Racism: How Did it All Begin?

There is an origin to everything.  Human activity, attitudes, and values all have their roots in history. We cannot deal with any of these in a historical vacuum.  Racism, the notion that one race is genetically superior to all others has a historical origin.

From a theological standpoint, I would submit that racism, just like all the other "isms' has its roots in the fall of humankind into sin.  The rupture in the relationship between God and humankind resulted in a rupture of human relations.  Humans began to discriminate against each other on the basis of class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, race, religion, sexual orientation, and xenophobia.

One may ask and debate as to whether racism itself is genetic or inbred.  Is it natural for people to be racist?  When one examines how racists deal with and treat people of other races, one can deny that racism is an inbred condition.

In this essay, I will deal with the origin of racism in the Americas.  As pointed out in a previous essay, racism is racism regardless of where it exists.  It takes on different forms and manifestations. At times it has been very subtly manifested and at other times, there have been outright expressions of this syndrome.

Richard Mather and John Cotton inherited from the English thinkers of their generation the old racist idea that African slavery was natural, normal, and holy.  These racist ideas were nearly two centuries old when Puritans used them in the 1630's to legalize and codify New England slavery-and Virginians had done the same in the 1620's.  Back in in 1415, Prince Henry and his brothers had convinced their father, King John of Portugal, to capture the principal Muslim trading depot in the Western Mediterranean: Ceuta on the northeastern tip of Morocco. These brothers were envious of Muslim riches, and they sought to eliminate the Islamic middleman so that they could find the southern source of gold and Black captives (Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning. New York: Nation Books, 2016, p. 22)

After the battle, Moorish prisoners left Prince Henry spellbound as they detailed trans-Saharan trade routes down into the disintegration Mali Empire.  Since Muslims still controlled these desert routes, Prince Henry decided to "seek the lands by way of the sea."  He sought out those African lands until his death in 1460, using his position as the Grand Master of Portugal's wealthy Military Order of Christ (Successor of the Knights Templar) to draw venture capital and loyal men for his African expeditions (Ibid.).

In 1452, Prince Henry's nephew, King Alfonso V, commissioned Gomes Eanes de Zurara to write a biography of the life and slave-trading work of his "beloved uncle."  Zurara was a learned and obedient commander in Prince Henry's Military Order of Christ.  In recording and celebrating Prince Henry's life, Zurara was also implicitly obscuring his Grand Master's monetary decision to exclusively trade in African slaves.  In 1453, Zurara finished the inaugural defense of African slave-trading, the first European book on Africa in the modern era.  The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea begins the recorded history of anti-Black racist ideas.  Zurara's inaugural racist ideas, in other words, were a product of, not a producer of, Prince Henry's racist policies concerning African slave-trading (P.E. Russell, Prince Henry "the Navigator:" A Life ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p, 6).

The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara's Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved  Africans back to Europe as Zurara shared in his book.  The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people.  For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain has been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders.  Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions.  Prince Henry's competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans (Ibid, 249, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Charles Raymond Beazley, and Edgar Prestage,  Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 2 vols. London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1896, 1, 6, 7, 29.)

But the market was changing.  Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up.  In Ibn Khaldun's day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea.  So many of the seized captives were "Slavs" that the ethnic term became the root word for "slave" in most Western European languages.  By the mid-1400's, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe's slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing.  As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black ( William McKee Evans, Open Wound: The Long View of Race in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, pps. 17-18).

The Captives in 1444 disembarked from the ship and marched to an open space outside of the city, according to Zurara's chronicle.  Prince Henry oversaw the slave auction, mounted on horseback, beaming in delight.  Some of the captives were "white enough, fair to look upon, and well proportioned," while others looked like "like mulattoes," Zurara reported. Still others were "as black as Ethiops, and so ugly" that they almost appeared as visitors from Hell.  The captives included people in the many shades of the Tuareg Moors as well as the dark-skinned people whom the Tuareg Moors may have enslaved.  Despite their different ethnicities and skin colors, Zurara viewed them as one people-one inferior people ( Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997, pps. 22-23).

Zurara made it a point to remind his readers that Prince Henry's "chief riches" in quickly seizing forty-six of the most valuable captives "lay in his own purpose for he reflected with great pleasure upon the salvation of those souls that before were lost."  In building up Prince Henry's evangelical justification for enslaving Africans, Zurara reduced these captives to barbarians who desperately needed not only religious but also civil salvation.  "They lived like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings," he wrote.  What's more, "they have no knowledge of bread or wine, and they were without covering of clothes, or the lodgement of houses, and worse than all, they had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in bestial sloth."  In Portugal, their lot was "quite the contrary of what it had been."  Zurara imagined slavery in Portugal as an improvement over their free state in Africa (Zurawa, et. al, Chronicle, 81-85, Prince Henry "the Navigator," 240-247, 253, 257-259).

Zurara's narrative covered from 1434 to 1447. During that period, Zurara estimated, 927 enslaved Africans were brought to Portugal, " the greater part of whom were turned into the truth path of salvation." Zurara failed to mention that Prince Henry received the royal fifth (quinto) or about  185 of these captives, for his immense fortune. But that was irrelevant to his mission, a mission he accomplished.  For convincing readers, successive popes, and the reading European world that Prince Henry's Portugal did not engage in the slave trade for money, Zurawa was handsomely rewarded as Portugal's chief royal chronicler, and he was given two more lucrative commanderships in the Military Order of Christ. Zurara's bosses quickly reaped returns from their slave trading.  In 1466, a Czech traveler noticed that the king of Portugal was making more selling captives to foreigners "than from all the taxes levied on the entire kingdom (Thomas, Slave Trade, 74 Zurara, et.al, Chronicle, xx-xl, Russell, Prince Henry "the Navigator," p. 246).

Zurara circulated the manuscript of the Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea to the Royal Court as well as to scholars, investors, and captain, who then read and circulated it throughout Portugal and Spain.  Zurara died in Lisbon in 1474, but his ideas about slavery endured as the slave trade expanded.  By the 1490's, Portuguese explorers had crept southward along the West African coast, rounding the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean. In their growing networks of ports, agents, ships, crews, and financiers, pioneering Portuguese slave-traders and explorers circulated the racist in Zurara book faster and farther than the text itself had reached.  The Portuguese became the primary source of knowledge on an unknown Africa and the African people for the original slave-traders and enslavers in Spain, Holland, France, and England.  By the time German printer Valentim Fernandes published an abridged version of Zurara's book in Lisbon in 1506, enslaved Africans-and racist ideas-had arrived in the Americas (Zurara et al., Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 187).

In 1481, the Portuguese began building a larger fort, Sao Jorge da Mina, simply as Elmina, or "the mine," as part of their plan to acquire Ghanaian gold.  In due time, this European building, the first known to be erected south of the Sahara, became West Africa's largest slave-trading post, the nucleus of Portugal's operations in West Africa.  A Genoese explorer barely three decades old may have witnessed the erection of Elmina Castle.  Christopher Columbus, newly married to the daughter of a Genoese protégé of Prince Henry, desired to make his own story-but not in Africa.  He looked instead to East Asia, the source of spices.  After Portuguese royalty refused to sponsor his daring westward expedition, Queen Isabel of Spain, a great-niece of Prince Henry, consented.  So in 1492, after sixty-nine days at sea, Columbus's three small ships touched the shores that Europeans did not know existed: first the glistening Bahamas, and the next night, Cuba (Thomas, Slave Trade, 71, 87).

Almost from Columbus's arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them "negros da terra (Blacks from the land)," transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans.  Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history.  Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement.  More died from European diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold.  Millions of Native Americans were driven off their lands by Spanish settlers dashing into the colonies after riches.  Spanish merchant Pedro de las Casas settled in Hispaniola in 1502, the year the first enslaved Africans disembarked from a Portuguese slave ship.  He brought along his eighteen-year-old son Bartolome, who would play an outsized role in the direction slavery took in the so-called New World (Lawrence Clayton, "Bartolome de Las Casas, and the African Slave Trade," History Compass 7, no. 6 2009, p. 1527).

By 1510, Bartolome de Las Casas had accumulated land and captives as well as his ordination papers as the America's first priest.  He felt proud in welcoming the Dominican Friars to Hispaniola in 1511. Sickened by Taino slavery, the Friars stunned Las Casas and broke abolitionist ground, rejecting the Spanish line (taken from the Portuguese) that the Taino people benefitted, through Christianity, from slavery.  King Ferdinand promptly recalled the Dominican Friars, but their anti-slavery sermons never left Bartolome de Las Casas.  In 1515, he departed for Spain, where he would conduct a lifelong campaign to ease the sufferings of Native Americans, and possibly more importantly- solve the settlers extreme labor shortage.  In one of his first written pleas, in 1516, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans to replace the rapidly declining Native American laborers, a plea he made again two years later.  Alonso de Zuazo, a University of Salamanca-trained lawyer, had made a similar recommendation back in 1510.  "General license should be given to bring negroes, a people strong for work, the opposite of the natives, so weak who can work only in undemanding tasks," Zuazo wrote.  In time, some indigenous peoples had gotten wind of this new racist idea and they readily agreed that that a policy of importing laborers would be better.  An indigenous group in Mexico complained that the "difficult and arduous work" involved in harnessing a sugar crop was "only for the blacks and not for the thin and weak Indians."  Las Casas and Company birthed twins-racist twins that some Native Americans and Africans took in: the myth of the physically strong, beastly African, and the myth of the physically weak Native American who easily died from the strain of hard labor (Thomas, Slave Trade, 50, 104, 123, Bethencourt, Racisms, 177-178, David M. Traboulay, Columbus and Las Casas: The Conquest and Christianization of America, 1492-1566. Lanham, MD: University Press of America , 1994, pps. 58-59).

