THE TWAIN MEETING

Mongolia's return to religion (Rupert Wingfield-Hayes,7/31/03, BBC)

Christian groups are proliferating so fast that they now outnumber official Buddhist organisations.

But to Mongolia's conservative Buddhist elite, such rapid growth is deeply troubling.

Some Christian groups now accuse the government of orchestrating a campaign to prevent them gaining new converts.

It is a charge which Mongolia's devoutly Buddhist Prime Minister Enkbayar strongly denies.

But he did acknowledge concern about the arrival of these new foreign religious groups in his once Buddhist country.

"Religious differences are very difficult to solve, because all religions express themselves in terms of ultimate truth," he said.

These young Mongolians have found their truth, and it lies in a new foreign god.

The question facing the country now is whether traditional Buddhism, in its critically weakened state, will withstand the foreign onslaught - or whether Christianity will peacefully succeed where communism so brutally failed.

Progress in the East depends on its moving West and Christianity is the most likely engine of this movement, as it has been in South Korea and The Phillipines. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2003 10:10 AM