In the past, I never had any issues with describing myself as an evangelical while living in Japan. But after the first election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, I struggled to identify with the term, as it became a politically charged label among the Japanese.
My discomfort with calling myself evangelical has only increased since Trump’s second term began. I felt distressed when a Japanese non-Christian friend asked me, “So are you the same kind of evangelical Christian who supports Trump?”
I am not the only Japanese believer who feels alienated from this identity.
Last November, a new Christian wrote a letter to the hosts of a Japanese evangelical YouTube talk show saying she had recently started going to an evangelical church. “But the news tells me that evangelicals are all radical Trump supporters,” she wrote. “Do I also have to support Trump if I become a Christian? I feel scared.”
Less than 1 percent of the Japanese population identifies as Christian, and evangelicals like myself constitute roughly a quarter of that demographic. But when some American evangelicals portray their country as a Christian nation, zealously support a president devoid of Christian piety, venerate their army, and embrace gun ownership, I wonder whether we are speaking of the same group.
The word evangelical now has an uneasy association with American nationalism, an association that has been brewing since Trump’s first term in 2017. This has led to a profound disconnect between Japanese evangelical identity and the perceived political and cultural direction of American evangelicalism.
As much as we Japanese evangelicals have our American counterparts to thank for spreading the gospel to our country, many of us are increasingly frustrated with aspects of American Christianity. We emphatically reject the commingling of the faith with nationalism and strongly advocate pacifism because of our own compromises leading up to and during World War II.
Japanese evangelicalism flourished under the influence of American missionary movements in the 20th century. The 1967 Billy Graham crusade in Tokyo, where around 15,000 people registered commitments to Christ, marked a turning point for Japanese evangelicals. It was the first major interdenominational event that brought evangelical churches together and later catalyzed the establishment of the Japan Evangelical Association (JEA).
But scores of other American missionaries were ministering in Japan for decades before Graham did. Following World War II, two US-based missionary organizations—Send International and The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM)—planted numerous churches across Japan. Many of these congregations later formed the foundation of Japan Alliance Christ Church, the country’s largest evangelical denomination (255 churches), and the Japan Evangelical Church Association (194 churches).
TEAM missionaries founded Japanese Christian publisher Word of Life Press in 1950, and InterVarsity missionary Irene Webster Smith purchased a house that would later become the Ochanomizu Christian Center, a central office for evangelical denominations and parachurch organizations. Smith also helped Japanese university students form InterVarsity Japan, which is known as Kirisutosha Gakusei Kai (KGK, Fellowship of Christian Students) today.
American evangelicals didn’t just plant churches and institutions in Japan, though. They also shaped and formed the Japanese evangelical mind.
Much of this work took place on American shores as emerging Japanese leaders headed to the States in pursuit of theological education. Later, they returned to Japan to seed and grow Christian scholarship on home soil. Notable evangelicals include Akira Hatori, a Fuller Theological Seminary graduate who cofounded Japan Bible Seminary in 1958, and Susumu Uda, a Westminster Theological Seminary graduate who was one of the founding members of the Japan Evangelical Theological Society in 1970.
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American Christian literature also served as a crucial resource for Japanese believers. Many of my Christian friends read Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye when they were teenagers and devoured Tim Keller’s Meaning of Marriage after graduating from college. The Japanese translation of Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology, first introduced in 2000, is still among the most widely used seminary textbooks today.
Unsurprisingly, Japanese evangelicals have historically adopted many doctrines from American evangelicalism. One of the most important developments was the Statement on Biblical Authority in 1987. This document arose from the inerrancy debate in America, which spilled over to Japan in the 1980s as many Japanese leaders were studying in US seminaries. Deeply influenced by the Chicago statement of inerrancy, Japanese evangelicals likewise declared that every word of Scripture is God-given.
Not everyone appreciated how profoundly American evangelical thought influenced Japanese evangelical Christianity. For instance, in a 2019 article, pastor-theologian Mitsuru Fujimoto criticized American theological imposition and questioned whether Japanese evangelicals were merely “inheriting the problems and challenges of fundamentalism.”
