Why Baptists Care about Burma

W hen the military overthrew the elected government in Burma (also known as Myanmar) in February, supporters of democracy worldwide were shaken by the setback in a country that was showing promise. Burma has long struggled to establish democratic institutions, but it held open elections in 2015 for the first time in 25 years. It voted again in November 2020. Both elections were legitimate. The military’s political party was crushed both times. After the second defeat, however, the military decided it had had enough. The day the new parliament was supposed to begin, the military arrested politicians and announced a one-year state of emergency, which, sadly, is likely to last much longer.

Human-rights groups around the world spoke out against the coup and the awful violence that accompanied it. One of the vocal groups, at first blush, might seem a little strange: the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). What interest does this predominantly American denomination have in a Southeast Asian country?

Shane McNary, a BWA permanent representative to the United Nations office in Geneva, explained to National Review why Baptists care about Burma.

McNary is from Arkansas and has served as a missionary in Slovakia and the Czech Republic for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship since 2004. The Baptist connection to Burma starts with the beginning of American international missions work itself. Adoniram Judson, one of the first American missionaries, left Massachusetts in 1812 as a Congregationalist and arrived in India as a Baptist. From there, he moved to Burma, where he translated the Bible into Burmese and worked for decades as a missionary, suffering imprisonment, war, and the deaths of two wives while spreading the Gospel in a country where nearly everyone was Buddhist and hardly anyone had heard of Jesus Christ before. The seeds Judson planted would grow into the Myanmar Baptist Convention, which today counts over 1.7 million members.

Burma has nearly 60 million people today, about 90 percent of whom are Buddhist. Baptists are the largest denomination of the Christian minority. The week of the coup, the convention put out a statement opposing the military government. If you asked most Americans where the idea of individual liberties comes from, they’d probably point to the First Amendment. That’s a fine answer, but for Baptists, individual liberty runs deeper.

In Baptist history McNary points to Thomas Helwys. Writing in the 1610s as a dissenter from the Church of England, Helwys was one of the first English-language defenders of religious liberty. Early Baptists weren’t just calling for liberty in reaction to their own persecution under James I. “They extended that call to everyone else,” McNary says. “This call has been repeated over the centuries, from Thomas Helwys all the way up to today . . . because we believe that faith, to be authentic, must be free.”

One consequence of that freedom is that people may choose to follow other religions. That doesn’t mean Baptists think those other religions are true; that’s why they send missionaries like McNary all around the world to preach the Gospel. The religious minority targeted by the Buddhist majority in Burma is not as much the Christians as it is the Muslims. As Jay Nordlinger has written for NR, the Rohingya people in Burma are a Muslim ethnic minority who “must be the most despised and persecuted people in the world right now.” That persecution happened even under the democratic regime and continues today. Baptists stand for their freedom, too.

“What we find in Scripture is this emphasis, not only that God has created all persons . . . but that every human is set apart as an image bearer,” McNary says. “When I read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that idea of the Imago Dei, the image of God, echoes through everything I read there.” The core freedom, however, is not that of speech or of the press or even of religion as such. “Jesus called to the disciples. God is calling to people. And there’s an understanding that we have a freedom to respond,” McNary says. “This freedom, unhindered ability to come to Jesus, is at the root of what we understand is freedom.”

The biblical text McNary thinks best exemplifies the proper understanding of religious freedom is the Christmas narrative, specifically when the wise men visit the baby Jesus in Matthew 2. King Herod wanted to use the wise men to locate Jesus, since he viewed Him as a threat to his throne. “The state said to the wise men, ‘Hey, we’re really interested in what you’re doing. Let’s talk about worship. You go and do your worship, and then come back and report to me,’” McNary says. “I have always looked at that as what happens when the state goes wrong, trying to coopt worship for the purposes of the state.”

Just as the protection for religious liberty extends to all religions, so does the danger of combining religious and state authority. It can be hard for Americans to comprehend that a country where 90 percent of the people are Buddhists is capable of the grotesque violence that Burma has been afflicted with for decades. But to McNary, it’s not surprising. “Whenever majoritarianism fills a group with power, even religion can be perverted,” he says. “I do not believe Buddhism is a violent religion, but when you merge religion with the power of the state, you always end up with violence, whether it’s Muslims or Christians or whoever else.”

The violence in Burma has caused many to flee the country, and plenty have come to the United States. Seven percent of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention are part of the Burmese diaspora. One of the most vocal senators on Burma has been Todd Young of Indiana. That’s because Indianapolis has the largest Burmese community in the country, and Fort Wayne also has a significant Burmese population.

Burmese aren’t just image bearers of God, as if that weren’t enough to make us care already. They are also our neighbors as Americans. When things happen in Burma, “that ripples through their communities, which will impact us when we live in community with them,” McNary says. Even if we don’t care about foreign policy or Burmese democracy, McNary says, we can realize that “what happens in Burma is really upsetting to my neighbor, and that should move us. If we have an ounce of Christianity in us, that should move us.”