In Singapore, economics is everything. With a per capita income higher than Ireland or Spain, and growth rates of 9% in the last 33 years since independence from British colonial rule,[1] Singapore's economic success has legitimized the policies of the founding party and present ruling government. To maintain economic survival, the government argues that political stability is paramount. Preventing conflict between Singapore’s four racial groups around ethnicity and religion is a top priority. To achieve this, governmental policies forbid civic organizations, including churches from any social commentary, for this is viewed as a challenge to the government. The acceptance of this status quo by Roman Catholics and Protestants has led to a Christianity that is pietistic. Consequently, social activism of both the left and the right is non-existent. Given such a compromise of Christianity’s traditional social witness, how is the evangelical zeal and high growth rate of the Church (including Anglicans) to be understood? Furthermore, how is the public crusade, led by the Anglican Church of Singapore against homosexuality and homosexual persons in both the domestic and international arena to be understood, when such social activism, were it over another issue, would have been considered political involvement by the government, and hence prohibited? This essay will provide some pointers.

Christianity became a privatized and de-politicized affair when in the 1960’s, the government curtailed the Social Gospel movement, rendering the rest of Christian witness largely evangelical and pietistic. However, in 1987, several individuals, including a few prominent lawyers, linked up with some lay and ordained members of the Roman Catholic Church to organize for the rights of Filipina women, then working as domestic help in Singapore. This came to an end when 16 of them were arrested by the government under the Internal Security Act (a piece of law left over from British colonial days, which provided for the detention without trial of political subversives) and charged with conspiring to overthrow the government. The liberation theology of some of the individuals was considered disguised Marxism. Unlike the historical communist insurgents of the 1950’s, who were Chinese-educated Maoists, these new ones were considered a "third phase" because they were English-educated professionals (one had a Harvard MBA) who had infiltrated the Law Society and the Roman Catholic Church.

In the ensuing months, the government said that all social commentary was political. As such, professional groups (like the Law Society), and civic groups (like the Church) which were not political parties, were prohibited from commenting on social and political issues. In a television broadcast of a meeting between the Roman Catholic Archbishop Gregory Yong and then Prime Minister and founding father Lee Kuan Yew, the Catholic Church accepted these parameters. In an Independence Day speech later that year, Lee said:

The government is not only concerned with the left, but also with right wing activism of the church. Take abortion for example. The Singapore government in the 1970's embarked on a comprehensive family program (whose success also contributed to higher economic growth), of which cheap and accessible abortions (costing about US$3) was a main stay. Eventually, abortion became the prefered form of contraception among women, because it was cheaper than the pill, and it did not require the negotiation with the male partner that a condom would otherwise have necessitated. Nevertheless, rampant abortions provoked no public commentary from Protestant (including Anglican) or Roman Catholic church leaders, thus indicating their quiescence.[4]

Consider another right wing or evangelical issue: converting people of other faiths to Christianity. In Singapore, though one is free to practice any religion, one may not always be at liberty to convert someone else. The proselytization of the indigenous Malay minority (16% of the population), who are almost entirely Muslim, is prohibited. (This is true in Malaysia as well.) The reasons are several, but mainly have to do with preventing a reoccurrence of the riots of the 1960’s between the Malay Muslims and Chinese (non-Muslims). Several years ago, an evangelical church began to actively evangelize some Malay-Muslims. In their tracts, these Christians used the Islamic word "Allah" for the New Testament word "God" which offended the Malay population. The Chinese dominated government, keen to preserve the peace, and always ready to defend their racial impartiality, arrested these Christian leaders for unsettling communal harmony[5]. Singaporeans are urged by the government to be vigilant, for it would only take one riot for the economy to disintegrate. [6]

If Singaporeans have chosen to concentrate on economic growth rather than on expanding their civic freedoms, so too has the Anglican Church followed this expansionistic logic. Its goal of 15-20% growth outstrips the economic forecasts[7]. It has also expanded by making larger countries like Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Indonesia deaneries of the Diocese[8]. How might one understand this drive?. Why is the English-speaking (and hence better educated) Chinese the bulk of converts to Christianity? What is the cause of the stark contrast between the spiritual fervor of the Evangelicals and Charismatics (who are almost the only expressions in both the Protestant and Roman Churches), and the endemic political apathy of Singaporeans? (A caveat emptor: this author was converted at a Charismatic rally at the Cathedral in the 1970’s and is not making an evaluation of the Spirit’s working, or of the veracity of the faithfulness of Christians. Instead, this essay analyses social forces.)

