Mapping the Unfinished Mission

Beyond the Religious Label

~10 min read

A person selects no religion on a survey.

What have we learned?

Perhaps the person is an atheist who rejects belief in any spiritual reality.

Perhaps she is agnostic.

Perhaps he is indifferent to organized religion.

Perhaps she visits temples, makes offerings to ancestors, believes certain places contain spiritual presence, consults diviners during crisis, and considers all of these practices cultural rather than religious.

The label is data.

It is not the whole religious world.

This chapter examines one of the hardest problems in global mission research: formal religious affiliation and lived religion do not always line up. Buddhism, Chinese popular religion, Shinto, ancestor practice, Indigenous traditions, and unaffiliated identities can overlap in ways that Western-style survey categories describe only imperfectly.

Mission therefore needs more than a religious census.

It needs to understand how people actually inhabit meaning.

The Modern Category of “Religion”

The English word religion can imply a bounded institution with a name, doctrines, recognized leaders, and exclusive membership.

That model fits some traditions and contexts better than others.

Pew’s 2024 study of religion and spirituality in East Asian societies explicitly notes that common translations of “religion” in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were historically modern imports and can be heard as referring particularly to organized, hierarchical religious systems. Practices connected to ancestors, temples, spirits, or family custom may therefore be experienced as something other than “religion” even when outside researchers classify them as religious.¹

This is not a semantic curiosity.

It changes how missionary statistics should be interpreted.

If half a society says “no religion,” that does not mean half the society has adopted philosophical naturalism.

Pew’s East Asia Findings. Pew surveyed more than 10,000 adults across Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and neighboring Vietnam in 2023. Large shares reported no religious affiliation, ranging from 27 percent in Taiwan to 61 percent in Hong Kong.

Yet spiritual beliefs and ritual practices remained widespread.

A majority in all five surveyed societies said they believe in God or unseen beings. At least four in ten religiously unaffiliated adults in each place expressed such belief. Ancestor practices were widespread among Buddhists and the unaffiliated alike. In Japan, 70 percent of adults reported offering food, water, or drink to honor ancestors during the prior year; in Vietnam the figure reached 86 percent.²

The missionary conclusion should not be:

East Asians are secretly religious.

It should be:

affiliation alone underdescribes the religious and spiritual environment.

Buddhism: One Label, Many Traditions

Pew estimates that about 324 million people identified as Buddhist worldwide in 2020, roughly 4.1 percent of humanity. Buddhism was the only major religious category in Pew’s study to decline in absolute number from 2010 to 2020.³

Even this apparently straightforward category contains enormous diversity.

Theravada Buddhism has shaped societies such as Thailand, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

Mahayana traditions developed across China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Vajrayana traditions are particularly associated with Tibetan and Himalayan worlds.

Pure Land, Zen/Chan/Seon, Nichiren, and other movements contain distinct theological, ritual, and institutional forms.

A Buddhist monk in Thailand, a Japanese family conducting a Buddhist funeral, and a Tibetan practitioner do not inhabit one identical religious system.

Missionary strategy that speaks of “reaching Buddhists” therefore begins at a level too broad for actual relationship.

Formal Buddhism and Cultural Buddhism. Japan illustrates the distinction between institutional identification and religious practice.

Many people participate in Buddhist funerary traditions without understanding themselves as strongly religious. Shinto-related rituals, Buddhist temples, family customs, New Year observances, and secular social life can coexist without the person constructing a single exclusive religious identity.

This creates missionary communication problems.

A Christian evangelist may ask:

What religion are you?

The hearer may answer:

none.

The missionary then begins explaining Christianity as an alternative to atheism, while the person’s actual questions concern ancestors, family obligation, death, suffering, and ritual continuity.

The failure is not theological courage.

It is poor listening.

Ancestor Veneration. Ancestor practice is among the most important examples of lived religion that resists simple classification.

Pew’s East Asia research found that at least half of religiously unaffiliated adults in the surveyed societies participated in some ancestor-veneration practices, as did large majorities of Buddhists. Practices included burning incense, leaving food or drinks, tending graves, and other forms of honoring the dead.⁴

The meaning varies.

For one family, the act may function primarily as remembrance and filial respect.

For another, ancestors are understood as continuing spiritual agents capable of blessing or harming descendants.

For another, the ritual is performed because refusing would dishonor living relatives regardless of personal belief.

A missionary who labels the physical act without understanding its meaning can make two opposite errors.

Error one: automatic condemnation

Every ancestor-related practice is assumed to be worship and therefore idolatrous.

Error two: automatic culturalization

Every ancestor-related practice is declared merely cultural and therefore spiritually neutral.

Both avoid the work of interpretation.

Contextualization requires the church to ask what the practice communicates in that community.

Vietnam: A Particularly Strong Example. Vietnam complicates easy Christian-versus-ancestor distinctions further.

Pew found very high rates of ancestor practices even among Vietnamese Christians. Eighty-six percent of Christians surveyed reported burning incense connected with ancestors and 81 percent reported offering flowers or lighting candles in honor of ancestors during the previous year.⁵

Those statistics do not tell us automatically whether the practices are theologically appropriate.

They demonstrate that Christian conversion does not simply remove people from inherited ritual worlds.

Churches must teach, discern, adapt, reject, reinterpret, or retain practices in ways that make Christian allegiance clear without turning Christianity into unnecessary cultural estrangement.

This is precisely the kind of question that must be answered primarily by mature Christians inside the culture rather than by outsiders applying a universal checklist.

Chinese Popular Religion

The term Chinese popular religion or folk religion refers to a wide and contested set of practices including temple worship, local deities, ancestor rites, festivals, spirit mediums, divination, and traditions influenced by Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist worlds.

