TruthBook Religious News Blog

Many new Christians are a mix of old and new faiths while others are torn between themselves
by Francesco Sisci

BEIJING --

In China, it is now trendy to wear a cross, hanging from a small chain at the neck, fully exposed on the chest.[1] The crosses are made of wood, metal or, sometimes, silver, gold or precious stones. And it is not just about fashion: It may be jewelry, but it is also a religious statement.

Most of the time, when asked about the meaning of the cross, the bearer will answer proudly and clearly: Yes, I am a Christian. Yet, after that, everything becomes blurred. Most people don’t know the difference between being Christian (“jidujiao,” which in China refers to Protestants) and being Catholic (“tianzhujiao”, a totally different word). Nor are they familiar with the various branches of the Protestant faith. A Chinese government estimate puts the total number of “Christians” at 130 million—almost 10 percent of the population and at least five times the percentage of Christians (Protestants and Catholics) there was when the Communists took power in 1949. Even taking into account the population increase, the absolute numbers have grown immensely, up from the original 8 to 9 million.

However, if one takes a closer look at these numbers, little appears to have changed since 1949. The Catholics, even in the rosier estimates, are about 12 to 13 million, or 1 percent of China’s population, the same percentage as in 1949. The rest of the Christians are Protestant or something similar. I conducted a small survey and found that in Italy, where they are free to express themselves, many Chinese migrants are Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are mostly from the Wenzhou area in the Zhejiang province and converted while living in their villages. In one case, a wandering pastor stopped by a home and saved a sick relative through his prayers. In return, the family converted.

In the countryside, there are also many Mormons and Evangelicals. Most just follow whichever pastor they meet out of “yuanfen,”[2] or fate. Many of those pastors are self-taught, having read a translation of the Bible in Chinese. The translation may be not very accurate or done in a scholarly way. To this very weak Biblical background they add their own preaching, which is bound to draw more from the local Chinese lore (non-Christian) than from the Bible, simply because the Bible is not part of Chinese education or tradition. Many pastors mix Christianity with Taoism and Buddhism.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons are considered to be pseudo-Christians by Catholics. Thus they might be not very different theologically from Hong Xiuquan’s Taipings, the religious sect that almost toppled the Qing dynasty in the middle of the 19th century.

The leader of the rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, claimed to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother and said he had a vision after reading a partial translation of the Bible in Chinese. He organized a movement and a hierarchical Church, in which he was the top leader and his siblings and friends were senior officials. He also edited his own version of the Bible. At its peak, the Taiping was a tightly knit organization with many millions of converts. Some modern Chinese Christians might have sprung out of that old distorted Christian sensibility, while others might be heirs of the highly literate Protestant foreign missionaries who have flocked to China since the 19th century. In contrast to the past, modern Protestants are not organized in a single vertical Church. As far as we know, they do not plan on bringing down the government: They are not rebellious and do not want to establish a new order.

The government, mindful of the history of Taiping, might have been inclined to put down these new Christians. However, the emergence of Falun Gong in 1999 changed the order of priorities.

On April 25 1999, about 10,000 Falun Gong (a Taoist-Buddhist sect) followers surrounded Zhongnanhai, China’s White House, in a show of force to demand greater political clout. China's top leaders had no warning from their security apparatus and were caught completely by surprise. They later found out the protest was organized or abetted by senior security officials. There were suspicions that it might have been part of an attempted putsch supported by the most conservative, xenophobic wing of the Communist party and aimed at stopping the process of reforms.

The Falun Gong were opposed to modern science and medicine. In a line with old Chinese traditions, they claimed that diseases do not exist, that they were just manifestations of sins, and thus without sins, there would be no sickness. The Falun Gong have a very structured organization, modeled after the Communist party with cells, a central committee, and a politburo. They claimed to have 100 million supporters in 1999.

“The fact that so many people believed in this mumbo-jumbo changed the debate in the Party. It proved that it was not that reforms were going too fast; the problem was that reforms were going too slowly.”[3]

Furthermore, it proved that there was a “spiritual market” that was out of the Party’s reach. The Party had forsaken all claims to total “spiritual” answers after Mao’s demise. It had long stopped preaching “dialectic materialism” as some kind of religion, as it did during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). This had created a huge spiritual void, and in the early 1980s, China was rife with all kinds of breathing exercises, such as Qigong, with their roots in ancient Chinese tradition. They all assured better health, but many went as far as promising miracles and immortality. The Falun Gong was one of them. People who had now lost all faith in eternal communism and who saw traditional Confucian values shattered by decades of Maoism turned to Qigong. And after the crackdown on Falun Gong many former Qigong practitioners turned their religious interest to Christianity “with Chinese characteristics”—with the blessings of the officials who preferred Christianity to Falun Gong.

In sum, many of these new Chinese Christians are new converts to "modernity," which in China is largely tantamount to “Westernization”—or the American way of life. They pray to Jesus as they eat at MacDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken. But just as they can't eat hamburgers every day (and can't digest cheese and can't stand its smell), so they can't take the "pure" overeducated Christianity and even the "purely" American Presbyterians or Evangelicals are hard to swallow. In the same way they add soy sauce or rice vinegar to their food, to Evangelical faith they may add belief in feng shui ("wind and water," traditional Chinese geomancy) and the Yijing (an ancient soothsayers’ manual).

