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Crypto-Christianity is the secret adherence to Christianity, while publicly professing to be another faith; people who practice crypto-Christianity are referred to as "crypto-Christians". In places and time periods where Christians were persecuted or Christianity was outlawed, instances of crypto-Christianity have surfaced.[ citation needed ]
Various time periods and places have seen large crypto-Christian groups and underground movements. This was usually the reaction to either threats of violence or legal action.
Secrecy is a motif which is found in the New Testament, particularly in Mark's Gospel. According to the Gospels, Jesus was concealing his mission or his messianic identity until a certain time, and he ordered his disciples to do the same, for e.g. in Mark 9:9, after the Transfiguration "Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen". This motif has been called "the messianic secret" and it has been interpreted in different ways. According to one interpretation, the historical Jesus wanted to avoid the immediate occurrence of a confrontation with Rome, because the Roman governor Pontius Pilate would not have tolerated the existence of a popular leader who would have referred to himself as the Messiah. There are also theological interpretations, of mixed historical and theological value. [1] The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman argues that Jesus was executed based on the claim that he was the "King of the Jews" a claim which also signalled the status of "Messiah" (A title of Hebrew origin, given to a promised man who would carry both kingly and religious authority as the anointed leader of Israel). Theologically and politically, the meaning of this title was possibly misunderstood by the Roman authorities.
During the initial development of the Christian Church in the Roman Empire, its members were frequently forced to practice their faith in secrecy.[ citation needed ] The official policy under Trajan forced Christians to make a choice: they could choose to recant their faith, which meant that they would be allowed to live, or they could choose not to recant their faith, which meant that they would be executed as martyrs. [2] The term crypto-Christianity can be applied to that segment of the church population which concealed its Christian beliefs as a means to avoid persecution. In contrast, many Christians, including Polycarp, [3] chose to retain their beliefs and suffer persecution, due to the fact that Christian doctrine did not allow Christians to publicly profess another religion, even if they held a mental reservation against it, which made it stricter than the Muslim practice of taqiyya and Jewish opinions on the matter, but many did so out of weakness:
All the inhabitants of the empire were required to sacrifice before the magistrates of their community 'for the safety of the empire' by a certain day (the date would vary from place to place and the order may have been that the sacrifice had to be completed within a specified period after a community received the edict). When they sacrificed they would obtain a certificate (libellus) recording the fact that they had complied with the order. [4]
Christianity was introduced to Japan during its feudal era by Saint Francis Xavier in 1550. Christianity was banned in 1643 by the Tokugawa bakufu government, which viewed Christianity as disloyal and a threat to their power. Churches were destroyed, known Christians faced forced conversion to Buddhism and all signs of Christian influence were systematically eliminated. The ban was not lifted until 1858.
During this period, converts moved underground into a crypto-Christian group called kakure kirishitan or "hidden Christians". Crypto-Christian crosses and graves, camouflaged to resemble Buddhist imagery, can still be seen in the Shimabara Peninsula, Amakusa islands and far south in Kagoshima. Shūsaku Endō's acclaimed novel Silence draws from the oral history of Japanese Catholic communities pertaining to the time of the suppression of the Church.
An early attestation and justification of crypto-Christianism is found in an epistle of Patriarch Ioannes 14th (Ιωάννης ΙΔ') (1334-1347) of Constantinople to the Christians of Bithynia (Asia Minor). He says that "those [Christians] who by the fear of punishment [by the Muslims] want to believe and practice Christianity secretly, they will be also saved, provided they study god's orders as far as possible". [5]
Due to the religious strife that has existed in the Balkan Peninsula and Anatolia, instances of crypto-Christian behavior are reported to this day in Muslim-dominated areas of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, and Turkey. [lower-alpha 1] With the threat of retribution for the religious and ethnic conflicts, many Christian minority groups keep their religion private to protect themselves. Crypto-Christianity was mostly practiced following the Ottoman Turkish conquests of the Balkans, but the earliest scholarly record of the phenomenon dates back to 1829. Linobamvaki in Cyprus traced their ancestry to both Catholics, Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christians who converted under Ottoman oppression. The Laramans in southeastern Kosovo hailed from the northern Albania highlands and converted after settling in the 18th century. Accounts of Crypto-Christian Serbs were documented as early as the 19th century and persisted into the 20th century.
