THE IMPACT OF CHRISTIANITY
Christianity impacted the Hmong
community quite early in China. Not only were Roman Catholic
missionaries from the Paris Foreign Missions Society (MEP) working
in the areas of Guizhou, Yunnan, and northern Vietnam where the
Hmong lived, but also Protestant missionaries, particularly from
the Methodist churches and from the interdenominational China
Inland Mission began working among the Hmong and A Hmao peoples
from the last quarter of the nineteenth century in both Yunnan and
Guizhou provinces. They were not as successful in Guizhou, but in
Yunnan several mass conversions were made by one of the first
missionaries, Samuel Pollard from Cornwall, attached to the Bible
Christian movement that later merged into the United Methodist
Mission. Pollard (and his son Walter) left several accounts of his
work in China at this time and the deprived and desperate position
his Hmong and A Hmao converts were in after the failure of their
various uprisings against harsh Chinese rule. In some case he
interceded for them against wicked or corrupt Chinese landlords and
magistrates. It was Pollard who, with A Hmao helpers, designed the
first script for any Miao language, a form of writing that is still
being used by the A Hmao of Yunnan province. There can be no doubt
that converts at this time were in a desperate economic and
political position and welcomed the teachings of Christ as a beacon
of hope in their history.
However, from the start there were
confusions and misinterpretations of understanding, which,
according to Pollard’s own writings, caused him considerable grief
and upset. Many of the converts took the words of the Bible too
literally, believing that the Day of Judgement was already at hand,
and that the Messiah, whom they identified as a Hmong one, was
shortly to be born. The pronunciation of Jesus as “Yesu” sounded a
little like the name of the Hmong deity Yawm Saub, so they became
confused. In one case a Miao woman claimed to be the sister of
Christ and went around winning converts. And it is more than
probable that, hearing that Pollard had bought a Book that was
specially for them, as he put it, and coupled with the fact that he
was designing a form of writing for their language into which the
Bible could be translated, many converts believed that this was the
fulfillment of the prophecy that one day the lost form of Hmong
writing would be restored to them. Without going too much into
history here, these movements and mass conversions of Hmong to
Protestant forms of missionary Christianity have continued to occur
at regular frequent intervals in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand up
until the present day. In the midst of the unhappy wars in Laos in
the 1960s, for instance, three Hmong men traveled about the country
claiming to be the Holy Trinity and seeking to convert other Hmong.
Around the same time the Communist Party of Thailand tricked many
Thailand Hmong into leaving their villages and fleeing to what
turned out to be a communist base in Chiangrai province by
spreading rumors of the birth of a Hmong Messiah there.
The impact of Christianity on the Hmong
has been dramatic, unlike the slow adoption of Buddhist values and
practices, and it has differed somewhat between different churches
and sects. In general the Catholic missionaries have taken a more
long-sighted view of Hmong culture and custom and in many cases
actively encouraged or sponsored the documentation of traditional
Hmong practices such as the death rituals and shamanic ceremonies.
Protestant missionaries such as the Presbyterians who worked in
Thailand have generally adopted an approach that is much more
culturally intolerant, often burning household altars and
forbidding any kind of ancestral or funeral practice. And different
sects have adopted different approaches; for example, the
Seventh-Day Adventists were known for not allowing even the
consumption of pork in northern Thailand. In the last two decades
further changes have taken place in the spreading of Christianity,
because most pastors now are Hmong themselves, unlike tthe fairly
recent past when the missionaries were almost all American, French,
or from other Western nations.
In Vietnam, and to a lesser extent in
Laos, Christianity is still disapproved of by the socialist
authorities, and in Vietnam the increasing Hmong adoption of
Christianity in recent years has been seen as a sign of their
wishes for subversion and has been savagely repressed with the
slaughter of household animals belonging to Hmong Christians, their
arrests, and even their executions. The Chinese government, too,
keeps a very careful watch on mass adoptions of Christianity by the
Hmong in its border provinces. The Hmong response to this
persecution has been in some cases flight (several families
disappeared into Burma from Yunnan for this reason in the 1990s),
and particularly in Vietnam, even suicide. The Christian faith has
a very strong appeal, partly because it originated from Western
missionaries, whom the Hmong have traditionally identified as
powerful advocates who would deliver them from oppression by other
local dominant groups. Christianity also teaches about the second
coming of Christ, which meshes with Hmong mythical belief about the
coming of a Hmong king to unite all Hmong under his rule as it did
with the converts made by Pollard. In such cases Christianity may
be seen by converts as a part of their culture and traditions, an
aspect that offers them hope in the face of oppression.
The kinship-based clan or lineage is
important in Hmong society at every level and there is a customary
need to perform ancestral and shamanic rituals at times of life
crises and at particular points in the annual calendar to affirm
and maintain that identity. However, once an individual or even a
family or group of families converts to Christianity, it becomes
virtually impossible for communal social activities, such as those
at weddings, funerals, or even the New Year, to be performed
together any more. Villages in Thailand and elsewhere have become
severely fragmented by these issues. It is fair to say that
families, lineages, and whole communities have been riven by
divisions between Christians and non-Christians. There are cases of
shamans converting to Christianity, or of fathers whose sons refuse
to follow them, or of children converting for reasons of strong
faith against the wishes of their parents.
