GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Evangelical Christianity in Asia presents a complex picture. Only one country, the Philippines, can in any way be compared to Brazil, being the only nation-state with a Christian (Catholic) majority and a growing evangelical minority. Another country with a unique experience is South Korea (and the whole of Korea before division, and possibly the whole of it again when unification comes), being the only country in Asia where Protestantism has reached significant proportions and entered the national mainstream. Protestantism there is not a ‘minority’ religion in a sociological (rather than statistical) sense, that is, as lodged primarily in a politically and/or economically marginalised ethnic or caste group (as with Dalits and tribals in India, Chinese and indigenous minorities in Malaysia and Indonesia, tribals in Myanmar). Protestantism has achieved a remarkable relationship to Korean national identity, something still unthinkable for believers (even though not from ethnic minorities) in Taiwan and Singapore, still less in China itself.

If evangelicalism in Latin America relates to a traditionally hegemonic Catholicism, and in parts of Africa to Islam, Asia presents a more complicated religious field. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Japanese religions have proved impermeable to Christianity, which (except in Korea) has achieved African or Latin growth only where those religions have not penetrated, and especially where oppressed tribal groups have shown interest in acceding to modernity by means of a world religion which is not that of their immediate oppressors.