Although Las Casas's ideas were at first discounted, his treatises soon became a useful tool for Spain's growing empire and its investment in American slavery.  Bishop Sebastian Ramirez de Fuenlean reported in 1531 that the "entire population.....of Espanola, San Juan, and even Cuba are demanding that they should have negroes to mine gold" and produce crops.  Las Casas led the charge for the historic passage in 1542 of the "New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians."  That memorable year, he also finished and sent to Prince Philip II his classic, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and issued his third memorial recommending that enslaved Africans replace Native Americans (Kendi, p. 27).

At some point after that, Las Casas read Gomes Eanes de Zurawa's book.  The more he read, the less he could square the African slave trade with the teachings of Jesus Christ.  In History of the Indies (1561), released five years before his death, Las Casas regretted "the advice he gave the king" to import enslaved Africans.  He saw in Zurara's writing, evidence revealing the slave trade to "be the horror that it is."  Las Casas lamented Zurara's attempt "to blur (the slave trade) with the mercy and goodness of God."  Las Casas tried to close the door on African slavery, after opening it for so many Spanish slaveholders. He failed.  A powerful reformer labeled a radical extremist in his last days-like every antiracist who came after him-Las Casas was condemned in Spain after his death, and his works were practically banned there.  Catholic Spain's Protestant rivals published and republished his devastating Account of the Destruction of the Indies-in Dutch (1578), French (1578), English (1583), and German (1599)-in their quest to label the Spanish Empire corrupt and morally repugnant, all in their quest to replace Spain as Europe's superpower (Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolome de Las Casas: A Biography. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pps. 349-353, 420-428. Bethencourt, Racisms, p. 233.  Peter N. Stearns, Sexuality in World History. New York, Routledge, p. 108).

Despite Spain's rise, Portugal remained the undisputed power of the African slave trade. And Gomes Eanes de Zurara's racist ideas remained Europe's undisputed defenders of slave trading until another man, an African, rose up to the legacy.  Around 1510, Al-Hasan Ibn-Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, a well-educated Moroccan, accompanied his uncle on a diplomatic mission down into the Songhay Empire.  Eight years later, he was enslaved on another diplomatic voyage along the Mediterranean Sea.  His captors presented the learned twenty-four-year-old to the scholarly Pope Leo X in Italy.  Before dying in 1521, the Pope freed the youngster, converted him to Christianity, renamed him Johannes Leo, and possibly commissioned him to write a survey of Africa.  He became known as Leo the African, or Leo Africanus.  He satisfied Italian curiosity in 1526 with the first scholarly survey of Africa in Europe, Description of Africa (Kendi, p. 28).

Leo Africanus described the etymology of Africa and then surveyed African geography, languages, cultures, religions, and diseases. His summation: "There is no Nation under Heaven more prone to Venery (sexual indulgence)." The Africans "leade a beastly kind of life, being utterly destitute of the use of reason, of dexterities of wit, and of all arts,"  Africanus wrote.  "They behave themselves as if they had continually lived in a Forrest among wild beasts (Ibid.)"

Leo the African did not ignore the elephant in the room.  How do "I my selfe write so homely of Africa ," he asked, when "I stand indebted to Africa for both my birth and education?"  He considered himself to be a "historiographer" charged with telling "the plaine truth in all places."  Africanus did not mind if Africans were denigrated.  He believed he was describing Africans accurately (Leo Africanus, John Pory, and Robert Brown, "The History and Description of Africa, 3 vols.  London: Hakluyt Society, 1896, pps. 130, 187-190).

Leo Africanus established himself through Description of Africa as the world's first known African racist, the first illustrious African producer of racist ideas (as Zurara was the first illustrious European producer of racist ideas).  Anyone can consume or produce racist ideas of African inferiority-any European, any Asian, any Native American, any Latina/o, and any African.  Leo's African ancestry hardly shielded him from believing in African inferiority and European superiority, or from trying to convince others of this plain racist "truth (Kendi, p. 29)."

Leo Africanus may have never visited the fifteen African lands he claims to have seen.  He could have paraphrased the notes of Portuguese travelers.  But veracity did not matter.  Once the manuscript was finished in 1526, once it was published in Italian in 1550, and once it was translated into French and Latin in 1556, readers across Western Europe were consuming it and tying African people to hypersexuality, to animals, and to lack of reason.  It is not known what happened to Leo the African, the author of the most widely read, and most influential book on Africa-next to Zurara's-during the 1500. He made countless Europeans feel that they knew him, or rather, knew Africa (Ibid).

Around the time Leo the African's text was making its way through Europe, and around the time Richard Mather's parents were born, the British began their quest to break the monopoly on African slave-trading, eager to reap the benefits and grow their empire.  In 1554, an expedition, captained by John Lok, ancestor of philosopher John Locke, arrived in England after traveling to "Guinea."  Lok and his compatriots, Robert Gainish and William Towerson docked with 450 pounds of gold, 250 ivory tusks, and five enslaved African men.  These three Englishmen established themselves as the new authorities on Africa and African people among curious British minds.  Their opinions seemed to be shaped as much by the Portuguese and French as by their observations.  Sounding like Leo Africanus or Zurara, Gainish labeled a "people of beastly living, without a God, law, religions, or common wealth."  The five "beats" that he and his shipmates brought back to England all learned English and were sent back to Africa to serve as translators for English readers (Joseph R. Washington, Anti-Blackness in English Religion, 1500-1800. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984, pps. 105-111, Thomas, Slave Trade, pps. 153-159).

As English contact with Africans matured, so did the desire to explain the radical color differences. Writers like Gainish applied climate theory to the dark skins of Africa and light skins of Europe. The popular theory made sense when looking at Europe, the Mediterranean, and Africa.  But what about the rest of the world?  During the final decades of the sixteenth century, a new genre of British literature adopted a different theory. Writers brought amazing stories of the world into Anglican homes, into the Puritan homes of Richard Mather, and John Cotton, and into the homes of other future leaders of colonial America.  And these worldly stories were as racist as they were amazing (Kendi,  p. 30).

En fin, we find that racism, having, as I stated at the beginning of this essay, has  its roots in the fall into sin of humankind, has been permeated throughout history in the institutions and literature of Western European society.  This is not to say that racism is naturally genetic and inherent to European peoples or their descendants, but indeed, because of the power that Anglo and European people have exerted throughout the centuries, it is much easier to equate racism with being a Caucasian phenomenon.

Economic, military, and political hegemony go hand in hand with racism.  Those who have the power to rule, also have the power to relegate others to conditions and positions of  social inferiority.  Racism, then, becomes institutional, structural, and systemic.

Liberation Theology deals addresses and deals with the issue of systemic racism by unmasking it, identifying it, and denouncing it.  Liberation Theology calls the community of faith to repent for being complicit in participating and justifying institutional racism, and calls for the community of faith to reverse its path by engaging with all those movements, faith-based or not, to fight the tripartite beast of institutional, structural, and systemic racism.  God calls.  We respond.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

Racism in the U.S.A.: A Historical/Theological Perspective.

Is racism in the U.S.A. different than it is in any other part of the world?  Some one can claim that "racism is racism."  There is a degree of truth to that.  But here I would like to focus on some of the peculiarities of racism in America.  I also would like to maintain the theological perspective on this phenomenon call racism, i.e. evaluate it in the light of Scripture, tradition, experience, and the different branches of human knowledge, especially the social sciences.

What is racism?  There are many definitions that could be given.  Some think of racism as mere contempt for or hatred of a race other than one's own.  This contempt and hatred is based on  emotion and lack of objective information about other races.

Others think of racism is hatred of another race due to the cruelty and inhumanity imposed by people of one race on people of another race.  In this case what we would be dealing with is what some people call "counter-racism," or "racism in reverse."

Then we have those who believe that racism is the belief in the inherent superiority of one race and the inherent superiority of the other races.  Based on this belief, we then have the case of one race being the one to have control of all the institutions of society.  In the U.S.A. this would be called "white supremacy."

This paper deals with the third definition of racism given above.  In other words, we deal with the idea that one race is superior to others, and therefore having the right to relegate people of other races to a secondary position in society.

There are statistics that will serve as a background for this paper.  The purpose of these statistics will be to demonstrate that the notion of white supremacy is not something that has been concocted by people "of color."

Young African American males were twenty-one more times likely to be killed by police than their White counterparts between 2010 and 2012, according to federal statistics.  The under-recorded, under-analyzed racial disparities between female victims of lethal police force may be even greater. Federal data show that the median wealth of White households is a staggering thirteen times the median wealth of African American households- and African American people are five times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites (Ryan Gabrielson, Ryan Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara, "Deadly Force in Black and White," ProPublica, October 10, 2014, Rakesh Kochbar and Richard Fry, Wealth Inequality Has Widened Along Racial, Ethnic Lines Since End of Great Recession, December 12, 2014, Pew Research Center, www. pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2014/12/12 racial-wealth-gaps-great recession, Sabrina Tavernise, "Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist," New York Times, July 18, 2013.

