Then & Now | Rice Christians: converts who are devoted to material benefits rather than religious faith

Materially opportunistic religious adherents arrived in the region in the wake of European voyages to maritime Asia from the 16th century. Commonly known as “rice Christians”, they have a long and generally distasteful history in Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

The term “rice Christians” appears in the writings of William Dampier, an English explorer (and occasional privateer-pirate) who visited Indo-Pacific waters in the late 17th century. Dampier dismissively wrote of the French Catholic priests active at that time in Indochina, opining that “alms of rice have converted more than their preaching”.

Even allowing for then-widespread doctrinal animosities between Catholics and Protestants, similar observations could be made throughout much of recent Chinese history, and disturbing examples appear in literature from pre-liberation China. Hosanna and Philomena Wang, the venal professional catechists found in A.J. Cronin’s moving novel The Keys of the Kingdom (1941), partly set in the Chinese interior in the first decades of the 20th century, are noted literary exemplars, and archetypes abound in other works.

Nobel Prize laureate Pearl Buck’s memoirs, such as My Several Worlds (1954), and her China-themed novels contain references to rice Christian types found on the fringes of her era’s missionary community. China’s Communists loathed them, and many of them rapidly and pub­licly jettisoned their religion once Mao Zedong came to power, in 1949.

For centuries across Asia, many of those who wished to benefit from education systems with better resources than the norm (as well as improved opportunities for economic advancement later) converted to Christianity, at least notionally and visibly. In these schools, alumni networks were as important as academic excellence, and being a co-religionist made life easier.