Many younger Hmong also convert on the
pretext that the Hmong traditional rituals that each married male
has to perform for his family are too difficult to learn, or are
not relevant to their modern needs. However, in many cases these
conversions are matters of genuine faith and belief and arise from
a feeling that the older Hmong beliefs are superstitious or based
on fear, as pointed out by Dowman. Often a succession of
unfortunate events such as illness or crop failure is pointed to as
the result of the conversion, or refusal or failure to convert. In
Canada, the United States, and elsewhere conflicts over the
adoption of Christianity have become endemic. In these countries it
was often local churches that sponsored the arrival of Hmong
refugees after 1975 and some converted out of a sense of obligation
to the sponsors, while others came into conflict with their
sponsors as occurred with the sponsorship of Hmong families by the
Mennonites in Canada. In Australia the conversion to Christianity
of a Hmong shaman who had been sponsored to come to the country
owing to the shortage of shamans caused deep resentment as the
individual concerned was seen as reneging on his commitment and
using the conversion to avoid his community obligations. For a
Christian, perhaps the most serious issue is the inability to take
full part in the funeral rituals for the soul of a deceased
relative or parent. However, debates and disagreements have also
centered on other ritual events and practices such as customary
weddings and the traditional practice of bridewealth
payments.
An important contributing reason to the
rifts that have developed within the Hmong community over the
adoption of Christianity has been that some Christian
denominations, especially in the United States, are so rigid in
their teachings that they dismiss all Hmong traditional practices
as paganism, so that their Hmong converts are forced to cut off all
ties with their relatives and clan members who remain faithful to
the Hmong traditional system. Some sects see all traditional
rituals as tainted by demons, and converts are not allowed to join
in any feasts arising from these rituals. This kind of cultural
intolerance further erodes mutual obligations between family and
clan members, because the more fundamentalist Christian Hmong may
refuse to provide help with family celebrations or community events
that involve some religious activities. Despite this, some of the
bigger Hmong churches are active with their own missionary work
among fellow Hmong in China and Southeast Asia, both through
conversion in the field and through missionary radio broadcasts
from the United States and the Philippines.
One must not forget the agony of
individual decision-making that the adoption of Christianity
involves in many cases, besides the communal conflicts drawn
attention to here. Cases of conversion back and forth several times
are very common. Many Hmong may wish to become Christian or leave
their ancestral belief system behind, but feel constrained by the
presence of an elderly parent or relative for whom the absence of a
traditional funeral would be a calamity. Where a girl from a
traditional family marries a Christian Hmong, or a brother converts
against the wishes of his father, the personal traumas caused can
be tremendous. At Hmong New Year in the United States, Christian
Hmong also hold a family feast but combine it with Christian songs
and blessings, while some hold the feast in a restaurant or hotel.
It has become more of a private, family celebration than a public
event, and may not be held on the exact date.
The issue in the wider sense comes down
to one of Hmong identity and how being Hmong is to be defined in
the future. The introduction of Christianity often challenges this
very identity, the traditional leadership structures and often the
traditional authority of men in the family, so that it involves not
just relations between men and women, but also relations between
the younger generation and their elders, and the traditional aspect
owed by wives to their husbands as by youth to their elders. So the
issue of the adoption of Christianity becomes conflated with other
changes in the relations between genders and generations that are
taking place in the new lives of the Hmong today, not just in the
United States or other advanced economies, but also in the rapidly
modernizing society of Thailand and the more urbanized parts of
Asia where Hmong families and individuals live. Many members of the
older generation may feel that the younger generation are losing
their Hmong culture and therefore their “Hmong-ness” by not being
able to speak Hmong, adopting ways seen as non-Hmong and turning
their backs on traditional customs. But others, not only among the
younger generation, feel that it is possible to remain Hmong while
adopting new ways and customs, and that being Hmong may and indeed
should be defined in different ways from those of the
past.
Besides membership of the Catholic
Church, many Protestant groups, including the Christian Missionary
Alliance, the Assembly of God, the Baptist, Lutheran, and
Pentecostal churches, Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, there are
small groups of messianic Hmong who seek to revive the traditions
of their people in new and unexpected ways, such as a group of four
families in Australia who have retreated to the mountains of the
Atherton Highlands to practice a new faith with newly designed
rituals that they see as traditional and as a way of remaining
Hmong in the face of pressures to become Australian. And there is a
small community of Hmong in Portland, Oregon, who converted to the
Baha’i faith in Laos, where some believers still remain.
Despite these conflicts and divisions,
the overwhelming majority of the Hmong today remain attached to
some degree or other to the more traditional beliefs of their
ancestors, and even those in Western countries often try to
maintain traditional practices of ancestor respect and shamanism as
best they can. Behind these beliefs there is a strong substratum of
wisdom and belief in the harmony of nature and the need of humans
to live in appropriate accord with the natural world that remains
an encouragement and inspiration for many Hmong people.
Gary
Yia Lee and Nicholas Tapp, 2010, Culture and Customs of the
Hmong