Christianity in Contemporary China

Socio-cultural Perspectives

Francis Khek Gee Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136204982
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Christianity is one of the fastest growing religions in China. Despite its long history in China and its significant indigenization or intertwinement with Chinese society and culture, Christianity continues to generate suspicion among political elites and intense debates among broader communities within China.

This unique book applies socio-cultural methods in the study of contemporary Christianity. Through a wide range of empirical analyses of the complex and highly diverse experience of Christianity in contemporary China, it examines the fraught processes by which various forms and practices of Christianity interact with the Chinese social, political and cultural spheres. Contributions by top scholars in the field are structured in the following sections: Enchantment, Nation and History, Civil Society, and Negotiating Boundaries.

This book offers a major contribution to the field and provides a timely, wide-ranging assessment of Christianity in Contemporary China.

Part I
Enchantment

1 Signs and wonders

Christianity and hybrid modernity in China

Richard Madsen

When asked by messengers of John the Baptist how they could know that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus replied: ‘Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the good news is proclaimed to the poor and happy is the man who does not lose faith in me’ (Luke 22–23). The most rapidly growing segments of Christianity in China today are full of signs and wonders – miracles of healing, exorcisms, ecstatic experiences in which believers are seemingly transported to another world, visions of Jesus or (for Catholics) of the Virgin Mary. The prevalence of belief in these signs and wonders is puzzling to — indeed scandalous for – most secular social scientists, not to mention Chinese government officials. Modern social scientists are committed to explaining the world through reason – logic and facts – and they base their work on an assumption that nature is governed by unbreakable physical laws that do not allow for miracles. Within this framework, if people perceive signs and wonders the cause must be psychological, a transformation of perception by emotional forces that override the capacity to see the truth through reason. The challenge for social scientists is how to explain these psychological (mis)perceptions in terms of logic and empirically observed facts. And how to explain the accelerating acceptance of belief in such impossible signs and wonders.

But this rationalized reduction of religious experience to interior psychic forces is in tension with another aspiration of social science, at least in its humanistic forms. That is, to enable us to walk (or at least hobble) in the shoes of people shaped by different cultures and historical experiences, to see the world from their point of view and even to learn from them. This aspiration has been shared by humanistic scholars in many different cultures. One beautiful expression is the quote from Mencius that is the epigraph of Robert Bellah’s recent (2011) book, Religion in Human Evolution:

When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, how could it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence one should try to understand the age in which they have lived. This can be described as ‘looking for friends in history’.

(Mencius 5B:8)

The way to get inside the mentality of people different from ourselves is to place those experiences in broad historical contexts, with special attention to what Charles Taylor calls the ‘frames’, the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape expectations and give meaning to experiences in particular historical times (Taylor, 2007). Thus Taylor tells us that people in medieval European Christendom lived in a ‘transcendent frame’ in which they took for granted that this everyday world was full of forces from beyond, from God or spirits or demons, and that humans could gain access to these forces through rituals and prayer. This was a world in which it was impossible to imagine that God did not exist, even though there could be plenty of debates about the nature of God and its implications for human life. Taylor shows how reforms within Christianity, including but not limited to the Protestant Reformation, gradually disembedded the transcendent, the ‘supernatural’ from the immanent, the ‘natural’. Thus the world became dis-enchanted. God created the natural world to run according to universal laws, which could be discovered through human reason; and when God did enter the world today it was through the conscience of individuals, inspiring them to faith and good works, leading to the establishment of scientific and social institutions to heal the sick and alleviate poverty. These were the new signs and wonders, not the suspension of the laws of nature through miracles which our medieval Christian forbearers sought through prayer.

According to Taylor, these developments within Christianity eventually led to the modern secular mentality of Europe and North America, which is characterized by an ‘immanent frame’. Within this set of taken-for-granted assumptions, this world is based on natural laws, knowable through scientific reason, which can be used by humans for their mutual benefit. Within this immanent frame, belief in God is a matter for each individual’s personal faith and it is optional so far as public life is concerned. Many people live satisfying lives without believing, and this forces people who do believe to be more thoughtful about what they are gaining from their belief. The goods of belief are usually conceived in terms of their usefulness for supporting good morality – although religious people do not necessarily have better morality than atheists. The purpose of life within the immanent frame is to steadily make this world better through human effort; and modern people assume that their ways of living and thinking represent progress over the medieval transcendent frame (Taylor, 2007, pp. 539–593). According to Taylor, through its historical transformations, modern Western Christianity created this immanent frame, which forms the broad context for how most modern Western Christians understand their faith, even though this modern immanent frame has led to a decline in the numbers of Christians and their capacity to influence the world.

