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Religion-in-a-box

Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao is readable anthropology that explores the resurgence of organized and institutional supernatural beliefs over the last generation in the People’s Republic. Though there is some general historical narrative at the beginning, the core of the book involves chapters on various local informants. Evangelical Protestant pastors, Buddhist lay devotees, and Daoist ritualists.

One of the most interesting and illuminating aspects of The Souls of China is that Johnson has to explain that religion, as it is understood in the West, did not entirely exist in China until the past century or so. Or, more precisely, a broad understanding of religion as it is in the West was not totally understood. By this, I mean the idea of strict and exclusive adherence to a particular institutional religious system with a package of beliefs and practices.

I stipulate broad understanding because the reality is that China has long had exactly these sorts of groups as part of its religious landscape. The first Ming Emperor, in fact, was affiliated originally with a group that had its origins in the White Lotus Society, a cult with Buddhist and Manichaean origins whose members were exclusive and devout adherents. But, these were historically marginalized, and only came to the fore during times of revolution. The first Ming Emperor discarded his radical religious connections upon obtaining power, becoming a patron of Neo-Confucianism.

Rather, typical peasant religion in China was not exclusive, nor was it bound up in a tight system of beliefs. Rather, it was customary, traditional, and part of the organic environment in which people were born, grew up and died. In this way, Chinese popular religion resembled ancient Roman paganism and folk Hinduism today. Buddhist and Daoist priests might perform particular services, but they did not have any particular owner of the identity of a community. Another way of saying this is that villagers in rural China were clients of a religious firm, they weren’t seen as part of the religious firm. This explains why Chinese and other East Asians have been rather liberal about borrowing from and participating in various religious practices (Chinese and Japanese initially assumed Roman Catholicism was a variant of Pure Land Buddhism).

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals underwent a crisis of confidence. In an attempt to modernize, they embraced Western science and a Western understanding of religion. They distinguished between religion and superstition. The former was what we consider institutional religions. Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, and Islam. The latter, Chinese folk religion. Long before the time of Mao progressive intellectuals and cadres destroyed and tore down the monuments to this folk religion, such as temples and shrines to city gods.

What arose in its place? Though the organic and locally rooted religions of rural China are shown to be coming back in The Souls of China, the explosion of Protestant Christianity, and the attraction of urban Chinese to Tibetan Buddhism, illustrates that urban people have different needs. I think these sorts of religions are very peculiar historically. I’m convinced that the Protestant Reformation, and in particular sectarian forms of Reform and Calvinist Christianity, would not have been possible without the economic and technological changes of the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe.

The rise of movements such as fundamentalist Protestant Christianity, Salafist Islam, and “Western Buddhism”* make sense in light of a world of globalization, urbanization, and the detachment of individuals and families from localities. These religions are often the “public face” of religion, but really I think they are religions adapted toward a certain atomized, unmoored, and cosmopolitan world. Evangelical Protestant Christianity is not very thick and can be moved from exurb to exurb rather easily.

What this suggests for the future of religion, I’ll leave as an exercise to readers.

* The highly non-supernatural forms of Buddhism promoted by people of European background.

12 thoughts on “Religion-in-a-box

  1. I’m convinced that the Protestant Reformation, and in particular sectarian forms of Reform and Calvinist Christianity, would not have been possible without the economic and technological changes of the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe.

    How does Thomas Muntzer fit into this picture?

  2. The first Ming Emperor, in fact, was affiliated originally with a group that had its origins in the White Lotus Society

    Heretics switching to a mainline religion, after taking power, is not uncommon in the Orient. Although I mostly associate this with Iran. The ‘Abbasids started out very weird as Islam goes, but became orthodox. The Safavids were an esoteric cult who only later adopted Twelver Shi’a. One wonders about the progress of “Zoroastrianism” over earlier dynastic shifts.

