The Civilisations That Did Not Bend

1China: The Civilisation That Watched Empires Rise and Fall

To understand why China did not convert to Christianity, you have to understand something about how China thinks of itself. For over 3,000 years, Chinese civilisation has had an unbroken sense of itself as the Middle Kingdom. The word for China in Chinese is Zhongguo, which literally means "the centre country". The Chinese saw their civilisation as the centre of the world, with barbarians and minor cultures arranged around them at the edges. This was not just arrogance. By most measures, for most of recorded history, China actually was the largest, richest, and most technologically advanced civilisation on Earth.

A Quick Tour of Chinese History

Let me give you the briefest possible tour of Chinese history, because the timescale is hard to grasp.

Chinese civilisation is usually dated to begin around 2000 BCE, with the legendary Xia dynasty. The first historically confirmed dynasty is the Shang, which ruled from about 1600 BCE to 1046 BCE. The Shang used a writing system that is the direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters. If you can read Chinese today, you can recognise some of the symbols carved on Shang oracle bones from 3,500 years ago. There is no other living writing system on Earth with that continuous a history.

After the Shang came the Zhou dynasty, which lasted from 1046 BCE to 256 BCE. That is almost 800 years. During this time, China developed most of the philosophical traditions that would shape it forever. Confucius lived from 551 BCE to 479 BCE. Laozi, the founder of Daoism, lived around the same time or possibly slightly earlier. Mozi, Mencius, Xunzi, and many other major thinkers all came from this period. The Zhou ended in chaos called the Warring States period, which lasted about 250 years.

In 221 BCE, China was unified for the first time by the brutal Qin emperor. The Qin dynasty was short lived but important because it standardised writing, weights, measures, and started building what would eventually become the Great Wall. The Qin was followed by the Han dynasty, 206 BCE to 220 CE, which lasted longer than the Roman empire and ruled about 60 million people at its peak. If you have ever wondered why Chinese people sometimes call themselves Han, this is why. The Han dynasty established Chinese cultural identity in lasting form.

After the Han came a period of disunity, then the great Tang dynasty from 618 to 907 CE, which was probably the high point of Chinese civilisation. The Tang capital Chang'an, modern Xi'an, was the largest city in the world with about a million people. It was a cosmopolitan place where Persian merchants, Indian Buddhist monks, Arab traders, and Japanese students all gathered. The Tang dynasty produced incredible poetry, art, and technology.

Then came the Song dynasty (960 to 1279), the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271 to 1368), the Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644), and the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912), which was the last dynasty before China became a republic. Each of these dynasties ruled tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. Each had its own great achievements. China invented paper, printing, gunpowder, the compass, mechanical clocks, paper money, the wheelbarrow, the umbrella, and many other things, often centuries before Europe.

The Three Teachings

The religious and philosophical life of China is sometimes called the Three Teachings, or in Chinese San Jiao. These are Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Unlike in the West, where religions are usually exclusive (you are either Christian or Jewish or Muslim, not all three), traditional Chinese people often followed all three at the same time. They might consult a Confucian text for matters of family ethics, visit a Daoist temple to pray for good fortune, and call a Buddhist monk for a funeral. The same person, same week.

Confucianism is more of a social philosophy than a religion. Confucius taught that society works best when people fulfil their proper roles. A ruler should rule wisely. A father should be a good father. A son should respect his father. Friends should be loyal. Confucianism is centred on ethics, family, and social order. It became the official ideology of the Chinese state for over 2,000 years. Most Chinese government officials had to pass exams testing their knowledge of Confucian texts. This created an unusual situation where the people running the largest empire on Earth were all trained in the same ethical philosophy.

Daoism, founded by Laozi and developed by Zhuangzi, is mystical and naturalistic. Its central concept is the Dao, which means "the way" or "the path". The Dao is something like the natural order of the universe, the underlying pattern that things follow when they are in harmony. Daoism teaches simplicity, spontaneity, and going with the flow of nature rather than fighting it. It has many gods and spirits, but it also has a deeper level of philosophy that is almost atheistic in feel. Daoism is what gave the world tai chi, qigong, feng shui, and many other practices that have spread globally.

Buddhism arrived in China from India along the Silk Road sometime in the first century CE. By the Tang dynasty, it had become hugely influential. Chinese Buddhism developed in its own unique directions, including Zen (called Chan in Chinese), which emphasised meditation and immediate insight over textual study. Chinese Buddhism was not the same as Indian Buddhism. It blended with Chinese cultural elements, including ancestor veneration and Daoist ideas about nature.

Together, the Three Teachings formed a sophisticated religious and philosophical ecosystem. Add to this the underlying layer of Chinese folk religion, which involves ancestor worship, household gods, local spirits, and a vast pantheon of gods of various kingdoms and professions, and you have a religious landscape that is incredibly rich and incredibly hard to convert.

The Jesuits Arrive: Matteo Ricci

The first serious attempt by Christians to convert China was made by the Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests known for their scholarship and missionary work. (A "Jesuit" is a member of the Society of Jesus, a highly educated Catholic religious order founded in 1540, famous for running schools and for difficult overseas missions.) The most famous of these was an Italian priest named Matteo Ricci, who arrived in China in 1582 and lived there for 28 years until his death in 1610. Ricci is one of the most fascinating figures in religious history, and his story tells us a lot about why Christianity could not break through in China.

Ricci was brilliant. He spent years learning Chinese, eventually mastering it so well that he could write classical Chinese essays that scholars admired. He studied Confucian texts and understood them deeply. He dressed in the robes of a Confucian scholar to gain credibility with the educated elite. He brought European mathematics, astronomy, and clockmaking knowledge as a way to demonstrate the value of Western learning to the Chinese.

Ricci tried something that no missionary had really tried before. He tried to present Christianity as compatible with Confucianism rather than opposed to it. He argued that the ancient Chinese had originally worshipped the same God as the Christians, that the Chinese term Shang Di (often translated as Lord on High) referred to the Christian God, and that ancestor veneration was a civic ritual, not idol worship.

This approach is called accommodation. Ricci was trying to make Christianity look like something Chinese intellectuals could accept without abandoning their cultural identity. It was a creative strategy.

And it partially worked. Ricci converted some Chinese scholars at the highest levels, including a few who became important members of the Ming dynasty court. By his death, there were perhaps a few thousand Chinese Christians. By 1700, there were maybe 200,000. This was tiny in a country of well over 100 million people, but it was real progress.

The Chinese Rites Controversy

Then it all collapsed. The reason it collapsed is one of the most important and least known stories in religious history. It is called the Chinese Rites Controversy. ("Rites" just means religious or ceremonial customs — here, mainly the Chinese custom of honouring dead ancestors.)

Other Catholic missionaries who came to China after Ricci, mostly Dominicans and Franciscans, looked at what the Jesuits were doing and were horrified. They said the Jesuits were not really converting Chinese to Christianity. They were just allowing Chinese to add Christianity to their existing practices. They argued that Confucian ancestor veneration was idol worship. They argued that translating the Christian God as Shang Di or Tian (Heaven) was a heresy.