Crypto-Greek Orthodox reportedly lived in many parts of the Ottoman Balkans and Anatolia. A good description of the Crypto-Christians among Pontic Greeks from northeastern Anatolia and the Pontic Alps region (often referred to as Stavriotes), including a bibliography about other parts of the Ottoman Empire, is provided by F. W. Hasluck. [7]
Further information is contained in "The Crypto-Christians of the Pontos and Consul William Gifford Palgrave of Trebizond," London: Valiorum Reprints, 1988, from Peoples and Settlement in Anatolia and the Caucasus 800–1900, by Anthony Bryer
Crypto-Armenians are believed to represent at least two groups of Armenians which are living in modern-day Turkey. One group has been Islamized under the threat of physical extermination, particularly during the Armenian pogroms of the mid-1890s and the Armenian genocide of 1915. Representatives of a different, much smaller crypto-Armenian group live in separate villages which are inhabited by Turks and Kurds in Eastern Turkey (on the territories of the traditional Armenian homeland). This group differs from the above-mentioned "Islamized" group due to the process and depth of its Islamization. [8]
In the first few centuries the Christian religion spread rapidly around the Mediterranean region with Egypt and Syria becoming especially important centers of the religion. Even as the Roman Empire disintegrated between the 5th and 7th centuries, the Christian faith only deepened in the Eastern Mediterranean. During the 7th century the Rashidun Caliphate took over what is now called the Middle East. Initially Christianity was well tolerated though preferential treatment was given to Muslims. However, often the only actual requirement for being considered a Muslim was to profess a belief in God and proclaim Mohammed as his prophet. As a result, many Egyptians, Syrians, and others in the region officially converted to Islam while still adhering to Christian practices.
As oppression of Christians arose under the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim, Christian (and Jewish) practices became more hidden. Secretive communities appeared in Egypt during the 11th century and in Morocco in the 12th century under the Almohads' rule. Many Crypto-Christian communities existed in Middle-East till the 19th century, as Muslim authorities continued to tolerate minimal requirements of obedience by converts. From late 19th century onward most of crypto-religious groups disappeared as a result of the rise of nationalism in the new Middle Eastern states. [9]
Many Christian communities in the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War had to go underground in so-called Catacomb Churches. After the break-up of the Warsaw Pact and the end of the Soviet era in the 1990s, some of these groups re-joined the official above-ground churches, but others continued their independent existence, believing the official churches had been irreconcilably tainted by their cooperation with the previous Soviet-supported regimes.
Chinese house churches are unregistered Christian churches in the People's Republic of China which operate independently of the official government-run religious institutions: the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and China Christian Council (CCC) for Protestants, and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association for Catholics.
In addition to Christians practising their faith secretly in a non-Christian society, there have been instances of crypto-Catholics in majority Protestant, or Protestant-dominated territories and Eastern Orthodox countries. For example, Catholicism was banned and individual Catholics were legally persecuted in England from 1558 onwards. This inspired Recusancy, especially in Ireland. Likewise, Catholicism was suppressed in the Russian Empire, in favour of Eastern Orthodoxy, and in Scandinavia, in favour of Lutheranism.
Crypto-Protestants have sometimes practised in Catholic territories. During the early modern era, this was the case for French Huguenots following revocation of the Edict of Nantes. More recently, Protestants in Eritrea, an Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church-majority country, number about 2% of the population and often practice in secret to avoid persecution and torture from the authorities.
Additionally, historically Eastern Orthodox populations in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that had come under the dominion of various Roman Catholic polities (the Republic of Venice, [10] the Austro-Hungarian Empire, [11] and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth [12] ) from the Middle Ages through the Early Modern era were often violently persecuted for not adopting the Catholic faith. Compromises were enacted whereby these formerly Orthodox peoples (such as those in western Ukraine) were permitted to retain their ritual peculiarities on condition of recognizing Papal jurisdiction over their ecclesial affairs, yet in many cases the faithful maintained their Orthodox identities [13] despite the superficial concessions made by their hierarchs.
