Was the Shimabara Rebellion a peasant uprising or a Christian holy war? This month’s Living Past revisits a brutal reckoning that still echoes through Japanese history. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2026/01/16/japan/history/christianity-japanese-history-massacre/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #japan #history #edoperiod #tokugawashogunate #christianity #kyushu #amakusashiro #missionaries
joene 🏴🍉
boosted
This is a tedious hit piece that gets re-run every few years. It always makes the same mistakes.
(1) overlooking the colonization of South Asia and Burma by British troops, Protestant missionaries, and capitalists, which is directly responsible for both Hindu Sangh Parivar violence (like Modi and the RSS/VHP) and Buddhist ethnic nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burma
(2) setting up a "wow, gosh, everyone thinks Buddhism is peaceful" straw man argument - look at the Mongols, Japanese Zen during the early 20th century, modern Korean Buddhism (nationalist and happy with military service), the Khampas who fought a guerilla war against the PLA.... it's only hand-wringing elites drenchef in colonial power who don't actually know the history of Buddhists worldwide.
(3) Treating Buddhist lineages worldwide as all part of a single "religion" -- itself a colonial idea enforced by European Christian missionaries, and now inescapably part of the post-colonial trap.
This is a tedious hit piece that gets re-run every few years. It always makes the same mistakes.
(1) overlooking the colonization of South Asia and Burma by British troops, Protestant missionaries, and capitalists, which is directly responsible for both Hindu Sangh Parivar violence (like Modi and the RSS/VHP) and Buddhist ethnic nationalism in Sri Lanka and Burma
(2) setting up a "wow, gosh, everyone thinks Buddhism is peaceful" straw man argument - look at the Mongols, Japanese Zen during the early 20th century, modern Korean Buddhism (nationalist and happy with military service), the Khampas who fought a guerilla war against the PLA.... it's only hand-wringing elites drenchef in colonial power who don't actually know the history of Buddhists worldwide.
(3) Treating Buddhist lineages worldwide as all part of a single "religion" -- itself a colonial idea enforced by European Christian missionaries, and now inescapably part of the post-colonial trap.
“Whatever people around the world learn from missionaries, whatever elements of American Christianity they keep, and whatever the missionaries themselves bring or take away, one thing is clear: the American church has been less affected and less enlightened by those on the receiving end of its missionary endeavor, or even by their own missionaries, then one might hope."
~ Ibid., p. 139
#WhiteChristianNationalism #evangelicalism #missionaries #Trump
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"Too often missions are less a relationship that challenges and matures the American church and more a pleasing product to consume, a beautiful reflection upon which to gaze.”
~ Ibid.
#WhiteChristianNationalism #missionaries #evangelicalism #Trump
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“At this point, an argument can be made that American evangelicalism is global evangelicalism — that it has been so woven into the fabric of so many cultures around the world that it has become self-perpetuating, like pizza in American cuisine or eucalyptus trees in South African landscapes.”
~ Holly Berkley Fletcher, The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism (Minneapolis: Broadleaf, 2025), p. 127
“Whatever people around the world learn from missionaries, whatever elements of American Christianity they keep, and whatever the missionaries themselves bring or take away, one thing is clear: the American church has been less affected and less enlightened by those on the receiving end of its missionary endeavor, or even by their own missionaries, then one might hope."
~ Ibid., p. 139
#WhiteChristianNationalism #evangelicalism #missionaries #Trump
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