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Shusaku Endo's book Silence, now adapted by Martin Scorsese for the big screen, is clearly a book about personal religious doubt in the face of suffering.

It is also a book which is haunted by the omission of any straight account of what it was about Christianity that invited such brutal persecution in Edo era Japan. Perhaps then it is also a book which asks questions about the politics of evangelism – how do religious ideas always progress through messy historical circumstance, and what are the implications of offering a different way of thinking and living when it comes to issues of power, authority and identity?

Answers to questions like that have to be both historical and theological. As with other themes in the novel, Endo resists simplistic accounts and so should we. In particular, responses (mainly to the recent film) which root themselves in post-colonial angst and a-historical chatter about European imperialism are misplaced and occlude much of what Endo was trying to say.

He offers several historical cues, which invite the reader to reflect on the complex politics of the time. His Jesuit protagonists, for example, begin their journey from Europe in the spring on 1638 – the time of the Shimbara rebellion. Though not initially motivated by religious concerns, this tax revolt soon took on strong religious overtones. Once suppressed, 37,000 rebel peasants – many of them Catholic – were executed, and an existing ban on the ‘evil sect’ was more assiduously enforced. Endo’s Rodrigues arrives in a Japan where Christianity isn’t really a matter of theological debate at all – as he puts it in another novel, “the Japanese don’t care whether God exists or not” – but it is nevertheless a matter of public concern.

Bluntly – and at least when it comes to Christianity – to invite someone to convert is to invite someone to change who and what they consider to be authoritative, both in public and private worlds. Not all religions operate that way – one of the reasons, we could suppose that Shintoism and Buddhism co-existed fairly happily for many hundreds of years. But Christianity makes claims over lives as well as souls. Sometimes it supports and sometimes it disturbs social orders, so business always has to be done with power. 

Inevitably, that business may be messy, and early missions to Japan made mistakes. There was the “offence of the cross” - the strange claims that Christianity makes about the nature of God - and then there was just plain offence. Endo’s missionaries do approach Japan and its culture with a degree of arrogance (as did some – though not all – of the missionaries of history). On a personal level, the character Rodrigues over-identifies with Jesus, at one stage vividly imaging Jesus’ face superimposed on his in a reflection. This all implies that he approaches things with a rather high view of himself. He is largely ignorant of Japanese beliefs, and in debate comes across as apologetically weak – as if he had not really done his homework. His interlocutors reason while Rodriguez asserts – hardly the best missionary approach. Is it a moment of defeat or redemption when he learns that he is not a Jesus but a Peter? Endo is saying, I think, that it is both.

And from his interrogator Inoue we learn of Japan’s frustration at the export of European religious politics to a recently unified Japan, with Portugal, Spain, Holland and England characterised as bickering concubines disturbing the peace of the house. It’s an easy accusation to cast at a distance of 400 years and 6000 miles, but surely European missions in Asia were far more caught up in trade and regional power-politics than was good for them.

Yet by the time Endo joins us to the story that game was over in Japan. What Catholic missionaries had left – in spite of their initial objective of top-down conversion – was a faith that sustained the lives of farmers and fishermen living on the margins of Japan’s feudal society. Maybe it’s the protestant in me, but I hear a critique of the notion that these poor communities should have to wait for a priest to administer the sacraments. Rodrigues finds their theological understanding flawed, but their faith is as strong as, or even stronger than, the priests'. After the elites reject and expel them, it is in the villages that the priests find shelter and protection. It is not the priest-Jesus Rodrigues who gives his life for them, but they who give their lives to protect him.

It’s also in the villages where the theological questions of the novel can be unfolded. For the apostatised Ferreira, genuine Christianity is simply not within the Japanese psyche – “the Japanese are not able to think of God completely divorced from man; the Japanese cannot think of an existence that transcends the human”. But it surely isn’t the God that ‘transcends the human’ that offers farmers and fisherman hope and dignity, or a God ‘divorced from man’ that Endo sees suffering with alongside them and Rodrigues. The philosophical god of the scholastics reason is precisely the one that remains silent – even mute – in suffering: this god is an irresolvable logical puzzle. For Endo, it is the weak and suffering God of the cross who has something to say.

But when it comes to the politics of mission, it’s surely significant that the reasonable, pragmatic, urbane voices of Inoue and the interpreter are the voices that most readily resonate with liberal secular sentiment. But to side with them – to ask, how dare these priests go and ‘force’ their religion on others – is to take a side against not just the priests and their church but the hope and dignity of the Tomogi villages. It is to take the side of a civilised torturer, prepared to kill and maim in defence of the status quo and in the name of the ‘peace’ of the house.

For me, this is a useful reminder that the project to control or limit religious expression or mission is not always a humane one. In fact, more often than not it’s just another way of defending or establishing some other principle, ideology or power. They aren’t always called religions, but that is what they are - visions of the good that ask for our public allegiance. As Bob Dylan once sang, you’ve gotta serve somebody. In spite of being assured that their apostatising is merely a public formality, Ferreira and Rodriguez are not just left blank. They are forcibly converted, given new clothes and even new families and new names, just as baptised Christians are received into the family of faith with a given Christian name. Endo is medidating on kind of religious conflict, but its not the conflict between Christianity and Shintoism or Buddhism - it's the conflict between Christianity and the religion which is Japan's national idenity. 

I'm not the first person to note that there are multiple resonances with the sense that many Christians - and indeed other believers - have in the 'liberal' secular west. Their 'beliefs' and their 'spirituality' is usually a subject of indifference - its the public nature of faith which is problematic. This is inevitable, even proper, though for the first time in many years it feels necessary to say that we are all much better off if states can accommodate religious difference. If the tree of Christianity never took root in the swamp of Japan – and if it has been uprooted in the swamp of Western post-modernity – then we should pay close attention to the fruit of the trees that do take root.

Paul Bickley is Director of Political Programme at Theos | @mrbickley

This is part of a mini-series reflecting on Silence. Check out:

• Nick Spencer's review of Silence , the new film by  Martin Scorsese  
• Natan Mladin's review of Silence and Beauty, a meditation on Endō's book by Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura
• An interview with Makoto Fujimura by Natan and Nick

Image by Simon Cozens via flickr under Creative Commons 2.0