Crypto-Christianity

1966 novel by Shusaku Endo

term for a member of the Japanese Catholic Church during the Edo period

Turkish-Armenians who conceal their Armenian identity

Crypto-Christianity is the secret adherence to Christianity, while publicly professing to be another faith; people who practice crypto-Christianity are referred to as "crypto-Christians". In places and time periods where Christians were persecuted or Christianity was outlawed, instances of crypto-Christianity have surfaced.

The Japanese term , from Portuguese cristão (cf. Kristang), meaning "Christian", referred to Catholic Christians in Japanese and is used in Japanese texts as a historiographic term for Catholics in Japan in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Crypto-Protestantism is a historical phenomenon that first arose on the territory of the Habsburg Empire, and in France after the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 until the Edict of Versailles issued by Louis XVI in 1787, but also elsewhere in Europe and Spanish America, at a time when Catholic rulers tried, after the Protestant Reformation, to reestablish Catholicism in parts of the Empire that had become Protestant after the Reformation. The Protestants in these areas strove to retain their own confession inwardly while they outwardly pretended to accept Catholicism. With the Patent of Tolerat