Too Many People, or Too Few?

This blog post is about the human population of the world. Are there too many people, or are there too few? 

(A slightly inaccurate graph of the world's population growth, but the point is well made.)

The county of my birth is very small; it could be argued that there are too few people there. I was born in Worth County, Missouri, which is the youngest of the 114 counties in the state. It is also the Mo. county with the smallest land area and the smallest population.**

According to the U.S. census records, the peak population of Worth Co. was in 1900 when the number of residents reached nearly 10,000. But in the 2020 census, the population had dropped to under 2,000.

It can be argued, with good reason, that there are now too few people in Worth Co. for it to be viable still, and the same is true for many rural counties across the nation.

The population of some nations is decreasing, and some people in those countries are worrying about there being too few people—especially too few of the “right” kind.

I have long been concerned about the rapid increase of the world’s population. When I was born in 1938, there were about 2.2 billion people living on this earth, but by 1998 (just 60 years later) that number reached six billion—and this year it topped eight billion!

If my home county had grown by the same percentage as the world’s population between 1900 and 2020, it would have a population of around 49,000, not fewer than 2,000.

But already by the early 2000s, there was serious talk about the declining population in Japan and the need to encourage more Japanese women to marry and for couples to have more children.

And it is true, many of the wealthy countries of the world are losing population, and even some in China, until this year the world’s most populous country, are increasingly concerned about the current population decline there.

The cover story of the June 3^rd-9^th issue of The Economist was “The Baby-Bust Economy,” and they highlighted the problem of the declining population growth in most of the world’s wealthiest countries: “The largest 15 countries by GDP all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate.”

Thus, they project that before the end of this century “the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death.”

The unchecked growth of the world’s population has long been a concern of some scholars, and others. It was 225 years ago when Thomas Malthus published the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798).

Malthus (1766~1834) was an English economist and demographer and is best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction.

Malthus was the first to write publicly about carrying capacity and overshoot, which are central themes of William Catton’s book that I introduced in my March 23 blog post, and that perceptive author refers to Malthus several times.

Malthus didn’t know of the coming industrial revolution in the 19^th century or the “green revolution” that began in mid-20^th century. But as Catton clearly explains, the extension of the carrying capacity of the earth was primarily based on the exploitation of depletable and non-renewable fossil fuels.

It was quite disappointing that the concluding paragraph of The Economist’s recent cover story states, “Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate.”

True, such time-bombs haven’t detonated yet. But why do they think that those time bombs are not still ticking in this world with its continual global warming, ongoing over-consumption of non-renewable resources, and increasing inequality and strife between the “haves” and “have nots”?

Because of the current, but insufficiently understood, ecological crisis, there will most likely be a drastic, and catastrophic, decline in the world’s population long before the end of this century.

Fortunately, rather than being a problem, the current decline in population pushes the coming catastrophic decline further into the future.

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** You might also find it interesting that the land area that became Worth County in 1861 was the most northwestern corner of the United States after Missouri became a state in 1821. 

Contextualizing Christianity: In Memory of Matteo Ricci

On March 31 last year, The Economist published an article about “Sinifying Christianity,” that is, seeking to make Chinese Christians more “Chinese.” The article begins by referring to James Hudson Taylor, the famous 19th-century Protestant missionary. They could have looked back much further.

Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci sought to Sinicize (=to change or modify by Chinese influence) Christianity in the 16^th century. His pioneer evangelistic activity is noteworthy even now, and there are Protestants as well as Catholics who remember his missionary work with deep appreciation.

Christianity Today, the flagship moderate evangelical Christian magazine, published an article in June of this year with praise, and a picture, of Ricci. 

Ricci and Chinese scholar Xu Guangqi

Ricci was born 470 years ago, on October 6, 1552. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1581, and the next year he arrived in Macao and prepared for entering China. He did enter the mainland in 1583 and remained there until his death 27 years later, in 1610.

As Baptist missiologist Justice Anderson wrote in 1998, “to win the favor of the Chinese, Ricci adopted their culture and appeared in the guise of a Confucian scholar.” He was quite successful: by 1650, forty years after his death, there were some 250,000 Christians in China.*

According to the article in The Economist, since 2018 the Chinese government has encouraged churches “to use Chinese architecture and Chinese tunes for hymns, as well as Chinese-style painting, calligraphy and other ‘popular cultural forms.’” All this would have pleased Ricci.

The Catholic Church, though, was not pleased with Ricci’s emphasis. Ricci and his successors “permitted converts to engage in ancestral and state rites regarding those as social and civil rather than religious in character.”**

That led to what is known as the Chinese Rites controversy (which is summarized well in Wikipedia). It was settled by the Pope in the early 1700s—against the Jesuits and to the great detriment of the continued expansion of Christianity in China.

