3 - The Making of an "Ethnic Millenarian Movement": Narratives of the Lahu Church History on the Early Mass Conversion

In his article “Hard to Imagine,” Benedict Anderson pointed out that once nationalistic discourse is established, the prehistory in which non-indigenous outsider populations participated in giving birth to nationalism becomes hard to imagine. Anderson’s insight can be applied to the highland minorities’ self-fashioning process for making themselves distinct ethnic groups in mainland Southeast Asia.

In this presentation, I examine the narrative of Church History of the Lahu. Not a small part of the Lahu population was converted to Christianity since 1904 when the American Baptist missionary evangelism led them to a millenarian mass conversion movement. Among the contemporary Lahu Baptists, this event is narrated as follows. Their ancestors were adherents of a prophet San Fo Zu, who had predicted the return of the true god and the redemption of the “lost book.” The “book” they were longing for return was the Lahu script of the Bible, and this prophecy was realized when the Baptist Missionary developed a Roman script for the Lahu language to translate the Bible.
This narrative contradicts some historical facts regarding the prehistory of the mass conversion. Actually, San Fo Zu’s prophetic movement and the mass conversion movement attracted other ethnic groups than Lahu. After the Lahu Roman script version of the Bible was introduced, however, it was presented as the “book” that the early converts were longing for. It is this moment when the multi-ethnic composition of the conversion movements has become “hard to imagine.”