In 2016, Henry Van Thio, a Chin Christian, was sworn in as one of Myanmar’s two vice presidents. While nationalist groups protested the appointment, a Buddhist friend of mine expressed more muted concern. He could see the new NLD government was trying to appear inclusive, he said. But still, something didn’t sit right: ‘It’s like having a Buddhist as president of Italy or Iran.’ Embedded in this reaction was a feeling that certain nations have specific religious identities, determined perhaps by demographic facts, historical processes, constitutional arrangements, or some combination of all three.

Myanmar, for my friend, was one such nation. The country’s constitution famously skirts the matter, enshrining Buddhism’s ‘special status’ while recognising the presence of select other faiths. Concern for minorities tends to prompt calls for more secular arrangements that dismiss the ‘Buddhist nation’ as an exclusionary fiction. It’s curious, then, that at least some Christians in Myanmar decline to endorse such a move. For them, the Buddhist nation – like the Christian nation or the Muslim nation, for that matter – is not some abstraction or aspiration conjured by nationalists; such entities fundamentally exist, and their existence goes some way to explaining the world these Christians see around them.

This became clear to me on the bus, of all places. During fieldwork in Yangon between 2014 and 2016, I spent a lot of time riding the bus, often with my friend Suan, an evangelist at a church called Hope.* Like other Pentecostal churches, Hope saw opportunities for evangelism in Myanmar’s nascent democratic opening, with its easing of censorship and relaxation of restrictions on assembly. This was a moment, the thinking went, when God was on the verge of saving Myanmar, rescuing it from fifty years of military rule, just as he would bring its Buddhist-majority population to Christ. By sharing the gospel with Buddhists, evangelists like Suan worked with God towards these twin goals of political and personal salvation.

Suan was responsible for managing Hope’s evangelism program in Thanlyin, a township about 20km from downtown Yangon, over the south side of the Bago River. The trip from the church involved three different buses, and sometimes took several hours, much of it stuck in the city’s notoriously bad traffic. Many of the buses were second-hand imports from South Korea, upon which the new Burmese owner would often retain the original advertisements: posters for South Korean products that current passengers were unable to buy, written in a language few were able to read.

Also unchanged were the transport maps that informed commuters about the route the bus had plied in its previous life in Seoul, not about their present journey through Yangon’s congested streets. Riding these vehicles thus engendered a spatiotemporal dissonance: by traversing an overlapping set of actual and imagined routes, they ferried passengers across one urban landscape, even as their commercial and cartographic traces called attention somewhere else.

And not just anywhere else. Alongside their Buddhist compatriots, Pentecostals like Suan have been swept up in the Korean Wave, the exported world of K-Pop hits and Korean soaps. But the figure of South Korea carries extra meaning for Pentecostals – members of a Christian minority thought to make up less than 10% of Myanmar’s population – by virtue of its perceived status as a ‘modern’, and importantly, ‘Christian’ nation. With echoes of Weber’s thesis, this figure stands in juxtaposition to a belated Myanmar whose unyielding Buddhism, even in the face of two centuries of mission work, has left it ‘fallen behind’ (nauk kya deh) – stuck at an impasse, like a bus idling in traffic.