Yet two key divergences between American and Japanese evangelicalism existed. Japan’s evangelicals repudiated nationalism and embraced pacifism, expressing core values formally articulated in JEA’s 2015 statement, which marked the 70th anniversary of World War II:
In post–World War II Japan, there were two pillars on which we evangelical Christian churches, churches believing the Bible to be the infallible Word of God, rallied. The first was the confrontation with liberal theology, which neglected the normative nature and the authority of Scripture. Second was confrontation with Japanese nationalism, which advocated the imperial system and the state Shinto religion, which suppressed and subjugated confessions of faith in Christ being the only Lord during wartime.
The statement’s focus on biblical authority and antinationalism came out of the twin failures of the Japanese church before and during World War II. In that period, theological liberalism had intertwined with nationalism to create a distinctive “Japanese Christianity,” which interpreted imperial conquest as a means of building God’s kingdom.
Prominent 20th-century theologian Danjo Ebina, for instance, viewed the Japanese colonization of Korea as a means of Christianization. In a speech to Korean Christian youth in 1910, right before Japan annexed Korea, Ebina proclaimed that God was building his kingdom by uniting Koreans and Japanese together in the advancement of the gospel.
This desire to marry church and state also seeped into Japanese sanctuaries. In 1941, the government forcefully merged several Japanese Protestant denominations to form the United Church of Christ in Japan. During services, Christians bowed to the imperial palace and sang the country’s national anthem, which was included in church hymnals. These practices stopped only after World War II ended in 1945.
Such nationalistic inclinations emerged due to the “minority complex” that many Japanese Christians held, according to historian Yoichi Yamaguchi. Because Christianity had faced persecution in Japan for 250 years, Japanese Christians at the time felt that they had to play a more active role in contributing to the state to gain a positive reputation.
Things changed after World War II. Japanese evangelicals started pushing back against a militant nationalism that controlled various expressions of the faith in Japan. They adopted an alternative ideology: pacifism. They vowed to serve no master but Christ and to be ambassadors of peace.
After years—or in some cases, decades—of reflection, numerous Japanese denominations began issuing public statements of repentance for practicing nationalistic syncretism and for supporting the war. “Above all, we repent before God the sin committed by our church, of idolatrous worship at Shinto shrines and of devotion to the Emperor,” one public confession, issued by the Japan Holiness Church in 1997, read. “Therefore, we apologize to the other Asian nations and their churches that our mission to these nations cooperated with the war effort, following the path [of] the Japanese war of aggression.”
This postwar pacifist stance has endured to the present day. For most Japanese believers, seeking peace and opposing nationalism are reflections of our commitment to Scripture. There is no greater authority than Christ (Col. 1:16). Christians are called to be peacemakers (Matt. 5:9) and ambassadors of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:20) in this broken world. Most Japanese evangelicals do not believe that Christianity can be married to nationalism or that warfare and the tools of violence can be objects of fascination rather than lament.
But on the other side of the Pacific, an unholy alliance seems to be emerging between militant nationalism and evangelicalism—a dangerous trajectory that Japanese evangelicals know well.
To be sure, some American evangelicals have been sounding the alarm on how Christianity and nationalism are incompatible. “Christian nationalism takes the name of Christ for a worldly political agenda, proclaiming that its program is the political program for every true believer,” Paul D. Miller wrote for CT. “That is wrong in principle, no matter what the agenda is, because only the church is authorized to proclaim the name of Jesus and carry his standard into the world.”
I understand and empathize with many American evangelicals who feel that their nation is facing a critical moment in which Christianity is no longer the moral majority. Making Christianity great again by means of political control is an easy temptation, especially when the country’s founding included various Christian elements.
Yet as the Japanese historian Yamaguchi has pointed out, holding on to a minority complex and a desire for political influence was the driving force behind Japanese Christians’ failure in adhering to a nationalistic Christianity before and during World War II.
Hear and heed these warning bells that reverberate from Japanese evangelicals’ painful history—one that seems to be repeating and refashioning itself in American dress.
Kazusa Okaya is a PhD candidate at Durham University and a steering committee member of Lausanne Younger Leaders Generation Japan.