  3. I once came across this rather archaic (going back 30-40 years back or so at least) paper or something of an old-school German Indologist (whose name I cannot recall now) in which he pointed out how dissimilar the original Indo-Aryan religion seemed to the later Indian religion (even the components that the most direct cultural descendants of Indo-Aryans like Brahmins came to adopt) in terms of the universalism vs. localism thingy. To him* it seemed that the tribal Indo-Aryan pantheon was very universalist, in that all the deities were neatly conceptual and universal such as Dawn, Rivers, Night, Sun, Fire, Whole, etc. and lacked the tying to place and Lord-of-the-Village-type deities seen in the later-day Indian (and as I said, even Brahminical religion). And IIRC, I think like any good Indologist/Indo-Europeanist, he attributed this to the inexplicable (or I don’t remember if he actually explained their peculiarity) but some type of a peculiar character of the Indo-Aryans/Indo-Europeans. If his observation that they have such a highly universal religion is true, how does this figure with their apparent rurality while they were present in their steppic homelands? Are the steppes somehow different to other places and do they encourage universalist religions even among the masses? (But still though, to me, Early Indo-Aryans never seem to stop feeling too sophisticated to be originally a part of that steppe whose other representatives like Turks, Mongols, etc. do not seem to have contributed such massive amounts of original stuff to the world in terms of culture as did Early Indo-Aryans (not even Early Iranics, I don’t think!)).

    I am superficially aware that Ancient Greek religion also has similar types of conceptual deities as tribal Indo-Aryan deities, but I don’t know if they are a result of some sort of urban activity in ancient Greece or have similar origins as Indo-Aryan religion (either by sharing same ancestral impulses of universalisation deriving from Proto-Indo-European times or by convergently ending up developing similar religion as Indo-Aryans in one/more of their rural periods of history).

    *Of course I was also fortunate to somehow chance upon a rejoinder (valid or not, I don’t know) of people to this German Indologist’s arguments that he was somehow merely projecting his own Protestant biases into the discussions on ancient Indo-Aryan tribal religion and thus his arguments should not be taken very seriously.

    Now I have a thought developing regarding this based on what I have read based on some of your other posts here and on Brown Pundits. It seems there is a basis for generalising the Protestantism example to become a part of the idea that all universalising impulses in religion arise in urban milieus and once they spread to the rural areas, localisation begins to take place gradually and a few centuries later, another universalising action takes place from urban areas and so on. This is because I seem to remember you saying somewhere that Early Islam (which is a universalist religion) was an urban religion and I also read somewhere that another universalist religion, Buddhism (if not Jainism also), is a classical example for a religion with urban origins. If this generalization is okay, then the major objection to that old Indologist’s argument would be that the strands of religion he was comparing are not really comparable to be able to draw his conclusions – for example, he was not comparing the Indo-Aryan religion with the urban Indus religion during the Mature phase (assuming one existed) since he had no data about the latter. He was comparing it with the much later Indian religion which had rural and other folk influences already polluting the Indo-Aryan religion and this was fully natural and this natural evolution/devolution alone does not point towards any peculiarity of the Indo-Europeans/Indo-Aryans. Indeed, it does seem to me that Ancient Near Eastern civilizations (with significant urban populations) (and which would perhaps have been the most similar to the ancient Indus religion) also had a certain level of generality and decoupling with place based on a youtube lecture I once heard, of an Ancient Jewish religion course. But it still cannot be explained why such universalist impulses rivalling those of contemporary urban civilizations arose in the Indo-European religions in the first place if they were developed by such rural peoples. One resolution I can think of is by distinguishing between true rural peoples characterised by extreme agricultural sedentism and steppic peoples who tend to be on the move very much. As such, in this regard, it seems steppic peoples, and verily, all hunting-gathering bands from Out-of-Africa till the onset of agricultural sedentism, are similar to urban peoples in that they are all not as coupled to place as rural peoples are. Verily, it does seem to me that animist hunting-gathering peoples also have very general elements in religion dealing with concepts of origins of universe, etc., they may be bound by their resources for research and thus perhaps be trying to generalise to the larger scale from the smaller scale of their (mobile) localities but their initial impulse certainly seems to be to have a universalistic religion. It thus seems to me that the localisation of divinity by agricultural rural peoples is the true peculiar thing in the entire history-of-religion business and a result of agricultural sedentism. (I also tend to think that this true localisation is somewhat of a caricature, and wont to speculate much farther that true localisation of divinity does not perhaps exist just on the basis of an intuition that I have that it might not lol. To my defense, I did read once somewhere that human beings are culturally/psychologically/whatever quite hunting-gathering-like because of the millions of years of evolution that way and that may support my intuition, but I don’t know haha.)

