Christian Voices and Buddhist Publics: Urban Evangelism in Contemporary Burma

• In Event: Buddhist Secularism? Interrogating the Relation between Buddhism and Religious Plurality in Burma/Myanmar and Thailand

Abstract

Recent developments in Burma have reignited longstanding debates on the relationship between Buddhism and local forms and conceptions of democracy. These debates are often shot through with the normative insistence that rational and secular voices entering into public discourse are the proper stuff of liberal democratic life. This paper takes the actual projection of religious voices into everyday urban spaces, sometimes through loudspeakers, as its starting point – using them to examine how democracy, and the boundary between public and private, are being renegotiated and redefined by different vocal actors during this time of political and economic ‘transition’. I focus in particular on practices of Christian evangelism that are occurring in spaces of religious diversity, in the shadow of a proposed anti-conversion law, and against the backdrop of several hundred years of missionary activity in Burma. Using this history, I locate contemporary moments of evangelism in Yangon as the latest in a long series of encounters between Buddhism and Christianity in the country – encounters which have contributed to shaping how the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ have been considered up until the present day. I conclude by showing how Burmese Christian evangelists, operating within and against these genealogies, reference democracy and Buddhism in their navigation and contestation of political spaces emergent in the ‘transition’.

Author

• Michael Edwards, London School of Economics