The category itself should be handled cautiously because it can imply that “real” religion belongs to organized institutions while everyday popular practice is secondary.

For many people, these practices address life’s most immediate questions:

Will my family prosper?

Why is someone ill?

Is this date auspicious?

What obligation do I owe my ancestors?

How should we respond to death?

What unseen forces shape this place?

Christian witness that answers only abstract doctrinal questions may therefore remain disconnected from the spiritual questions people actually ask.

Shinto and Japanese Identity. Shinto presents another classification problem.

It includes shrines, festivals, ritual purity, kami traditions, imperial and national histories, local communal practices, and modern institutional forms. Many Japanese people participate in shrine practices without adopting Shinto as an exclusive religious identity.

Christian mission should therefore not imagine that conversion requires a person first to identify consciously as “Shinto” and then exchange one system for another.

The social meaning of particular practices has to be understood one by one.

Korea: Christian Visibility and Religious Fluidity

South Korea contains substantial Protestant and Catholic Christian populations, Buddhist traditions, new religious movements, and a very large unaffiliated population.

Pew’s 2024 East Asia survey found extraordinarily high levels of religious switching in South Korea: 53 percent of adults reported a current religious identity different from the one in which they were raised.⁶

This makes Korea one of the strongest examples of why religious identity should not be treated as static inheritance.

The country simultaneously sends thousands of Protestant missionaries and contains large numbers of people who have left Christian affiliation or were never Christian.

Missionary direction is not permanent.

Buddhism and Ethnic Nationalism. In several societies, Buddhist identity intersects strongly with national or ethnic identity.

Sri Lankan Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, Myanmar Buddhist nationalism, and Tibetan religious-cultural identity represent very different political histories. In such contexts Christian conversion can be interpreted not merely as religious change but as cultural or political betrayal.

This parallels some Muslim and Hindu contexts discussed earlier.

The missionary challenge therefore concerns social belonging as much as doctrine.

Religious freedom in law does not automatically eliminate communal cost.

Folk Religion and the Language of “Fear”. Some missionary frameworks have described societies through “fear/power” worldviews, suggesting that people shaped by folk religions are primarily concerned with spiritual power and protection.

The framework can alert Western missionaries to dimensions of spiritual experience their own cultures minimize.

It becomes reductionist when entire continents are assigned one dominant worldview.

People concerned with spirits also experience guilt, honor, shame, love, moral obligation, intellectual doubt, and material need.

A more careful anthropological approach asks which concerns are prominent in this setting rather than assigning the population to one worldview box.

Chapter 20 will examine this cultural-distance problem more directly.

Indigenous Religious Worlds

The category Indigenous religion covers an extraordinary range of traditions across the Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Arctic regions.

They should never be treated as one world religion.

Many are deeply connected to:

land;
ancestry;
oral narrative;
sacred places;
communal identity;
ritual specialists.

Modern missionary history contains cases in which conversion became associated with the destruction of language, dress, art, governance, or social practices that were not intrinsically incompatible with Christian faith.

The resulting memory can become a contemporary access barrier.

A community may hear Christianity not as a religious claim about Christ but as a threat to peoplehood.

The missionary must therefore know the history of prior mission as well as the current theology of the community.

Mission and Cultural Survival. Christianity’s translation principle can work in the opposite direction.

Missionaries and local Christians have sometimes contributed to the preservation of minority languages through literacy, translation, dictionaries, and written literature. Local Christian movements can appropriate Christian faith while defending cultural identity against dominant populations.

The relationship between mission and Indigenous culture is therefore not one universal story of destruction or preservation.

It is empirical and historical.

The key ethical principle remains:

conversion to Christ does not require conversion to the missionary’s ethnicity.

The Religiously Unaffiliated. Globally, Pew estimated approximately 1.9 billion religiously unaffiliated people in 2020, about 24.2 percent of humanity.⁷

This category includes:

atheists;
agnostics;
people who say “nothing in particular”;
people who reject organized religion while retaining spiritual beliefs;
people whose traditional practices do not fit their society’s formal category of religion.

Therefore unaffiliated should never be used as a synonym for atheist.

The missionary approaches appropriate to a philosophically naturalist university student and an unaffiliated Taiwanese adult who believes in spirits and practices ancestor rites may be very different.

The checkbox is only the beginning.

The Problem of Measuring Belief. Survey researchers necessarily simplify.

They ask questions capable of being answered across thousands of people.

Missionaries should not criticize that simplification while making even simpler assumptions themselves.

Instead, quantitative data can identify patterns and qualitative listening can interpret them.

A useful missionary research process therefore moves through several layers:

population affiliation;
beliefs;
practices;
social obligations;
trusted institutions;
crisis behavior;
personal narratives.

The deeper layers cannot all be mapped globally.

Local churches and field researchers become essential.

Questions Better Than Labels

Instead of beginning only with:

What religion are you?

missionaries can learn to ask:

What happens when someone dies?

How does your family remember ancestors?

Where do people go when seriously ill?

What kind of spiritual danger do people fear?

Which festivals matter most?

What makes a person morally good?

What happens after death?

Which religious institutions are trusted?

What do younger people think about the traditions of their parents?

These questions reveal lived religion without requiring people to fit one imported conceptual box.

Christian Contextualization Begins With Description. A recurring temptation in mission is to move immediately from observation to judgment.

Practice identified → theological verdict issued.

Faithful contextualization requires an intermediate step: description.

What is actually happening?

What does the community think it means?

Do different generations interpret the same practice differently?

Can the practice change meaning within Christian use?

Only then can Scripture and Christian theology evaluate it responsibly.

This is why anthropology matters for mission. It does not replace biblical judgment. It helps ensure that Christians judge the real practice rather than a misunderstanding of it.