But these statistics should come as no surprise.  Most Americans are probably aware of these racial disparities in police killings, in wealth, in prisons-in nearly every sector of US society.  By racial disparities is meant how racial groups are not statistically represented according to their populations.  If African American people make up 13.2 % of the US population, then they should make up somewhere close to 13% of the Americans killed by the police, somewhere close to 13 % of the Americans sitting in prisons, somewhere close to owning 13% of US wealth.  But today, the United States remains nowhere close to racial parity.  African Americans own 2.7% of the nation's wealth, and make up 40% of the incarcerated population. These are racial disparities and racial disparities are older than the life of the United States (Leah Sakla, "Breaking Down Mass Incarceration in the 2010 Census:State-by-State Incarceration Rates by Race/Ethnicity," Prison Policy Initiative, May 28, 2014, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/rates.html, Matt Bruenig, "The Racial Wealth Gap," American Prospect , November 6, 2013.

In 2016, the United States celebrated its 240th birthday.  But even before Thomas Jefferson and the other founders declared independence, Americans were engaging in a polarizing debate over racial disparities, over why the exist and persist,  and over why White Americans as a group were prospering more than African Americans as a group.  Historically, there have been three sides to this heated argument.  A group we can call "segregationists" has blamed African American people themselves for the racial disparities.  A group we can call "anti-racists" has pointed to racial discrimination.  A group we can call "assimilationists" has tried to argue for both, saying that African American people and racial discrimination are to blame for racial disparities.  During the ongoing debate over police killings, these three sides to the argument have been on full display.  Segregationists have been blaming the recklessly criminal behavior of the African American people who were killed by police officers.  According to this outlook, Michael Brown was a monstrous, threatening thief, therefore Darren Wilson had reason to fear him and to kill him.  The life of this dark-skinned eighteen -year-old did not matter to Darren Wilson. Assimilationists have tried to have it both ways.  Both Wilson and Brown acted like irresponsible criminals ( Ibram X. Kendi, "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America."  New York: Nation Books, 2016, p. 2).

For nearly six centuries, anti-racist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationists and assimilationist.  The history of racial ideas is the history of three distinct voices and how they have each have rationalized racial disparities, arguing why Whites have remained on the living and winning end. while African Americans remained on the losing and dying end (Ibid.).

When we look back on our history, we often wonder why so many Americans did not resist slave trading, enslaving, segregating, or now, mass incarcerating.  The reason is clearly speaking, racist ideas.  The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities.  The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ides of African American people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell.  Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe that there is something wrong with African American people , and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many African American people (Ibid. p. 10).

Not all individuals who happen to identify as African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, or Native American are equal in all ways.  The point is that there is nothing wrong with African American people as a group, or with any other racial group.  There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of all ethnic, national, and racial ancestries.  There are also industrious and wise and harmless individuals in all groups.  But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene-not now, not ever.  Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins.   All cultures, in their behavioral differences, are on the same level.  African American's history of oppression has made Black opportunities-not African American people-inferior ( Ibid. p. 11).

How do we in the Christian and other faith communities respond to how racist ideas have engendered racist actions and policies?  This is a very difficult question to answer because within the faith community itself, we have the existence of racism.   There are people at both the leadership and congregational levels who embrace, consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously racist ideas.  As a community of faith, we are called to reevaluate our beliefs and practices in order to determine whether or not they are rooted in or promote racist ideas

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona

Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

Theology for the Puerto Rican Diaspora

I have stated in previous writings that there is as much diversity in Liberation Theology as there is in classical Western theology.  Liberation Theology is not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination. Those who undertake a rigorous and serious reading of Liberation Theology will discover that:

1. All Liberation theologians believe that theology should emerge from the "bottom up" rather than from the "top down." In other words, theology should emerge from whose who are alienated, marginalized, and powerless, not from those who are in positions of authority and power.

2.  All Liberation theologians believe that those who are in a condition or position of powerlessness and subjugation, are in a privileged position to receive and understand God's revelatory acts in history.

3.  All Liberation theologians believe that oppression and suffering should be the starting points for biblical interpretation and theological reflection.

This Puerto Rican minister/theologian and writer subscribes to the three principles listed above.  While Liberation Theology was initially intended to address the issues of social class and political conditions in Latin America, it has taken on a life of its own in the U.S.A. in which we deal with additional issues of race and gender.  Readers are encouraged to search out writings of Liberation Theology relative to issues of race and feminism.

Although Liberation Theology emerged within a Christian context, it offers a message of hope for the Puerto Rican Diaspora, regardless of the variety of religious practices within our community.  It does not seek to demonize any particular religious expression, but rather to identify the liberating elements in all religions and to establish ties of solidarity with all those individuals and social entities whose goal is to dismantle structures of injustice and work for the construction of the Beloved Community.  As a Puerto Rican Liberation theologian who believes that Jesus of Nazareth is the main agent in God's liberating and redemptive activity, I also believe that Jesus is the "Cosmic Christ," who is not only the "Christ of Christians," but of all those who are oppressed and seek to work for the benefit of all humankind, regardless of religious affiliations or labels.  Our Puerto Rican sisters and brothers in the Diaspora, as descendants of our colonized parents, and as people who have been treated as second-class citizens in the U.S.A., have in Liberation Theology the call and hope for a society of full equality, justice, and peace.

To God in Christ be the glory!  In the Name of the Creator, and of the Redeemer, and of the Sustainer. Amen!

Dr. Juan A.Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

The Sovereignty of Taiwan: A Theological Perspective

This blog post is the conclusion of my book "The Sovereignty of Taiwan: A Theological Perspective."

As I conclude the writing of this book, we are faced with various options as to the position that we as a Church can take regarding the issue of self-determination.  We can opt to engage in or disengage from the struggle and quest for the self-determination of the people of Taiwan.  We can continue to perpetuate the false dichotomy between "political" and "spiritual" in deciding whether or not to participate  in the struggle for self-determination.  If we decide to engage, how do we do so?  Do we resort, together with other people to armed struggle as a means of achieving our liberation?  Do we take a stand of "neutrality?"  Do we take a non-violent approach to social change and the quest for liberation?

It is this writer's conviction that the Church, operating in the power of the Holy Spirit, would bring about the best and most long-lasting results.  This does not mean that we sit with our hands crossed and waiting "for Jesus to come."  Nor does it mean that we play an idle role relative to the struggle of our beloved land.  We are called to be pastoral, learned, and prophetic as we become protagonists in the struggle for human emancipation, and for the sovereignty of our beloved nation.  It is my prayer, that you the reader, have heard the clarion call and will respond to it.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

Homeland Theology

The purpose of exploring Homeland Theology is to examine its role in addressing the issues of the oppression and suffering of the Taiwanese people (colonization. Kuomintang, land rights, human trafficking, etc.).  These conditions and issues gave rise to the emergence of a home-grown theology in Taiwan.  This paper focuses on the writings of Wang Hsien-Chih, who was a former professor at Tainan Theological College/Seminary.

The concept of doing theology in context was articulated and introduced by Chang-Hui Hwang (also known as Shoki Coe) and his colleagues of the Theological Foundation Fund of the World Council of Churches in the early 1970's, getting a positive response from Taiwan.  Before serving as the director of the Fund, Hwang, the first Taiwanese principal of Tainan Theological College/Seminary, had already invited the churches in Taiwan and South East Asia to reflect on theological education in their own contexts in a paper entitled "A Rethinking of Theological Training for the Ministry in Younger Churches Today."  Afterwards, Choan -Seng Song, in his inauguration as the first principal of TTCS after Wang, had advocated a theology of the Incarnation, proposing that the Gospel must be incarnated on the land and in the people of Taiwan.  Obviously, the contextual theology was not new to the church in Taiwan.  However, it was Wang Hsien-Chih, a theologian who suggested that Taiwanese Christians focus on the contextual issues, i.e. the issues of homeland at that time, and proposed a "homeland theology (Chen Nan-Jou, ed. A New Testament to Taiwan Homeland Theology:The Essential Writings of Wang Hsien-Chi. Yeong Cultural Enterprises Co..Ltd. August 2011, p. ix).

"Homeland" was taken as a theological issue in the time of "debate" on homeland literature" in Taiwan society in the 1970's, especially in 1977 and 1978.  Those who identified Taiwan, not China, as their homeland, were severely censured and persecuted by the Nationalist totalitarian regime.  Though the theological motives of Homeland Theology are ethnicity, land, power, and God, Wang stated that the core of these four motives was the people of Taiwan who strived to search for and to construct the Taiwanese identity, an identity denied by the Chinese government, both in China and Taiwan (Ibid., p. 22).  In other words, we may say that the main concern of Homeland Theology was the issue of identification (Ibid., p. x).

The social-political situations have changed a lot in the last two decades.  The martial law which lasted nearly 40 years was lifted in 1987.  The Nationalist Party's regime which had ruled Taiwan for 50 years was defeated by the presidential elections in 2000 and 2004, respectively.  However, the pernicious effects of the Nationalist totalitarian regime's egregiousness are still in existence.  The issue of identification is still a crucial one in today's Taiwan.  "Identification" has been a key word in the Taiwanese contextual theology.  One of the impetuses behind the socio-political concern and involvement of the Christian churches in Taiwan is identification, i.e. identifying with the people of Taiwan (Ibid.).

To continue the spirit of the theological endeavor of the Homeland Theology, the contextual theology in Taiwan nowadays must be toward a theology of identification (Nan-Jou, "Contextualizing Catholicity: A Taiwanese Theology of Identification," in Asia Journal of Theology, Vol. 17, No. 2, October 2003, and Nan-Jou, "Involvement of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan on the issue f the Future of Taiwan-A Theological Reflection," Asia Journal of Theology, Vol. 9, No. 2, October 1995, pp, 256-262).

This theological construction can be described in the following three aspects:

1.  Identifying with the sufferings and the hopes of the people of Taiwan, especially striving for the human rights of self-determination.

