War-torn Afghanistan is a world away from South Korea in distance, culture and condition. Yet for almost three weeks millions of Koreans have been glued to their television and computer screens hoping for some good news from Afghanistan, where twenty-three of their compatriots (Christian missionaries and volunteers) were seized by Taliban rebels while travelling from Kabul to Kandahar on 19 July 2007. Two have since been killed by their captors, and thousands of Koreans have held candlelit vigils and other events to publicise the survivors' agony and press for their release. For many more Koreans, a faraway land that was once on the periphery of their consciousness has brutally taken centre-stage. In 2004, a similar drama involving Korean missionaries (one of whom was decapitated by insurgents) had brought Iraq too into the consciousness of ordinary Koreans.
Nayan Chanda is editor of YaleGlobalOnline.
He is the author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization (Yale University Press, 2007)The plight of such missionaries arouses worldwide sympathy and concern. In this, it is a replay of countless such events that have shaped globalisation. One episode in 16th-century Japan provides an early example of the continuing global interconnectedness. In 1597, the shogun Hideyoshi had twenty-six Christian missionaries and lay persons (including ethnic Koreans, Spanish friars and Indian and Mexican-born missionaries) crucified in Nagasaki. Although there was no internet or satellite TV, the news still spread. The martyrs of Nagasaki offered the church fresh material to inspire the faithful and galvanize the conversion effort. Christian faithful in Mexico led processions bearing the images of those martyred in a faraway land called Nippon.
It is thanks to the efforts of foreign missionaries that Korea's population, once majority Buddhist (another imported faith that Koreans transmitted to Japan) is now one-third Christian. Korean Christians have also turned out to be among the most committed in their attempts to preach the faith and gain converts. With some 16,000 missionaries scattered in 150 countries, Korea is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries leaving its shores.
The embrace of faith
As I argue in my book, Bound Together, preachers have historically played an important role in connecting geographically dispersed human communities. Proselytisation has always been accompanied by the exchange of goods, ideas, and practices, shaping the multicultural world we know. Similarly traders, adventurers, and warriors left, and continue to leave, their places of birth to satisfy the desire for power, wealth or knowledge. They were unconscious globalisers. They had no idea what "globalisation" was (for the word entered the English dictionary only in 1961) but the exchange of people, goods and ideas that resulted from their long-distance travels over the millennia brought about a fusion and resulted in an interconnected world. In recent decades those connections have accelerated. The exponential growth of travel and trade created the need for a new word to describe the process. "Globalisation" is merely a new word for a venerable phenomenon.
The world's first evangelist, in the figurative sense of the word, was Gautam Buddha. Founder of the world's first universalist religion, Buddha urged his disciples to fan out to the four corners of the earth to spread the teachings of Dharma: "Go forth, O monks, for the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world. Teach, O monks, the Dharma." It was thanks to the zeal of Indian, Chinese, and other monks who traversed thousands of miles of the most inhospitable terrain that the Buddhist faith was carried to China, Korea, Japan and southeast Asia.
The trade along the Silk Road connecting east and west Asia was given a huge boost by this effort to spread Buddhism. Offerings of silk cloth to Buddha's image and Buddhist icons were important items of trade, helping to make this network of roads to emerge as the major transmission-belt of goods, ideas and culture between the east and the west. The Chinese zeal for Buddhist texts taken to China and translated into Chinese produced the world's first printed book on paper; the Diamond Sutra was published in the mid-9th century, long before Johannes Gutenberg built his press. Indian sugarcane was introduced to China by monks who sucked lumps of sugar to cut their fast-induced hunger pangs. Even China's own product, tea, was popularised in the country by monks who drank it to stay up late to pray. (Around the same time in another part of the world, Islamic preachers popularised coffee-drinking for the same purpose - to stay awake to pray. Born in Ethiopia, spread through west Asia, coffee was often called "Islamic wine").
Christians were inspired by a similar command to evangelise. The "great commission" urged Christians: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." Within a few decades, the first Christian reached India and his efforts to convert others cost him his life. In the two millennia since the religion's birth, missionaries, colonial governments, and occasionally the force of arms, have succeeded in bringing a third of humanity into its fold.
openDemocracy writers explore the outer limits of a world transformed by globalisation:
David Held, "What are the dangers and the answers? Clashes over globalisation" (11 October 2004) - the culmination of a debate involving Anne-Marie Slaughter, Meghnad Desai, Maria Livanos Cattaui, John Elkington, and others
Alex MacGillivray, "Wonderful shrinking world"
(19 April 2006)
Doreen Massey, "Is the world getting larger or smaller?"
(15 February 2007)
Saskia Sassen, "Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit"
(17 July 2007)Even where the missionaries had limited success in winning converts, their efforts had the effect of introducing the wealth of western culture, its history, science and philosophy to the east. In turn, missionaries brought back to Europe the cultural riches of the non-European world. The activities of the missionaries undoubtedly destroyed many indigenous cultures, but reinforced others by introducing modern printing technology. The spread of different faiths has led to the efflorescence of literature and art and inspired the creation of thousands of monuments - from the stunning architecture of Córdoba's La Mezquita (the Grand Mosque) to the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat.
The flag of unity
The ongoing tragedy involving Korean missionaries in Afghanistan highlights the continuing impact of missionaries in connecting the world. Unlike preachers in the past who traveled on camel-back or sail-ship, today's missionaries take commercial flights by the thousands and use radio, satellite television and the internet to carry their messages. Along with the traditional religious missionaries, today various secular organisations and individuals can be counted as modern-day preachers.
A greater awareness of human conditions around the world and a growing consciousness of the unity of the human species impel these new types of missionaries. Their faiths focus on saving all the species on earth, protecting the environment, and nurturing human life and dignity. With their idealistic fervour, human rights and environmental activists have launched campaigns every bit as passionate and devoted to these causes as many religious preachers. They have campaigned for freeing prisoners, ending human-rights abuse, debt forgiveness of poor countries, fair prices to commodity growers and against practices that endanger the global climate. The latest United Nations initiative to help the victims of the conflict in Darfur would not have happened without a sustained campaign by millions of modern-day missionaries for human rights, or what Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel called the "secular religion" of our time.
The net result of the action of these missionaries - old and new - has been to bind humankind with broader and thicker webs of religious faith and secular convictions. In so doing they have shaped the world that we know.
