November 6, 2024

Grassroots Religion in Southeast Asia

Over the last century and more, Christianity has flourished outside of the United States and Europe, upending the notion that Christian faith is a “white man’s religion” inextricably bound up with Western culture. One happy consequence of this shift is increased scholarly attention to churches and believers in the Global South, from detailed studies of remote Christian villages to big-picture accounts of social and theological movements.

David Thang Moe, a native of Myanmar who now studies religion in Southeast Asia at Yale University, wants to build more bridges between academic research on global Christianity and the perspectives of ordinary believers. Moe works toward that goal in a new book, Beyond the Academy: Lived Asian Public Theology of Religions.

Angela Lu Fulton, CT’s Southeast Asia editor, recently spoke with Moe about his scholarly journey, relations between Christians and Buddhists in Myanmar, and the importance of fostering dialogue between Christian academics and grassroots Christian communities.

“Theologians in the academy,” says Moe, “talk a bit too much about politics and political power while sometimes forgetting about spiritual power. This gap is especially noticeable in Africa and Asia, where people are mostly thinking about spiritual power in their daily life.

“When it comes to salvation, some academics focus too much on physical liberation. But these grassroots Christians talk a lot about life after death, about spiritual salvation.

“Another gap: Academic theologians focus too much on the prophetic role of Jesus Christ without sufficiently addressing his priestly life and its implication for pastoral work. Myanmar ethnic minorities relate Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to their pre-Christian cultural practice of ritual sacrifice, which is similar to what the Israelites practiced in the Book of Leviticus.

“I asked one of the grassroots church elders I interviewed what his favorite book of the Bible was, and he said Hebrews because ‘it focuses on the sacrificial role of Jesus Christ as the priest.’”

Rod Dreher and ‘The Alien Business’

If you’ve followed the work of Rod Dreher over the last few decades—and there’s a lot of it, between several conversation-shaping books and a torrent of blog and Substack posts—you’ll have noticed his tendency to pair impassioned critiques of modern politics and culture with an insistence that the ultimate solutions for our personal and social crises lie in other domains.

He’ll tell you, for instance, that the political and cultural right has fallen prey to a free-market fundamentalism that erodes the nourishing bonds of tradition and community. Or that the political and cultural left has fallen prey to an authoritarian wokeness that echoes the repressiveness of Communist dictatorships. And he wants those things to change! But he places his highest confidence in bottom-up wellsprings of renewal: believers gathered in worship, churches making disciples, and hearts attuned to the power and glory of God.

In his latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher once again has plenty to say about Western moral and social decline. We will only reverse it, he argues, by reversing the “disenchantment” that blinds us to realities outside the dominant paradigms of rational, scientific, and technological progress. Among those realities, he even includes possible alien activity and other paranormal happenings.

Theologian and regular CT contributor Brad East picks up on this theme, among others, in his review. As he observes, “the book is filled with story after story of the numinous and remarkable. The stories are not only others’ experiences but also Dreher’s own. He is neither defensive nor apologetic. His guard is all the way down. As he writes at one point, ‘I’m too old to care what people think.’

“Hence the chapter on UFOs. Diana Pasulka uses the phrase ‘epistemological shock’ to describe what happens to anyone who moves from skepticism to openness regarding aliens and other paranormal phenomena. But Dreher’s life as a Christian has been one long shock to what he thought he knew, and this book is where he lets it all hang out.

“He’s in good company. With Jacques Vallée, Jeffrey Kripal, and Carlos Eire, Pasulka is part of a vanguard of thinkers unwilling to follow modernity in preemptively writing off the atypical, the paranormal, and the mystical. Andrew Davison, an Anglican priest and systematic theologian, last year published a book called Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine: Exploring the Implications of Life in the Universe. The careful, subtle arguments of Davison’s impressive scholarship might be boiled down to say, ‘Christians should be in the alien business.’

“Dreher is already there. His position is simple: Whatever the nature of the encounters to which so many people across so many cultures and continents bear witness, these stories are one more reason to resist disenchantment. Reality is not what the secular West supposes. The official story is false. Christians of all people should be the first to realize it. In fact, they should be leading the charge against it.

“Let me put my cards on the table: I think Dreher and his allies are right on enchantment generally. I don’t have any difficulty believing the miraculous testimonies he shares, nor do I see why any Christian should. As Blaise Pascal wrote long ago, ‘How I hate such foolishness as not believing in the Eucharist, etc. If the gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, where is the difficulty?’ That doesn’t mean everything Dreher reports actually happened, only that it’s possible.

“But the one place I think Dreher begins to lose his moorings is in his discussion of aliens, the government, and Silicon Valley. By all means, these topics belong in the book. But Dreher is too confident in his assertions, too deferential to insiders, too quick to offer detailed hypotheses about what ‘they’ are up to and why. On aliens—unlike angels—the apostle Thomas should be our model. Here, it is a virtue to doubt first and then verify.”

Matt Reynolds

Senior Editor, Books

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