2.  Identifying with the history and cultures of the people of Taiwan, i.e. discerning the theological meaning of Taiwanese history of cultures.

3.  Participating in the building of koinonia to transform society, that is identifying Taiwan as the homeland (Nan-Jou in Wang Hsien-Chi, p. xi).

In fact, one of the main themes of the Bible is also identification.  In the Old Testament, God heard the groaning of the people of Israel, saw their situation of being under oppression and was concerned about them.  God's love and justice made God identify with the oppressed and suffering Israelites by sending Moses to them.  In the New Testament, the loving God was revealed through the incarnation of Jesus.  The incarnation means God's identifying with human beings, particularly the enslaved, the suffering, the suffering, the marginalized, and the oppressed. The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan also confesses that God is the Lord of history and the world, and to be a servant of God today means to do what Moses did.  The Church must also imitate Jesus's incarnation, to identify with the suffering of Taiwan, so that the people might be liberated from oppression, and own a new identity to bring new life (Ibid.).

The motif of identification was the core of Wang's Homeland Theology and is still a key to doing theology in the Taiwanese context today.  In order to participate in the Missio Dei (God's mission), to build a new Taiwan and to be part of the human community, Christian communities in Taiwan have to move toward a theology of identification (Ibid.).

Homeland Theology entails the theological exploration and exposition of nation-building arising from the peculiar context of Taiwan.  Taking the book of Exodus as a paradigm,, nation-building, and exiles of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures, Homeland Theology reckons that the issues of ethnicity (people), land, power, and God as the main theological themes for the Israelites and the Taiwanese as well.  But in the New Testament, the theological focus of nation-building was transformed into the community-building (ecclesia) in the light of the reign of God proclaimed and realized by Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.  This nation-building coexists with the community-building under the reign of God.  The global conflicts among nations should be reconciled and redeemed through the sovereignty of God and neighbors as themselves (Wang Hsien-Chi, "Homeland Theology," in a Dictionary of Asian Christianity.  Scott W. Sunquist, ed.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 2011, p. 345).

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

Liberation Theology

In order to determine how Liberation Theology applies and relates to issues of colonization and social justice, we must first have an understanding of what it is and what it is not.  What follows below is a description of what Liberation Theology is not and what it is.

WHAT IT IS NOT

There are many who base their conception of Liberation Theology on what they have heard from others.  What they have heard is usually negative, and in many cases, the "others" themselves are not acquainted with Liberation Theology.  Those who think negatively about Liberation Theology are getting second and even third-hand information about it and that is why their perceptions about Liberation Theology are so distorted and warped.

Contrary to what many people believe, Liberation Theology is not a school of thought that originated in the Roman Catholic Church.  As a matter of fact, as will be pointed out below, Liberation Theology did not begin as a school of thought in any church, but rather is a movement.

Many people, especially those who are theologically-speaking uninformed, think of Liberation Theology as Marxism "in disguise."  The reason for this is because Liberation Theology in some cases, makes use of Marxist categories in terms of social analysis.  Many Liberation theologians are very conversant with Marxism and make use of Marxist terms in order to describe how they view the need for social change and transformation.  But this writer (yours truly) humbly and respectfully submits that Liberation Theology is not Marxist at all.

There are those who believe that Liberation Theology is just another school of thought or even a mindset.  But I say that it goes much further than that, and subsequently is something that will never cease, be irrelevant, or "go out of style."

WHAT IT IS

In a very general sense, Liberation Theology begins with the doctrines of Creation, the Fall, and Redemption.  Liberation Theology takes seriously the divine initiative in all of the previously-mentioned historical events.  Liberation Theology affirms God as the Creator of all things, the Liberator of humankind from the consequences of the Fall, i.e. slavery to sin, both individual and systemic, and the Sustainer of the universe.

In that same vein, Liberation Theology focuses on God's act of the liberation of the Hebrew people from physical slavery in Egypt.  Yahweh God speaks to Moses and says to him "I have heard the cry of my people."  God's hearing the cry of the people is the pivotal moment in history that engineers the process of liberation.

In the Exodus narrative, God identifies with the affliction, misery, and suffering of the Hebrews.  God conveys to Moses that he is being called to be the agent through which God's liberation of the Hebrews from slavery will be accomplished.  Moses would lead the people out of what at one time was the house of abundance, and then became the house of bondage.

The failure to acknowledge and recognize the biblical roots of Liberation Theology will result in a gross misunderstanding as to what it is, and cause many to demonize and even distort not only its contents, but also its thrust.  In addition, if one fails to recognize the biblical roots of Liberation Theology, then the tendency will be to think of it as one school of thought among others and begin to equate it with secular ideologies and movements such as Marxism and political and social revolution. It will also result in placing Liberation Theology within the framework of extreme humanism which tends to ignore the divine initiative and overemphasize human achievement.

The task of defining Liberation Theology is a difficult and complex one.  There is no one "Liberation Theology."  Liberation Theology is a variegated affair, both in its motifs and the personalities involved (Rosino Gibellini, ed. Frontiers of Theology in Latin America. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1979, p.x).

One will find diversity of thinking and methodology in Liberation Theology.  It is not one particular way of thinking.  There is as much diversity in Liberation Theology as there is in classical Western Theology.  Nevertheless, there is an underlying unity in Liberation Theology's trend of thinking.

Liberation Theology offers us not so much a new theme for theological reflection, but rather a new way to do theology.  Theology as critical reflection on historical praxis is a liberating theology, a theology of the liberating transformation of the history of humankind-gathered into ecclesia-and which openly confesses Christ.  It does not stop with reflecting on the world, but rather tries to be part of the process through which humankind is transformed.  It is a theology which is open in the protest against trampled human dignity, in the struggle against the plunder of the vast majority of people, in liberating love, and in the building of a new, just, and fraternal society to the gift of the Reign of God (Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation.  Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973, p. x).

Liberation Theology is an understanding of the faith, and a re-reading of the Word as it is lived in the Christian community and other communities of faith.  More than anything, it has to do with the communication of faith, and the proclamation of the Good News, which is that the Creator loves all people.  To evangelize is to witness to that love; to say that it has been revealed to us and was made flesh in Christ (Hugo Assmann, Practical Theology of Liberation.  London: Search Press, 1975, p. 5).

Liberation Theology is the "result of a new reading of the Scriptures in a particular historical situation."  The experience of the Exodus becomes the key to a new perception of the Gospel.  The Exodus story is a model for freedom,.  Liberation Theology is a participation in that story (Ester and Mortimer Arias, The Cry of My People.  New York: Friendship Press, 1980, p. 127).

Liberation Theology is seen as "a question addressed to the Christian obedience of our sisters and brothers in Christ, a question which only they can answer.  Liberation Theology is a critical and committed Christian reflection of the people who have decided to join the struggle to construct a different society.  It is not merely a "new school," nor a set of self-contained theological tents or positions.  If  Liberation Theology is made into a new school, it will have its day and be gone (Jose Miguez Bonino, Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation.  Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975, p. xx)."

Liberation Theology is a global way of articulating the task of the intelligence of the faith.  It is not a theme among others in theology.  It is done from the standpoint of captivity (Leonardo Boff, Teologia desde el Cautiverio.  Bogota: Indo-American Press Service, 1975, p. 13

Liberation Theology is the "claim to view theology from the standpoint which the Christian fonts point up as the only authentic and privileged standpoint for arriving at a full and complete understanding of God's revelation in Jesus Christ.  Theology must be validated by the choice which is made for approaches to social development (Juan Luis Segundo, "Capitalism Versus Socialism,: Crux Theologica," in Gibellini, p. 40).

As previously pointed out, Liberation Theology is not monolithic by any stretch of the imagination.  There are differences in motifs and prisms through which different theologians engage in social analysis.  The one thing that most, if not all Liberation Theologians have in common is their belief that biblical interpretation and theological reflection have oppression and human suffering as their starting points.  While historically speaking, the Scriptures and the traditions have been considered as sources which shed light on the present situation, Liberation Theology does just the opposite, i.e. views the Scriptures and the traditions in the light of the situation.  While that approach carries the risk of eisegesis (reading into the text), it also has the advantage of making the text and the tradition come alive.  It allows for there to be interaction between the text and the traditions on the one hand, and the current situation on the other hand as continuous event.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen!

Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Past Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

The Role ofChristianity in Taiwan

In this paper, we will explore the role that the various Christian communities have played in Taiwan's history.  As we engage with this history, we will have to decide for ourselves whether that role has been negative, positive, or a combination of both.  We will also have to decide for ourselves as to whether the various Christian communities are promoting the self-determination of the people in Taiwan, or whether their theology merely serves to legitimize the status quo of international indecision and the eventual return to Chinese rule over Taiwan.

Amongst almost twenty-three million people on Taiwan, only three percent is Christian.  The rest of the people, more or less, hold on to beliefs in folk religion, i.e. Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, etc. The folk religions are people's popular beliefs which consist of certain native elements mixed with the above-named religions, and are diffused into secular and social institutions.  The folk religions have an entire pantheon of gods and goddesses: more than 243 deities are worshiped.  In 1981, the number of temples and shrines was 5,539, while the number of churches was 2, 169 (Yu Kuang-hong, "Development of Taiwanese Folk Religion: Analysis of Government Compiled Data," in Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, no 53 (1982), pp. 67-103).

