[Buddha-l] Religious Persecution [was: NYTimes.com: Let Us PrayforWealth]

[Dan Lusthaus]

Franz and gang,

> Still, I'm must not comfortable with this sort of politics.

Is the mangled syntax a sign of your ambivlence?

> I
> can't get away from some kind of gut level disgust with anti-religious
> policies. [...] I just can't support preventing them
> from other forms of their religious practice, which as I understand it,
> did happen to the Japanese Christians. (Note that I'm *not* speaking of
> foreign Christians in Japan, just native Japanese who had converted or
> been born into Christian families. Like the Muranos, I recall they hung
> around for centuries.)

This may get a bit complicated, but your initial sentiment is a good one.
The problem is the issue is more complex than that, and email (and other
demands on my time) prevent a full airing. The problem for the Japanese of
that time (and history should always be viewed in its own historical context
as much as possible, at least initially, before me revert to moralistic
judgementalism) is the question of loyalties. Catholics, especially at that
time (and arguably until the Vatican tried to ban that horrid movie
Cleopatra in the early '60s for showing a bit of Liz's flank), paid
allegiance to Rome and the Pope. We needn't recite how Christianity spread
through Europe -- Charlesmagne, Ferdinand and Isabella, etc. -- or the
various religious wars and struggles for *political* autonomy from Rome
(Reformation, the Dutch battles mentioned recently, the War of the Roses,
Hundred Years War, ad infinitum), to remind ourselves of the nature of the
Vatican in those days.

What that means is that the neat partitioning of "private" religious
practice from public citizenship and loyalty is something Christians of
various stripes were fleeing Europe until recent times to establish here in
the evil USA. It was not in any way an obvious fact in the old days -- and
may not have been a fact at all.

Japanese converts had not just converted to a "religion" (the concept itself
being a Western construct that, in Japan, the Catholic missionaries of the
time were busy trying to invent a word for -- none existed in any East Asian
language), they had sworn allegiance to a foreign despot, whose intentions
toward Japan had revealed itself in military, seditious expressions.

Another dimension (I said this gets complicated), is that the Japanese
understood better than we moderns that religion and fidelity to the State
were one and the same. Buddhism won over support in China, in part, by
proposing that Buddha and Buddhism were protectors of the State; this aspect
became more prominent in its acceptance in Korea, and even moreso in Japan.
So religion and national integrity are not separable issues -- or at least
they weren't until the Founding Fathers drafted the First Amendment to the
evil USA's Constitution.

It was in this same period in Japan that the Buddhist monastic armies that I
mentioned awhile back were also confronted and wiped out -- militarily -- by
some of the same cast of characters as purged Christianity from Japan. They
didn't expurgate Buddhism per se from Japan, but demilitarized it, and
eliminated some of its power centers (monasteries).

Today we tend to think of religion as portable and decentered. In those days
it was very much place and political-power centered. So the concept of a
privately practicing Christian would have been a category error -- very
likely for the Christian converts as well.

Clearer?

Dan