In this chapter, I argue that religious freedom in Turkey has been a virtual seedbed for the origination of the Turkish Protestant movement. This is not to deny that the manifestation of religious freedom in Turkey has often fallen short of the relative standard set in the 1961 Constitution and retained in the 1982 Constitution. Nor is it to suggest that the emergence of the movement has been as simple as planting seeds and watching them grow. Antithetically, one could argue that the movement was improbable due to innumerable difficulties involved. Nevertheless, Turkey’s shift in 1961 from a communal to an individual basis for its more-generous provision of religious freedom and the missionaries’ ensuing shift from a Christian-minority to a Muslim focus for their work were crucial in the origination of the movement. It became just a matter of time until the missionaries guided predisposed Muslims through religious conversion and gathered them into local, multipliable ecclesial communities, which gradually gained acceptance in society and viable means of legality from the government. Thus, the Turkish Protestant movement has emerged, despite the improbabilities involved.

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Religious Freedom as the Seedbed for the Turkish Protestant Movement

  • James Bultema

摘要

In this chapter, I argue that religious freedom in Turkey has been a virtual seedbed for the origination of the Turkish Protestant movement. This is not to deny that the manifestation of religious freedom in Turkey has often fallen short of the relative standard set in the 1961 Constitution and retained in the 1982 Constitution. Nor is it to suggest that the emergence of the movement has been as simple as planting seeds and watching them grow. Antithetically, one could argue that the movement was improbable due to innumerable difficulties involved. Nevertheless, Turkey’s shift in 1961 from a communal to an individual basis for its more-generous provision of religious freedom and the missionaries’ ensuing shift from a Christian-minority to a Muslim focus for their work were crucial in the origination of the movement. It became just a matter of time until the missionaries guided predisposed Muslims through religious conversion and gathered them into local, multipliable ecclesial communities, which gradually gained acceptance in society and viable means of legality from the government. Thus, the Turkish Protestant movement has emerged, despite the improbabilities involved.