Besides these, there are tens of thousands of family altars of folk religions.  Both the number of shrines, temples, and churches, is increasing year by year.  In the traditional ethnic Chinese mind, Christianity is acknowledged as a foreign religion.  But Taiwanese people of Chinese origin usually think that all religions are good for humanity, and that they teach people to do good.  Therefore, Christianity can coexist with other religions in Taiwan, although Christian are an absolute minority group ("The Coexistence Between Christians and the People on Taiwan," in Christianity Among World Religions. Hans Kung and Jurgen Moltmann, eds. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1986, pp. 90-95).

Christianity, besides being accepted as a religion of teaching good among many religions in Taiwan and China, is usually recognized as the most liberating prophetic religion.  The leaders of two decisive revolutions in China, in the 19th and 20th centuries, Hung Hsiu-chuan and Sun Yat-sen, were considered Christians ( A.T. van Leeuwen, Christianity in World History, pp. 365-381, C.S. Song, The Compassionate God, New York, 1982, pp. 192-215).

Historically, the Protestant mission to Taiwan started in the year 1627, three years after the Dutch colonization of Taiwan.  They were just a step ahead of the Spanish Dominican missionary effort. Both missions were confined to the natives of Malayan origin, at that time, the majority of the Taiwanese populace.  The first wave of the Christian missionary effort had more or less come to an end with the conquest of Taiwan by the Chinese under Cheng Cheng-kung, a warrior of the Ming dynasty, and known to the West as Koxinga (1624_1663) in 1661.  Christianity faded away quickly because both the Dutch and Spanish missionaries were too closely linked with the colonizing effort to be able to lay the foundations for indigenous church leadership. ("The Reflection and
Envisioning of the Missions in Taiwan.:  Taipei, Taiwan, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 1995).

The second wave of the Christian mission started with the Spanish Dominican priests in 1859 in Kaohsiung, then Presbyterian missions to South Taiwan in 1865, and Canadian Presbyterian missions to North Taiwan in 1872.  Denominational diversity or chaos came into the picture when Chiang Kai-Shek (1887-1975) and around two million of his followers took refuge on Taiwan in 1949.  Coming along with them were various denominational missions and independent churches initiated and developed in China.  This marked the third wave of the Christian mission to Taiwan (Ibid.).

It is in the recent three decades that the idea of contextual theologies have developed in Asia and Africa, while at the same time, liberation theologies have flourished in Latin America.  Therefore, it might be helpful to clarify the importance and meaning of context in the biblical-theologizing foundation in order to make use of the contextual analysis for missiological reflection and envisioning in Taiwan (Ibid.).

Christianity came to Taiwan with its colonial background.  It usually has an ahistorical orientation.  In comparison, main world religions, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, which came from China, usually have a China-oriented historical view.  Therefore, both Christianity and major world religions in Taiwan do not encourage Taiwanese people to build their own historical world view (Ibid.).

With the coming of Koxinga to Taiwan and the end of Dutch rule, little is known of the existence, nature, and significance of the surviving Christianity among the original inhabitants. Most of the aboriginal villages where the Dutch had promoted the Christian faith were in the plains.  With the great increase of Chinese coming to the island after the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, and then 38 years later when the Ming survivors were finally defeated, the social situation was changed drastically.  Gradually, the aborigines were pushed back from their fertile lands into the foothills and high mountain areas (Ralph Covell, Pentecost of the Hills of Taiwan.  Pasadena, California: Hope Publishing House, 1998, p. 103).

By the 1860's, English and Canadian missionaries, as well as Catholic mission orders arrived to "claim Taiwan for God."  The early Protestants had much more success among the Pepohoan-the "civilized aborigines"- then they did among the Chinese.  After this movement waned and ministries among the Chinese became more responsive and stable, missionaries commenced to work among the various groups of "raw savages" in the high mountains and adjacent areas (Ibid., p. 104)

This continued even after Taiwan was annexed by Japan in 1895. In fact, it was Japan's success in pacifying the tribes, particularly the more rebellious Tayal and Sediq, that helped to prepare for the entrance of the Christian faith, not only to these two groups, but to all of the original inhabitants.  On the other hand, the Japanese effort in the mid-1920's to push its own nationalistic Shinto faith and persecute Christianity led to a period of crisis (Ibid.).

When he gained power, Koxinga established his headquarters in Anping, the new name for Zeelandia, and his capital at nearby Sakkam, the present-day Tainan.  He instituted Chinese laws, customs, and administrative procedures to replace the old Dutch ones.  Inasmuch as Christian churches were found largely among the aborigines or the Dutch citizens, there was no witness, as far as is known, among the Chinese (Ibid.).

Koxinga, of course, had not been friendly to the Dutch missionaries or the aboriginal Christians.  Whether this was due to his antipathy to the Christian faith or to his perception that these people seemed more to be Dutch civil servants and traitors than Christians is a matter of debate. After his death, his son, Cheng Ching, apparently following his father's policy, offered to release the Dutch magistrates, clergy and wives-about 100 in all-if the Dutch would agree to oppose the new Manchu government on the mainland.  The Dutch preferred to work with the new government, and this offer was not accepted (Ibid.).

Koxinga became close friends with an Italian Dominican missionary, Vittorio Riccio, whom he had met in Amoy.  He confided in him.  With a hopeless ambition to take the Phillippines, he appointed Riccio to be both his ambassador to the Spanish governor in Manila.  When these hopes were dashed after Koxinga's death, Riccio continued as advisor to Cheng Ching.  Eventually he became the "vicar" of the Formosan mission and meridional China.  It is said that "a European friar converted into an ambassador for a Chinese pirate was a novelty" (Davidson, The Island of Formosa, n.p., n.d., pp. 51-52).

Roman Catholics had indicated an interest in returning to Taiwan as early as 1847, but it was not until 1859 that two Dominican friars from Manila, accompanied by three Chinese catechists arrived in Takao (present-day Kaohsiung).  Their initial contact with the magistrates was not cordial.  Only by the intercession of a European opium dealer, then living on a barge in the harbor, were they permitted to stay and to commence religious work (Covell, p. 112).

The beginning of missionary work in Taiwan at this particular time after nearly 200 years of Christian silence is related closely to the situation in China.  Modern Protestant missionary work outside of Europe and America, apart from that which grew out of the chaplaincy of the Danish mission in India in the early 1700's, and the Dutch in Taiwan in the 1600's, did not really develop until the late 1700's or early 1800's (Ibid., p. 113).

Since the prohibition of Christianity in 1724, and the temporary disbanding of the Jesuits in 1773, Chinese Catholic Christians had undergone periods of severe persecution.  No new missionaries were able to enter the country.  When Protestant missionaries, beginning with Robert Morrison in 1807, sought to evangelize China, they had to be content to build a "wall of light" about China from their bases in Macau, Canton, Malacca, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, and Batavia.  They were not able to enter China proper (Ibid., pp. 113-114).

English Presbyterians commenced their missionary activity in China in Amoy along the South China Sea coast in 1847.  When by the treaties of 1858, Taiwan was "opened" to foreigners , Douglas Carstairs and H.L Mackensie, English Presbyterian missionaries in Amoy, made an exploratory trip to Tanshui in the north.  They brought two Amoy Christians as well as a large supply of books and tracts with them.  Since the language of Amoy and of the local Chinese on Taiwan was the same, it was easy for them to evangelize.  They were unaware of the earlier Dutch efforts and assumed that they were preaching the Gospel for the first time there (Ibid.).

A question which is in order for us today is the following: If Christians comprise only 3% of the population in Taiwan, do we need to redefine what it means to "win Taiwan for Christ?"  Does the Christian Church have to find a way to coexist with the other communities of faith on the island?  Can Christians work in unity for the good of the people of Taiwan by putting aside their theological differences?  In the next paper, we will seek to address how Taiwanese Liberation Theology addresses the issues of sovereignty, land rights, etc.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Visiting Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College

Religion in Taiwan

In order to understand the role that religion has played in Taiwan's history, it is necessary to take certain things into consideration.  They are:

1.  Religion, from a Judaeo-Christian standpoint, is considered humankind's attempt to reach and understand God.

2.  The Judaeo-Christian tradition purports to be God reaching out to humankind through self-disclosure.

3.  Liberation Theology seeks to discover the liberating elements in all religions.

The world in which the original inhabitants of Taiwan lived, was filled with spirits.  Although the tribal groups had differing religious customs and beliefs, they were united in their traditional religion that all of life was controlled by spirit activity. Spirits existed in all of nature-the trees, mountains, rivers, rocks, wind, and the earth.  For the most part, these were evil.  They might be thought of as "spirits" or "gods."  Most prominent among the spirits were the ancestral spirits. Depending on the good or bad conduct of the departed one, these spirits could be beneficial or evil.  People tried to communicate with them and offered sacrifices to them (Ralph Covell, Pentecost on the Hills of Taiwan.  Pasadena, California: Hope Publishing House, 1998, p, 20.)

The ancestral rites varied according to the customs of each group.  The Paiwan and Rukai had ancestral houses and men's houses, and in the latter could be found ancestral statutes.  In some literature, these two houses are referred to as "temples (C. S, Yang, "Animism in the Mountain Tribes of Taiwan." Southeast Asia Journal of Theology, April 1969, p, 29)"

The Paiwan had three levels of ancestral figures: the "grandfather" who must be recognized as the most important for every ritual; the "father" who was worshiped chiefly for harvest and sowing festivals, and the "son," who was responsible for rituals associated with warfare.  Paiwan ancestral rites were done as needed, annually or in five and six-year cycles.  (Yao-Te-hsiung, Formosan Aboriginal Culture Village.  Nantou Count: Aboriginal Culture Village Tourism Co. Ltd, 1987, p. 138)

The Tayal and Sediq also had ancestral rites, but these were not associated with special ritual places or with any specific physical representation of the spirits.  As with other tribes, they had special terms to refer to the spirits.  With the Tayal, the term was "rutux," and with the Sediq, it was either the general word for "spirit (utox)," or the word for "wind (bighorn)." (Covell, p. 20).

