Reading Endo’s Silence, recently made into a movie by Martin Scorsese, I was stuck by a mention of a Mormon theological concept. The story takes place in early seventeenth-century Japan, so it doesn’t mention Mormons specifically, but does mention a Mormon idea when discussing the theology of the Japanese Christians.

Silence focusses on Jesuit priests Rodrigues and Garrpe sailing to Japan after having heard that their mentor and hero, father Ferreira, had apostatized under torture. Silence is based on the history the harsh measures the Japanese government took toward crushing Japanese Christianity after the Shimabara Rebellion of 1638, driving Christianity there underground. Endo based the characters of Rodrigues and Ferreira on the actual Jesuit priests, Chiara and Ferreira, who did apostatize during the persecution. Endo himself came out of the Japanese Catholic community who saw the Japanese “Hidden Christians” as heroes and the apostate priests and not truly committed. Endo thus novelizes these Jesuits’ stories.

The Mormon theology comes in the buildup to the climax of the story after the Japanese capture Rodrigues and bring him to Ferreira so that Ferreira can convince Rodrigues to apostatize. Ferreira first begins by explaining the tortures he’s undergone before moving to his central arguments: “The one thing I know is that our religion does not take root in this country” (157). Rodrigues protests that the plant has been torn up and that Christianity flourished in Japan before the crackdown.

“‘And supposing the God whom the Japanese believed in was not the God of Christian teaching …’ Ferreira murmured these words slowly, the smile of pity still lingering on his lips” (158). Ferreira insists that persecution was not the reason for Christianity’s demise in Japan, declaring that the Japanese Christians only had the externals of religion, but not the true belief of God. Rodrigues counters, “I have not been in Japan as long as you, but with these very eyes I have seen the martyrs…. I have seen them die, burning with faith” (160).

Ferreira then explains, “The Japanese are not able to think of God completely divorced from man; the Japanese cannot think of an existence that transcends the human.” Ferreira continues, “The Japanese imagine a beautiful, exalted man—and this they call God. They call by the name of God something which has the same kind of existence as man. But that is not the Church’s God” (161).

Because of this, all Ferreira’s missionary efforts were wasted. “The sapling I brought quickly decayed to its roots in this swamp” (161). “Before your eyes stand the figure of an old missionary defeated by missionary work,” Ferreira declares earlier (157).

Whether Mormons think that God has “the same kind of existence as man,” Joseph Smith certainly taught God being an “exalted man.” While it’s certainly true that is not the Catholic teaching, it’s curious that Endo had Ferreira say that such a belief invalidated all of Ferreira’s work and the Japanese Christians’ Christianity in total.

That fact that Ferreira had been so severely tortured, that he was being forced to write a denunciation of Christianity, and that the Japanese officials repeat Ferreira’s line about Christianity not being able to take root in Japan all point to the likely possibility that Ferreira didn’t really believe what he was telling Rodrigues. Certainly Smith’s teachings in the King Follett Sermon was highly heterodox, but would such beliefs really invalidate the Christianity of 400,000 Japanese converts?

NB Robert Bellah argues in his Religion in Human Evolution that notions of powerful ancestors were the religious beliefs that preceded transcendent notions of gods that humans developed later. So such a belief that Endo has Ferreira describe the Japanese believing could be a more primal human belief than the more orthodox Catholic view.
Silence ultimately points to the power of the modern state when it comes to religious choices. Though “Hidden Christians” did persist, the Japanese government’s crackdown certainly curtailed Christianity’s growth there. My classes on the Reformation noted that who became Protestant or Catholic in Europe was ultimately up to the state who had the power to crush dissent.