China's Christians

"It was in villages that we met people whose lives had clearly been transformed; but not by the government slogans, or by political maxims, nor even the burgeoning market; they had been given new hope because of faith." -- Rhidian Brook, BBC Thought for the Day, 12 July 2006.

Religion is often embraced as a source of stability in economically insecure areas of the world. But the growth of Christianity in China, a region of relative economic strength, betrays the lack of an existing moral compass as the country emerges onto the world stage.

Before Maoism imploded, it damaged traditional reliance on Confucian precepts. This gave Christianity plenty of room to grow after the relaxation of restrictions on religion in the 1970s. Yet estimates of the number of Christians in China are difficult to obtain due to:

• the number of Christians unwilling to reveal their beliefs;
• Beijing's hostility towards some Christian sects; and
• difficulties in obtaining accurate statistics on unregistered 'house churches'.

The official figure in 2002, which consists of members of the state-recognised  Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, is about 15 million, while estimates on members of Chinese house churches, most of them unofficial and many of them at risk of suppression,  range from 50 million to 100 million.

Beijing periodically cracks down on the proliferation of unapproved pulpits. It could do so more systematically if the Communist Party feels it is haemorrhaging moral authority to the church. Given the syncretistic, atomised and disorganised nature of the house churches, this will not be easy. 

Beijing may move to subdue Christian groups they perceive to be xie jiao, or heretical cults. As with the government's persecution of the Falun Gong spiritualist movement, the authorities will reserve the iron fist for Christian sects that are practicing a Pentecostal, ecstatic form of worship, that they deem disruptive of social stability.

It is not just Christianity that has more adherents. Chinese people vacillate between religions according to their needs. The country's traditional religions, like Buddhism, have also been attracting more practitioners. The Christian Science Monitor points out that there are more Yoga devotees because of its image as a fashionable Western trend.

All this soul-searching is evidence that the systems of belief that once governed Chinese communities are weak. There is no longer a fast balm that cements society together. Yang Fenggang, a sociologist at Purdue University, wrote that China's market economy is accompanied by "a widespread moral corruption", which prompts many individuals to seek a theodicy to put their seemingly chaotic universe into order.

In any case, spiritualism of every kind will increase in the absence of strong moral leadership elsewhere. The question is whether the Communist Party will recognise that it often has an overwhelmingly benign nature and that it can play a positive role in constructing the ‘harmonious society’ that the Party so fervently champions.  

Sources:

Pew Forum

BBC

The Christian Science Monitor