Christian name

monosharp

I'm in Asia. Why do Asian Catholics/Christians have to pick english-style names and their priests/pastors call them 'christian' names ?

Whats so unchristian about their own names ?

MrPudding

I have no idea, but is it something to do with the name having to be that of a saint?

MrP

PDN

It's because they are closer to the practices of the early Christian church.

When someone becomes a Christian then the Bible teaches that they have become a new creation (hence 'born again') and so start a new life. The sins and hang-ups of the old life are left behind. To symbolise this it was common for the earliest Christians to take a new name.

There was also a very practical reason, in that Christians faced persecution. If one was arrested then he couldn't inform on everyone else under torture if he didn't know all their legal names. All he could say to the torturers was, "I don't know they're real names. Several use the name David, others call themselves Joshua etc."

I would think the 'English-style" names are actually Hebrew, Roman or Greek names? eg David, Matthew, Thomas, John, James, Mark, Samuel etc? Those are biblical names.

robindch

Sociologically, it's to enforce a sense of common group identity and separateness from the rest of the population who have not acquired imported names.

You could also look at it as a variation on the religious habit of wearing special clothes or ornaments whose purpose is also to establish group identity. It's also quite similar to the custom of christian monks and priests discarding their secular names and taking new ones upon profession -- the idea being, as PDN points out, you cast away your old identity and acquire a new one which is dedicated to the religion, possibly to some figure within it which is particularly inspiring. I also suspect that there's something rather deeper going on, since many cultures assert that knowledge of names implies power over an individual so renaming implies a acquisition of power and political allegiance by the religion over the religion's dedicatee.

In Indonesia, I work with an organization which employs muslims and christians -- the muslims all have traditional Indonesian names (frequently suggesting which province/island they come from), while the christians who are mostly ethnic chinese have generic western names (Alex, Antony, Victor, Albert, Henry etc).