The Sediq term "utux," has a wide meaning.  It referred to the spirits of the natural world, to ancestors, to a being who knew all about human conduct., and to what was seen in a dream.  If the words good or bad were used before "utux" as modifiers, he meaning was good luck or bad luck.  No terms existed for an evil spirit, only a term meaning "a spirit to be feared (Ibid, pp. 29-21)."

The Amis used pictures, rather than statutes, to remind them of their ancestors.  The Tsou put the old clothes of their ancestors in a basket and made sacrifices to it (Ibid, p. 21).

Creator Gods

With the Tayal and Sediq, if the terms "rutux" or "utux" are not used with modifiers, the indication is that they refer to the ancestor(s), then they indicate a "high god."  They believe that this one controls the entire universe, including human beings.  He knows about all the inequities that humans face.  Even if there are wicked people who mistreat others, the victims are not to retaliate because the "spirit above" knows about this.  He will take revenge either through judgement now or in the future upon the perpetrators of evil (From a text by Wiran Takoh on that which he heard from his father on the "utux)."

The Sediq and Tayal have no clear concept of creation.  And when people die, if all conditions have been met, it is to the home of the rutux or utox that they go (Covell, p, 21).

The Puyuma believe that there is a creator god who gives a soul to human beings and that at death, the soul returns to this one.  It is not known where this god came from or whether he is personal or impersonal (Yang, "Animism in Mountain Tribes, pp 29-31)."

The Yami have a complex hierarchy of divine beings.  Various "gods" exist on the highest levels as well as humans who have taken on divine qualities.  Some of these deities have specific names such as Nunurao, Shipariud, Shibairai, and Shinunmanuri.  Each has responsibility for a particular sphere of human existence.  Within this system there are no creator gods or those who exercise retribution on the human race (Arundel Del Re, Creation Myths of the Formosan Natives.  Tokyo: Hokuseido Press, n.d. pp 53-71).

The Amis also recognized special deities as a part of their religion, with no clear boundaries between "gods" or "spirits."  An exact listing of these is difficult, since names differed from district to district.  The most common of the deities was Malatau, who was created, but yet had the power to bring sickness and death.  Tsidar was the sun goddess and Bolal was the moon god (Robert Donnell Mc call, "Conversion, Acculturation, and Revitalization: The History of Fataan Amis Presbyterian Church."  Unpublished D. Miss. Dissertation, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1995, pp.67-68).

In the hierarchy of the gods, the Amis placed these three at the top.  Just below them were the Tatakusan, a generic name for all of the ancestral spirits.  Those responsible for worship and the rituals were the Cikawasai or shamans, and the Kakitaan or priestly families (Ch'en Chi-lu and Michael Cove, "An Investigation of the Ami Religion."  Quarterly Journal of the Taiwan Museum, vol. 7, pp. 249).

The interaction of these several gods was best seen in the ancient "ilisin" ritual, the Amis New Year Festival.  The chief priest, the priestly families, and members of the senior and junior grades were the most active participants in this ceremony intended to purify and renew the worshiping community (Covell,p. 22).

Religious Intermediaries

In their practice of traditional religion, all of the original inhabitants depended on the mediation of the shamans.  Usually younger or older females, shamans were thought to have developed such an intimate relationship with the spirits that their ecstatic dancing, crying, and ritualistic acts could overcome any evil or produce the desired blessing.  On the negative side, this included cure from illness, overcoming misfortune caused by a broken taboo, casting out evil spirits, praying for rain and interpreting bad dreams.  On the positive side, this included divination or predicting the future, presiding over the various agricultural festivals to insure and give thanks for good crops, the erecting and finishing of houses, boats, and community buildings, and the celebration of enemy heads.  They sometimes were asked to help interpret birds, although the common people learned the meaning of certain bird calls or flight in a certain direction.  Proper understanding of this determined whether or not the men would go hunting, whether omens were favorable for taking a head, or whether some type of danger was lurking (Ibid.).

In these various activities, the shamans used magic and often were in a state of ecstasy. Their function was not that usually associated with a priestly figure who was not possessed with the spirits to the same extent.  They depended more upon experience, attention to ritual procedure, and their reputation within the community (Eugene A. Nida and William Smalley, Introducing Animism. New York: Friendship Press, 1959, p. 29).

The frenzied activity of the priests and priestesses was that which most impressed some of the 17th-century Dutch missionaries when they first visited the "raw savages" of the high mountains.  They reported that" "Temples are everywhere to be met with, there being one for every sixteen houses: and while all other nations have priests to perform religious ceremonies, this is done by priestesses called "inibs."  The inib sacrifice the heads of the pigs and deer, which they are accustomed first to boil somewhat, and then, to place before their gods with some rice, strong drink.  Thereupon, two of the priestesses rise and call upon their gods with a horrible shouting and screaming, so furious that their eyes stand out of their heads as they foam at the mouth, causing them to look as if they were either demon-possessed or suffering from madness.  On recovering, the two priestesses climb to the roof of the temple and stand, one at each end, calling upon their gods in a violent way.  Every article of clothing is now laid aside, and they appear stark naked before their idols, to honor them and move them to answer prayers by the exhibition of, and continual touching of their female parts (William Campbell, "Formosa," in James Hastings, ed.  Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1995, vol. 6, p. 84).

The Sediq did not regard the shaman as highly as did many of the other tribes.  In fact, the village chief made some of the sacrifices to the streams, mountains, or trees.  The shamans were known to all.  They were not selected as such, but gained recognition by their success.  Each village had two or three families referred to as "mhoni."  All within the family-not merely the females-had this power.  The mhoni cast their spells, not face, but by putting a curse on a person from a distance.  If the people within a community knew a person or a family to be a mhoni, they killed them.  Often if a person were suspected of being mhoni, the potential accuser would come and say "Put a curse on me."  In this situation, the mhoni would not dare do anything, since by putting a curse on the accuser, if that person should die, the others would now that a person was a mhoni and kill him (Material obtained from Sediq Informants).

Religion is thriving in Taiwan.  Political candidates sometimes secure their promises by beheading a cock, thus making their oath directly to the gods.  New temples have popped up everywhere; many are unlicensed, but the government has problems closing them because no workers are willing to tear them down.  Buddhist clergy often preach for hours on television, and movies about various gods and temples are frequent.  These examples attest to the health of religion in Taiwan and to the ways in which it is embedded in everyday life (Robert Weller, "Identity and Social Change in Taiwanese Religion," in Taiwan: A New History, Murray Rubinstein, ed.  Armonk, New York:  M.E, Sharp, Inc., 1999, p. 340).

The embeddedness of religious practice in Taiwanese life has linked it closely to changing notions of identity.  The close ties among religion, kinship, and community have made temples and rituals an arena in which we can see historical changes in contending notions of self and society, especially in the absence of a higher religious authority that could attempt to impose such an interpretation.  Religious practice has both shaped and been shaped by Taiwan's history, and speaks especially clearly about ethnic identities over time, the changing nature of social marginality, and the current dilemmas of modernity (Ibid.).

Contemporary Taiwanese History

This essay covers the history of Taiwan from 1895 under Japanese rule to the present.

After many centuries of being occupied and ruled by various countries (Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch), Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 at the conclusion of the Sino-Japanese War.  This sudden act ushered in a fifty-one year period of colonial rule that is now undergoing a major reassessment.  Up until recently, appraisals of the Japanese period generally reflected two contrary frame of reference: a positive perspective highlighting the achievements brought about under a colonial regime, and an anti-imperialist orientation featuring the harsh Japanese rule and the hardships suffered by the island's population (George W. Barclay, Colonial Development and Population in Taiwan.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, pp. 6-8).

Sinophiles and exponents of Chinese nationalism subscribed to the latter view in keeping with their anti-Japanese sentiment.  This led to a highly biased historiography by which resistance to colonial rule was emphasized and constructive measures were often slighted or ignored. In post-colonial Taiwan, after the colony's retrocession to China in 1945, the Japanese period tended to be discredited as a dark age or as a mere cipher wedged between Taiwan's late Chi' ing and Nationalist eras, when Chinese mainlander governance prevailed (Harold J. Lamley, "Taiwan Under Japanese Rule, 1895-1945: The Vicissitudes of Colonialism" in Rubinstein, p. 202).

Japan's annexation of Taiwan was not the result of long-range planning.  Instead, this action came about by way of strategy adopted during the war with China and diplomacy carried out in the spring of 1895.  Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi's "southern  strategy," supportive of Japanese navy design, paved the way for the occupation of the P'eng-hu islands in late March as a prelude to the takeover of Taiwan.  Soon thereafter, while peace negotiations were still in progress, Ito and his minister of foreign affairs, stipulated that both Taiwan and P'eng Hu were to be ceded by imperial China (Edward I-Te Chen, "Japan's Decision to Annex Taiwan: A Study of Ito-Mutso Diplomacy, 1894-95," Journal of Asian Studies, p. 37, no. 1, November 1977, 66-67).

The acquisition of Taiwan marked an historic occasion for Japan.  An island province and its inhabitants had been wrested from China and the status of a colonial power achieved.  Moreover, extraterritorial privileges in China had been gained as an outcome of a war highlighted by impressive military and naval victories.  In East Asia, at least, Japan now seemed to have almost gained parity with the Western powers that it could continue to emulate, boasting modern armaments, and overseas empires (Marious Jensen, "The Menji State: 1868-1912," Modern East Asia:  Essays in Interpretation.  James B. Crowley, ed., New York: Harcourt Brace, and the World, 1970, p. 115).