The dispute went back to Rome. For nearly a century, the Pope and the Catholic theologians argued about whether the Jesuit accommodation was acceptable. In 1704, Pope Clement XI ruled against the Jesuits. He forbade Chinese Christians from venerating their ancestors. He forbade the use of Shang Di or Tian to refer to God. He ordered Christianity in China to look exactly like European Christianity.

This was a catastrophe for the mission. The Kangxi Emperor of China, who had been friendly to Christianity and had even allowed it to be practised in the imperial court, was outraged. He had earlier written a famous edict, the Edict of Toleration of 1692, that allowed Christianity to be practised in China. But when he found out that the Pope was forbidding Chinese Christians from honouring their parents and grandparents through ancestor rituals, he reversed his position.

By 1724, Kangxi's son the Yongzheng Emperor had banned Christianity in China entirely, except in Beijing. Missionaries were expelled. Chinese Christians went underground. The whole effort that had started with Ricci nearly 150 years earlier was rolled back almost completely. The Jesuit accommodation strategy, which had been their best chance at converting China, was dismantled not by Chinese opposition but by Catholic European theologians who could not tolerate any compromise.

This is one of the most important moments in the history of Christian missions. If the Papacy had let the Jesuits continue their work, China might today have a significant Christian minority similar to South Korea. Instead, the Chinese government concluded that the foreigners could not be reasoned with on religious matters, and the door was closed.

The Nineteenth Century: Christianity Returns by Force

Christianity returned to China in the 1800s, but in a very different way. By this time, China was being attacked by European powers in what are called the Opium Wars (1839 to 1842 and 1856 to 1860). Britain and France, primarily, used military force to compel China to open its ports to European trade, to legalise the British opium trade that was wrecking Chinese society, and to grant special privileges to Europeans. Among these privileges was the right of Christian missionaries to travel freely in China and the right of Chinese converts to be exempt from certain Chinese laws.

This was a disaster for Christianity in China. The religion was now associated with foreign invasion, opium, and the humiliation of the Chinese state. Christian converts were often seen as traitors who had aligned with the foreign aggressors against their own country.

There was also a strange and bloody chapter. In the 1840s, a Chinese man named Hong Xiuquan became convinced after reading some Christian missionary tracts that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He started a religious movement that grew into a full scale rebellion against the Qing dynasty. This was the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from 1850 to 1864. The Taiping movement was a strange syncretic version of Christianity, mixed with Chinese end-of-the-world traditions. (Syncretic means blending two or more different belief systems into one.) At its peak it controlled most of southern China and had perhaps 30 million followers. The Qing dynasty eventually crushed it with European help.

The Taiping Rebellion was one of the deadliest civil wars in human history. Estimates of the death toll range from 20 million to 70 million. Most modern historians put the number around 30 million. By comparison, the American Civil War, fought in roughly the same decade, killed about 750,000. The Taiping Rebellion was about 40 times more deadly.

When ordinary Chinese people thought of Christianity in the late 1800s, this is what they thought of. A movement that had killed tens of millions of their countrymen, led by a man who thought he was Jesus's brother, fought partly with European weapons. This was not the same image of Christianity as the calm Jesuit scholars who had visited Beijing two centuries earlier. The Taiping Rebellion poisoned the well for Christianity in China for generations.

The Boxer Rebellion and Anti Christian Backlash

By 1900, the resentment of Chinese people against foreign missionaries had built up to an explosion. A peasant movement called the Boxers, originally a martial arts and folk religion society, rose up against both the Qing dynasty (which they saw as too weak in dealing with foreigners) and against the foreign missionaries themselves.

In the summer of 1900, the Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Beijing, killing several hundred foreign missionaries and tens of thousands of Chinese Christians across northern China. The Boxers were eventually crushed by an international army of eight foreign powers, including Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and Russia. The foreign troops looted Beijing and demanded huge reparations from the Chinese government.

The Boxer Rebellion is sometimes presented in Western histories as an example of irrational Chinese xenophobia. Looking at it from the Chinese side, it looks different. After 60 years of being humiliated, invaded, forced to legalise opium, forced to accept missionaries who often acted as agents of foreign powers, the Chinese peasantry finally rose up. Their methods were brutal. But the conditions they were responding to were also brutal.

By 1900, after 300 years of effort, Christianity in China had perhaps two million Chinese converts in a population of 400 million. That is less than one percent. Despite massive investment by European missionary societies, despite the support of European military power, despite the work of brilliant individuals like Matteo Ricci, Christianity had failed to penetrate Chinese society in any meaningful way. The Chinese had received it, examined it, and largely rejected it.

Why? That is the question for the next chapter.

2Why Christianity Could Not Convert China

Some of the reasons Christianity failed in China are the same as the reasons it failed in India. Some are different. Let me walk through them carefully.

Reason One: Confucianism Already Filled the Ethical Space

In Europe, Christianity replaced pagan religions partly because Christianity offered something the old religions did not. A clear, written ethical system. A theology of compassion, forgiveness, and equality of souls before God. A community of believers organised across kingdoms. These were genuinely useful contributions to societies that were politically fragmented and ethically thin.

China already had all of this, in the form of Confucianism. Confucian ethics is one of the most sophisticated systems of moral thought ever developed. It has clear teachings about how to be a good person, how to be a good family member, how to be a good citizen, and how to govern wisely. Its sacred texts, including the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, and others, have been studied and commented on for over 2,000 years. When Christian missionaries showed up offering ethical teachings, Chinese scholars listened politely and then asked how their teachings improved on what Confucius had already said. The missionaries struggled to answer.

The Confucian teaching of the Golden Rule, for example, predates the Christian Golden Rule by over 500 years. Confucius said "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire" around 500 BCE. The Christian version, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," comes from the Gospel of Matthew around 70 CE. The Christian version is more positive in formulation, but the basic ethical insight is the same. Chinese scholars who knew their Confucius could point out that this and many other Christian teachings were not new. They were just translations of things their own civilisation had said long before.

Reason Two: The State Was Religious, but Not in a Way Christianity Could Use

In medieval Europe, the church and the state were partners. The Pope crowned emperors. Kings claimed divine right to rule. Religion legitimised political power. This meant that when a king converted, his subjects had to follow. The political and religious systems were tied together.

In China, things were structured differently. The Chinese emperor was called the Son of Heaven and his rule was justified by something called the Mandate of Heaven. But this was not a personal religious connection in the Christian sense. It was more like a philosophical and ritual position. The emperor performed rituals at the Temple of Heaven to maintain cosmic harmony. He was not a personal believer in any specific religion in the way Christian kings were.

This meant Christian missionaries could not use the "convert the king and the kingdom follows" strategy that had worked so well in Europe. Even if a Chinese emperor became personally interested in Christianity (and some did, including the Kangxi Emperor), he could not simply declare China Christian. The whole structure of Chinese religious life was different. It did not have a top down hierarchy that could be captured. It was more like Hinduism in this way. The religion was diffused throughout daily life, family rituals, local temples, and individual practice. There was no centre to convert.

