremis manifested a deep indignation or outrage that could distort collective military judgment." (p. 6)
It is important to understand that General Aylwin-Foster litters his prose with qualifications to his generalizations. As a military officer, he appears to appreciate the very real strengths of the American military, but his thesis clearly is that there are substantial flaws in their doctrinal, strategic, and cultural approaches that undermine those strengths. The U. S. Army's strengths on the open battlefield, in short, become weaknesses in the realm of COIN.
He goes on to argue that even the "can do" attitude of the U. S. Army has its limitations and can, at times, actually be a weakness. It sometimes creates an atmosphere of optimism that tends to reject bad news as being defeatist. Such optimism can be misleading, and it discourages junior officer from passing negative assessments to their superiors.
Still another characteristic, a cultural one, has imposed limitations on the American military efforts in Iraq, namely dualism, or what he calls American perception of the "binary nature of war" (p. 9). The American military expresses this cultural strain in two ways. First, it takes "an uncompromising approach to conventional warfare that is particularly ill-suited to the nuances of COIN" (p. 9); that approach, as we have seen, is aggressive and violent even at the expense of local populations. Second, the American military believes that there are only two states, war or peace, and it therefore has trouble adapting itself to situations like Iraq that are something in-between. While the author does not tie the matter to dualism, he goes on to note the U. S. Army, like all military organizations, finds it extremely difficult to adapt to changing circumstances for cultural reasons.
It has to be repeated and emphasized that the author does not issue a blanket condemnation of the Unites States Army. It is an unrivaled conventional fighting force marked by a generally high degree of professionalism. He is impressed by numerous individual U. S. Army officers who are willing to be self-critical and to listen to the criticism of others. Still, its very success as a conventional fighting force as well as traits inherited from its mother culture have made it almost impossible for the army to adapt to the difficult exigencies of counter-insurgency and peace-keeping operations in Iraq. The result has been that inadvertently the U. S. Army has fanned the flames of insurgency. In some ways, it is its own worst enemy in Iraq although the ultimate victims of its failures to adapt are the Iraqi peoples.
I did not pick up Aylwin-Foster's article expecting to find anything relevant to Protestant missionary history in Thailand. My goal, instead, was to gain a better understanding of the tragic quagmire of the Iraq War. Yet, as I worked my way into the article, what I found was a British general providing a succinct, cogent summary of the historical experience of the Presbyterian (and other Protestant) missions of Thailand. The parallels go like this:
One. While the two historical Presbyterian missions (Siam Mission and Laos Mission) did not swiftly "defeat" Thai Buddhism-animism, they did overcome enormous financial, logistical, and sociocultural obstacles in the course of establishing their work. Their pioneering successes in a range of fields, particularly medicine and education, have been widely described and gained them much praise in their own day. They, like the American Army in Iraq, were "imbued with an unparalleled sense of patriotism, duty, passion, commitment, and determination" (quoted above). And also like the American Army these fine qualities proved to be a two-edged sword—the foundation of both initial success and long-term failure.
Two. Protestant missions in Thailand have also been plagued by precisely those problems that have also dogged the U.S. Army in Iraq as described by General Aylwin-Foster in the quotation above. [1] It created a cumbersome administrative mechanism that hampered it from responding to changing conditions or momentary opportunities (see Khrischak Muang Nua, pages 71-73). [2] Virtually all of the Protestant missions operating down to the present long insisted on missionary control in what amounted to a hierarchy where the overseas missionaries ruled from the pinnacle. An early, crucial example of the reality of missionary control is found in the Laos Mission's insistence that Christian converts had, first, to publicly declare their faith whatever the price and, second, to refuse to work on Sundays even in defiance of a patron's legal demand that they do so (corvée labor). The converts themselves proposed a less confrontational approach, which was rejected out of hand by the mission (see "Prelude to Irony," Chapter Five). [3] Most missionaries also shared the trait that Aylwin-Foster described, above, as "a predisposition to offensive operations, and a sense that duty required all issues to be confronted head-on." Until well into the 20th century, the members of the Laos Mission (with a very few notable exceptions) believed that they were at war with Thai culture and society. They believed it necessary to take an aggressive stance, which emphasized evangelism as its key weapon in conquering heathenism (see "This Heathen People," Chapter Three).
Three. Aylwin-Foster suggests, somewhat tentatively, that the American army's cultural insensitivity to the Iraqi people may well amount to unintentional "institutional racism." A generation ago, Coleman examined the role of racism in Presbyterian missionary thinking in their work with American Indians, and he concluded that the missionaries were not racists as such. That is, they did not treat the Indians as racially inferior. Although the subject requires more systematic study, the missionaries of the Presbyterian Laos and Siam Missions were also probably not racists in a formal sense. They believed that with proper training and given a Christian environment converts could become their equals in every way—eventually.
