David Radford Explores Conversion to Christianity in Kyrgyzstan

May 13, 2023210 views0

David Radford Explores Conversion to Christianity in Kyrgyzstan

2023-05-13T09:54:38+01:00

By Church News

David Radford teaches sociology at the University of South Australia and in this interview with Union of Catholic Asian News, he explores the implication of conversion to Christianity in Kyrgyzstan.Could please tell us something about yourself?I’m originally from Australia. But most of my life, from childhood through adulthood, I have lived outside Australia My interest in the topic came about when I was working in a non-academic capacity with a faith-based youth organization in India and became increasingly aware of developments and changes after the collapse of the Soviet Union.Around the late 1980s and early 1990s, a revitalization of religion was taking place both in terms of Islam and Christianity in Central Asia. After my own studies of religion comparing Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism, I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to explore what was happening in Central Asia with its rapidly changing context. That’s what resulted in the book about Kyrgyzstan.Could you give us an overview of the religious landscape in Kyrgyzstan?Kyrgyzstan has some 7 million people. Figures would say that close to 90 percent of the population are Sunni Muslims, and some 8 percent would be Russian Orthodox Christians and minorities. The rest, 2 percent or so, would be other religious groups, including other Christians, mostly Protestants.But Kyrgyzstan has an interesting kind of eclectic history about what makes up Kyrgyzstan and its religious framework. All of these different elements impact the particular topic of Kyrgyz Muslims becoming Protestant Christians.In terms of that religious landscape, the first interesting contextual issue was the role of Soviet secularization and its ratification up until 1991, when Kyrgyzstan got independence.During the Soviet period, there were strong anti-religious policies towards all religious groups, Muslim and Christian, and certainly, this negatively affected Islam in Central Asia.Along with promoting an atheist kind of framework and outlook on life, they also tried to replace religious rituals and practices with atheistic ones. So, you’d have pilgrimages to the tomb of Lenin in Moscow.You can see another example in what one of my respondents told me. When they were in class in school, they were told that Lenin “is who is, who was, and who is to come.” This, of course, is how the New Testament presents Jesus Christ.These attempts at replacing religion with communist belief and practice were important because in 1991 when Kyrgyzstan became independent, the role of religion had been significantly diminished. Islam largely came to be associated with ethnic identity rather than a religious identity for many Kyrgyz in Central Asia.What was the main finding of your research?The research highlights the interconnectedness for many people between religion and ethnic identity. What happens when religious mobility through conversion takes place?The book argues that we can understand the religious conversion of Muslim Kyrgyz to Protestant Christianity through an understanding of the social, cultural, religious, and political context of post-Soviet Central Asia. Particularly, Protestant Christianity was seen as what we would say in sociology, a deviant religious identity.It wasn’t normal for Kyrgyz to be Christian. Indeed, embracing the Christian faith struck at the heart of Kyrgyz’s identity. As in many other parts of Central Asia, the common saying was, “to be Kyrgyz, is to be Muslim.” The idea of religious and ethnic identity was interconnected.But what happens when you don’t consider yourself Muslim anymore? Do you stop being Kyrgyz because you stopped being Muslim? Or do you stop being Kyrgyz if your religious identity has changed?The book speaks about the way Kyrgyz Christians have entered a dynamic process of engaging with this issue of identity — what it means to be Kyrgyz. This occurs through a process that seeks to locate their new Christian religious identity within the Kyrgyz community, not on the margins as it were.The book describes how Kyrgyz Christians have challenged the Kyrgyz-Muslim identity construct by negotiating and reconstructing what ethnic identity means in light of their new Christian faith — drawing on from Kyrgyz cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, language and history. This answers the question: What does it mean to be Kyrgyz beyond a strictly Muslim framework? In other words, for many Kyrgyz Christian participants in the research, to be Kyrgyz is to be Christian, as well as to be Muslim. A few participants actually said that they felt a stronger sense of Kyrgyz ethnic identity because of their Christian faith.The book also highlights the growth of the church. At the time of my research in 2004, upwards of 20,000 Muslim Kyrgyz had become Protestant Christians, and that’s very significant in the context of the Muslim community around the world. There are not many places where such large numbers of Muslims have become Christians, in this particular case, Protestant Christians.The research demonstrates that after 1991, some foreign missionaries were present. But the change of religion was largely an indigenous phenomenon. It was Kyrgyz Christians reaching out to other Kyrgyz Christians. It showed that even in religious conversion, people will seek to maintain continuity — socially and culturally — as much as possible.What was your methodological approach?I used a mixed methods approach. This included ethnography and participant observation, which is an approach that seeks to engage in community with the people that you’re studying. I used an inductive approach. It means, while I had some knowledge about the religious conversion of Christian and Muslim communities, I wanted to explore religious conversion among the Kyrgyz Christian community and draw from the information they offered.I was attempting to find out what was happening rather than trying to impose what I thought was happening in terms of conversion. I also wanted to focus on conversion from the perspective of those who were converting.I lived in Kyrgyzstan for several years. I participated in several Christian events, went to people’s homes and ate with them. I also conducted life history narrative interviews with nearly 50 Kyrgyz Christians, urban and an extensive survey with about 500 Kyrgyz Christians of different ages, genders, Protestant groups, and from both urban/rural locations across Kyrgyzstan. This was done to understand how prevalent the findings from the interviews were across the whole Kyrgyz Christian community.ALSO READ: Dolly Parton Accentuates Her Faith in New Interview