Between secularist ideology and desecularizing reality: the birth and growth of religious research in Communist China

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2004 by Fenggang Yang

Merely three decades ago, China appeared to be the most secularized country in the world. Not a single temple or church was open for public religious service, and people appeared to wholeheartedly believe in atheism, as reported by this American observer. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, China may have become one of the most religious countries in the world. All kinds of religions, old or new, conventional or eccentric, are thriving. American and other Western media often feed images and stories of spectacular revivals of various religions and reckless crackdowns of religious organizations by the Communist government. The growth of various religions and the government's religious policies are important research topics both for understanding China and for theoretical development in the social scientific study of religion, which have received limited but some scholarly attention (e.g., Hunter and Chan 1993; Madsen 1998; Overmyer 2003; Kindopp and Hamrin 2004).

However, between the atheist ideology and repressive religious policy of the government on the one hand and the desecularizing reality of thriving religions on the other hand, religious research in China has emerged as the third entity playing complicated but increasingly important roles in China's religious scene. This paper focuses on the changing scholarship of religious research. (1) What are the roles of religious research in China under the rule of the Communist Party? Is the scholarship merely part of the atheist propaganda and for the purpose of controlling religion? Or is it serving the interest of religions? What are the predominant theories, perspectives, or approaches in religious research? How are these changing and why?

I will show that during the last two decades of the twentieth century, the birth and growth of religious research in China have been dramatic. In a sense it parallels the paradigm shift in the sociology of religion in the United States (Warner 1993), in which the new paradigm offers a more objective, scientific, and consequently more balanced approach to religion than the old paradigm that favors secularization as the destiny (Stark and Finke 2000). Religious research in China remains limited and restricted in many ways. However, the scholarship has shifted away from ideological atheism--a radical form of secularization "theories"--to a more scientific, objective approach that affirms both the positive and negative functions of religion. This intellectual history has three distinct periods: the domination of atheisms from 1949 to 1979, the birth of religious research in the 1980s, and the flourishing of the scholarship in the 1990s. Religious research in Communist China was established for the purpose of atheist propaganda and religious control, but it grew into an independent academic discipline that has become more responsive to the desecularizing reality.

1949-1979: RELIGIOUS RESEARCH AS PART OF ATHEIST PROPAGANDA

In the ideological lexicon of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), atheism is a basic doctrine, which manifests in two major forms: scientific atheism and militant atheism. Scientific atheism, as the offspring of the European Enlightenment Movement, regards religion as illusory or false consciousness, nonscientific and backward; thus atheist propaganda is necessary to expunge religion. In contrast, militant atheism, as advocated by Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks, treats religion as the dangerous opium and narcotic of the people, a wrong political ideology serving the interests of the anti-revolutionary forces; thus forces may be necessary to control or eliminate religion. Scientific atheism is the theoretical basis for tolerating religion while carrying out atheist propaganda, whereas militant atheism leads to antireligious measures.

In practice, almost as soon as it took power in 1949, the CCP followed the hard line of militant atheism. Within a decade, all religions were brought under the iron control of the Party: Folk religious practices considered feudalist superstitions were vigorously suppressed; cultic or heterodox sects regarded as reactionary organizations were resolutely banned; foreign missionaries, considered part of Western imperialism, were expelled; and major world religions, including Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, were coerced into "patriotic" national associations under close supervision of the Party. Religious believers who dared to challenge these policies were mercilessly banished to labor camps, jails, or execution grounds.

Within such a political environment, academic research on religion was no more than a means for atheist propaganda. A Chinese scholar who lived through that period states:

    Scholarly research on religion was considered an important means for
    atheist education to the masses of people, thus it stressed the
    differences and conflicts between theism and atheism, and between
    idealism and materialism. (Dai 2001:41)

Religious research was indeed an almost forbidden field because of the political risks involved (Cao, 1998a:3; Wu [1995] 1998:3). Any religious research could be easily labeled as "pure scholarship" (i.e., an irrelevant subject and a waste of resources), or with "feudalist-capitalist content" (i.e., reactionary substance), thus subject to reproach and penalty.