I first learned about Ricci when I was a graduate student in the 1960s. Dr. Hugo Culpepper, a Missions professor at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, stressed the importance of what was then often called accommodation.

Later the terms indigenization, inculturation, or contextualization became more common. The emphasis was the same, however: effective mission activity must seek to relate intentionally and positively to the culture in which the missionary is located. That is certainly what Ricci sought to do.

Even now, and perhaps now even more than in past decades, there are many who criticize missionary activity as being a form of imperialism.

The critics think that Western missionaries were intentionally linked to the Western powers that sought to gain political and economic control over Asian and African countries.

Unfortunately, that was often the case in the 19^th and early 20^th century. Missionaries sought to make Christians and churches in non-Western lands look much like the Christians and churches of the West. Converts were given “Christian” names, and church buildings exhibited Western architecture.

My first Japanese pastor was an elderly man who was born into a samurai family in 1890. When he was baptized as a young man, he was given the name Timothy. (Fortunately, he was not using that name when I first met him in 1966.)

As the article in The Economist notes, “long before the Communist Party seized power in 1949, people used to say, ‘One more Christian, one fewer Chinese.’ Officials in China still mutter this phrase today.”

But to cite the same 4/3/21 source again, in 1867 the prominent English missionary Hudson Taylor (1832~1905) “wrote a letter home defending his policy of encouraging fellow preachers in China to wear Chinese robes and the Manchu-style pigtail.”

Taylor’s emphasis was quite similar to what Catholic missionary Ricci had advocated 275 years earlier.

While the specifics changed, the central point of Ricci (and Taylor) was adopted more and more in the last half of the 20^th century.

Along with many of my missionary colleagues, during my 38 years in Japan I intentionally sought to practice accommodation/indigenization as much as possible—and have bristled some when accused, directly or indirectly, of fostering Western (Christian) imperialism.

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* “Medieval and Renaissance Missions (500-1792),” Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Missions (1998), p. 192.

** R. Pierce Beaver, “The History of Mission Strategy,” Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader (1981), p. 194.

Assessing Christianity in Contemporary China

Thirty-five years ago this week, I made my first of three delightful visits to China and first-hand contact with Christians there. My last trip to China was in 2004, and in the 18 years since then there have been some definite changes: both increased persecution and increased growth.

Grace Church, Shanghai

Visiting Grace Church in Shanghai (1987)

In August 1987, I went to an academic meeting in Hong Kong. When the meeting ended, rather than fly directly back to Japan as originally planned, I decided to take the train to Guangzhou (Canton) and fly from there to Shanghai—and then from there to Nagasaki three days later.

On Sunday morning, Aug. 23, I hailed a taxi and showed the driver the address of what in English is called Grace Church. He took me there without difficulty, and it turned out to be a delightful morning. I was greeted (in English) by an elderly gentleman and then introduced to a Mr. Wu.

Mr. Wu sat by me and translated the sermon during the worship service, which was attended by 1,500~2,000 people. After I treated him to a nice Sunday dinner at a local restaurant, he took me to see the first Baptist church built in Shanghai. His grandfather was pastor there in the 1920s.

Grace Church was originally a Baptist church also, but it was forced to close in 1966 at the beginning of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Four years after the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, the church was able to reopen, and from then until 1987, the church had baptized 1,600 people.

Hearing Christian Philosophers in Beijing (1994)

My second trip to China was in October 1994 when I was able to attend a fascinating symposium of Christian philosophers from the United States and philosophers at Peking University.

(This year, Peking [the old spelling of Beijing] University was ranked [here] the best university in China and the 12^th best in the world.)

I was not only impressed with the Christian philosophers, particularly Alvin Plantinga,* who had come from the U.S. but also by the brilliance of the Chinese philosophers, who were eager to learn more about Christianity. I was told that one or more of them were “crypto-Christians.”

Visiting Churches in Shandong (2004)

Shandong (Shantung) is a province of the People’s Republic of China on that nation’s eastern coast, the part of China closest to South Korea.

On the last day of July 2004, June and I left Japan, which had been our home for one month shy of a full 38 years. We took the two-hour 45-minute flight from Fukuoka, where we had lived for 36 years, to Qingdao on the eastern coast of Shandong Province.

The next day we made a three-hour trip to Penglai (Tengchow) and visited the church Lottie Moon first attended in China. (If you don’t know who Lottie Moon was, see this 12/26/12 blog post.) We had a delightful conversation (in Japanese) with Rev. Shin, the 80-year-old pastor there.