Reason Three: Christianity Demanded Exclusive Loyalty

This is one of the biggest issues. Chinese religion was naturally pluralist. (Pluralist means comfortable holding several beliefs at once, rather than insisting on only one true one.) A Chinese person could be a Confucian in their ethics, a Daoist in their personal practice, a Buddhist at funerals, and still maintain a family ancestor altar at home. Mixing these traditions was normal and respected.

Christianity demanded that converts give up everything else. No more Buddhist prayers. No more Daoist amulets. No more ancestor altars. Only Jesus. This was a massive cultural ask. It meant cutting yourself off from your family traditions, your community rituals, and centuries of inherited wisdom. For most Chinese, the cost was simply too high. Why would you give up all of this to join a small group of foreigners and their Chinese converts?

The Chinese Rites Controversy made this worse. When the Pope ruled in 1704 that Chinese Christians could not even venerate their dead parents and grandparents, he was asking Chinese converts to commit what they saw as a profound moral failure. In Confucian thought, honouring your ancestors is one of the most basic duties of being a human being. To refuse to do this would mark you as a barbarian. The Christian demand to abandon ancestor veneration was a deal breaker for most potential converts.

Reason Four: The Chinese Knew Foreigners Lied About Religion

By the 1800s and 1900s, the Chinese had centuries of experience with foreigners claiming religious authority while pursuing political and economic gain. The Christian message of peace and love was contradicted by Christian governments forcing China to legalise opium, by Christian armies looting Beijing, by Christian missionaries claiming special legal privileges for their converts.

The credibility problem here was even worse than in India. China had not been fully colonised. China still saw itself as a great civilisation that was temporarily weakened. Chinese intellectuals could observe the gap between what missionaries said and what their governments did, and draw their own conclusions. Many concluded that Christianity was just another tool of Western power, dressed up in spiritual language to manipulate the gullible.

Reason Five: The Communist Critique Came at the Worst Time

In the early 1900s, just as Christianity was making some new headway in China through educational and medical missionary work, Marxism arrived. Karl Marx had famously called religion the opium of the people. He argued that religion was a tool used by rulers to keep the working classes pacified and accepting of their exploitation. He argued that religion would wither away as societies became modern and rational.

For young Chinese intellectuals in the 1910s and 1920s, who were trying to understand why their once mighty civilisation was being humiliated by foreign powers, Marxism offered an explanation. Religion, they decided, was part of the problem. Christianity in particular was the religion of the foreign oppressors. The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921, was officially atheist from the start.

When the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, they took an unfriendly view of religion. Foreign missionaries were expelled. Chinese Christian churches were taken over by the state and forced to break ties with foreign denominations. The Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 was particularly harsh. Religious sites of all kinds, Christian, Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian, were attacked. Temples were destroyed. Priests and monks were beaten or killed.

Christianity has actually grown in China since the 1980s, when religion was partially liberalised. Estimates of the current number of Chinese Christians range from 30 million to 100 million, depending on whether you count underground house churches. But this is still a small minority in a country of 1.4 billion. Christianity remains contained.

Reason Six: Chinese Civilisational Confidence

I want to end with the deepest reason, which is hard to quantify but is real. The Chinese have been a great civilisation for so long that they have a deep, often unconscious confidence in their own way of doing things. They have watched empires rise and fall. They saw the Mongols come and the Mongols leave. They saw the Manchus conquer them and then get assimilated. They saw Buddhism arrive from India and become Chinese. They have seen everything.

When Christian missionaries showed up promising eternal salvation if the Chinese would abandon their ancestors and embrace Jesus, many Chinese intellectuals responded with what amounted to a polite but firm "no, thanks." They were not closed minded. They studied Christianity. They thought about it. They considered its claims. And after consideration, most of them concluded that Christianity was a perfectly fine religion for the foreigners who needed it, but not something that improved on what China already had.

Jonathan Spence was probably the leading Western historian of China in the late twentieth century. His point captures something important. The Chinese were not anti religious. They were not anti foreign. They had absorbed Buddhism from India centuries earlier and made it their own. They could have absorbed Christianity too. But Christianity refused to be absorbed. It insisted on replacing everything. And once it became clear that this was the deal, the Chinese passed.

There is one more chapter to write about Christianity in China, which is what is happening now. In the past 40 years, Christianity has grown faster in China than in any other country. Some scholars estimate that by 2050 there could be 250 million Chinese Christians. If this happens, China might become the largest Christian country in the world by sheer numbers. But it is happening through ordinary Chinese converts in underground churches, often deeply at odds with the Chinese state, and the form of Christianity that is growing is heavily Chinese in flavour, often with traces of folk religion and pragmatic ethics that orthodox Christians would not recognise. Whether this is really Christianity conquering China, or China absorbing Christianity into its own framework, is a question for future historians.

For now, let us turn to the second great East Asian civilisation that resisted conversion: Japan. The story there is even more dramatic.

3Japan: The Island That Closed Its Door

The story of Christianity in Japan is one of the most extraordinary in religious history. Christianity arrived in Japan in 1549, spread rapidly for about 60 years, was then violently suppressed for over two centuries, went almost completely underground, and eventually re emerged in the 1800s as a small minority that it remains today. Today, less than one percent of Japanese are Christian. This is despite Japan being a wealthy, modern, democratic country that has been open to Western influence since the late 1800s. Why did Japan reject Christianity so completely? The answer is one of the most fascinating cases in the whole story.

A Quick Background on Japan

Japan is a chain of islands off the east coast of Asia. It has been inhabited for thousands of years, and Japanese civilisation as we know it developed mostly in the past 1,500 years. Japan was heavily influenced by Chinese civilisation, but it always maintained its own distinct identity. The Japanese borrowed the Chinese writing system, Confucian ethics, and Mahayana Buddhism from China, but they adapted all of these to fit Japanese culture.

Japan also has its own native religion called Shinto. Shinto is one of the most interesting religions in the world because it has no founder, no scriptures in the way we usually mean, and no real theology. It is a religion of kami, which is a Japanese word that does not translate well. Kami are spirits or divine forces that live in things, including mountains, rivers, trees, rocks, and ancestors. There are millions of kami in Shinto thought. Some are powerful gods. Others are local spirits of specific places.

Sound familiar? It should. Shinto is exactly the kind of nature religion that pagan Europeans practised before Christianity. Sacred groves, sacred mountains, sacred rivers, ancestor spirits. The Japanese never lost this. They still have it. Even today, Japanese Shinto priests bless new buildings and businesses. Mount Fuji is sacred. There are over 80,000 active Shinto shrines in Japan. The Japanese mostly do not call themselves religious, and yet they practise something that is unmistakably the same kind of religion that Europe had 2,000 years ago.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese were also generally pluralist. A Japanese person could be born with a Shinto baby blessing, get married in a Shinto or Christian style ceremony, and have a Buddhist funeral. These are not contradictions in Japanese thinking. They are different tools for different occasions.

Francis Xavier Arrives, 1549

The first Christian missionary in Japan was a Spanish Jesuit named Francis Xavier, who arrived in 1549. He was working under the Portuguese, who had reached Japan a few years earlier and established trade relations. Xavier was an extraordinary man. He spent only two years in Japan, but he made an enormous impression. He praised the Japanese as the most cultured and capable people he had met in Asia.