Rūm, also romanized as Roum, is a derivative of Parthian (frwm) terms, ultimately derived from Greek Ῥωμαῖοι. Both terms are endonyms of the pre-Islamic inhabitants of Anatolia, the Middle East and the Balkans and date to when those regions were parts of the Eastern Roman Empire.
In the Ottoman Empire, a millet was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community was allowed to rule itself under its own laws.
Albania is a secular and religiously diverse country with no official religion and thus, freedom of religion, belief and conscience are guaranteed under the country's constitution. Islam is the most common religion in Albania, followed by Christianity, though religiosity is low and there are many irreligious Albanians. In the 2023 census, Muslims accounted for 51% of the total population, Christians made up 16%, while irreligious were 17%. The other 16% were undeclared.
Paulicianism was a heretical medieval Christian sect which originated in Armenia in the 7th century. Followers of the sect were called Paulicians and referred to themselves as Good Christians. Little is known about the Paulician faith and various influences have been suggested, including Gnosticism, Marcionism, Manichaeism and Adoptionism, with other scholars arguing that doctrinally the Paulicians were a largely conventional Christian reform movement unrelated to any of these currents.
Hayhurum is the name given to Armenian-speaking Christians who are members of the Greek Orthodox Church. Their exact ethnicity has been a source of debate. Some of these Armenian speakers living in the vicinity of the town of Akn till the 16th century were of Orthodox faith. There were also a number of people of Greek Orthodox faith among Hamshenis, who are considered to have been converted to Greek Orthodoxy during the late Middle Ages under the rule of the Empire of Trebizond.
Under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, Christians and Jews were considered dhimmi under Ottoman law in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax.
Religion in Bulgaria has been dominated by Christianity since its adoption as the state religion in 864. The dominant form of the religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity within the fold of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. During the Ottoman rule of the Balkans, Islam spread to the territories of Bulgaria, and it remains a significant minority today. The Catholic Church has roots in the country since the Middle Ages, and Protestantism arrived in the 19th century; both of them remain very small minorities. Today, a significant part of the Bulgarians are not religious, or believers who do not identify with any specific religion, and Bulgaria has been the cradle of some new religions, notably the Neo-Theosophical movement of Dunovism.
Islam in Kosovo has a long-standing tradition dating back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Before the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the entire Balkan region had been Christianized by both the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. From 1389 until 1912, Kosovo was officially governed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire and a high level of Islamization occurred among Catholic and Orthodox Albanians, mainly due to Sufi orders and socio-political opportunism. Both Christian and Muslim Albanians intermarried and some lived as "Laramans", also known as Crypto-Christians. During the time period after World War II, Kosovo was ruled by secular socialist authorities in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). During that period, Kosovars became increasingly secularized. After the end of Communist period religion had a revival in Kosovo. Today, 95.6% of Kosovo's population are Muslims, most of whom are ethnic Albanians. There are also non-Albanian speaking Muslims, who define themselves as Bosniaks, Gorani and Turks.
A significant number of people in the former Kingdom of Bosnia converted to Islam after the conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 15th century, giving it a unique character within the Balkan region. It took over one hundred years for Islam to become the majority religion. Many scholars agree that the Islamization of the Bosnian population was not violent, but was, for the most part, peaceful and voluntary.
Christianity in Turkey has a long history dating back to the early origins of Christianity in Asia Minor during the 1st century AD. In modern times the percentage of Christians in Turkey has declined from 20-25% in 1914, to about 2% in 1927, to 0.2–0.4% today Sources estimate that the Christian population in Turkey ranges between 180,000 and 320,000. However, the exact number remains unclear due to the absence of a religious census in the country. The percentage of Christians in Turkey fell mainly as a result of the late Ottoman genocides: the Armenian genocide, Greek genocide, and Assyrian genocide, the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the emigration of Christians that began in the late 19th century and gained pace in the first quarter of the 20th century, and due to events such as the 1942 Varlık Vergisi tax levied on non-Muslim citizens in Turkey and the 1955 Istanbul pogrom against Greek and Armenian Christians. Exact numbers are difficult to estimate, as many Turkish former Muslim converts to Christianity often hide their Christian faith for fear of familial pressure, religious discrimination, and persecution.