Aylwin-Foster, however, raises a slightly different point, one worth pondering in light of missionary history in Siam-Thailand. He's not accusing the individual soldier of racism but the U.S. Army of institutional racism, in other words a form of racism embedded in Army operations as such. Though not the language I used then, Khrischak Muang Nua is largely an argument for looking at the history of the Laos Mission as being, if not covert institutional racism, certainly overt and blatant institutional ethnocentrism. The line between institutional racism and institutional ethnocentrism is fuzzy at best and in terms of the practical results is probably not meaningful anyway.
One of the best examples of the pervasive and toxic nature of missionary ethnocentrism is found in the history of the Phrae churches. Those churches were long known for their lack of capable indigenous leadership, which defect the missionaries attributed to the churches themselves. Historically, however, it is clear that actions taken by the mission itself frustrated the emergence of that leadership (see Khrischak Muang Nua, 109-113 and 157 and "The Poor Lost Sheep at Phrae and Revisited" HeRB 5). By whatever term we label it, missionary prejudices towards Thai Buddhist culture and society continues to be a central issue for the study of Thai Protestant church history and for the life of today's Protestant churches.
Four. The U.S. Army in Iraq, Aylwin-Foster argues has been too "offensively minded." At first blush, the charge seems almost absurd. What is any army supposed to do, after all, if not carry the battle to the enemy? On a classic battlefield, it is probably still true that "the best defense is a good offense," but Iraq today is even less of a classic battlefield than was Vietnam. Cultural sensitivity is as much a part of a winning strategy as is having sufficient ammunition and proper equipment. Knowing when not to shoot and relying on less rather than more violence are crucial to winning the people.
Precious few Protestant missionaries in Thailand even down to the present have learned the lesson that the American Army in Iraq also needs to learn, namely to be less offensively minded. The Laos and Siam Missions certainly engaged in aggressive evangelism that was often offensive to many of their auditors. Eventually, some (probably most) of the Presbyterians did learn that strident attacks on Buddhism are counter-productive, to say the least, but well into the 20th century some, at least, continued to practice a forceful, strident form of evangelism. In 1935, for example, the Rev. Kenneth Wells, a leading member of the united American Presbyterian Mission, complained that some Presbyterian missionaries continued to publish pamphlets and books that were derogatory towards Buddhism (see Kenneth E. Wells to Paul A. Eakin, 4 March 1935, Records of the American Presbyterian Mission, Payap University Archives).
As briefly reported in HeRB 11, the participants in the Wiang Pa Pao "Consultation on Evangelism in the Northern Thai Context" generally agreed that evangelism in the northern Thai context requires an approach very different from the one taken by earlier generations of missionaries. It needs to be more patient, less overtly aggressive, and based on establishing personal relationships. While some missions and groups continue to promote Billy Graham-style evangelistic crusades, these working evangelists felt that such crusades do little if any good. They seem to have learned the lesson that General Aylwin-Foster believes the U.S. Army has to learn, namely to approach matters in ways that will win over local sentiment rather than be offensive to it.
Five. The General willingly admits that U.S. soldiers have shown impressive levels of compassion to the Iraqi people, but he argues that U.S. Army overly violent strategy renders that compassion inoperative. Although many Thais have converted to Christianity because of missionary compassion, especially in the form of medical care, missionary ethnocentrism and their aggressive evangelism have rendered that compassion less effective than it might otherwise have been. As in the case of the U.S. Army, Protestant missionaries have a long history of caring humanitarian service in Thailand. They have historically played an important subsidiary role in Thai modernization, especially in earlier generations. We cannot say with certainty whether or not that compassion would have led to a greater rate of conversion if they had carried out a less abrasive, ethnocentric strategy; but it is clear in retrospect that their strategy forestalled any such possibility.
Six. Aylwin-Foster's observation that the U.S. Army has a "binary" understanding of war almost exactly parallels what I have called missionary "dualism" in Khrischak Muang Nua and other pieces that I have written. In both cases, these American institutions have been unable to compromise at times when compromise and a less abrasive approach might have better served their purposes. Both have historically shown an inability to adapt to changing circumstances because they see things only in terms of dualistic absolutes: right versus wrong, true verses false, and good versus evil. The U.S. Army, according to the General, seems unable to comprehend a situation where war and not-war ("peace" is a term we can hardly apply to Iraq today) intermingle and coexist. The Siam and Laos Missions, similarly, generally could not accept their "neighbors of other faiths" as anything other than adversaries. They taught their converts to think of people of other faiths as khon nawk (literally, "outsiders" - "gentiles") and to erect religious, social, and cultural boundaries between themselves and their neighbors. Christians thus frequently formed separate communities or gathered themselves into Christian quarters on the principle that it is not "appropriate" for Christians to live with outsiders (see HeRB 4, "Religion and Community Formation in Northern Thailand: The Case of Christianity in Nan Province").
