Online Lecture: Between Missionaries and Neighbors - The Formation of the Nineteenth Century Northern Thai Protestant Community

20. Mai 2022, von AAI Webmaster

Foto: pixabay

We kindly invite you to this online lecture organised by the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies and the Department for Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia on Friday, May 20, 2022, 14 - 16h CEST.

The Northern Thai Protestant community from its inception in the 1870s wrestled with the conflicting ideological expectations of its Western missionary patrons and the religious expectations of its Buddhist/animist neighbors. In the hothouse of these contending expectations, Northern Thai Protestants created a new religious community in which they reimagined missionary Christianity in ways that made sense to them culturally while putting religious, social, and physical distance between themselves and their neighbors. They accepted missionary beliefs but then pared down the Western dualisms inherent in those beliefs while transforming the missionaries’ emphasis on right thinking (orthodoxy) into a more culturally appropriate emphasis on correct religious behavior (orthopraxy). The result is a hybrid Christian community that arguably is as northern Thai as are other northern Thai and as Protestant as are the Protestantisms of other nations. This community’s experiences offer a window into the way in which the various peoples of Thailand continue to wrestle with the religious tensions between their historical ways of life and secularizing modernization.

This lecture will be held by Dr. Herbert Swanson who is a retired historian who has devoted his academic career to the study of northern Thai Protestantism. He was the founding director of the Payap University archives and then the director of the Office of History of the Church of Christ in Thailand. He lives in Chiang Mai and teaches a course in Thai church history at the McGilvary College of Divinity, Payap University.

The lecture will be held in English and can be attended via Zoom. For the link and more information, kindly refer to our Flyer (PDF).

We would like to thank the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies for the cooperation.