After Xavier left, other Jesuits continued the work. They learned Japanese. They studied Japanese culture. They presented Christianity in ways that Japanese audiences could understand. They were welcomed at first by some Japanese feudal lords (called daimyo) who were interested in Western technology, particularly firearms. (A "daimyo" was a powerful regional warlord who ruled his own domain under the Japanese system.)

The growth was rapid. By 1582, just 33 years after Xavier's arrival, there were perhaps 200,000 Japanese Christians. By 1614, the number had reached perhaps 700,000, in a country of about 20 to 25 million people. That is around three percent of the entire population, achieved in 65 years. By comparison, after 450 years of European presence, Christianity in India is still only 2.3 percent. The Jesuits had hit something special in Japan.

Several daimyo converted, including some powerful ones like Omura Sumitada in Kyushu, who turned his entire domain Christian and ceded the port of Nagasaki to the Jesuits. By the late 1500s, Christianity was on track to potentially become a major religion in Japan within a few generations. Some Jesuits in Rome were already imagining a Christian Japan that would convert China next.

The Crackdown Begins: Hideyoshi

Then everything changed. In 1587, the Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who was effectively the dictator of Japan at the time, issued an edict ordering the expulsion of all foreign missionaries. He did not enforce this strictly at first, but the policy was set.

Why did Hideyoshi turn against Christianity? Several reasons.

First, he had become suspicious that Christianity was a tool of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism. He had heard about what the Spanish had done in the Philippines, conquering it and converting it by force. He had heard about what the Portuguese had done in Goa. He correctly observed that wherever Catholic missionaries went, Catholic empires often followed. He did not want Japan to become like the Philippines or Goa.

Second, Christian Japanese daimyo were sometimes destroying Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines in their territories. This was a problem because it was attacking the deep cultural and religious fabric of Japan in a way the rulers found dangerous.

Third, the Jesuits were involved in the trade in Japanese slaves, particularly Japanese women being sold to Portuguese ships and exported across Asia. This was a moral scandal that the Japanese government found deeply offensive. The Jesuits eventually tried to prohibit this trade among their followers, but the damage was done.

Fourth, the Christians were too organised and too loyal to their religion over loyalty to Japanese authority. They were seen as a political risk in a country that had just gone through a century of civil war and was being unified under a single ruler.

The Twenty Six Martyrs of Nagasaki, 1597

In 1597, Hideyoshi finally moved decisively against Christianity. He had 26 Christians arrested in Kyoto, including six European Franciscan friars, three Japanese Jesuits, and 17 Japanese laymen including three young boys. They were marched 800 kilometres to Nagasaki, the centre of Japanese Christianity. There, on February 5, 1597, they were crucified on a hill overlooking the harbour. (A "martyr" is someone who is killed for refusing to give up their faith.)

This is one of the most famous events in the history of the Christian missions. The 26 martyrs were later canonised as saints by the Catholic Church. A memorial church now stands at the site of their execution in Nagasaki. The story of their courage in dying for their faith spread through European Christianity and is still remembered today.

But the crucifixion of the 26 martyrs was just the beginning. After Hideyoshi died in 1598, the situation got worse, not better. The Tokugawa shogunate, which took power in 1603 and would rule Japan for 265 years, intensified the persecution. (A "shogun" was the supreme military ruler of Japan; the "shogunate" was his government, which held the real power while the emperor was only a figurehead.)

The Great Persecution, 1614 to 1639

In 1614, the Tokugawa shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu issued a comprehensive ban on Christianity. All missionaries were ordered out of the country. All Japanese Christians were ordered to renounce their faith. Churches were destroyed. Christian property was seized. What followed over the next 25 years was one of the most thorough religious persecutions in history. The Japanese authorities developed extreme methods to find and eliminate Christians.

The most famous method was the fumi e, which means "trample picture." Authorities would set up a copper plate with an image of Jesus or Mary engraved on it. Suspected Christians were ordered to step on the image. If they refused, they were identified as Christians and arrested. If they stepped on it, they were considered to have apostatised and were spared. (To "apostatise" means to publicly abandon your religion.) Most who stepped on the picture did so under enormous psychological strain, knowing they were being forced to desecrate something sacred to them. Many later committed suicide from guilt.

Those who refused to apostatise were tortured to make them recant. The Japanese authorities became famous for their creative cruelty. Christians were thrown into boiling water at the Unzen hot springs. They were hung upside down in pits filled with excrement, sometimes with their veins partially opened to extend the dying process for days. They were burned alive. They were crucified, often left to die over days. The persecution was systematic and prolonged.

About 3,000 to 5,000 Japanese Christians were martyred for refusing to renounce their faith during this period. Many more were forced to apostatise. The Christian community of Japan, which had reached perhaps 700,000 people, was systematically destroyed.

The Shimabara Rebellion, 1637 to 1638

The persecution finally provoked a desperate uprising. In 1637, in the Shimabara region of Kyushu, peasants who were mostly former Christians rose up against their daimyo, who had been taxing them brutally. They were joined by ronin (masterless samurai) and former Christian samurai. The rebels gathered at a castle called Hara, where they raised crosses and Christian banners.

The Tokugawa shogunate sent a huge army of perhaps 125,000 men against the rebels, who numbered around 27,000 to 37,000 men, women, and children. The siege lasted four months. When the castle finally fell in April 1638, the shogunate executed almost everyone inside, including the women and children. Estimates of the dead range from 30,000 to 40,000.

The Shimabara Rebellion confirmed for the Tokugawa government that Christianity was inherently linked to political rebellion. The response was even more severe. Japan was effectively sealed off from the outside world.

Sakoku: The Closed Country, 1639 to 1853

In 1639, the shogunate issued the final Sakoku edicts. Sakoku means "closed country." Under these laws, no foreigners could enter Japan and no Japanese could leave. The only exceptions were a small Dutch trading post on Dejima island in Nagasaki harbour, and limited trade with China and Korea. Foreigners who arrived without permission were to be executed. Japanese who tried to return from abroad were also to be executed.

This policy was maintained for 214 years. From 1639 to 1853, Japan was almost completely closed to the outside world. The reason was almost entirely about preventing the return of Christianity. The Tokugawa government had decided that the price of being open to foreigners was the risk of religious conversion that would undermine Japanese identity. They chose isolation.

During these 214 years, Christianity in Japan went underground. Some Christians, known as kakure kirishitan ("hidden Christians"), continued to practise their faith in secret across multiple generations. They had no priests, no churches, and no contact with the rest of the Christian world. They developed their own forms of Christian practice, often heavily mixed with Buddhist and Shinto elements. They would gather quietly, recite remembered prayers in mangled Latin and Portuguese, and pass on their faith to their children.

When Western powers forced Japan to reopen in the 1850s, missionaries who returned were astonished to find these hidden Christian communities still existing in remote areas around Nagasaki. Some had preserved a recognisable form of Catholicism. Others had developed into something so different that they could not really be called Christian by orthodox standards anymore.

