Rice Christian

Rice Christian is a term used, usually pejoratively, to describe someone who has formally declared himself/herself a Christian for material benefits rather than for religious reasons.

The term comes from Asian countries, such as China and Japan. Concerns have been expressed both by Christian missionaries and by those opposed to Christian missions that people in these situations are only nominally converting to Christianity in order to receive charity or material advancements.

Internal and external critics of Christianity have asserted that missionaries sometimes exploit this type of convert in order to shame the people of native religions, such as is alleged in Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth:

Only Christianity was at that time an exception. I developed a sort of dislike for it. And for a reason. In those days Christian missionaries used to stand in a corner near the high school and hold forth, pouring abuse on Hindus and their gods. I could not endure this. I must have stood there to hear them once only, but that was enough to dissuade me from repeating the experiment. About the same time, I heard of a well known Hindu having been converted to Christianity. It was the talk of the town that, when he was baptized, he had to eat beef and drink liquor, that he also had to change his clothes, and that thenceforth he began to go about in European costume including a hat. These things got on my nerves. Surely, thought I, a religion that compelled one to eat beef, drink liquor, and change one's own clothes did not deserve the name. I also heard that the new convert had already begun abusing the religion of his ancestors, their customs and their country. All these things created in me a dislike for Christianity.

See also

• Religion of the Yellow Stick
• Christianity in Asia
• Mission (Christian)