First, revitalization. In the Anglican Church, the charismatic movement, which began in the 1970’s served to renew what had become a moribund and elitist ex-colonial church. The renewal of worship was a breath of fresh air. Of course today, the pendulum has swung the other way, so that the vast majority of parishes (with the exception of the Cathedral) have done away with Anglican forms of Prayer Book liturgy, and have instead adopted a free-form, spontaneous, non-liturgical charismatic style.

Second, demographics. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants (10% of the population) are mainly made up of ethnic Chinese (76% of the population). Several studies done by the National University of Singapore in the 1980's showed that younger Chinese people had converted from the traditional and syncretized Taoism-Buddhism (which is the majority religion) to Christianity. They had found the latter to be more rational and systematized than the magical superstitions of the former[9]. This comparison may come as a surprise to people living in the West where Buddhism is often considered a sophisticated philosophy. However, it is important to note that the Buddhism and Taoism of the immigrant overseas Chinese are a folk, rather than a scholarly tradition. As such magic and evil spirits are major elements in the Buddhism-Taoism of Chinese Singaporeans. As such, when the Chinese person converts to Christianity, this basic orientation of a cosmic battleground where hierarchies of spirits do battle continues. In the previous generation, their parents sought a more powerful temple deity to combat a lesser deity. In Christianity, these new converts have found the King of Kings—Jesus Christ—to be the supreme deity. Nevertheless, lesser spirits continue to work even in the lives of baptized Christians. This henotheistic, rather than monotheistic orientation explains why a few years ago an antique table with Chinese dragons—symbols of benevolence in Chinese culture, but confused with the dragon of Revelations—at the Anglican Cathedral was hacked to pieces[10]. By taping into a culturally real vocabulary of evil spirits, Charismatic Christianity has thrived.

One consequence of seeing the working of spirits is that genuine psychological dysfunctions are given a demonic interpretation. Homosexuality, infertility, behavioral and medical problems are often interpreted as oppression by evil spirits[11]. Why does a sophisticated Western educated population believe more in evil spirits than in psychological analysis? First, most Chinese people do not think of mental illness as a disease, much like arthritis for example but as the disgraceful and stigmatized condition of "madness." Secondly, analytical psychology argues that a lack of wholesome parenting is a principal cause of personal dysfunction. This lays too much responsibility on parents, and directly undermines Chinese Confucian values of filial piety. Thirdly, the important psychological concept of individuation is often confused with the rightly criticized Western social concept of individualism. The net effect is that exorcism, whether by the church, or by any other religion is often preferred to therapy.

Finally, the churches are growing because Singaporeans, despite their new found wealth, live in perpetual fear of economic disaster. The government perpetuates this state of siege by reminding the citizens of the Japanese invasion of World War Two and the failure of the British in preventing this, and the confrontation with Indonesia in the 1960’s.

If the churches have been quiescent in social and political issues of both the left and right, how does one explain the public nature of the church’s campaign against homosexuality and homosexuals? In the last decade, the Anglican Church of Our Savior invited the U.S organization Exodus to Singapore. The precipitating factor was the frequency of sex-change operations in Singapore, mistakenly seen as a homosexual issue. The local press gave this ex-gay ministry ample coverage, and church leaders were able to use overt religious precepts to condemn homosexuality. This religious publicization of a private social issue would appear to be a violation of the political settlement separating private beliefs and public commentary. Nevertheless, led by Anglicans, the churches’ anti-homosexual activism in both the domestic and international scene has grown. One can only conclude that such activism is possible because it exploits an already existing social antagonism and stigmatization of homosexuality.

But whence this stigmatization in Asian cultures? The Harvard scholar Brett Hinsch has shown that homosexuality was prevalent, accepted and sometimes celebrated throughout the different Chinese dynasties. Nevertheless, he suggests that in the colonial encounter, national humiliation led China to both question its collective masculinity, and then to adopt the Victorian Christian mores against homosexuality. Interestingly enough, the anti-sodomy laws in Singapore, which provides for life in prison, were likewise inherited from the British colonialists. Today, such stigmatization is considered an Asian value.

Prior to colonialism, sexuality and gender varied greatly among Asians. Among the Bugis people, now part of the Indonesian nation, a third gender consisting of men dressed in women’s clothes-- akin to the Native-American Berdache--was accepted. The Minangkabao people, also now part of Indonesia, were a matrilineal society. Among the Chinese, polygamy was practiced. Everyone lived in families that were multi-generational. I do not mean to suggest that these arrangements are better, but the situation was more diverse and complex. Homogeneity came with the advent of colonialism and industrial capitalism—and abetted by Protestantism, Max Weber would say—so that today sexuality, and family and gender roles have become monogamous, patriarchal, single-generational, and exclusively heterosexual.