Modern Japan and Christianity Today

Japan was forced to reopen in 1853 when American naval ships under Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Edo Bay and demanded the right to trade. The Tokugawa shogunate eventually fell, replaced by the Meiji government in 1868, which set Japan on a path of rapid modernisation. Religious freedom was eventually established. Christian missionaries returned.

But the cultural memory of what Christianity had cost Japan in the seventeenth century did not disappear. Christianity in modern Japan grew, but slowly. By the early twentieth century, perhaps one percent of Japanese were Christian. By today, the number is similar. About 1.5 percent of Japanese identify as Christian. There are roughly 1.9 million Japanese Christians in a country of 125 million.

This is despite Japan being one of the most modern, urbanised, and Westernised countries in Asia. The Japanese have adopted Western clothing, Western technology, Western political institutions, and Western popular culture. They have not adopted Western religion. The Japanese are perhaps the most striking case in the world of a society that has modernised without religious conversion.

Some Japanese Christians have made important contributions. The novelist Endo Shusaku wrote Silence, one of the most acclaimed twentieth century novels about faith and persecution. It was made into a film by Martin Scorsese in 2016. Japanese Catholic theology has developed its own distinctive flavour. But Christianity remains a small minority religion in Japan, mostly because most Japanese never felt they needed it.

Today, polls show that around 80 percent of Japanese do not identify with any specific religion. Yet around 80 percent participate in Shinto rituals at New Year, get married in Shinto or Christian ceremonies, and have Buddhist funerals. The religion of Japan is mostly practised, not believed. People do not think hard about whether they believe in kami. They just live in a world where the rituals continue. The old gods are still there, in the shrines and in the mountains and in the small ceremonies of daily life. They never left.

This is what Europe lost. This is what Japan kept.

4Korea: The Great Exception, and What It Teaches Us

I want to spend a chapter on Korea because Korea is the great exception. Of all the major Asian countries, Korea is the only one where Christianity became a major religion. About 30 percent of South Koreans today are Christian. That is over 15 million people. Seoul has some of the largest churches in the world. There are Korean Christian missionaries operating in many countries.

How did this happen? Why Korea and not Japan or China? Understanding the Korean case actually clarifies why the other Asian countries did not convert. It shows what conditions are needed for mass conversion to actually work.

The Korean Context

Korea is a peninsula between China and Japan. (A "peninsula" is a strip of land almost surrounded by water.) Historically, it has been overshadowed by both. Chinese culture, Confucianism, Buddhism, and the Chinese writing system all entered Korea from China centuries ago. Korea developed its own civilisation, its own literature, its own technology (Korea actually invented movable metal type around 1234 CE, almost 200 years before Gutenberg in Europe), but it always felt a degree of vulnerability between two larger neighbours.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s, Korea was in a desperate situation. The country had been forced to open to foreign powers. Japan was rising as an aggressive imperial power and would eventually colonise Korea entirely from 1910 to 1945. Many Koreans felt their country was being destroyed. The traditional ruling class, the yangban, had failed to defend the country.

Korean Confucianism had been one of the strictest and most rigid in East Asia. The yangban had imposed a very hierarchical, oppressive social order on Korea. Lower class Koreans had no real path to advancement. Women had very few rights. The Buddhism that had been popular in earlier Korean history had been pushed aside in favour of state Confucianism for centuries.

So when Christianity arrived seriously in Korea in the late 1800s, it found a situation very different from China or Japan. It found a country where the traditional system was discredited, where many people were looking for alternatives, and where Christianity could be presented as the religion of modern, free countries (especially the United States, which became a major patron of Korean Christianity).

Christianity as a Tool of Resistance

Here is a key difference from China or Japan. In Korea, Christianity became associated with Korean nationalism and resistance to Japanese imperialism, not with foreign domination of Korea. American Protestant missionaries (and some Catholic ones) were seen as friends of Korea against the Japanese colonisers. They ran schools, hospitals, and universities. They translated the Bible into Korean using the Korean alphabet (called hangul) rather than the Chinese characters that the traditional elite used. This made Christianity accessible to ordinary Koreans, including women, in a way that Confucian texts were not.

Korean Christians played important roles in the resistance to Japanese rule. The March First Movement of 1919, a peaceful nationwide protest against Japanese occupation, was significantly organised by Christian leaders. Many Korean independence fighters were Christians. After Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945, Christianity was associated with Korean freedom and modernisation.

The Korean War of 1950 to 1953 made things worse. North Korea, under communist rule, brutally suppressed Christianity. Thousands of Christians fled south. South Korea, which had the support of the United States, became more Christian as Christians fled the communist north. The Cold War association of Christianity with the free, prosperous side of the conflict reinforced its appeal.

After the war, South Korea went through massive economic development. By the 1980s and 1990s, it was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. The Christian Korean middle class grew with the economy. Mega churches sprang up. Korean Christianity became distinctively Korean, with intense emotional worship, all night prayer meetings, and an aggressive missionary outlook. Today, Korea sends more Christian missionaries abroad per capita than almost any other country in the world.

What the Korean Case Teaches

Why did Christianity succeed in Korea and not in China, Japan, or India? Looking at the Korean case carefully, several factors stand out.

First, the traditional system had been discredited. In China, the Confucian state was still powerful when Christianity arrived. In Japan, the Tokugawa system was strong. In India, Hinduism was deep rooted and diverse. In Korea, the Joseon Confucian state had visibly failed. Many Koreans were looking for an alternative.

Second, Christianity was associated with national liberation, not foreign domination. American missionaries were resisting Japanese colonisation alongside Koreans. This is a complete reversal of how Christianity was perceived in China or India.

Third, the language strategy worked. American missionaries used the Korean alphabet, hangul, which had been invented in the 1400s but was looked down on by the Confucian elite as a women's script. By translating the Bible into hangul, Christians gave ordinary Koreans access to a holy text in their own everyday language. This made Christianity feel like the religion of the common people, in contrast to elite Confucianism in classical Chinese.

Fourth, the social opening was real. Christianity offered Korean women equality before God in a way Confucianism did not. It offered lower class Koreans dignity in a way the yangban system did not. The first universities in Korea, founded by missionaries, accepted students based on merit rather than birth.

Fifth, there was no equivalent of the Chinese Rites Controversy. Protestant missionaries in Korea, learning from the Catholic disasters in China and Japan, were more flexible. They allowed Korean Christians to continue ancestor veneration in modified forms. They adapted to Korean cultural sensitivities. They did not demand a complete break from the past.

Sixth, the Cold War gave Christianity unique geopolitical backing. Communist North Korea suppressed religion. Capitalist South Korea, allied with the deeply Christian United States, gave Christianity room to flourish. The geopolitical context favoured Christian growth in a way it never did in China or India.

Why Korea Is Not a Counterexample to the Larger Argument

Some people might point to Korea and say it disproves the argument that the great Asian civilisations could not be converted. But I think Korea actually strengthens the argument. Look at the conditions Korea had that needed to come together for conversion to work: a discredited traditional system, association with national liberation, accessible language, social opening, missionary flexibility, and supportive geopolitics.