  4. How does Thomas Muntzer fit into this picture?

    part of the overall decentralization of religion and its ability to fuse with social movements.

  5. Heretics switching to a mainline religion, after taking power, is not uncommon in the Orient. Although I mostly associate this with Iran. The ‘Abbasids started out very weird as Islam goes, but became orthodox.

    this is general. philip jenkins points out the same pattern in africa. local independent churches give way to established worldwide denominations.

    re: abbasids. they were more pro-shia party initially and came out of some ghulat trends in iran. that being said, sunni ‘orthodox’ was more created by the abbasids, rather than something they adhered to.

  6. If his observation that they have such a highly universal religion is true, how does this figure with their apparent rurality while they were present in their steppic homelands? Are the steppes somehow different to other places and do they encourage universalist religions even among the masses?

    i think it’s steppe pastoralism.

    the dominant god among turks and mongols is tengri. he lives in the sky.

    nomadic ppls need portable gods not associated with local cult sites.

  7. I’ve only just learned of Tengrism but have the impression it is confined to Mongolia now (who I believe are nominally Buddhist for the most part). Does it still have influence among Muslim Turks? I can certainly see how a sky god can be adapted to Allah, and I suppose both Jehovah and Allah have these pastoral sky god aspects to them because they originated in or were spread by pastoral cultures.

  8. I’ve only just learned of Tengrism but have the impression it is confined to Mongolia now (who I believe are nominally Buddhist for the most part). Does it still have influence among Muslim Turks? I can certainly see how a sky god can be adapted to Allah, and I suppose both Jehovah and Allah have these pastoral sky god aspects to them because they originated in or were spread by pastoral cultures.

    tengrism exists among Turks too in Russia. some Turks consider it their primal religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tengrism

    allah/el of the mountain, was the semitic sky god. baal

  9. There’s the principle of confederation as well; you might expect religions of groups of nomads that form alliances to de-emphasize gods of special places local to one group or another, or “gods of a people”. Tengriism is sort of a pan-Turkic thing from what I understand, probably influenced by prior “post-Axial” religions (Buddhism, Islam) and binding together Turkic groups in Central Asia, de-emphasizing local tendencies and beliefs? Hand-in-glove with de-emphasizing local spirituality (The gods do not live on anyone’s specific Mount Olympus.)

    Under the normal model (IA from the late MLBA Western steppe, arriving in destination in MLBA->early IA period), that probably would matter more for Indo-Iranian groups in late stages, where they are forming alliances with / absorbing other peoples in “Turan” and Northern South Asia.

    Another thing is that there’s the product of the consideration that even if you have fixed place gods to begin with, you can’t take ’em with you.

    I would not be surprised if people of the late MLBA Western steppe did believe in deities bound to and powerful in particular territory. They seem pretty territorial, and adding a sort of spiritual dimension to that would be typical? But you’d in any case expect to forget about such tutelary and place deities if you’re four or five generations on a migration. And the groups that do the migrating might be pre-selected to be those that are not in control of them in the homeland. On the lines of British emigrants to the Americas being pre-selected to be types of Christian who didn’t/couldn’t care that much about Canterbury Cathedral – disproportionately lower status religious dissenters, who didn’t control the landmarks and ceremonies).

    (This second point is a lot like reconstructing IE religion as male-deity biased. That might be an after effect of selection for male migrants from IE homelands, and what the actual emigrants from homelands placed the most emphasis on re-telling the original stories about).

  10. I am extremely sorry; I just want to note that in my overwhelming zeal to do something exciting yesterday, I concentrated solely on the beyond-localising vs. localising aspects of religion. It obviously is the case that there are many other variables whose unusual values contribute to the true universalism/not-much-ness of a given religion.

