Adoniram and Ann Judson, along with the Baptist mission to Burma their work initiated, occupy an almost mythic status. For many contemporary evangelicals, the Judsons stand among the heroes of the faith, offering a paradigm for contemporary missionary activity. Scholars have cited the need to develop financial mechanisms to support the Judsons and other early missionaries as the driving force behind the 19th-century consolidation of autonomous Baptist congregations into cohesive denominational structures (see, for example, Nancy Tatom Amerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, Rutgers, 1990). Yet, while the Baptist mission to Burma is a familiar part of American religious history, missionaries’ interventions within Burma itself have remained in the shadows.
In Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom, Alexandra Kaloyanides does the important work of embedding American Baptist international evangelicalism within the religious and political fields of 19th-century Burma. Drawing on a wide variety of Buddhist and Baptist sources, she argues that while missionaries failed in their efforts to convert the nation as a whole, they nevertheless had a significant impact on the Burmese religious landscape, in part due to their success among ethnic minorities. She further argues that the religious practices of both Theravada Buddhists and Protestant Christians were changed by the encounter, drawing special attention to how missionaries adapted their teachings to mirror Buddhist ritual practices. At the same time, Kaloyanides documents how missionaries distorted Burmese Buddhist traditions in their writings in ways consistent with their expectations regarding the superiority of Christian theology and the inevitability of evangelistic success.
Baptizing Burma’s introduction offers a sweeping account of the triangular relationship between missionaries, Burmese political and religious leaders, and British imperialist forces. Like other recent work, the book complicates the picture of missionaries as unproblematically aligned with other colonial actors, resisting the temptation to reduce complex dynamics into binaries. Even as missionaries produced and propagated forms of colonial subordination, Kaloyanides shows that their interests regularly clashed with British officials in the region.
The introduction is followed by four substantive chapters, each of which focuses on a sacred object or site, contributing to research on material religion. The book moves between Buddhist and Christian voices, although asymmetry in Kaloyanides’ sources means that missionaries’ perspectives tend to emerge with greater clarity. The first chapter focuses on sacred writings, with an emphasis on how books were deployed within early encounters between Buddhists and Baptists. Compared with other work on religious writings, the chapter is distinctive in its focus not on theological content but on material production and use.
Chapter 2 shifts to a discussion of schooling to describe Burmese responses to new visions of the world offered by Baptist teaching institutions, which imported maps, telescopes, and procedures for measuring and dividing space. While missionaries hoped that education would offer a first step toward Christianization, Kaloyanides documents how Buddhist monastic schools variously embraced, resisted, and modified newly introduced educational forms. The chapter also illuminates important tensions within the Baptist mission over the organizational roles that women could legitimately claim for themselves and the degree to which missionaries could adapt their teachings to the local context, both recurrent issues within Protestant evangelistic organizations worldwide.
Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of Baptists’ fixation on the pagoda, which the missionaries considered a form of idolatry. Viewing the prevalence of pagodas as a major obstacle to the spread of Christianity, Baptists worked strenuously to counter the symbolic status of these spaces, in a few cases engaging in acts of physical desecration. This discussion of missionaries’ antipathy towards the physical manifestations of Buddhist ritual practice sets the stage for an extended analysis of the Paramat movement, which engaged in iconoclastic critiques of the Buddhist establishment. While Paramats constituted a reform movement within Buddhism, Kaloyanides documents how missionaries read their own worldview onto the group, hailing the Paramats as evidence of the breakdown of superstition in the face of Christian teachings.
The final chapter abruptly shifts to the 21st century to describe the Judson200 Legacy Tour, a 2013 trip organized by the American Baptist Historical Society to commemorate the bicentennial of the Judsons’ arrival in Burma. The chapter centers around numerous images of the Judsons featured on the walls of contemporary Baptist churches in Myanmar, which Kaloyanides argues work to mark these churches as distinct from the majority Buddhist culture and to assert Burmese Christians’ place within international religious networks.
As this eclectic set of topics may already indicate, Kaloyanides does not provide a systematic history of either the Baptist mission or the religious development of 19th-century Burma. Instead, larger trajectories are glimpsed in flashes as the narrative circles around the focal sacred materials of each chapter. Rather than follow a strict periodization, the book moves forward and backward in time as the emphasis shifts from one object to another. At its best, this constant motion mirrors the complex and shifting religious terrain that Kaloyanides seeks to capture. However, it frequently leaves the reader without narrative scaffolding to understand the overall historical trajectory. This disorienting effect is exacerbated by the book’s lack of a traditional conclusion. Rather than pull together the disparate components of her argument, Kaloyanides leaves us with a brief reflection on recent political protests in Myanmar, a reflection that stands in jarring contrast to the rest of the manuscript and opens more questions than it resolves.
Despite these weaknesses, Baptizing Burma is a useful piece of scholarship that will be of interest to researchers studying American missions history, as well as those working on Buddhism and on 19th-century Burmese religious movements. It provides a welcome addition to a long tradition of research on missionaries that highlights the dynamic interplay between religious communities, as well as the tension and innovation that such interaction inspires.
Andrew Chalfoun in a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Andrew Chalfoun
Date Of Review:
July 17, 2024