China, Japan, and India had none of these conditions or only some of them. In China and Japan, the traditional systems were strong. In India, Hinduism was too decentralised to be discredited. Christianity was associated with foreign domination in all three. The missionaries were not always flexible enough. The geopolitics did not favour mass conversion.

Korea also shows us something important. Even where Christianity did succeed, it succeeded in a Korean form. Korean Christianity is not American Christianity. It has its own intensity, its own theology, its own cultural character. The pattern of indigenisation that we saw in Indian Christianity is also visible in Korea. (Indigenisation means a foreign thing being reshaped to fit the local culture.) When religions cross cultures, they get changed by the receiving culture. Christianity in Korea today has more in common, in some ways, with Korean shamanism (which has been suppressed but is part of the deep cultural background) than with American Protestantism.

The lesson here is that religions can be converted across cultures, but only when specific conditions are right, and even then the religion that emerges is usually a hybrid of the foreign source and the local culture. Pure replacement, which was what happened in Europe in the conversion from paganism to Christianity, is actually quite rare in history. It requires unusual conditions.

What were those unusual conditions in Europe? Why was Europe so susceptible to total religious replacement when most other major civilisations were not? That is the question for our synthesis chapter.

5The Real Lesson: Why Some Civilisations Did Not Bend

We have travelled a long road in this book. We have seen the slow conversion of Europe over a thousand years. We have seen the resistance of India over more than two thousand years. We have seen the rejection of Christianity in China and the violent rejection in Japan. We have looked at Korea as the great exception. Now I want to pull it all together and answer the central question.

Why did the old religions of Europe die while the old religions of India, China, and Japan survived?

I think there are six big reasons, and they work together. Let me lay them out.

Reason One: Decentralisation

I have said this several times throughout the book, but it deserves the central place. The pagan religions of Europe were not really one religion. They were many. The Germanic religion was different from the Celtic religion was different from the Slavic religion was different from the Greek and Roman religions. Each was decentralised, with local cults and local priests and local sacred sites.

But here is the key. None of them developed a strong central organisation to coordinate their resistance to Christianity. There was no Pope of paganism. There was no Vatican of the old gods. There was no organised pagan theology that all pagans across Europe shared. So when Christianity arrived, it could pick off individual kingdoms, individual priests, individual sacred sites, one at a time. The pagans could not coordinate a continent wide response because they had no continent wide organisation.

Hinduism, by contrast, had a similar lack of central organisation. There is no Hindu Pope. But Hinduism had something the European pagans never developed. It had a vast body of written sacred texts, including the Vedas, the Upanishads, the epics, and dozens of philosophical schools. These texts gave Hinduism a kind of intellectual centre that could not be destroyed by capturing any single temple or king. The texts were everywhere, in millions of copies, memorised by tens of thousands of priests. To destroy Hinduism you would have to destroy the texts and the memories of everyone who knew them. That was impossible.

Chinese religion also had a strong textual tradition, in the form of the Confucian classics, the Daoist texts, and the Buddhist sutras. Japan had less of this written tradition, but Japan had something else. It had its physical isolation as an island, and its eventual decision to close off contact with the outside world to protect itself from Christianity.

So the lesson is: decentralisation can be a weakness politically, but it is a strength when defending a religion against takeover. And decentralisation combined with a strong textual tradition is even better. European paganism had the weakness without the strength. The Asian religions had both.

Reason Two: Philosophical Depth

The pagan religions of Europe were not philosophically weak. The Greek philosophical tradition, which grew out of Greek religion, produced Plato and Aristotle, two of the greatest thinkers in human history. But here is the thing. The mainstream pagan religions of the Germanic, Celtic, Slavic, and Norse peoples did not have the kind of philosophical infrastructure that Greek and Roman paganism had. They had myths, rituals, and stories, but they did not have written treatises arguing about the nature of God, the soul, suffering, salvation, and ethics.

When Christianity arrived in these regions, it came armed with the Greek philosophical tradition (much of which the Church Fathers had absorbed) and with its own theology developed over centuries. The local pagan priests had no equivalent intellectual apparatus to push back with. They could not say "actually, your idea of one God and our idea of many gods both have philosophical merits, here is the argument." They could only fight or convert.

India and China had the equivalent philosophical depth. When Christian missionaries showed up in India, they met scholars who had been arguing about the nature of reality for 2,000 years. The same in China. The same in Japan, although Japan's tradition was somewhat shallower than India or China. The Asian intellectual traditions could engage with Christianity on its own ground and find it wanting in many respects.

The lesson is: religions that have developed deep, written, philosophical traditions are much harder to displace than religions that exist mostly in ritual and oral tradition.

Reason Three: Pluralism Versus Exclusivism

Most of the pagan religions of Europe were pluralist by default. The Romans famously adopted gods from every culture they conquered, adding them to their own pantheon. The Greeks did the same. The Germans had no doctrine that other religions were wrong. They just had their own gods and assumed other peoples had their own gods too.

Christianity came in with a completely different framework. There is only one true God. All other religions are false. You must convert exclusively or be damned. This was new, and it was effective. Once you accept the exclusivist framework, you cannot really go back to pluralism. You have to choose. And once you have chosen, you have to actively reject everything else.

The Asian religions were also pluralist by default. Hinduism explicitly taught that truth is one but the wise speak of it in many ways. Chinese religion blended Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism into a single ecosystem. Japanese Shinto and Buddhism coexisted easily. So when Christianity arrived demanding exclusive loyalty, the response from Asian religious thinkers was often something like "thank you for sharing your teachings, we will add Jesus to our pantheon, now please be tolerant of our other gods."

But Christianity could not be tolerant of other gods. That was the whole point. So the offer was rejected, and Christianity could not find a way to convert without total replacement, which the Asians refused to do.

The lesson here is interesting. Pluralism, which seems weaker than exclusivism in a fight, can actually be much harder to convert than another exclusivism. You cannot replace something that is already willing to absorb you. The Asian religions essentially said "sure, we will add your god to our list," and Christianity collapsed at that offer because it could not accept being one option among many.

Reason Four: The Marriage Strategy Did Not Scale

Christianity conquered Europe partly through the royal marriage strategy. Christian princess marries pagan king, princess converts king, king converts kingdom. We saw this with Clovis and Clotilde, with Ethelbert and Bertha, with Mieszko and Dobrawa, with Vladimir and Anna.

This strategy could not be repeated in Asia. India had Hindu kings who were sometimes married to women from other regions, but the religious system was decentralised enough that royal conversion would not have automatically converted the whole population. Even when Muslim emperors ruled India, they could not convert the majority of their subjects. The royal marriage strategy worked in Europe partly because European religions had a relatively shallow penetration into daily life. In India, religion was so deeply embedded in every household, every meal, every ritual, that you could not change it by changing the king.

China was even worse for the marriage strategy. Chinese emperors did not really marry foreigners as a matter of policy. The whole Chinese imperial system was designed to keep foreign influence out of the inner court. Japan was similar.

The lesson is: the political mechanisms that worked for spreading Christianity in Europe did not exist in Asia in the same way. The technology of religious conversion that worked in one place did not transfer easily to another.

Reason Five: Military Limits

Christianity in Europe was sometimes spread by violence. Charlemagne's wars against the Saxons. The Northern Crusades against the Baltic pagans. The Reconquista in Spain. Forced conversions in the Inquisition. Violence was a major tool.

In Asia, this tool was much less effective. The Asian civilisations were simply too large, too populous, and (for most of history) too militarily capable to be conquered by Christian armies. The Mughals could rule India militarily for 200 years but could not force mass conversion to Islam. The Portuguese could rule Goa with the Inquisition but could not extend their religious control to the rest of India. The European armies that arrived in China and Japan in the 1800s and 1900s could win individual battles but could not occupy and convert entire civilisations.

The military reach of Christian Europe simply was not enough to do to Asia what it had done to its own pagan periphery. By the time Europe had the military power to potentially try, Asia had modernised enough to defend itself. Japan did this most dramatically. By the early 1900s, Japan had become a great industrial and military power capable of defeating Russia in the Russo Japanese War of 1904 to 1905. The window for forced conversion of Japan, if it ever existed, was closed.

The lesson is: Christianity required a window of military superiority over the regions it wanted to convert. It had that window in Europe in 600 to 1400 CE. It had that window briefly in the Americas in 1500 to 1700 CE. It did not really have that window in Asia, because Asia was too big and too organised. By the time European military power could project into Asia in the 1800s, the religious moment had passed and Christianity had lost its previous credibility in Europe itself.

Reason Six: Cultural Confidence

This is the deepest reason and the hardest to measure. The pagan Europeans who converted to Christianity were, on the whole, members of cultures that did not have a strong sense of themselves as superior or central. They had local pride. They had tribal identity. But they did not have a clear sense of being a major civilisation with a coherent worldview that needed defending.

The Asian civilisations had that sense in spades. The Chinese saw themselves as the Middle Kingdom, the centre of the world. The Indians saw their civilisation as the home of the deepest spiritual wisdom on Earth. The Japanese saw themselves as the descendants of the sun goddess Amaterasu, blessed with a unique homeland. All of these are forms of civilisational confidence. They are also psychological defences against foreign religious takeover.

When you have civilisational confidence, you can engage with foreign ideas without feeling that you have to accept them. You can take what is useful and reject what is not. You can have your scholars study Christianity for 200 years and still conclude that, on the whole, your own tradition is better. This is what the Chinese did. This is what most Indians did. This is what the Japanese did, although in a more aggressive way that closed off the country entirely.

The pagan Europeans did not have this kind of civilisational confidence. They had not been told for a thousand years that their tradition was the most refined on Earth. They had not built libraries and universities and philosophical schools that gave them the tools to compare and judge. They were small, fragmented, and intellectually outmatched by the missionaries who arrived from a Roman world that did have those tools.

What This All Means

When you put all six reasons together, you can see what made Europe susceptible to total religious replacement and what protected Asia from it.

Europe was fragmented politically and religiously. Its religions were oral and ritual based without strong written philosophy. Its societies were small and centralised under kings who could be converted. It was militarily inferior to the Roman world that produced Christianity. Its peoples did not have a strong sense of being members of a major civilisation. All of these factors combined to make it vulnerable.

Asia was the opposite in almost every way. The major Asian civilisations were huge. They had deep written philosophical traditions. They were religiously pluralist rather than tribal.

They had strong central political traditions but ones that did not work through royal religious conversion. They were militarily capable of resisting most foreign invasions. And they had thousands of years of civilisational pride to defend.

Europe lost its old gods because the conditions were right for replacement. Asia kept its old gods because the conditions were not.

There is something else worth noting. The story I have just told is not a story about religions being good or bad. It is a story about how religions actually spread or fail to spread under different conditions. Christianity is not better than the pagan religions of Europe were. Hinduism is not better than Christianity. Each religion has its insights and its problems. What matters is the conditions under which they meet, and what each can offer the people they meet.

When pagan Europe met Christianity, Christianity offered things pagan Europe did not have: an organised philosophical theology, a literate priesthood, a community across kingdoms, a unified moral code, and political alliance with Rome. These were useful innovations. Europeans took them. That is not shameful. That is how cultural development works.

When Asia met Christianity, Christianity could not offer anything that Asia did not already have or have a better version of. Asia had philosophy. Asia had ethics. Asia had organised priesthoods. Asia had unified moral codes. So Asia took small parts of what Christianity offered (some Christian schools, some hospitals, some converts among groups that benefited specifically) and rejected the rest. That is also how cultural development works.

There is a tendency among some people to celebrate Asia's resistance to Christianity as a triumph of indigenous culture. There is also a tendency among some people to lament Europe's loss of its old gods as a tragedy. Both views have something to them, but neither is the whole truth. Religions die and are born. Cultures change. The question of whether a particular change was good or bad depends on what was gained and what was lost. We have spent a lot of pages looking at both sides.

Now let me close the book with some final thoughts.

6Closing Thoughts and Acknowledgements

We have come to the end of this book. It has been a long journey. We started with a question about whether pre Christian Europeans worshipped nature and ended with a deep comparison of how four great civilisations responded to foreign religious pressure. Along the way, we covered thousands of years of history across most of the world. Let me close with a few thoughts on what I hope you take away.

On Honest History

The most important thing I hope this book has taught you is the value of honest history. I started writing this because someone had given me a version of European and Indian history that was simple and angry, full of made up conspiracies and confused timelines. I knew that version was wrong, but I also knew that the real version, when you actually dig into it, is more interesting and more useful.

Real history is uncomfortable. It does not let you have heroes who are pure and villains who are pure evil. It makes you confront that the people you want to admire did terrible things. It makes you confront that the people you want to blame had reasons for what they did. It makes you accept ambiguity and complexity in a way that simple narratives do not.

But honest history is also more powerful. The argument that survives a fact check is the argument that wins in the long run. The version of history that explains both the good and the bad of every side is the version that you can defend against any honest opponent. The story that is true is the story that lasts. I hope I have given you a story like that.

On Civilisations and Their Survival

The deeper theme of this book is about how cultures survive. We have seen that some cultures bend and break under outside pressure, and others bend but do not break. The pagan Europeans were the broken ones. The Hindus, the Confucians, the Daoists, the Buddhists, the Shintoists, all survived. Why? I have given a long answer in chapter twenty seven, but let me give you the short version here.

Cultures survive when they have: deep written traditions, multiple interlocking philosophical systems, strong family and community structures that do not depend on central authority, pluralist habits of mind that can absorb foreign ideas without being replaced by them, sufficient size to resist physical conquest, and a confident sense of who they are.

If your culture has these things, foreign ideologies will visit you but they will not replace you. They will be absorbed, modified, and either accepted in modified form or eventually rejected. Your core will continue.

