After the Pol Pot auto-genocide, Christian missionaries must have thought that the surviving Cambodians would be easy targets for conversion to Christianity.
When I first arrived in Cambodia in 1995, I saw a traumatized people. There were almost no psychiatrists to treat the PTSD that was rampant across the country. Not only had most of them seen their loved ones brutally murdered, many acquiesced into participation. The guilt must have been awful. Image a starving young man who, in exchange for a bowl of rice, had turned in his mother to be tortured and clubbed to death before his eyes.
Now along comes Jesus Christ, with the positive message that the young man’s sins will be forgiven. You can bet that conversion to Christianity would be a big temptation. Indeed, mass torturer and murderer Comrade Duch, overseer of the Tuol Sleng torture and killing prison, later converted to Christianity. His torture and murder of thousands of innocent Cambodians were now forgiven and he would go to heaven.
There is also collective guilt. A Buddhist nation must have asked itself, “How bad can our karma be to have deserved the murder of 2 million of our citizens? Is this what our Buddhism has brought us?” I might imagine a mass exodus from the Buddhist religion after the Pol Pot debacle.
I first came to Battambang, Cambodia, as a volunteer for COERR: Catholic Office for Emergency Relief and Refugees. COERR had set up operations in the refugee camps along the Thai border, and some wonderful people like Sister Joseen Vogt had worked with the refugees to train English teachers. Upon their eventual return to Cambodia, they set up the COERR school in Battambang, and I worked closely with these returnees, who were the best trained English teachers in the country.
Nearly 30 years later, many of these same Khmer people are still dedicated teachers at the — now 3 — COERR schools. Wonderful people, but none of them are Christians, despite the propaganda blitz by the missionaries! That happened all over Cambodia. Estimates of the number of Christians range anywhere from 0.4% to 2% of the population, even by Christians’ own estimates. That’s not many, considering the missionary effort over 30 years, and a disproportionate number of these are Vietnamese boat people or non-Khmer ethnic groups.
What happened? Or rather, what didn’t happen? Buddhism has bounced back amazingly. The pagodas have been reconstructed, and monks are out collecting alms everywhere you look. I know almost no Christians among my Khmer friends, many of whom are survivors from the refugee camps. Clearly, the Khmer Rouge attempt to destroy Buddhism, by murdering all the monks and tearing down pagodas, failed miserably, while Christianity has failed to gain a foothold.
Buddhism is thoroughly ingrained in the Khmer personality. To use an overworked cliché, Buddhist values are ‘in their DNA’. The fact that they are one strong, unified culture across the country adds to this solidarity of their value system. This quality is explained brilliantly in a great book by Philip Coggan, called Spirit Worlds, in which one of the closing lines is, “To be Khmer is to be Buddhist.” It’s a question of identity. Khmer people still identify with the proud civilization of Angkor Wat and its God-kings like Jayavarman VII.
Religion is culture. So how must Khmer persons feel when Western missionaries arrive and tell them that their crummy Khmer culture is vastly inferior to Christian culture, the only true culture? They must feel this as an insult, an attack.
I worked a lot with missionaries in Africa, and I was always struck by their arrogant attitude that they had nothing to learn from the local Africans. They had all the answers, and were there only as teachers to bring the benighted natives into the light of Jesus. When they bring this same arrogance to Cambodia, is it any wonder that the proud Cambodians turn their backs?