The vicissitudes of colonialism were such that the Taiwanese never had control over their own destiny.  In 1895, Taiwan had been ceded to Japan, much to the consternation of the inhabitants, and painful years of resistance had ensued. Thereafter, the Taiwanese were not granted home rule, and allowed only a limited measure of self-government.  They were not appointed to high office in the imperial government.  In 1945, when Taiwan was ceded to China by Japan, the Taiwanese once more came to governed by "outsiders," only this time they would dominated by the Kuomintang and mainland Chinese instead of by Japanese authorities (Lamley in Rubinstein, p. 248).

Japan's fifty years of colonial rule over Taiwan ended on October 25, 1945.  At a brief ceremony in Taipei, the island returned to China, then governed by Chiang Kai-Shek's Nationalist Party.  The simple transfer of sovereignty accomplished in a single day, however, belies the complexity and contradictions of the 1945 -1948 period, which blended a troubled decolonization with an abortive reintegration into China (Steven Phillips, Taiwanese Political Aspirations Under Nationalist Chinese Rule, 1945-1948, in Rubinstein, p, 276).

Even after 1945, the colonial experience remained an important factor in determining the course and content of political activity in Taiwan.  The Taiwanese relied upon their collective memory of Japanese rule to create frameworks for evaluating and interacting with the Nationalist government (Steven Harrell, Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan.  Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982, pps. 117-128).

Reintegration of Taiwan into China, which had ruled the island from the 1600's until 1895, was no simpler than decolonization.  Although the mainland, sometimes called the "motherland," was the source of most of the island's population, the legacy of Japanese rule assured that reintegration was marked by ambiguity, and then conflict.  Furthermore, both Taiwan and mainland China had changed so much between 1895 and 1945-politically, socially, and economically-that the retrocession was less the restorations of historical ties than the attempt to forge an entirely new relationship (Phillips in Rubinstein, p. 276).

Because of their limited knowledge of Taiwan, well-justified animosity toward all things Japanese, and the pressure of reconstruction and civil war on the mainland, the Nationalists sought tight control over the economic and political life of the island.  The central government delegated to a provincial administration staffed almost exclusively with the mainlanders.  As they had during the colonial era, the Taiwanese attempted to maximize the island's autonomy within a larger political entity, in this case, the Republic of China (Ibid).).

Decolonization and reintegration began with the interregnum, two months of uncertainty between Japan's surrender in mid-August 1945 and the Nationalist takeover in late October.  From late 1945 through mid 1946, the Nationalists attempted to solidify their control over the island, causing considerable hardship and increasing tensions between the provincial administration and the population.  The Taiwanese, even as they broke with their past in the process of decolonization, consciously and subconsciously recalled Japanese rule as they navigated their way through this extraordinarily difficult period.  Islanders wrestled two interrelated problems: Where did they fit in the nation of China?  What was their place in the Nationalist state?  To many, China appeared chaotic and backward-a potential drain on the island's resources and a threat to stability.  The Nationalist state failed to meet many standards of acceptable governance that the Taiwanese had formed under the previous regime.  Increasingly, they saw the mainland government and its representatives on the island as new, yet less competent colonial rulers.  Reintegration became to many of them, recolonization.  Taiwanese criticism of the state mirrored calls for expanded provincial autonomy (Ibid., p. 277).

In early 1947, simmering tensions between state and society exploded in what became known as the 2-28 incident.  Taiwanese quickly took control of the island from an ill-prepared provincial administration.  Although the elite did not lead the uprising, they used the opportunity to demand a large role in governing the island and controlling its resources. After a week of tense negotiations, military reinforcements arrived from the mainland, crushing all opposition, massacring thousands of the island's inhabitants.  The process of decolonization made a quantum leap forward as those who had invoked the memory of the Japanese era to justify political reform were killed or cowed into silence.  After the incident, the state dominated debate over Taiwan's place in China and the Nationalist Party.  Subsequent changes in the political and economic spheres came from and through the regime, not as a result of the Taiwanese themselves.  The high point of reintegration was 1948.  By the end of that year, the collapsing Nationalist regime had retreated to the island.  Communist victory and US support for Chiang's regime assured that by 1950, Taiwan was isolated more completely from the mainland than at any time under Japanese rule (Ibid.).

Linguistic differences resulting from colonial rule became a point of conflict between the Taiwanese and the new administration.  Over fifty years of spoken Japanese had come to replace the common Chinese dialects among the better educated.  In response, the Nationalist Party struggled to spread the use of better Mandarin Chinese, literally "national language."  In April 1946, the government established a committee for the promotion of Mandarin.  While most Taiwanese enthusiastically studied their new language-whether out of patriotism, drive for profit in the Chinese market, release of curiosity stifled by the Japanese, or simple self interest is difficult to say-there were several problems with the government's approach.  The state vastly overestimated the speed at which the Taiwanese could learn Mandarin well enough to discuss political issues, and read and write materials. This prove especially troublesome for those seeking positions in the provincial administration.  Even in the Provincial Consultative Assembly meetings of 1946, translation was required as so few representatives could speak "standard Mandarin (Ibid, p. 285).

In debates carried out through factions, the press and representative assemblies, the Taiwanese linked the colonial legacy with their immediate concerns over Nationalist rule.  Perceptions of the provincial administration's corruption and ineptitude, defined by standards derived from the experience of Japanese rule, motivated a drive for reform.  The goal of the reform-greater self-government-represented a return to a political movement from the pre-retrocession era.  Only by showing that they had not been "tainted" by Japanese influence, could the Taiwanese justify their participation in political activity or criticism of the government.  Many Taiwanese faced the dilemma of reconciling pride in their Chinese cultural background with the reality of Japanese military power, institutional efficiency, and economic modernization (Ibid, p. 288).

The February 28 incident epitomized the collision between decolonization and reintegration.  The drive for self-government linked these two complicated processes.  Taiwanese concerns, amorphous at the time of retrocession, then increasingly specific and linked to criticism of Nationalist policies in 1946, finally exploded in concrete anti-state action in early 1947.  Islanders briefly overthrew the provincial administration and attempted to change their relationship with the central government.  The Nationalists reacted brutally, crushing the island's elite as a political force, capable of operating outside the mainlander-dominated state, i.e. the Kuomintang (Ibid, p. 293).

The state eventually cleared a path for innovative policies to promote development that is today characterized as the "economic miracle."  Few prominent Taiwanese would dare oppose measures such as rent reduction and land reform, even if they did not think it was in their best economic interests.  In the political realm, the Nationalists blocked any change in the relationship between the state and the Taiwanese society.  Restrictions on civil society grew in scope and severity as Chiang Kai-Shek and the remnants of his defeated army retreated to the island, beginning a "White Terror" in 1949.  Thousands of Taiwanese and recently arrived mainlanders were killed , arrested, or intimidated for their alleged ties to the Communists.  The Korean War and resulting support for Chiang's regime was the final step in solidifying the relationship between Taiwanese and the Nationalist government, creating a pattern that would exist for almost forty years.  Although mainlanders represented a minority on the island, the Nationalist government had no fear of overthrow by the Taiwanese.  It was not until the 1980's that the Taiwanese could safely advocate a political agenda of their own.  Economic development and resulting change enlarged a middle class that increasingly pressured the state for more democratic reform.  Also, Taiwanese gradually came to dominate the Nationalist Party and government from the inside-thus making both institutions more amenable to the interests of the island's people (Ibid., pp. 302-303).

Two major things have happened in Taiwan after the time that has been mentioned in this essay.  In 1971, Taiwan was for all effects and purposes, "unseated" at the United Nations, in that the position formerly occupied by Taiwan in this world organization, was now ceded to the People's Republic of China.  It was a very disappointing experience for the Taiwanese nation, as in effect, this action led to the "One China (including Taiwan) Policy," meaning that there is only one China whose government is based in Bejing.   In a very indirect manner, this also meant that the People's Republic of China had the right to claim absolute sovereignty over the island of Taiwan.  This matter is still unsettled in the international community.

In 2000, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) became the dominant political entity in Taiwan.  Since then, the people of Taiwan have lived under conditions of democracy under a party which has not imposed itself on the people, but which rather, represents the interests of the majority of the people of Taiwan.  Only time will tell if the KMT returns to power or tries to influence the DPP in order to pressure Taiwan to return to the orbit of the People's Republic of China.

Taiwanese Liberation Theology: Taiwan in Historical Perspective

Theology does not and cannot take place in a historical vacuum.  In order for us to understand any theological movement or system, we need to first be familiar with the context in which it emerged and developed.  Since theology did not "fall from the sky," we need to take into account the geographical context, the people affected, and the factors which led to its emergence and development.  We need to be familiar with the social and political factors that gave rise to theological systems.  In this essay, we will consider Taiwan's history, and then utilize that history to understand how Liberation Theology developed and is developing in that region of the world.

There are today, at least 380,000 people in Taiwan now officially called "Taiwan Aboriginal Peoples," who are speakers of Austronesian languages.  Their dozen extant and dozen extinct languages are agreed to be the most archaic of the Indonesian of that vast language family.  Their cultures and physical attributes, which are quite varied, also identify them as Austronesian people.  There have been human settlements in Taiwan since at least fifteen thousand years ago, in the paleolithic age.  By the seventeenth century, there were several ethnolinguistically distinct groups settled in Taiwan.  However, we cannot yet explain the development of such ethnic diversity (Michael Stainton in "The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins," Taiwan: A New History.  Murray A. Rubenstein, ed.  Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1999, p. 29).