There are several reasons why this analysis is useful for understanding the development of Christianity in China. First of all, it shows us that Christianity is not a fixed, static set of universal beliefs. It is a rich historical tradition. Although all Christians make reference to certain common ‘classic’ texts, particularly the New and Old Testaments of the Bible, there has been constant change in the ways that Christians have understood these texts and related to each other and to the world. A major example of this change has been the internal reforms in Christian understandings that led to the transformation of the transcendent frame to the immanent frame and thus to the creation of Western modernity. Thus when we talk about the encounter of Christianity with Chinese culture, we are talking about the interaction between a dynamically transforming Western tradition and a dynamically transforming Chinese tradition – interactions that have caused further transformations in each. A second reason why this dynamic understanding of Christian development is important is that it allows us to see how Christianity undergoes constant change as it interacts with the modernization of Chinese culture. Chinese Christianity is different from Western Christianity, and Chinese modernity is different from Western modernity. One sign of this difference (but certainly not the only one) is the pervasive importance of ‘signs and wonders’ in indigenous Chinese Christianity, especially the kind that has been flourishing since the Reform era.

Modernizing Christianity and the modernization of China

The Protestant Christianity that came to China in the nineteenth century was by and large a modernizing Christianity. As Max Weber (and now in a different voice Charles Taylor) has argued, this form of Christianity had ‘dis-enchanted’ the natural world and made it possible to see nature as governed by impersonal universal laws that could be uncovered through empirical science and manipulated through human endeavor. This made possible a scientific revolution and industrial revolution – which in turn provided means and motive for the West’s imperialist expansion (Weber, 1958, pp. 129–156). Most of the Protestant Christianity that came to China in the nineteenth century promoted, at least indirectly, this Western modernizing spirit. The Protestants strongly criticized popular worship of gods, ghosts, and ancestors; and they demanded that Christian converts give these up. Many missionaries to be sure believed in the literal truth of the Biblical account of creation and would be considered ‘unscientific’ and ‘fundamentalist’ by today’s standards. But even these carried a worldview that opened the way for modern science. They promoted the notion that the world was empty of invisible spiritual forces. Partly to distinguish themselves from Catholics, Protestant missionaries criticized belief in miracles and visions. Healing of the blind, and lame, and lepers was to be done through the application of Western medical science carried out by doctors (like Peter Parker) infused with a Christian spirit of dedication and generosity. They also promoted a disciplined, rationalized way of life and identified this with the essence of Christianity (Dunch, 2001).

Protestant Christianity was thus identified in the Chinese mind with modern Western culture, for better or worse. For worse, because it was part of the West’s imperial aggression. For better, because it embodied the scientific spirit and rationalized organization that might enable China to improve its economy and defend itself against the West. At the end of the nineteenth century, reformers like Liang Qichao were encouraged by missionaries like Timothy Richards to eliminate the shrines and temples that had anchored community and meaning at the grassroots level and to transform Chinese life through a modern scientific education. In the early twentieth century, it was Christian missionaries who created universities like Yanjing and St. John’s that became models for a modern higher education.

It was because of competitive dialogue with Western Christian nations that Chinese reformers at the turn of the twentieth century developed categories for thinking about the relationship between the world of material forces and the world of spiritual forces. It was at this point that they developed the category of ‘religion’ itself. The word used was zongjiao, derived from Japan, which in turn had borrowed it from European scholarship. As Chinese intellectual elites saw it, all Western nations had a national religion and if China was to be a modern nation, it had to have one too. That religion should have its own distinctive national content but to be a real religion it had to have a particular form, which was in fact the form taken by Protestant Christianity in the West. The religion would be a matter of beliefs which would be adhered to by individuals and would provide proper guidance for their moral character. It would eschew ‘superstitious’ practices that supposed that people might improve their fortunes by calling upon unseen beings that stood behind the visible world. The most truly modern form of religion (as expressed in the writings of European liberal theologians) would in fact go completely beyond traditional religion by subtracting all belief in divine forces and retaining only core moral teachings.

The Chinese national religion-equivalent, Chinese intellectuals said, was Confucianism, which was now assumed (contrary to the historical record) to be a set of coherent teachings that promoted good social morality and was not connected with irrational spiritual forces – an ancient proto-secular moral teaching that anticipated the post-religious wisdom that modernizing Western Christians were now adopting. Later (after 1912), two other indigenous Chinese faiths were added to the officially recognized world of Han Chinese national religions: Buddhism and Daoism. These retained certain beliefs in realities that transcended this visible world and so, unlike Confucianism, were classified as religion (zongjiao). But in their officially recognized forms these too were Westernized constructs that selected certain aspects from a welter of Chinese cultural traditions and fit them into the standard religious mold: systems of beliefs that promoted good morality and were practiced by individuals who voluntarily joined together into congregations. To Buddhism and Daoism were then added the ‘foreign religions’ (yangjiao) of Protestantism and Catholicism. In the name of unity between Han Chinese and minority nationalities, Islam was also officially recognized as a religion. In the constitutions of the Republic of China, the free practice of these five religions was supposed to be protected by the state (Yang, 2008, pp. 11–19).

If this was what Chinese religions truly were, then Chinese society would indeed have conformed to a Western model of modernity. Religion was mainly a set of models for personal morality, stripped of any forces that might intrude upon the order of nature, which was governed by laws that could be discovered through modern science. In the early twentieth century, the predominant forms of Protestant missionary Christianity were important agents for transferring this Western view of modernity to China. The missionaries pioneered the establishment of modern schools and hospitals and to meet the social disruptions of industrialization and urbanization, they established new forms of social work and community development. While their efforts to improve life in this world were embraced by many Chinese, their efforts to connect their this-worldly activity with a supernatural source received only lukewarm acceptance. For example, St. John’s University in Shanghai graduated many distinguished alumni who contributed greatly to modern Chinese intellectual life – but only a tiny fraction of them ever converted to Christianity. Although some of the major Chinese leaders of the twentieth century, like Chiang Kai-shek, were Christians, the total number of Chinese Protestant converts never even reached one million.

The path followed by a modernizing Protestantism in China paralleled that taken in the West, where the very success of Protestant efforts to progressively improve modern society eventually led to a weakening of attachment to the supernatural message of the religion. But there were important differences. The modernizing agenda in China did not go nearly as deep as it did in the West. The Chinese Protestant universities and hospitals and YMCA associations only touched the surface of Chinese urban life. Despite some genuine, admirable contributions to local rural development, they had little impact overall on the terrible poverty and social disruption afflicting the vast rural population. Moreover, in the minds of many nationalistic urban elites, they were fatally compromised by their continued connections with foreign imperialism. Eventually, the Chinese people would arrive at their own hybrid version of modernity, in which elements derived from the West were amalgamated with indigenous traditions in a mutually transforming process. This eventually led to important differences between patterns of Christian belief in China and in the West (van der Veer, 2011).

In the West, particularly in the United States, the perceived spiritual vapidity of modernizing Christianity led to a ‘fundamentalist’ reaction. Key issues were an insistence on a literal interpretation of the Bible and a rejection of scientific theories of evolution, and an affirmation of strict moral standards, supposedly based on Biblical teachings, especially about sexuality. There was also a movement toward a ‘pre-millenialist’ theology, based on an i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Notes On Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Shields of faith Christianity in contemporary China
• PART I Enchantment
• 1 Signs and wonders Christianity and hybrid modernity in China
• 2 From ‘Christianity in China' to ‘Chinese Christianity' Changing paradigms and changing perspectives
• PART II Nation and history
• 3 Christian revival from within Seventh-day Adventism in China
• 4 Protestant reactions to the nationalism agenda in contemporary China
• 5 Trying to make sense of history Chinese Christian traditions of countercultural belief and their theological and political interpretation of past and present history
• 6 Contemporary Christianity and the religiosity of popular Chinese cinema
• 7 ‘To the Peoples' Christianity and ethnicity in China's minority areas
• PART III Civil society
• 8 Civil society and the role of the Catholic Church in contemporary China1
• 9 The emergence of Christian subcultures in China Beginnings of an inculturation from the grassroots?
• 10 Calvin, culture and Christ? Developments of faith among Chinese intellectuals
• 11 Christian ethics and business life An ethnographic account of overseas Chinese Christian entrepreneurs in China's economic transition
• 12 Saints, secrets, and salvation Emergence of spiritual—religious groups in China between 1978 and 1989
• PART IV Negotiating boundaries
• 13 The house church identity and preservation of pentecostal-style Protestantism in China
• 14 Making sense of China's state-society relations Unregistered Protestant churches in the reform era
• 15 A Three-Self Protestant church, the local state and religious policy implementation in a coastal Chinese city1
• 16 Constructing sacred space under the forces of the market A study of an ‘upper-floor' Protestant church in Hong Kong
• Index