The four-hour return trip to Qingdao took us by the inland city of Pingdu (Pingtu), where Lottie Moon started a church, and, appropriately, the senior pastor was Rev. Wang, a woman. (Her picture is in the link above.)

So, What About Now?

In recent years, you may have read stories about the persecution of Christians and the destruction of Christian churches in China—and there have been many such cases. Opposition to Christianity increased after 2013 when Xi Jinping became president of China.

But in Sept. 2020, The Economist posted an article titled “Protestant Christianity is booming in China.” With about 3% of the population being Christian, there are now more Christians in China than in France or Germany.

Much of this growth has been since 2004 when I was last in China—and has primarily been by adult conversion not by the birth of children to Christian parents. Moreover, this growth has been without the assistance of Western missionaries.

If present trends continue, which they may not, in a few decades there may well be more Christians in China than in any other country in the world. Imagine that!

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* My Sept. 15, 2017, blog post was about Plantinga.

In Praise of Lottie Moon

“Southern Baptists have only one saint and her name is Lottie Moon.” So wrote Texas pastor Chuck Warnock in his fine review of Regina D. Sullivan’s book Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (2011). 

I am writing this in praise of “St. Lottie” (she has never actually been called this), whose full name was Charlotte Digges Moon, and in commemoration of her outstanding work and life, which ended soon after her 72^nd birthday 100 years ago, on Christmas Eve, 1912. She was on her way back from China to the U.S. and died on board the steamer Manchuria as it lay at anchor off Kobe, Japan.

At the beginning of the 1870s, Southern Baptists did not think single women should be appointed as missionaries, but in 1871 Lottie argued publicly that women should be allowed to do paid religious work.

Consequently, Lottie became one of the first single Baptist women to be appointed as a missionary—with the understanding that she would be involved only in “women’s work for women.” Among other things, that meant not preaching or engaging in any kind of public activity when men were present.

But Lottie soon began to ignore the restrictions. As Sullivan says, “Moon was never one to be dissuaded by an argument that centered on gender.” Her breaking with her culture and board policy culminated with her, alone, beginning new mission work in the city of Pingtu. It was the first time for a Southern Baptist woman to start a new mission point.

As Southern Baptist missionaries for 38 years, June and I were indirectly linked to Lottie Moon, for in each of those years the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering (LMCO) was a major source of funding for the Foreign (later International) Mission Board that provided our support in Japan. And I have spoken in numerous churches through the years, encouraging generous giving to the LMCO.

In July 2004 when June and I left Japan as missionaries for the last time, we spent a few days in China before coming on back to the States. Our most memorable time there was seeing the places where Lottie Moon had lived and worked. We visited the church where she had worshipped soon after her arrival in Tengchow (now Penglai) in 1873. And then we went to Pingtu (now Pingdu), where Lottie had lived and worked from 1886 to 1891.

We visited a church in Pingdu that resulted from Lottie Moon’s work there. Appropriately, the senior pastor there is Wang Xia, a woman—and a fourth-generation believer whose ancestors were among the earliest Christians in the city.

The picture shows Pastor Wang on the left and the couple who were living on the property by the house where Lottie had lived—and which we are standing in front of. 

For a long time Lottie Moon has often been considered “saintly” because of what was written about her sacrificing her food, and ultimately her life, for the sake of the poverty-stricken people of China. According to Sullivan, those stories are likely fabrications for the most part. (Writing as a scholar rather than as the promoter of a cause, makes one more objective—and more nearly accurate.)

Lottie Moon deserves our praise, though, for her courageous work for gender equality among missionaries and for sparking the formation of the Woman’s Missionary Union among Southern Baptists as well as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which has raised more than $1.5 billion for missions since its inception in 1888.

We may not want to call her St. Lottie, but she is well deserving of appreciative remembrance on this 100^th anniversary of her passing.

Remembering the "Rape of Nanking"

December 13, 1937, was the beginning of a terrible, terrible time for the Chinese people living in Nanking (now Nanjing), China. That day was the beginning of the Nanking Massacre, which is also known as the Rape of Nanking.

Nanking (literally: Southern Capital) first became the capital of China in 229 A.D. and was the capital of the country many times over the next eighteen centuries. In 1912 it was made the capital of the new Republic of China and then was re-established there in 1927 under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Exactly 75 years ago, from 12/13/37 and for the next six weeks, perhaps as many as 300,000 Chinese people in Nanking were murdered, and it is estimated that around 20,000 Chinese women and girls were raped by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Iris Chang (1968-2004) was a Chinese-American woman who wrote The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, a powerful book that was a bestseller in 1997. Ten years later, “Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking,” a documentary starring Olivia Cheng, a Chinese-Canadian actress, was released.

