{"id":895,"date":"2021-10-14T09:17:32","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T09:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/?p=895"},"modified":"2021-10-14T09:17:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-14T09:17:32","slug":"the-capitalism-of-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/2021\/10\/the-capitalism-of-christianity\/","title":{"rendered":"The Capitalism of Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The opening of Japan in the mid 1800s resulted in an intellectual exchange between Japan and the \u201cWestern\u201d world as Western countries vied to establish ties with Japan and to exert their own cultural influence on the country.\u00a0 While the general model for imposing cultural conventions is through capitalist systems, Christian influences took a different approach.\u00a0 The prevalence of capitalism in the nineteenth century permeated all aspects of life in the United States and many European countries, including missionary work.\u00a0 H. B. Cavalcanti uses the case of American missionaries in Latin America to demonstrate that even religion could be commodified and used as a means of exerting capitalist influences on other countries.\u00a0 He describes the competition between American Christian denominations which \u201ccompeted openly in the American religious market, vying for \u2018shares\u2019 of the country’s faithful (Finke and Stark 2000). Once those churches established foreign-mission programs, it was only natural that they tried to reproduce in host countries similar market conditions to the ones enjoyed at home.\u201d[1]<\/a> \u00a0While the spread of capitalism in the nineteenth century seemed to be an unstoppable force which, among its other political, economic, and social consequences, effectively exported Christianity globally, this was not the case in Japan.<\/p>\n

Instead, the diplomatic relations between Japan and Russia led to a transnational exchange of ideas which led to the emergence of a form of religious anarchy.\u00a0 Sho Konishi argues that this cultural exchange was highly influenced by the popularity of Russian literature translated into Japanese.[2]<\/a> \u00a0Populist Russian literature introduced new, and complemented existing solutions to \u201csocial problems\u201d which both countries were facing in the aftermath of their revolutions.\u00a0 A running theme in translations of Russian literature was that \u201c\u2018society\u2019 began to be defined in this context as a problem of unfettered capitalism.\u201d[3]<\/a> \u00a0The socialist and anarchist themes in Russian literature built off pre-existing anarchist traditions in Japan, creating an anti-capitalist base among Japanese intellectuals.<\/p>\n

This Russian translation culture was not only anarchist in nature, but Christian as well.\u00a0 Konishi uses the popularity of Leo Tolstoy in particular to illustrate this fact.\u00a0 Just as \u201cTolstoy became a dangerous apostate of the Russian Orthodox Church, he was gaining a widespread religious following in Japan, where many regarded him as a prophetic religious thinker and a saint.\u201d[4]<\/a> \u00a0But, the Christian ethic which was popularised by Tolstoy does not conform to either the typical Western Christian theology or the methods of its dissemination.\u00a0 Instead, \u201cThe resulting conversions to what was called \u2018Tolstoyan religion\u2019 (Torusutoi no sh\u016bky\u014d) or \u2018religious anarchism\u2019 (sh\u016bky\u014dteki an\u0101kizumu) in Japan occurred in the total absence of the converter, that is, without a missionary or church institution.\u201d[5]<\/a> \u00a0Unlike the missionary organisations which operated in other countries, Christianity in Japan was not the result of capitalist systems imposing religious doctrines, but a unique religious theory which rejected the very idea of capitalism.\u00a0 This \u201creligious anarchism\u201d was both a political stance and a utopian dream for a future universal human religion.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> H. B. Cavalcanti, \u201cThe Right Faith at the Right Time? Determinants of Protestant Mission Success in the 19th-Century Brazilian Religious Market,\u201d Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion<\/em> 41, no. 3 (2002): 423\u201338, http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/1387454, 423.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Sho Konishi, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan<\/em>, 1st ed. Vol. 356 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2013), https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2307\/j.ctt1x07vz6, 95.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ibid., 74.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid., 93.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid., 95.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The opening of Japan in the mid 1800s resulted in an intellectual exchange between Japan and the \u201cWestern\u201d world as Western countries vied to establish ties with Japan and to exert their own cultural influence on the country.\u00a0 While the general model for imposing cultural conventions is through capitalist systems, Christian influences took a different … Continue reading “The Capitalism of Christianity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,6,25,135],"class_list":["post-895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anarchism","tag-christianity","tag-japan","tag-russian-literature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":896,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895\/revisions\/896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/world\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}