山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:
Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast
Asia

Masao IMAMURA
Introduction
While studies of migration tend to focus on the migration of humans, in this paper I draw attention
to the migration of religion. Although spatial mobility of religion has been a neglected topic, humans
have moved through religious networks throughout history. A religious network, on the one hand, canbe very resourceful for migrants. People might rely on assistance provided by the members of the same
faith: a variety of “goods and services” including transportation, shelter, food, and work. On the other
hand, religion might find migrants to be resourceful as mobile envoys, ambassadors, or missionaries.
From the perspective of an evangelist, migrants might be an especially useful group precisely because
they are mobile; they know and visit multiple places. Given this relationship, it is not surprising that
religion facilitates the migration of people and that migrants, in turn, facilitate the migration of religion.
It goes without saying that not all religions are equally mobile, however. Some religions are
spatially more rooted, fixed, and local; others are more mobile, migratory, and trans-local. A goodcontemporary example of the former might be Judaism, which is today firmly anchored in Israel. The
primary examples of the latter are the so-called “world religions”; they are the religions that can befound around the globe. Today, it is not surprising to find a Muslim woman in Tokyo or a Buddhist
temple in California. Among all the world religions, Christianity is by far the most spatially spread in
the world. This exceptional mobility of Christianity is the focus of this paper.
While it is indisputable that Christianity exhibits extraordinary mobility, it is not necessarily clear
what explains this trans-localism. How it is that Christianity in particular has been able to reach remotecorners of the world? This unique quality of Christianity was by no means foreseen until the dawn of
the modern era. During the medieval period, Islam, not Christianity, was surely the most globalized of
all religions. Muslim communities were spread from the Malay archipelago in the east to West Africa in
the west. During the past five centuries, however, Christianity has come to spread its reaches around theglobe, surpassing Islam. During this period, as Gananath Obeyesekere remarked, “one universal religion,
Christianity, began to take root in virtually every part of the world, and in this sense it became the first‘world religion,’ and perhaps remains the only one” (Obeyesekere 2003, 64).
How Christianity, especially Protestantism, has spread widely around the globe can be observed－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

clearly in Southeast Asia, a region of multiple religions. While Protestants make a small minority among
Southeast Asians, they are extraordinarily spread across the region. Christianity has been endorsed byvarious minority peoples—especially tribal peoples, both in maritime and mainland Southeast Asia.
Take, for example, the Kachin people of Myanmar. They were all animists 150 years ago. Today, thevast majority of them are Christian. Furthermore, they are remarkably enthusiastic Christians. How
did Christianity get to this remote corner of northern Myanmar? In this paper, I trace back the global
journeys of Protestantism from the Kachin region of Myanmar to Europe. In doing so, I highlight inparticular the Protestant view of language, which endorses vernaculars.
Migration of Protestantism: From Europe to North America
It is well known that a central component of the “protest” lodged against the papacy in sixteenth-century Europe was a demand for a right to read the scripture independently of clerical authority. Basedon the doctrine of sola scriptura, which places authority in the scripture only, Protestants contended thatthe Bible be made accessible not just to the elites but to every person. They began to make the scripture
available in various local vernaculars, rendering it unnecessary to learn Latin to understand the scripture.
The most well-known of the translations is the ground-breaking attempt by Martin Luther, who, in
1522, published a German translation of the New Testament1. The profound and extensive impacts ofthis translation have been well acknowledged by historians; the widespread and sustained circulationof Luther’s translation greatly contributed to the standardizations of the German language (Dickens andFriedrichs 1976)2.
With this translation turn made by Protestants, the Bible came to be accessible in an everincreasing number of vernacular languages. Printing became a defining work of Protestant evangelists.
Once the major European vernaculars were covered, Protestants found new mission frontiers in North
America.
In North America, Bible translators encountered a new challenge, however. As they encounterednumerous tribal—that is, alliterate—peoples, they leaned about numerous unfamiliar languages which
had never been written down. In order to translate the Bible into these languages, they first had todevise writing, systems or orthographies.
Already in the early half of the seventeenth century, Protestant evangelists in New England began
creating orthographies for some of the indigenous languages spoken in the region. In 1655, an “Indian
1

According to the appendix presented in Sanneh 2009, the complete Bible translations were made available in French(1530), English (1535), and Spanish (1553). Against this trend of Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church declared theLatin Bible to be the only authentic and official Bible at the Council of Trent in 1546. At the Second Vatican Council(1962-1965), the Catholic Church granted permissions to conduct most of the Mass in vernacular languages.
2 Language standardization would later contribute to the emergence of ethno-national identities.