The original inhabitants are considered to be loyal citizens of the Republic of China.  Those under 50 years of age who have had any education, will be able to converse with some ease in Chinese Mandarin, the national language.  While many work as farmers, some serve as doctors, dentists, teaches, lawyers, and business persons in Taiwan's cities.  Unless one goes into any one of their villages and views a special tourist performance, one may not be able to distinguish them from the Chinese.  Their village homes are replete with many of the conveniences of modern life, i.e. electricity, refrigerators, air conditioners, modern propane stoves, TV, VCRs, and computer.  They drive modern cars equal to those driven by the Chinese.  Nearly politically conscious in Taiwan's emerging multipolitical society, they have emboldened to insist on justice for what they perceive as past inequities.  Their lifestyle is rapidly entering into all phases of modern industrial society (Ralph Covell, Pentecost on the Hills of Taiwan.  Pasadena: Hope Publishing House, 1998, p. 2).

This adaptation to modern life does not mean that they have abandoned their traditional culture.  Dancing and music, hunting, special foods, gracious hospitality, their own languages, ancient tales of early ancestral exploits, and hard work all serve to remind of the past and give a needed foundation in their ongoing search for self-identity (Ibid.).

There are various theories regarding the origins of the aboriginal people of Taiwan.  In 1889, the Dutch Indologist Henrik Kern proposed the "southern origin" theory of the Austronesian languages.  He suggested that the bearers of this language family came from Southeast Asia and moved eastward through the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos, northward to Taiwan, and eastward into the Pacific.  In Kern's time, Indonesia was a Dutch colony.  In the southern origin theory, Taiwan is a dead end, valuable as a living museum (Stainton, p. 29).

For aboriginal people in Taiwan, establishing the boundary between themselves and the Chinese was a constant issue in the period up to the early 1990's.  ROC (Republic of China) nationalist "history" insisted that they were "a branch of the Chinese nation."  Drawing a line between Taiwan's prehistory and China is also a counter-argument to Chinese claims that "Taiwan has been a part of China since ancient times (Ibid, p. 32)."

Lin Hui-hsiang, an anthropologist at Amoy University, visited Taiwan and wrote a monograph suggesting a northern theory of origin.  He also published an article "Research Into Taiwan-Stone Age Tools,", which would possibly lead one to conclude that Neolithic humans in Taiwan had close relations with the southeast continental coast, and floated across the sea.  In Lin Hui-hsiang we see the development of the northern original model as new data and new ideas are entered into the selection process.  But we can also see that this development parallels the change in the political position of Taiwan in relation to China -from an island of no special import in 1929, to the search for roots of the Chinese nation in a period of nationalism being constructed against Japan in 1936, to the position of Taiwan as the unrecovered province of China after 1949 (Ibid., p. 34).

In 1963, Isidore Dyen proposed that Taiwan might be the place from which the Austronesian languages originated.  He proposed that the place of origin of the Austronesian languages should be the place where the greatest number of language families is concentrated.  If there are more than twenty languages in an area the size of Vancouver, Taiwan, according to this theory, is logically the place to look for the origin of this language family (Ibid., p. 37).

The people in Taiwan are comprised of many ethnic groups.  Hoklo and Hakka, which came from Fukien and Kwangtun provinces in China during the seventeen and nineteenth centuries, constitute about 87% of the population.  Aborigines, which came more than 5,000 years ago from the Philippines, Okinawa, and most probably Malaysia and Indonesia, constitute less than 2% of the population.  Chinese mainlanders who fled to Taiwan after the Communist takeover in 1949, constitute about 11% of the population.  There are marked differences of languages and customs among these groups.  Friction and tension between native Taiwanese (Hoklo, Hakka, and Aborigines) and Chinese mainlanders developed as soon as Chinese mainlanders arrived in Taiwan.  The primary sources of animosity between the two groups was the dominant position of Chinese mainlanders on Taiwan.  Throughout the years, however, the differences in social and economic status within each group tend to blur ( Chen Nan-Jou, ed. A Testament to Taiwan Homeland Theology: The Essential Writings of Wang Hsien-Chi. Yeong Wang Cultural Enterprise Co. Ltd., p. 11).

Historically, there are also divisions within each group.  Tensions between groups or within a group (eg., Chuanchou and Changchou origins of the Hoklos, different tribes of the Aborigines) on Taiwan have been exploited by the different intrusive rulers.  The colonial rulers employed the rule "divide and rule" strategy to aggravate these tensions and to hold on their possessions in Taiwan.  Serious uprisings against Ming or Ching Chinese rulers, or Japanese rulers were frequent and intensive. There were also several great rebellions. It became common to say of Taiwan: "Every three years an uprising, every five years a rebellion."  However, long-standing ethnic and subethnic feuds prevented the formation of an effective united force to revolt against the common colonial rulers.  In a way, the intrusive rulers on Taiwan in the last four centuries had been successful in suppressing the rise of Taiwanese consciousness with the nationalistic implications (Ibid., p.12).

Although the existence of the so-called "Taiwanese people" conceptually and ethnically speaking is real, the term is ambivalent, much depending on the ruler's attitude.  In the Japanese colonial documents, people on Taiwan are called "Taiwanese," and Japanese people in Taiwan are called "natives."  But later on, the Nationalist government in Taiwan prohibited any public usage of the term "Taiwanese people," conversely it asserts that there are only "Chinese" people in Taiwan, including those Aboriginal tribes who are "granted" with Chinese names by the local Chinese bureaucrats.  This Taiwanese/Chinese complex becomes very confusing only domestically, but also internationally (Ibid.)

The preceding information serves as a foundation for us to understand how theology is constructed in the Taiwanese context.  The subsequent essays on colonialism, land rights and sovereignty will place into perspective the emergence and development of what can properly called "Homeland Theology."

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona
Visiting Professor of Theology
Tainan Theological College/Seminary

The Church Behind The Gates

In this final essay on theology from a prison standpoint, I would like to talk about the prison church, or as I referred to in the volunteer training sessions which I conducted, "The Church Behind the Gates."  The title of this essay may come as a surprise to some, as many, if not most of us, are used to thinking of the Church as in institution of society and as a place where people gather together for fellowship, study, and worship.  I will not say that these concepts about the Church are wrong, but I will say that the Church is that and more.  

In the strictest sense of the word, the Church is a gathering of people of different backgrounds and walks of life who have been transformed by the liberating message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  It is a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, international, and interracial community of people who have in common their allegiance to and faith in Jesus Christ.  It is also a community that consists of people who together with Christ, commit themselves to combat systemic and structural injustice wherever it may be encountered and manifested.

During the 17 years that I served as the Protestant Chaplain at the Groveland Correctional Facility in Sonyea, New York, the concept of prison ministry (at least for the Protestant community) was changed.  Initially, the volunteers who came to conduct Bible study, and to assist in the worship services by preaching, came with the attitude that they were there to "minister to the residents."  Over a period of time, they came to accept their role in the prison ministry as a partnership with the residents, rather than seeing the residents as "targets of mission." Initially, the residents were recipients of the ministry of the chaplains and the volunteers.  By the time I retired in 2009, they were considered fellow-workers.

In the last five years before my retirement, a program of theological studies was carried out in conjunction with Jesus the Liberator Seminary. This seminary was a Buffalo, New York-based organization that had a program where students would complete courses in biblical studies, church history, ministry, and theology.  This was a correspondence program that residents would complete independently.  The Groveland Correctional Facility served as the first prison to have an "on site" program, where several residents who had degrees in religious studies and in other areas, would together with me, teach the courses of the program.  Those who completed the ten courses would receive a Certificate in Theology and would be able to use the courses as partial credit towards an undergraduate degree with Empire State College, and independent studies program of the State University of New York.  One of the resident instructors had received a Master of Professional Studies degree from the New York Theological Seminary through a program that they conducted at the Ossining (Sing Sing) Correctional Facility.  Upon his parole two years later, he founded a church in Auburn, New York.

Some of the volunteers who came in to the prison with an attitude of paternalism and moral superiority, withdrew their services because they could not stand the idea that these residents were on an equal footing with them in terms of ministry.  They came in with the notion that they were coming to "bring Christ" to the prisoners.  When they realized that Christ was already there in the lives and ministry of the residents, it became challenging and difficult for them to continue coming.

Other volunteers gladly accepted the new structure.  They saw the residential leaders not as people who needed Christ, but as people who had already been transformed by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit to carry out the ministry of Jesus Christ in that environment.  When they witnessed and participated in the celebration of the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, they came to realize that the Church of Jesus Christ is not geographically or physically bound to any one location, but exists "wherever two or three are gathered in Christ's name."  They also came to acknowledge the "Church Behind the Gates" as being an integral part of the world-wide Body of Christ where "the word is duly proclaimed, and the Sacraments duly celebrated."

One day before my retirement, the resident elders of the prison church and I gathered together in a special meeting to "dissolve" the pastoral relationship between the congregation and me. One of the resident elders, who possessed an undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Syracuse University was commissioned as a resident pastor.  He continued to serve in that role with the new Protestant Chaplain until the day of his parole.

I will not say that this model of governance is the perfect model for the prison church.  I would, however, state, that if nothing else, there is an indication that there is a vibrant community of faith behind the gates.  Liberation Theology, which I alluded to in the previous essay, is the model which this church utilizes in its governance and ministry.  The prison church continues to live on in the midst of "fire, dungeon, and sword."  To God be the glory!

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona

Visiting Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary