Taiwan Christianity enters new phase

SAPULOU, Taiwan — Sixty years after Roman Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries first converted large numbers of Taiwanese aboriginals in their leafy mountain villages, Christianity here is entering a new phase. Adherents are leaving the faith.

Faced with a declining agricultural economy in their hard-pressed rural communities, more and more upcountry Christians are moving to Taiwan's bustling cities, where worldly temptations and a bewildering social framework are challenging their beliefs.

At a recent Sunday morning service in the nearby community of Laolauran, American Presbyterian missionary John McCall tried to rally the faithful, as local hill tribe pastor Sakulu translated his Mandarin Chinese sermon into the aboriginal language of Paiwanese.

"God loves you, and he is your father," McCall said. "You're all the children of God."

But the church was mostly empty, and the worshippers included few if any young adults.

"I used to go to church," said Dzwo Ying-gung, who recently returned to the area to work at the Dawu Mountain National Education Center. "But now I don't. My faith has fallen away."

The attitude of Dzwo and thousands of hill tribe Taiwanese like him represents a fundamental challenge to McCall and the legion of local pastors he and his predecessors have helped train at three Presbyterian seminaries around the island.

Ever since Canadian George Mackay came to Taiwan in 1871, the center of the missionary enterprise on the island has always been its hill tribe people, whose ancestors migrated here from South Pacific islets about 6,000 years ago.

The Paiwan and others once proved much more receptive to Christianity than their lowland neighbors, who followed Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.

Today, some 65 percent of the hill tribe population of 460,000 is Christian, about equally divided between Presbyterians and Catholics, according to government statistics. That compares with about 2 percent of Taiwan's 22.5 million Han Chinese, who originated on the Chinese mainland, where they constitute a large majority.

Sociologist Jonathan Unger of Canberra's Australian National University said the hill tribes were more open to the Christian message, largely because of the prejudice they felt from the Han. Other Asian minority peoples, in places like southwest China, Laos and upland Thailand, also were more willing to embrace Christianity, he said.

"It's a common phenomenon that a minority people considered inferior in many respects by the dominant culture will protect itself by turning to a world religion," Unger said.

Rangalu, a 45-year-old primary school teacher in the hill tribe village of Sapulou, said the discrimination he experienced played a key role in forming his own Paiwan identity.