The earlier Protestant missionaries to the lands of South and
204 CHRISTIANITY AND OTHER FAITHS
Unitarian Christianity sometimes become nearly identical in religious doctrine.
There have always been considerable Christian elements in
Islam. The Koran teaches high respect for Jesus, as a true prophet
of God, even though Mohammed is regarded as having superseded him, and though neither Mohammed nor most Moslems know much about the actual content of the New Testament. Christian influence is said to be more apparent in Sufism than in the rest of Islam.
Since a Christian church existed in South India at least as early as the ninth century, and perhaps even in the second century, subsequent similarities to Christianity found in the Indian religions may be due to Christian influence. The modern Christian penetration of Hinduism and Buddhism will be discussed in our next section.
3. The Contemporary Situation
The earlier Protestant missionaries to the lands of South and East Asia generally gave unfavorable reports of the religions encountered there. Those religions did not appear to offer any serious competition in high moral and spiritual values. This situation has radically changed. The more favorable contemporary assessment of the Eastern religions is doubtless due in considerable measure to more generous understanding by the missionaries at work. However, it is also apparent that the religions of Asia have changed radically and now offer much more that is morally and spiritually attractive to a sensitive Christian.
In Hinduism, the Brahma Samaj, Arya Samaj and Ramakrishna Society are all obviously syncretistic and include conspicuous Christian elements. To be sure, the Arya Samaj and many Ramakrishna devotees profess to find all their teachings in the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas. However, these interpretations often seem highly strained, to say the least, and many were first brought forth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under Christian stimulus. The Christian influence has been widely diffused in Hinduism, especially through C. F. Andrews and Mohandas K. Gandhi.15
Buddhism, too, provides many examples of Christian influence
* Cf. Bouquet, op. cit., pp. 136, 276-77.
Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions 205
among the devotees and institutions of a non-Christian religion. Much of the present Buddhist activity in social work, hospital service, and other benevolent projects is obviously imitative of prior Christian activity or responsive to it. Sometimes the imita-
tion is even more explicit, as in the Young Men's Buddhist Association in Japan and in the use of Christian hymns in worship, sometimes with the substitution of "Buddha" for "Christ." Some
visitors in Polynesian Buddhist centers have been surprised to find
that the Buddhists were even using hymnals and Sunday-school
leaflets originally prepared for Christian churches.
What evidence is there that contemporary Christianity, in the United States, for example, has been influenced by non-Christian religions? Where the Nicene Creed is used, it bears witness to the ancient Hellenistic penetration of the Church already mentioned. The Old Testament lesson is a contribution of the ancient Hebrew faith. The sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper remind us of ancient Jewish rites, while the Lord's Supper is also reminiscent of the Mysteries.
The Church calendar bears emphatic witness to a syncretism of customary rites. Christmas is celebrated in the Church as the birthday of Jesus. However, the date of December 25. was originally the date of a celebration in honor of Mithras, Persian god of light widely popular in the Roman Empire in the early Christian centuries. The observance of Christmas obviously includes also elements of other pagan festivals, some of them Nordic, associated, like the Mithraic rites, with the winter solstice. Easter is historically related to the Jewish Passover and to pagan celebrations of spring, the time of nature's rebirth. The name Easter is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Eastre, the Teutonic goddess of spring. Since the rest of the annual Church calendar is derived from the dates of Christmas and Easter, the whole Church calendar is continuing witness that the Church long ago took to itself various pagan religious rites, with appropriate changes in form and interpretation.
In American churches more recent non-Christian influences are evident. Preaching and Christian instruction show the effects of _ popular hedonism, individualism, nationalism, and other aspects of Americanism which in other times and places would be regarded as
not only non-Christian, but even, in some instances, anti-Christian. These borrowings from our secular culture appear to be often ac-