Christianity, which originated in the Middle East during the 1st century AD, is a significant minority religion within the region, characterized by the diversity of its beliefs and traditions, compared to Christianity in other parts of the Old World. Today, Christians make up approximately 5% of the Middle Eastern population, down from 13% in the early 20th century. Cyprus is the only Christian majority country in the Middle East, with Christians forming between 76% and 78% of the country's total population, most of them adhering to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Lebanon has the second highest proportion of Christians in the Middle East, around 40%, predominantly Maronites. After Lebanon, Egypt has the next largest proportion of Christians, at around 10% of its total population. Copts, numbering around 10 million, constitute the single largest Christian community in the Middle East.
Religion in Kosovo is separated from the state. The country's constitution establishes Kosovo as a secular state, that is, neutral in matters of religious beliefs, and where everyone is equal before the law and is guaranteed freedom of religion, belief, and conscience.
In North Macedonia, the most common religion is Eastern Orthodox Christianity, practiced mainly by ethnic Macedonians, Serbians, Vlachs, and Romanis. The vast majority of the Eastern Orthodox in the country belong to the Macedonian Orthodox Church, which declared autocephaly from the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1967.
In AD 1453, the city of Constantinople, the capital and last stronghold of the Byzantine Empire, fell to the Ottoman Empire. By this time Egypt had been under Muslim control for some eight centuries. Jerusalem had been conquered by the Rashidun Caliphate Muslims in 638, won back by Rome in 1099 under the First Crusade and then reconquered by Saladin's forces during the siege of Jerusalem in 1187. Later in the seventh Crusade, it was briefly taken back by the Catholics once again. It was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517. Orthodoxy, however, was very strong in Russia which had recently acquired an autocephalous status; and thus Moscow called itself the Third Rome, as the cultural heir of Constantinople. Under Ottoman rule, the Greek Orthodox Church acquired power as an autonomous millet. The ecumenical patriarch was the religious and administrative ruler of the entire "Greek Orthodox nation", which encompassed all the Eastern Orthodox subjects of the Empire.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity is today the religion of only a minority in Turkey. It was once the dominant religion, during the time of the Byzantine Empire, as the region that comprises Turkey today was a central part of the Byzantine heritage. Today, less than one tenth of one percent of the population are Orthodox Christians. The provinces of Istanbul and Hatay, which includes Antakya, are the main centers of Christianity in Turkey, with comparatively dense Christian populations, though they are minorities in these areas. The traditional variant of Orthodox Christianity present in Turkey is the Eastern Orthodox branch, focused mainly in the Greek Orthodox Church.
Minorities in Turkey form a substantial part of the country's population, representing an estimated 25 to 28 percent of the population. Historically, in the Ottoman Empire, Islam was the official and dominant religion, with Muslims having more rights than non-Muslims, whose rights were restricted. Non-Muslim (dhimmi) ethno-religious groups were legally identified by different millet ("nations").
The term Laraman in Albanian refers to crypto-Christians who adhered to Islam officially but continued to practice Christianity within the household during the Ottoman era. It was derived from the Albanian adjective i larmë, meaning "variegated, motley, two-faced", a metaphor of "two-faithed" (l'arë), a reference to the Laramans following both Christianity and Islam (nominally).
The Islamization of Albania occurred as a result of the Ottoman conquest of the region beginning in 1385. The Ottomans through their administration and military brought Islam to Albania.
The ethnonym Turks has been commonly used by the non-Muslim Balkan peoples to denote all Muslim settlers in the region, regardless of their ethno-linguistic background. Most of them, however, were indeed ethnic Turks. In the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic faith was the official religion, with Muslims holding different rights from non-Muslims. Non-Muslim (dhimmi) ethno-religious legal groups were identified by different millets ("nations").
TurkicChristians are ethnic Turkic people who follow Christianity. The Christian Turkic peoples represent an intersection of Turkic and Christian cultural and historical dynamics, particularly within the context of Central Asia and the Caucasus. Historically, the most prominent group within this category were the Bulgars. Currently, The major Christian-Turkic peoples include the Chuvash of Chuvashia, and the Gagauz (Gökoğuz) of Moldova and Yakuts of the Sakha Republic. The vast majority of Chuvash and the Gagauz are Eastern Orthodox Christians.
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