Asian family values of today are therefore historically relative and socially constructed. That these values may yet be reshaped by governmental legislation was given a rather strange twist in 1984. Then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew—a Cambridge trained lawyer-- bemoaned the ironic success of family planning, especially the lowered birth rates of the higher educated (and economically more productive) classes. This had come about because women with graduate degrees were choosier and getting married later, or not getting married at all. Lee extrapolated from this and held forth the specter of national economic decline. At the National University, he then publicly ruminated about the wisdom of having abolished traditional Chinese polygamy in favor of Western monogamy[12]. Social values are socially constructed, and must in the end serve the economy[13].

What of the charge that Western values are contaminating Asia? In recent years, the government has variously encouraged more freedom of expression—particularly when it has felt that a vibrant arts culture would attract expatriate professionals to work in Singapore, hence adding to the economy—and opposed this--when it has deemed such expressions to be too Western and permissive and thus detrimental to stability. In any case, that which is "Western" is alternately emulated or castigated, with the government playing the role of arbiter. This same process of simultaneously assimilating and rejecting the West applies in the Diocese of Singapore. Several gay and lesbian Christians, who have been educated abroad —some hand picked by the government and sent on scholarships to Oxbridge and the American Ivy League—had encountered a more tolerant Christianity while there. The Internet had also connected gay Singaporeans with gay Christian groups from around the world. All these interchanges have been considered harmful Western influences. Nevertheless, the Diocese’s own active courting of the American based ex-gay Exodus is likewise an instance of Western, albeit conservative, influence. Theologians from conservative seminaries advice the Diocese on church growth[14].

The larger question in Singapore is whether there is anything that is not foreign? The laws that provide for private property, detention without trial and caning are British inheritances. MNCs and free-trade are American influences. All religions and all races, apart from the indigenous Malays are imports. It follows that a nation of immigrants whose success comes from the utilization of imported ideas and imported capital must necessarily go through bouts of anxiety about its own identity. In this process of self-definition, it must define itself against the "Other," and the foreign becomes either something to emulate or to castigate. Just before the recent economic downturn, Asian governments and academics were involved in a theoretical re-formulation of how Asian values had accounted for the spectacular economic growth of the East Asian Tiger economies. Underlying this was the self-conscious awareness that the West might have been beaten at its own game. The assertion by the Province of South East Asia that it is more orthodox than the West likewise recapitulates this sentiment of being the new standard bearer. In the case of Singapore, the contestations between "liberal" and "conservative" in both the political and theological arenas occur within a context of economic, hence existential anxiety, and are expressed in the vocabulary of the cultural and cosmic. As in government, so in the church, the outcomes of these contestations are not being decided by the people but by the leaders.

If economics is the real issue in Singapore, what has been the Christian Churches response? By and large, all Christian denominations, but in particular Anglicanism, have been part of the establishment: originally of the colonial classes, later of the English educated professionals. Where there have been losers in the economic game, the churches, in sync with colonial and post-colonial governmental policies, have performed its work of charity. But the structural defects of capitalism—the endless labor restructuring, the monotony of repetitive work, the susceptibility of the weak and ignorant to systemic abuse etc.—are not even talked about (except to say God controls the monetary system[15]), let alone questioned. (The issue of world debt, now before Lambeth, would be considered political commentary in the Singapore context.) A vulnerable and small island state—230 square miles and 3 million people--that also happens to be rich will have the odd mix of spiritual determinism, material drive and social apathy.

The confidence of Singapore and other South East Asian countries in matters of politics, economics, and church is accompanied by its shadow: the fear of subversion, deflation and heresy. This is not peculiar to Asia. The United States has the same phenomenon. The mistake is for any community to completely externalize this into an international "clash of civilization"[16], or cast into a Manichaean struggle of heretics and orthodox. Walking the Anglican middle path with a measure of consciousness for the complex and symbolic might well provide a welcomed sobriety for all.

The author acknowledges the contribution of Dr. Paul Ananth Tambyah in the writing of this article. Dr. Tambyah is a 4th generation Singaporean Anglican. At present, he lives with his wife in Wisconsin, USA. A post-doctoral fellow in infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Tambyah and the author met 20 years ago at a Bible camp in Singapore.

Contact email: LengLim@post.harvard.edu