However, as with food, there are real “gourmands” of faith. A whole legion
of Chinese goes to seminaries and devoutly studies Latin to become good priests, Catholic or Protestant. These people take the old Chinese beliefs with a grain of salt: They do not believe in the metaphysical power of feng shui, but accept some of its more physical and "realistic" aspects: Do not reside near to polluted river because the air will be dirty; build your house with back to a high mountain so that it will be protected from cold winds and warmer in winter.

It is important to consider religion in two separate parts. There is the kernel belief in divinity, and there is the cultural wrapping that enables the delivery and acceptance of that belief. These differences are not absolute, and they can be reconciled once the different cultures are fully understood and “translated.” But this translation work has been lagging behind presently.

This is not a theoretical issue—it is critical since it trickles down to present Chinese Catholics, for whom there is a split between the official and underground churches, with lots of people caught in between. This is a political issue, but not only a political issue.

The official Catholics fear of losing their standing, direct contact with the leadership, control of the physical assets of the Church, and power over the hierarchy. The underground Catholics fear of being completely swept under the rug and sacrificed for the official Church. Both know that a time of total freedom has ended.

So far, both groups are de facto independent both from the Chinese government and the Vatican. The official Catholics can have great leeway with the Chinese government claiming they have to be loyal to the religious precepts of the Holy See, and Beijing does little to interfere in the internal life of official Catholics, fearing it could face international opposition for oppressing religious followers. Meanwhile the official Catholics can also keep religious interference from the Holy See at bay claiming they have to follow the government.

The underground Catholics do not obey to the government, as they hardly recognized it; and they were also quite independent of Rome, citing the distance, the particular conditions, and the official persecution.

Over the years, things have grown so confused and messy that there are cases of dioceses with three bishops—one official, one underground, and one “conciliatory”—all fighting with each other.

It is as if parts of the same separated body are all fighting with each other, knowing they will be sewn together again but not knowing how they will to live together.

At the moment, there are two possible solutions. The first is to reach a minimal agreement and then build slowly on successive revisions. This would require sending a nuncio to Beijing to manage all the existing threads. The second solution would be to first reach a comprehensive agreement, then have normalization, and finally send a nuncio to Beijing.

Some middle-ranking officials on both sides, concerned with the actual implementation of the agreement, would prefer the latter. Top leaders might go for the former, as they are interested in benefiting from the broad political fallout of the agreement or starting to sort out practically the local complications of the life of the Chinese Church.

Despite the larger friction, there is growing trust between the two sides. China and the Holy See reached a common agreement for the man who became bishop of Beijing last year, after the demise of Fu Tianshan. Fu had been appointed by the government but not recognized by Rome. Conversely, in 2007, through intense consultations, Beijing and Rome jointly picked young Li Shan (born in 1965) for the prestigious and symbolic position of Bishop of Beijing, virtually the head of the Chinese Catholic Church.

Furthermore, for the first time since the departure of the last nuncio in 1951, the Chinese government agreed to let four Catholic priests celebrate a mass per week during the Olympics. The masses will be in five foreign languages (Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Korean) at three central churches. English-language masses are already celebrated by Chinese priests. The masses are intended for the foreign community that will flock to Beijing during the Olympics and Paralympics period, which lasts until September 20, and thus their political impact can be minimized. However, it is a major political event as the government will concede about 50 occasions (about the total number of masses) to foreign, uncontrollable priests who will preach the Catholic creed in “communist” Beijing. It is clear proof of a new trust between China and the Holy See.

Yet, in the end, both sides are clear that the agreement cannot be just a political barter over small clauses on a piece of paper. Present China is the continuity of a millennial tradition, while Vatican represents the inheritance of only 30 centuries of Western civilization. All the way to the present, in agreement with or opposition to it, the Christian tradition has been largely defined by Rome.

If these two traditions manage to find common cultural grounds and a deeper dialogue, beyond the petty economic or political bartering, relations between China and Western world could be in place.

In the end, what also matters will be finding shared values that go beyond the issue of national integrity, something that was forced onto China by Western powers during colonial times. Before adapting to “modern Western concepts” of a nation-state, China was something close to the American melting pot: You could speak Chinese, you behaved like a Chinese person, and therefore you were Chinese—despite the color of your hair, the color of your skin, or even your accent.

Meanwhile, in the West: “In their rebellion against Christianity, the nations of Europe have exhausted and demoralized themselves. After the catastrophes of the past century, they are neither Christian nor nationalist.”[5]

In China, influential thinkers such as Zhao Tingyang, Huang Ping, Li Xiaoning, Qiao Liang, and Wang Xiangsui are striving to elaborate new doctrines that would go beyond the notion of nation as the post-Westphalian nation-state imposed on China since the 19th century. In this sense, their effort appears parallel to a similar elaboration going on in the USA. However, this is a separate subject that goes beyond the scope of the present article.

This new cultural project should be the real basis for the renewal of international organizations such as the UN, the IMF, et cetera, which are now becoming outdated.

Labels: Catholicism, China, Christianity, church, Falun Gong, Francesco Sisci, Hong Xiuquan, religion