－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

College,” equipped with a press, was established as part of Harvard College in Massachusetts. In 1663,
an English Puritan clergyman and pastor named John Eliot (c. 1604-1690) translated the Bible into the
Massachusetts language (also often called the Wampanoag language). The Massachusetts-Wampanoag
Bible, printed at the Harvard Indian College, was indeed the first scripture to be printed in the “NewWorld.” Upon the printing of the translation, an influential Puritan minister named Cotton Mather (16631728) rejoiced: “Behold, ye Americans, the greatest honor that ever you were partakers of. The Bible
was printed here at our Cambridge, and is the only Bible that ever was printed in all America” (Brumberg
1980, 31). Between 1655 and 1672, the Harvard Indian College produced books and pamphlets, alongwith primers, catechisms, grammars, and tracts in the Massachusetts-Wampanoag language.3 Eliot cameto be known as the “Apostle to the Indians” (Cogley 1999; Salisbury 1974).
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the missionaries in tribal frontiers in North America
were widely revered. David Brainerd (1718-1747), who worked among Native Americans of New
Jersey and Delaware, was another legendary missionary. Brainerd, who wrote “All my desire was theconversion of the heathen,” would be immortalized through a biography written in 1749 by Jonathan
Edwards, arguably the greatest theological thinker of early America.4 According to Brumberg’s studyof the 19th-century American evangelical culture, figures like Eliot and Brainerd were “part of theChristian lore passed from parents to children” by the end of the eighteenth century (Brumberg 1980,
25).
This lore from the American frontier reverberated back across the Atlantic, inspiring long-distancemissions to “heathen” frontiers. Indeed, Jonathan Edwards commanded a large audience in Englandand Scotland (Phillips 1969, 13). Among the inspired across the Atlantic was William Carey, who later
became the first English missionary to India. Many missionaries dispatched to Asia in the 19th century
drew inspiration from the pioneer evangelists in North America. Given the source of inspiration, it is not
surprising that most Christian missionaries to Asia were Americans.
Beyond the Atlantic—to the Asia-Pacific
From the end of the eighteenth century on, we see the emergence of global evangelism;
missionaries were dispatched to a variety of places from both sides of the Atlantic. An Enquiry into
the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, written in 1792 by
3 The funding came from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America.
On this see Cogley 1999. The Wampanoag lost 40 percent of the population in the war against the English colonialists,
King Philip’s War (1675-1676); most of the male survivors were sold into slavery in the West Indies; many women andchildren were enslaved in New England. On this see Lepore 1998).
4 Jonathan Edwards published Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd in 1749. Jonathan Edwards himself
was a missionary to the Housatonic Native Americans in his later years before he was elected president of the college of
New Jersey (later Princeton University).