    One such variable I can see is the attachment-to-ethnicity aspect of a religion. For example, though Judaism and Hinduism seem very universal in many other respects, they both seem to give significant importance to the ethnic character of the people professing them in that both Jews and Brahmins (at least the most ancient ones or maybe the medieval ones instead?) may have felt/feel a genuine spiritual anxiety about people outside their ethne copying their religious practices and ways of life for themselves. For them, everyone has his/her own place in the world and some worldly variables like ethnicity/caste/whatever continue to play an important part in deciding the correct religious course of an individual. (My basis for Judaism is the fact I once read online on a website run by Jews (some type of conservative perhaps, not orthodox I think) in which they said that Jews are the only people bound by their special relationship with God while all other peoples are bound by other types of relationships, though God is the same for all peoples.)

    By contrast, in Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc. there is no much anxiety regarding the ethnic aspect of the worldly life of an individual (though in practice all these societies alos have ethnic divisions and such). So as such these may be more universalistic. At least intended to be originally so by their (urban) forebears perhaps. Extremely radical religions like Unitarian Universalism might be the ultimate of, well, universalism, as they seem to lack even such features like requirement of conversion, acceptance of strict monotheism (I know their position is strict monotheism as opposed to the standard Christian unitarianism but do they even forbid entry, let’s say, of a hypothetically (confused) person who personally professes trinitarianism and seeks to join them into their religion?), etc. and they thus lack attachment to any and all kinds of worldly markers (it perhaps appears so to me under the influence of my most base personal-ungodly nature-driven reptilian liberal part of mind lol) ironically though there perhaps exists a lot of bad worldliness (appropriately justified and condoned off probably) itself in their ranks.

    But all this said, I don’t know how much weight each of these variables like need to retain importance of ethne, need to have a lot of importance for conversion, having a basic-universal-theology vs. having a strictly-local-theology, etc. have in trying to model universalism and and assigning a universalism (and non-universalism) score for a given religion.

    I would also like to apologize to everybody most sincerely for being extremely offensive like this with my incredibly lazy, stupid, unlearned, annoying, and ridiculously superficial comments. I urge all of the kind folk here to take a view filled with compassion and pity towards me and forgive and completely ignore my occasional ramblings here subsequently and try to not experience any harm/pain because of my actions.

  11. I’m a little bit surprised that the analysis is not more in depth.

    For historical perspective, Chinese civilisation is intrinsically linked to Chinese folk religion with gods, goddesses, demons, epic heroes. The sculptures found on the wooden palaces of the forbidden city reminds us of the bridge between the sky and the earth, how the dynasties come and go as they win and lose the mandate of heaven. It is part and parcel of Chinese psyche and the monumental statues to the goddess of the sea, the lunar space probes in honour of the celestial rabbit all speak to the 1.4 billion Chinese irrespective of actual faith.

    The three teachings had a lasting impact. Confucius implemented ancestor worship, Taoism to this day remains alive and thriving and Indian Buddhism found an imperial place within China. As Hu Shih, Chinese ambassador to the US once said “India invaded and dominated China culturally for twenty centuries without ever sending a soldier across its border”

    These were the indigenous belief systems in China when it first came into contact with Christian missionaries and when that happened, the result was catastrophic.

    If the history of China is a succession of civil wars, only one of these was based on religion – the Taiping Rebellion. 30 million deaths because a failed candidate to the post of mandarin dreamt of being the brother of Jesus.

    Christianity left a bloody imprint on China. The Manchu Qing Dynasty was weakened and the Hakkas became outcasts. The Hans barely benefitted from the mayhem, the Opium war was just starting.

    China won’t be seeing a rise in religious practice as in Russia. The power of modern science is too great to fight in a society where excellence in maths and science determine your worth but the Chinese will go back to their roots, wear Han atire, read Confucius, learn about Tao and rediscover the three jewels of Buddhism. They will commemorate their ancestors and the ancient gods, plunge into folk heroes’ stories. They will remain atheists mostly with some dashes of superstition but they won’t become zealots of exclusivist dogmas.

    Nonetheless, lurking in the dark, Christianity and Islam will be waiting. Yet again bent on destroying another ancient civilisation but there’s no reason that the self centred empire of the middle land should lay its future in the hands of the foreign Semitic traditions of the arid middle East. China has an identity and it’s definitely not abrahamic.

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