Two years ago Miss Cheng was in Japan and spoke in Chapel at Seinan Gakuin University (where I taught for thirty-six years). It must have been hard for the Japanese students, and especially for faculty and staff members, to hear the details about such an atrocity. This is a part of history that most Japanese would like to forget—and they have fairly successfully kept it under cover.

Since the 1970s, though, there has been a gradual recognition in Japan that the Japanese people have not only been victims (especially of the atomic bombing) but also victimizers (as in the case of the Nanking Massacre).

Two outstanding artists, Toshi and Iri Maruki (a married couple whom I have had the privilege of hearing speak), are mainly known for their paintings about the bombing of Hiroshima. But in 1975 they painted “The Rape of Nanjing,” a 13 x 26 feet black and white panel.

This fall I read the highly acclaimed novel Nanjing Requiem (2011) by Ha Jin (b. 1956 in China). Although a novel, Jin’s work is based partly on the diaries of Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary who was the acting dean of Jinling College in Nanking in 1937. Through her efforts, some 10,000 girls and women were admitted to the relative safety provided at the college.

Earlier this week, June and I watched “Nanking” (2007), a very well done documentary. The film is a blend of actual movie clips taken at the time (in 1937) and contemporary actors telling the story of the main foreigners who exerted extraordinary effort to save perhaps as many as 250,000 lives. (Mariel Hemingway told Minnie Vautrin’s story of valor.)

Toward the end of Nanjing Requiem, one of the American men in the devastated city avers, “Men can be more vicious than beasts of prey if they’re put in the extreme situation of war. No rules will be followed, and all kinds of evil will be unleashed. War is simply the most destructive force we human beings can produce, so we must make every effort to prevent it” (p. 273).  

Those were profound words for the people in Nanjing in 1937—and for us today, 75 years later.

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According to yesterday’s SouthChina Morning Post, about 10,000 people gathered in Nanjing on Thursday to mark the 75^th anniversary of the Massacre. The Japan Times reported that there were 9,000 people there, including around 100 Japanese.

The China Conundrum

Today is “Double Ten,” a very special day for some of the Chinese who live on the island of Taiwan, and to a lesser degree for all Chinese.

The Chinese Revolution began on October 10, 1911. It resulted in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), the last imperial dynasty, and the establishing of the Republic of China (ROC), which was formed on January 1, 1912.

So today is the centennial celebration of Double Ten Day, the national day for the ROC.

 A symbol often seen during Double Ten Day (it is the combination of two characters for "10" (十)

Long called Formosa (“beautiful island”) Taiwan is the name of an island off the east coast of China, home to about 23,000,000 people. While most of the people of Taiwan are Chinese (only about 2% are aboriginal people, like the Native Americans in this country), only about 15% of them are from the mainland. And they are the ones who lead the celebration of Double Ten.

Several memories linger from the first time I visited Taiwan many years ago—such as being surprised at seeing beautiful poinsettia trees, many over ten feet tall. I hadn’t known poinsettias grew so tall.

I also remember the feeling of incongruity when I was visiting an old shrine erected in veneration of Confucius—and at the same time seeing Taiwanese Air Force jets screaming overhead.

One other memory: seeing many portraits of Sun Yat Sen, the first President of the Republic of China. Actually, he was only Provisional President and served less than three months, but still he was, and is, widely celebrated at the founder of the Republic of China (ROC).

In 1949, however, the Communists under Mao Zedong (Tse-tung) overthrew the ROC and established the People’s Republic of China, which is still the name of the nation on mainland China.

On March 1, 1950, ROC President Chiang Kai-shek moved the government of China to Taiwan, and formally resumed duties as President. And, sixty-one years later, the U.S. is still supporting Taiwan. Should that support continue? Or should the U.S. recognize that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the only legitimate government for the country, including the island of Taiwan?

That is a difficult question.

Just last month, the Obama administration approved a $5.8 billion arms deal to Taiwan, including upgrades to the island’s fleet of old F-16 fighter jets. Not surprisingly, that did not set well with the government of the PRC. In fact, Beijing warned that U.S.-Chinese relations would suffer “severe obstacles” as a result of that action.

On the other hand, Republican critics accused the Obama administration of bowing to Chinese pressure with its decision only to upgrade aging Taiwanese warplanes rather than sell the island the later generation fighters it had requested.

According to CBS News, GOP presidential aspirant Mitt Romney said, “President Obama’s refusal to sell Taiwan new military jets is yet another example of his weak leadership in foreign policy.”

In light of the vital American economic and financial relationships with the PRC, what should the U.S. stance toward Taiwan be? That’s a difficult question, and one that I’m glad I don’t have to decide how to answer.