If your culture lacks these things, you are vulnerable. You can be replaced. The replacement may even feel like an upgrade at first, because the new system may offer organisational tools you did not have. But what you lose in the trade is hard to recover. Once your old gods are gone, they are mostly gone forever. The pagan Europeans cannot get back what they had. Some modern revival movements try, but they are reconstructions, not the real living tradition.

This is one of the most important lessons in human history, and it has applications beyond religion. Any culture that wants to survive in a world full of pressure needs to know who it is and have the tools to defend that identity. This does not mean refusing all contact. It does not mean rejecting all foreign ideas. It means engaging from a position of confidence rather than weakness.

On What India Means

I am Indian, so let me say a word about what India means in this story. India is the proof that a civilisation can be politically conquered without being religiously conquered. India was ruled by Muslim dynasties for 700 years. India was ruled by the British for 200 years. India was looted on a scale that broke its economy and killed tens of millions through deliberate famines. By all the normal measures, India should have been destroyed.

It was not. Today, India is the largest country in the world by population. It is one of the largest economies. It has produced major thinkers, scientists, writers, and business leaders. Its culture has spread worldwide through yoga, meditation, food, music, and Bollywood films. Its civilisation is being studied with fresh interest by Western scholars who realised that the old condescending narratives were wrong.

But none of this means India is perfect. India has serious problems. The caste system, though officially abolished, still shapes Indian society in painful ways. Religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, fanned by colonial divide and rule policies, continue to cause violence. Corruption, poverty, environmental degradation, treatment of women, and many other issues need to be addressed. The India of 2026 is not a flawless paradise.

What it is, though, is alive. The civilisation continues. The temples are full. The festivals are celebrated. The classical languages, music, dance, and philosophical traditions are practised. The thread of cultural continuity that goes back to the Indus Valley five thousand years ago has not been broken. That is what survival means.

On What Pagan Europe Means

I want to also say a word about pagan Europe, because the story I have told is in some ways a tragic one for them. The old gods of Europe were not bad gods. The nature worship of the Celts, the Germans, the Norse, the Slavs, the Greeks, and the Romans was a meaningful spiritual tradition that gave its practitioners ways of relating to the world that have been lost.

Some Europeans today are trying to recover these traditions. There are modern Asatru groups practising reconstructed Norse paganism in Iceland and Scandinavia. There are Druid revival groups in Britain. There are Romuva reconstructionists in Lithuania, where the old religion lasted longest. There are scholars studying old texts and trying to figure out what the original beliefs were. These efforts are partial, incomplete, often controversial. But they are happening.

I do not know whether they will succeed. The original traditions are mostly gone. Reconstructions are always different from originals. But something is being tried. Europeans are looking back at what their ancestors believed before Christianity and asking whether some of it might be worth recovering.

At the same time, much of pagan Europe still lives on in disguised form within European Christianity. Christmas trees. Easter eggs. May Day celebrations. Halloween. The Maypole. The names of the days of the week (Tuesday is Tiw's day, Wednesday is Odin's day, Thursday is Thor's day, Friday is Freya's day). The folk customs of rural Europe. All of these are pagan survivals dressed in Christian clothing. The old gods are not entirely gone. They are sleeping under the surface.

Maybe one day they will wake up. Maybe not. That is for Europeans to decide.

On What This All Means for Today

Let me close with what I think this story means for the world we are living in right now.

We are at a strange moment in history. The religious authority that Christianity had in Europe for over a thousand years has largely collapsed. Most Europeans today do not believe in God, or believe in a vague way that does not change their lives. The churches are mostly empty. The same is happening in the United States, although more slowly. Religion is in retreat across the developed Western world.

At the same time, Asian religions are spreading in the West. Yoga is everywhere. Meditation is mainstream. Buddhist mindfulness practices are taught in schools and used by therapists. The Bhagavad Gita is read in college philosophy classes. Tai chi is practised in parks. Western intellectuals study Confucian ethics and find them sophisticated and useful. The flow of religious and philosophical ideas, which for centuries went from West to East, is now going the other way.

Some Western religious authorities are alarmed by this. They see it as a loss of identity, a kind of soft conquest of the West by Eastern ideas. They are not entirely wrong. Something is happening.

But here is the deeper point. The success of Asian religious ideas in the West today shows that the Asian traditions we discussed in this book have something genuinely valuable to offer. They survived attempts to replace them not because they were lucky but because they had real depth, real insight, real wisdom. Now, with the failure of mainstream Christianity in the West to satisfy modern spiritual needs, people are looking to other traditions for answers. The traditions that survived in Asia turn out to be uniquely well prepared for this moment, because they have always been pluralist, always been about practice rather than dogma, always been about the relationship between humans and the larger reality of the world.

What I am saying is that the long arc of religious history is bending in a direction that those of us in 2026 cannot yet see clearly. But there are signs. The old gods of Europe may be mostly gone, but the wisdom they represented, of seeing the world as alive, of treating nature as sacred, of accepting plural truths, of grounding life in seasonal rhythms, of valuing local tradition and community, is being rediscovered through the surviving Asian traditions. The river may have changed course, but the water continues to flow.

I find this hopeful. I started this book thinking I was telling a story about loss and recovery. I end it thinking I am telling a story about continuity and renewal. The forgotten gods of Europe are not really forgotten. They are remembered in different names, in different lands, through different mouths. The thread of human spiritual experience does not break. It continues, even when individual cultures cannot hold onto it. Wisdom finds its way.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank everyone who helped me think through this material, even though most of them have no idea they did. I thank the historians I have quoted throughout the book: Robert Bartlett, Peter Brown, Romila Thapar, William Dalrymple, Audrey Truschke, Eric Christiansen, Ronald Hutton, Fred Donner, Barry Cunliffe, Diana Eck, Jonathan Spence, Endo Shusaku, Madhusree Mukerjee, Utsa Patnaik, Tirthankar Roy, Mike Davis, Yasmin Khan, Sebastian Kim, and many others whose work I have drawn on. None of them are responsible for my interpretations. The mistakes are mine.

I thank my family, who lived through some of this history personally and gave me the stories that no book could provide. I thank my grandmother, whose walk from Pakistan in 1947 is part of what made me want to learn this history in the first place. I thank Punjab, my home state, for being the place where so many of these threads of history converge: ancient Indus Valley civilisation, the Vedic Age, Buddhism, the long Muslim conquests, the Sikh response to those conquests, the British occupation, the Partition, and the modern rebuilding. To grow up in Punjab is to walk on layers of history that go back further than most of the world remembers.

I thank you, the reader, for staying with me through over 150 pages of dense argument. I know this is a lot to ask. I tried to make it as readable as I could. I hope I succeeded enough to make the journey worthwhile.

A Final Word

When I started writing this book, I had one goal. To take a confused and angry argument and turn it into something honest, careful, and useful. Whether I have succeeded, you will have to judge. But I will say this. The argument I have ended up making is much stronger than the one I started with, precisely because it is honest. It does not depend on conspiracy theories. It does not rely on inventing villains or saints. It just shows what actually happened, with all its complexity and texture, and lets the reader draw their own conclusions.

I hope you take that approach with you into other arguments. The strongest argument is always the one that can survive a fact check. Make sure yours always can.