Transnational Religion And Fading States by Susanne H Rudolph

Author:Susanne H Rudolph [Rudolph, Susanne H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9780429983092
Google: NvZKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-07T03:35:38+00:00

Six

World Religions and National States: Competing Claims in East Asia

DON BAKER

Historians have long been aware that the arrival of European and American gunboats and businessmen off the shores of China, Japan, and Korea in the nineteenth century changed East Asia dramatically and permanently. When Western weapons and merchants arrived on East Asian soil, they brought Western political and economic concepts with them. These new concepts undermined traditional East Asian approaches to waging war and trading goods, challenging and changing the ways that the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean states had related to other states and how they had related, politically and economically, to people both within and beyond their borders.

That encounter with the West changed not only the way East Asian states behaved but also the way they defined themselves. After their encounter with the West, China, Japan, and Korea could no longer remain kingdoms operating within the isolation of the Sino-centric world. In order to survive in a geopolitical environment not only very different from but also much larger than that to which they had been accustomed, they had to embark on a rapid and traumatic transformation into modern nation-states. Historians have frequently noted that this change in political and economic behavior and thought constituted a revolution in the prevailing Weltanschauung of East Asia. Few have noted, however, that as part of this change in the dominant worldview, traditional attitudes toward religion, and the relationship of religious communities to the state, were changed as well.

A major driving force behind this transformation of traditional East Asia has been the invention and promotion of nationalism by political elites determined to create strong nation-states with a greater sense of national unity and national identity than had ever before existed in that part of the world. These nationalist modernizers were convinced that if they did not respond quickly to the challenge of the modern world, with its Darwinian struggles between competing national political entities, they and their fellow countrymen would be swallowed up by stronger, alien political powers. They believed that their only hope for such a rapid response lay in harnessing the energies of their people toward one end and one end only—the construction of a powerful and wealthy nation. This could only be done by replacing the centrifugal loyalties to clan and neighbors of the past with centripetal loyalty to the state of the future.

One barrier to this redirection and unification of loyalty arose from an unexpected direction. The West, which had supplied the blueprint for the modern nation-state, also supplied a new paradigm for conceptualizing religion and managing church-state relations. This imported Western approach granted religious communities more autonomy than they had traditionally enjoyed in East Asia. Such autonomy appeared to threaten the national unity that these nation-building governments so desperately needed.

This threat to emerging national unity was heightened by the fact that representatives of transnational religious regimes living in East Asia were able, for the first time in history, to call on international support to defend their autonomy and to enhance their power.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.