－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

Carey, was effectively the manifesto for global frontier evangelism. This publication quickly led to theformation of the Baptist Missionary Society in the same year, whose original name was “the ParticularBaptist Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Heathen.” Taking action himself quickly,
Carey moved to Kolkata in the following year (1793). Eventually he would become a legendary
missionary, “the father of modern missions.” For our present purpose here, it is particularly important tonote that Carey was a tireless translator and proved responsible for the Bible translations into Bengali,
Oriya, Assamese, Arabic, Marathi, Hindi, and Sanskrit.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Asia emerged as a particularly appealing frontier to Christian
missionaries. In 1809, Claudius Buchanan, the Scottish chaplain attached to the British East India
Company, published the sermon “The Star in the East.” Buchanan declared that “the time is come fordisseminating the knowledge of Christianity in the heathen world,” and he specifically identified asa priority “the translation of the Bible into almost all the languages of Asia” (Buchanan 1811, 26). In
1806, an interdenominational letter was circulated among the American churches, calling for support for
William Carey’s Bible translation projects (Brumberg 1980, 32).5 Adoniram and Ann Judson became thefirst missionaries from the United States to be sent from an organization dedicated to foreign mission. In
1813, they arrived in Myanmar, a country not yet ruled by a European power.
William Carey’s action led to the formation of numerous missionary organizations both in Britain
and in the United States. The London Missionary Society was established in 1775 by Anglicans
and Nonconformists. In 1799, the Church of England followed with the establishment of the Church
Missionary Society for Africa and the East. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions (ABCFM) was established in 1810.6
The ABCFM, supported by the Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches, was remarkable in thatit explicitly sought not only to convert “heathens” but also to make missionaries among them. In 1816,
the ABCFM opened a seminary in Connecticut “for the purpose of educating youths of Heathen nations,with a view to their being useful in their respective countries” (Foreman 1929, 242). This was the firstmajor institutional effort to train “heathens” as future missionaries—not as passive converts but active
evangelists.
The project to produce native missionaries was inspired in particular by a native Hawaiian named
Henry Opukahaia (circa 1792–1818), one of the first Hawaiians to convert to Christianity. Opukahaia
himself worked to create an orthography for the Hawaiian language, and even translated parts of the
Bible himself. When, shortly after his death, his memoir was published, it became the best-known title
5

The circulation of this request was facilitated by the orthodox Calvanist journal The Panoplist and by The Connecticut
Evangelical Magazine.
6 On the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the definitive study remains Phillips 1969.

－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

among the rapidly growing literature about “converted heathens.” (Brumberg 1980, 33–36). Personallyinspired by Opukahaia was above-mentioned Adoniram Judson, who met the Hawaiian at the Andoverseminary in Massachusetts (Brumberg 1980, 33–36).
Myanmar as an Evangelical Frontier
Myanmar turned out to be among the first real testing grounds for vernacular evangelism
launched by Protestants. Adoniram and Ann Judson devoted themselves to learning the Burmese
language as soon as they arrived there in 1813. In 1815, the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions
appointed the printer George H. Hough and his wife to bring a press machine to Myanmar.7 The
missionary and the printer signed an agreement together in 1816 as folloes:We agree … that our sole objet on earth is to introduce the religion of Jesus Christ into the Empireof Burmah; and that the means by which we hope to affect this are translating, printing, anddistributing the Holy Scriptures; preaching the Gospel; circulating religious tracts, an promoting the
instruction of native children (Brumberg 1980, 65).
As this agreement clearly shows, the evangelical work on the ground consisted first and foremost oftranslation, printing, and distribution of the Bible.
The pace with which the Protestant missionaries learned the local languages is staggering. By
1817—that is, within four years of their arrival in Myanmar—the Judsons had written the Grammatical
Notices of the Burman Language, and produced 3,000 copies of catechism in Burmese. In the same
year, they published the first portion of the Bible translation: 500 copies of the Gospel of Matthew(Brumberg 1980, 253). In fact this was the first time that the Burmese language was ever printed with apress machine. The printing work by the Baptist missionaries was not limited to Burmese; they printed
in a number of languages that they encountered in lower Myanmar and considered print-worthy. Since
they worked along the Andaman coast, these included not only Mon and Karen but also Thai. The firstprinting of the Thai languge by press was done in took place in Moulmein in 1819 (Limapichart 2008,27).8
Of all the languages that the Protestant missionaries printed in Myanmar during the earlynineteenth century, their work on Sgaw Karen made especially transformative impacts amongits speakers. When Protestant missionaries arrived in Myanmar, the Karen tribal people showed
exceptionally enthusiastic responses, while the lowland Buddhists—the Burmans and the Mons—showed
little interest. Judson, who made persistent efforts among the Burmese people, said that converting one
7

It goes without saying that these activities required very substantive financial support. For Judson, two thousand dollars
was appropriated to set up the press and another thousand for printing. (Brumberg 1980, 65)
8 Ann Hasseltine Judson worked on Siamese and Sarah Hall on Mon, which was then called “Talain” (Brumberg 1980, 253).

－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

hundred Karens was easier than converting two Burmans (Maung Shwe Wa 1963, 133). The varied
responses led the missionaries to shift the focus from lowland Buddhists to tribal peoples. The American
missionaries were delighted to hear about the Karen prophetic myth that their “white brother” would one
day bring back their “lost book.” The missionaries, in turn, considered the Karens to be a lost tribe from
Israel.9
The American missionaries devised an orthography for the Sgaw Karen language and produced
catechisms and Bible translations. It is doubtful that the content of the scripture immediately appealed
to the Karen peoples. Regardless, Protestant missions certainly gained a distinguished status among thetribal people because of their unique capability of printing. The technology of press printing appeared,
to the uninitiated, magical. It was not uncommon that books themselves became objects of worshipwhen print materials of any kind were extremely rare (Womack 2005). Such an effect was illustrated,among others, by Shawy Bau, a Karen Baptist pastor in Pathein (Bassein) District, who recollected his
own initial contact with printed tracts as follows:
The first we heard about the new religion was, that Shway Weing had begun to worship God. Then
we heard that he had a little book that told about God and the way to worship him; and straightway
we had so strong a desire to see the book, that we could hardly stay at home; and we were talking
about it, and wishing to see it, all the time. By and by we got a book and one looked at it, andanother looked at it, and said it was very nice, and then we looked at it again, one after another,and then we held it up between our hands, and worshipped it, and said to the book, ‘O Lord! O
Lord!’ for we thought God was in the book (Carpenter 1883, 30).10
Such confusion between God and the book troubled Protestant missionaries. The fetishism of the bookwould wane over time, however, as printing materials became more readily available. In any case,American Baptist missionaries gained unique prestige because of their capability to produce a large
amount of materials in various languages; they effectively enjoyed a monopoly on printing technology
in Myanmar during the early nineteenth century. The Baptist churches continued to grow in mountainareas, including the Kachin region of northern Myanmar.
News from Frontier: Back Home in the United States
The missions to “heathen” frontiers became a rallying cause and a common purpose among
Protestants, especially in the United States. In 1813, Baptist delegates from eleven different states in the9This theory was first proposed by Francis Mason (1799-1874) in 1833. Mason was an English-born missionary from
Massachusetts. He arrived in Myanmar in 1830. For a historical study of the “ten lost tribes of Israel” with a global scope,
see Benite (2009).
10 Womack (2005) presents other similar incidents in his dissertation on Karen history. Comparable episodes are found in
Tapp’s study of Hmong and Diamond’s study of Miao (N. Diamond 1996; Tapp 1989).

－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

country met in Philadelphia in order to form an organization dedicated to foreign missions. This was
the first time that Baptists from various states gathered and met in person (Merriam 1900, 13). Prior to
the formation of the foreign missions, the Baptists were “scattered . . . and also divided. The Baptist
churches of different sections of the country had little communication with each other” (Merriam 1900,
6).
News from the global mission frontiers transformed not only mission frontiers, but also the mission
home. This can be observed particularly well in the United States, which sent out the overwhelming
majority of international missionaries in the 19th century. The letters from the Judsons delighted theMassachusetts Baptists, who wrote: “the PRESS, that powerful engine employed by Providence in the
propagation of the truth, has been put in motion in this land of darkness. We confidently hope that thesefirst fruits of the mission … will be succeeded by a rich harvest of immortal soul” (Brumberg 1980,
66). Dramatic events from frontiers, such as the imprisonment of Adniram Judson, especially became
most sensational, and best-selling news. While Judson was imprisoned in 1825, the American Baptist
Magazine, originally established in 1803 by the Massachusetts Baptists Missionary Society, sold sowell that it became a monthly publication (Brumberg 1980, 257).11 The regular reports from Myanmar
to update the plight of the American missionary captured in the land of an oriental despot caught theimagination of countless readers.12 Stories from frontier missions contributed greatly to the formation ofmass readership in the United States of America.13
The global missions also produced unlikely connections between non- Europeans. The abovementioned Foreign Mission School in Connecticut, which opened in 1816, included not only Native
Americans (from the continental USA and the Hawaii) but also a variety of Asians. When the school
began, “there were twelve students; seven Hawaiians, one Hindu, one Bengalese, an Indian and two
Anglo-Americans. The school had increased its number of pupils the second year to twenty-four; four
Cherokee, two Choctaw, one Abenaki, two Chinese, two Malays, a Bengalese, one Hindu, six Hawaiians,
and two Marquesans as well as three Americans” (Foreman 1929, 242). Such a mixture of students fromvarious places across the Pacific reflects the uniquely encompassing scope of the Protestant evangelisms.
The remarkably inclusive mission school in Connecticut, however, was disbanded in 1827 becauseof two interracial marriages, involving two Cherokee male students and two white female students.
(Foreman 1929, 258). It appears that the evangelical vision of the united human race was not able

11 At the time of the foundation, it was called “The Massachusetts Baptist Missionary Magazine.” The name changed to “TheAmerican Baptist Magazine” in 1817.
12 By the mid-1830s, Christian denominational newspapers to disseminate news became “a distinguishing characteristicof the evangelical community, North and South, and on the frontier” (Brumberg 1980, 88). The 19th century westward
expansion of the United States was taking place as these stories were arriving from mission frontiers around the world.
13 Judson was imprisoned for seventeen months during the war between Britain and Myanmar.

－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

to overcome the contradictory racial cosmology of the era.14 Indeed, evangelical work among Native
Americans was halted, when President Andrew Jackson issued the Indian Removal Act in 1830 despite
the opposition of many missionaries. Some of the American missionaries who went to Myanmar in theearly nineteenth century first worked among Native Americans before embarking on a mission in Asia.
For example, one of the first single female missionaries to Myanmar, Eleanor Macomber, worked among
the Ojibway in Michigan for five years before leaving for Myanmar in 1835 (Eddy 1859, 133–162).15
Nonetheless, by the early nineteenth century Protestant missionaries were creating active linkages
between “converted heathens” from various corners of the world. As William Womack has pointed out,
“there was a clear association in the minds of the Baptist missionaries between Karens [of Myanmar]and Native Americans as indigenous peoples” (Womack 2005, 99). These linkages among the newconverts to Protestantism continued to grow around the world. Central to this global endeavor was thework of translation and printing. Protestant missionaries have been keenly aware of—if not obsessed
with—written words. When, later in his life, Judson gave an address at the American and Foreign Bible
Society, he reiterated that for “all missionary operations to be permanently successful [they] must be
based on the written word” (Brumberg 1980, 65).
Comparison with Catholicism and Islam
In understanding the extraordinary mobility of Protestantism, enabled by its unique enthusiasm
about for it is helpful to draw comparisons with Catholicism and Islam. We can observe the relative
immobility of Catholicism and Islam in the modern era by briefly looking at their activities in Southeast
Asia.
Paul Ambroise Bigandet (1813-1894), a prominent Catholic scholar and the author of The Lifeor Legend of Gaudama, the Buddha of the Burmese (1866), described the religious landscape of precolonial Myanmar as follows:T he Natives believe that religion being essentially a part and portion of nationality, every
individual has a right to follow without hindrance, or opposition that region of the nation hebelongs to. Hence the Mussulmen, the Hindoos and the Christians being looked upon as foreigners,
are left at liberty to practice in the way they like, the observances of their respective creeds.
They are not expected to abandon them for the Budhist observances, because the nationality they
belong to, ignored Budhism. … [A Christian is] tolerably secure, provided he limits the efforts of
14 I should note that I am not able to find details of this case. I thank Will Womack for sharing his draft paper.
15 When, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act, despite the opposition of many missionaries,
evangelism to Native Americans became extremely difficult. It is possible that many evangelists changed the mission fields
from North America to overseas. A particularly detailed study of missionary responses to Indian Removal can be found in
MacLoughlin 1984.

－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

his zeal to the preaching of the Christian religion, to the members of his congregations (Bigandet
1887/1996, 43).
The court of Myanmar did not find the Catholic communities to be threatening, because their activities
were contained within their own small and isolated communities.16 The Catholics themselves did notseek to convert non-Christians. A variety of religious communities existed as discrete, separate entities.
According to Bigandet, the Barnabite Fathers, the Catholic order in charge of Myanmar during the precolonial period “never troubled themselves about the spread of Christianity among the heathen” (Bigandet
1887/1996, 27).
Remarkable here in Bigandet’s account of the Portuguese Catholic community in Myanmar istheir lack of interest in learning the local language: “They would not even condescend to learn thelanguage of the natives. They spoke Portuguese, preached in that language, and made it the distinctive
characteristic of Christians” (Bigandet 1996, 27). The work for the Barnabite Fathers was to serve theexisting Portuguese-speaking populations; translating the Bible into a local language was not considered
to be their work.17 Here we observe a crucial difference between Catholicism and Protestantism innineteenth century Myanmar.
A brief observation of Islam might also serve us in understanding how different Protestant andMuslim views of language are. From its beginning, Islam maintained the view that the form and content
of the scripture are inseparable; Muslims have been generally very reluctant to translate the Quran.
The words in the Quran are, for Muslims, directly revealed from God to Muhammad the Prophet andtherefore not to be altered by mere mortals. The Quran, in Arabic, was understood to unify humans, whowere divided by too many different languages, cultures, and races. Writing in 1875, the pan-Africanist
Edward Blyden proudly pointed to the unifying force of Quranic Arabic: “Among Mohammedans,
written or printed translations of the Koran are discouraged. The Chinese, Hindoos, Persians, Turks,
Mandingoes, Foulahs, etc., who have embraced Islam, speak in their ‘own tongues’ wherein they wereborn but read the Koran in Arabic (Blyden 1967, 6–7).
The idea that Quranic Arabic is the divine language, superior to all other languages, is still widely
circulating. Anthropologist Lorraine Aragon presents an episode from her fieldwork in Sulawasi,
Indonesia in which children at a local school are told that “Islam was superior to Christianity because
Muslims hold their services in ‘God’s language’ … while Christians use only human language” (Aragon

16 See Charney 2006, 150.
17 This point is particularly well illustrated by the fact that despite the long and influential presence of the Jesuits in
China from the sixteenth century, it was Protestant missionaries who began the translation and printing of the Bible in
the early nineteenth century. On the publication and circulation of the Chinese language Bible in the nineteenth century,
see DeBernardi 2011. Sanneh, however, stresses the continuity between Catholicism and Protestantism in terms of Bible
translations (Sanneh 1989).

－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

2000, 240). Given this view on the supremacy of the Quranic Arabic, it makes sense that whilecalligraphy has been enthusiastically practiced, modern printing has not been keenly received in theIslamic world. While Protestants have avidly established publishers one after another, “print technology
was relatively slow to be received among their Muslim neighbors (Feener 2011, 45).
The view quoted in Aragon’s study makes a sharp contrast with a quote from a Christian
missionary in Mary Steedly’s study from the same country. This missionary, trying to outdo his Muslim
competitors, expresses confidence in the Christian approaches to local languages: “The stronger wemake the people’s language, the smaller is the chance for Islam” (Steedly 1996, 457). According to thismissionary, the unifying force that Edward Blyden found in Quaranic Arabic slows down the spread oflslam; he is confident that vernacularism allows Christianity to expand.
The argument here does not neglect the historical fact that many important Islamic texts wereindeed translated from Arabic to various Southeast Asian vernaculars such as Javanese, Malay, andTamil between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and that these created a sort of Islamic multilingual “cosmopolitan” world, as described richly in Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and
the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia by Ronit Ricci (Ricci 2011). While it is certainly
true that there is a rich history of Muslim vernacular literature, the point remains that when it
comes to translating the scripture, Muslims have been far more reluctant and slower than Protestant
Christians. Protestants have been uniquely driven to translate the Bible into vernaculars because they
have theological reasons for scriptural translation. While Islam is quite inseparable from the Arabic
language and culture, Protestantism has sought to separate the content of the scripture from its particularlanguages that merely convey the “message.”18
Conclusion
The uniquely Protestant doctrine of languages has contributed greatly to the mobility of thereligion. This doctrine holds that there is no particular language that provides privileged access to higher(more divine) knowledge and that all human languages are essentially equal and equally translatable.
This doctrine sets Protestant christianity apart from other world religions. Ever since Martin Luthertranslated the Bible to German in the early 16th century, this view of language has been central in
the theory and practice of Protestantism. Previously, religious teachings were typically conveyed
through a particular “Truth language”—be it Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, Classical Chinese, or Classic Arabic.
With the translation turn, Protestantism has become available in virtually every language through thetireless, obsessive work of translation. Translation and printing have thus made Christianity radically18

See discussion in Sanneh 1989, 266.

－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

mobile.
In ending this analysis of religious migration facilitated by translation, I go back to the example
of a Protestant community that was been formed as a result of global evangelism: the Kachin people ofnorthern Myanmar. Since Baptist missionaries arrived in the Kachin region in the late 19th century, theoverwhelming majority of this highland people have converted to Christianity. As they have migrated in
the past hundred years, the Kachin have built countless churches on their own. They conduct the prayer
service in the own vernacular, across their homeland and beyond. For example, in Yangon, the largest
city in Myanmar, they have formed a tight community consisting of a few thousand people around thechurch in the Sanchaung district. While this is a case of “domestic” migrants, the Kachin have built
their own churches, abroad as well. In Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tokyo, and elsewhere, theycongregate in their church every Sunday. This minority people from a mountain region of northern
Myanmar have built an extensive network across international boundaries. The network has been
instrumental in the facilitation of their long-distance migration.
The case of the Kachin illustrates how Christianity has travelled to “virtually every part of theworld.” This unique religious migration has been achieved in the late modern era—in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries—primarily through Protestant evangelism, which exhibits radically decentralized—
indeed anarchic—spatial patterns. While Catholicism was transplanted primarily through governmentsanctioned agents in top-down manners, Protestantism has been disseminated through a series ofvoluntarily organized missions, which acted independently of state authorities (Van der Veer 1996). In
spite of—or probably because of—its decentralized and unmanaged nature, Christianity continues to thisday to be exceptionally vibrant, as the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism in the Global South testifies.
References
Aragon, Lorraine V. 2000. Fields of the Lord Animism, Christian Minorities, and State Development inIndonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor. 2009. The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University
Press.
Bigandet, Paul Ambroise. 1996. An Outline of the History of the Catholic Burmese Mission from the Year
1720 to 1887. Bangkok: White Orchid Press.
Blyden, Edward Wilmot. 1967. Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1980. Mission for Life: The Story of the Family of Adoniram Judson, the Dramatic
Events of the First American Foreign Mission, and the Course of Evangelical Religion in the
Nineteenth Century. New York: Free Press.
－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

