God on the steppe : Christian missionaries in Mongolia after 1990

Abstract

A pervasive image of Mongolia found in Western popular culture is of a wide steppe untouched by civilization and people living simple pastoral life in a way they have been doing for centuries, but Mongolia is a country of enormous contrasts. Life in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, where close to half of the population resides, is as far from the image of the steppe as one can go. Mongolia underwent tremendous social and cultural transformations in the last two decades. The purpose of this thesis is to tell the story of Christianity in Mongolia after 1990 and to provide framework for understanding it. What we are witnessing in contemporary Mongolia is a third wave of missionary efforts of Western Christianity to “conquer the steppe”. The previous attempts, the Catholic envoys to the Great Khans in the Mongol Empire and the missionaries in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century failed. The steppes of Outer Mongolia turned out to be hostile and inaccessible, the nomadic settlements were not permanent and sparse and the work brought few converts. The only successful Christian missionaries in the Mongol lands were the Syriac-rite Nestorians, deemed as heretics by Western Christianity, who managed to gain significant influence among some of the Mongol tribes. The third wave of Christian missionary efforts to Mongolia began after Mongolians cast off the restrains of communism and embraced democracy in 1990. After seventy years of socialist atheism, freedom of religion and belief was introduced. However, the new freedom of religion meant not only the freedom to openly practice the religion of their ancestors, but also the freedom to choose religion from the infinite pool of options in the modern pluralist religious market. Different faiths, religious organizations, churches and denominations began to penetrate Mongolia in order to seek new converts. Among them the most prominent were the Christian missionaries. My study focuses on how the Christian missionaries maneuver the legal, social, political and religious landscape of rapidly changing Mongolia and explores how they deal with its possibilities and limitations in the attempt to propagate their beliefs. Furthermore, the thesis attempts to provide the reader with tools for understanding of the interplay between the external influences and local adaptations as Christianity is trying to gain a foothold in this predominantly Buddhist country. The thesis is largely based on a fieldwork conducted in Mongolia in spring of 2009.