One of the most compelling descriptions of the "dark side" of Western dualism is found in Edward W. Said's classic work, Orientalism (1978. London: Penguin Books, 1995), reviewed in HeRB 7. Said argues that Europe has used dualistic thinking virtually since ancient times to formulate a sophisticated, baseless prejudice against Arabs. It has used that prejudice to justify the historical subjugation of western Asia and to maintain domination of Arab peoples down to the present. Although Aylwin-Foster makes no mention of Said, his description of American military dualism and, more broadly, its reliance primarily on war-making force and only secondarily on peace-making alternatives would come as no surprise to Said.
Some years ago I was asked why I did not do some comparative studies of Presbyterian mission fields in other countries with the two Presbyterian missions in Siam. My response then was that there is so much to do in the study of Thai church history that it leaves little time for such studies, which would involve huge amounts of primary research in any event. On further reflection, there is another reason. Broadly speaking, Presbyterian missionaries throughout the world and throughout the 19th century showed a great deal of uniformity in its three-pronged approach: evangelism, medicine, and education. Presbyterian missions in historical Siam, furthermore, replicated patterns long established in the United States for reaching the American Indians, first, and then later Catholics, Mormons, Jews, and most especially the "untamed" Western and Southern frontiers (see "This Heathen People," chapter six).
While comparative studies between Presbyterian missions have their uses and certainly no two missions were carbon copies of each other, more far-ranging comparative studies such as we've explored briefly here seem to me to be more useful. The 21st century American military is not a religious institution. It's mission and goals in Iraq are very different from those of Protestant missions. It's organization, funding, traditions, training methods, leadership styles, and virtually every other aspect of its being differs radically from 19th century Presbyterian missions such as the Laos Mission. Yet, across all of these differences we still find fascinatingly unexpected parallels in underlying philosophy and in the strategies employed by each.
Those parallels reinforce the perception that the Presbyterian missionaries in Siam, as well American missionaries in Thailand more generally, have pursued their ministries along lines largely mandated by their cultural background. The gospel they preached was not a simple, uncomplicated Christian one. It was, rather, an American expression of the gospel. In my personal experience, the missionaries of other nations in Thailand have done precisely the same thing in their presentation of the Christian message. They have preached and taught an Australian, a German, or a Korean version of the gospel.
The parallel case of the U.S. Army in Iraq is that it also servers to shed further light on the very human fact that Presbyterian strengths in old Siam were also weaknesses. Those parallels help us to identify still more clearly the particular combinations of strengths and weaknesses in Siam's two Presbyterian missions. General Aylwin-Foster's analysis, for example, lays bear the importance of the underlying passionate commitment of the American soldier in Iraq and how that passion cuts both ways as both a virtue and a defect. Most of the old-time Presbyterian missionaries clearly felt passionately about their religious cause. A fresh reading of the missionary archive for Thailand with an eye to its emotional content would almost certainly reveal hitherto unappreciated facets of the missionary enterprise. It would especially find, I am sure, that missionary passion also created as many (or more) problems as it solved.
The American military experience in Iraq is important to the study of missionary and church history in Thailand for another reason. It points to the fact that earlier generations of Presbyterian missionaries believed that they were on a holy crusade. From time to time right into the 20th century they employed the language of war to describe their mission. They had an enemy, Satan, and they were at war with Satan's agents in Siam (see Khrischak Muang Nua, Chapter Three, pages 39-42). While not every missionary expressed herself or himself in such ways, this sense of being at war does potentilly help us understanding many facets of missionary work. It may be one element, for example, in the conscious use of mission stations as Christian centers in a heathen land (see the short note, "Archipelagic Isolation," in HeRB 6).
In any event, comparative studies of other American institutions—their beliefs and strategies—and the American missions in Siam/Thailand will help us to see more clearly and fully the role the missionaries played in the formation of the Thai church. Though now dated, the bibliography in "This Heathen People" points to the literature that describes the common threads that run through American history, ones that "connect" the Laos and Siam Missions and the U.S. Army as parts of a far greater story. Comparative studies of American institutions, such as the U.S. Army in Iraq, offer one good way to explore those common threads and their importance for Thai church history. |