Carpenter, C. H. 1883. Self-Support, Illustrated in the History of the Bassein Karen Mission from 1840 to1880. Boston: Rand, Avery, and Co.
Charney, Michael W. 2006. Powerful Learning : Buddhist Literati and the Throne in Burma’s Last
Dynasty, 1752-1885. Ann Arbor: Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University ofMichigan.
Cogley, Richard W. 1999. John Eliot’s Mission to the Indians before King Philip’s War. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1991. Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1: Christianity,
Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa. University of Chicago Press Chicago.
Diamond, Norma. 1996. “Christianity and the Hua Miao: Writing and Power.” In Christianity in China:
From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, 138–58. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Dickens, Arthur Geoffrey, and Christopher R. Friedrichs. 1976. “The German Nation and Martin Luther.”
Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 12 (2):140–41.
Eddy, Daniel Clarke. 1859. The Three Mrs. Judsons, and Other Daughters of the Cross. Boston:Wentworth, Hewes & Company.
Foreman, Carolyn Thomas. 1929. “The Foreign Mission School at Cornwall, Connecticut.” Chronicles of
Oklahoma 7 (3):242–59.
Lepore, Jill. 1998. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York:
Knopf.
Limapichart, Thanapol. 2008. “The Prescription of Good Books: The Formation of the Discourse andCultural Authority of Literature in Modern Thailand (1860s-1950s).” Thesis (Ph.D.), Madison:
University of Wisconsin-Madison.
MacLoughlin, William Gerald. 1984. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Martin, David. 1990. Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Protestantism in Latin America. Oxford, UK;
Cambridge, Mass.: B. Blackwell.
Merriam, Edmund Franklin. 1900. A History of American Baptist Missions. Philadelphia: American
Baptist Publication Society.
Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2003. “Buddhism.” In Global Religions: An Introduction, edited by Mark
Juergensmeyer, 63–77. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Phillips, Clifton Jackson. 1969. Protestant America and the Pagan World: The First Half Century of theAmerican Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 1810-1860. Cambridge, Mass.: East Asian
Research Center, Harvard University, distributed by Harvard University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society.
－222 －

山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）201－214

Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.
Salisbury, Neal. 1974. “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot.” The
William and Mary Quarterly 31 (1):27–54.
Sanneh, Lamin O. 1989. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books.
Steedly, Mary Margaret. 1996. “The Importance of Proper Names: Language and ‘National’ Identity inColonial Karoland.” American Ethnologist 23 (3):447–75.
Tapp, Nicholas. 1989. “The Impact of Missionary Christianity upon Marginalized Ethnic Minorities: The
Case of the Hmong.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 20 (1):70–95.
Womack, William Burgess. 2005. “Literate networks and the production of Sgaw and Pwo Karen writing
in Burma, c.1830-1930.” Thesis (Ph.D.), London: University of London.

－222 －

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast Asia――IMAMURA

On the Mobility of Religious Communities:
Migration and Translation of Protestant Christianity—Seen from Southeast
Asia

Masao IMAMURA
移動や関する研究は，ヒトを対象にしたものが主だが，本研究では宗教の移動を取り上げる。
ヒトの移住と宗教の移動は有史以来密接な関係にあり，現在でもそれは変わらない。今日でも多くの人が，様々な情報やサービスの提供主として宗教組織やネットワークを使っている。また宗教組織にとっても，移動力が高く複数の地域に通じている人々は有益であり，布教への貢献も期待できる。しかし，当然のことながらすべての宗教が同様の移動力を持ち備えているわけではない。
特定の場所に根ざし，ローカルな現象にとどまる宗教もあれば，長距離移動を得意とするいわゆる「世界宗教」もある。本論文では世界宗教，中でもプロテスタンティズムに焦点をあて，その際立った移動力を分析する。プロテスタンティズムは，国家や地域に関わりなく文字通り世界の至る所に拡散するようになった類まれな宗教である。その拡散のパターンは，世界宗教が入り混じる東南アジアにおいてよく確認できる。東南アジアにおいてプロテスタンティズムは，山地民など辺境の少数民族の間に受け入れられており，他宗教と異なる拡散のパターンを示している。
この際立った移動力を説明するには，現地社会との関係に欠かせない，現地語の使用に注目する必要がある。プロテスタンティズムは例外的に現地語・俗語の使用に神学的根拠を与える宗教であり，世界各地で数多くの正書法も考案してきた。東南アジアの少数民族も例外ではない。本論
文では，プロテスタンティズムによる聖典翻訳および正書法考案の世界的展開を分析し，プロテ
スタンティズムの移動を歴史的プロセスとして明らかにする。

－222 －