Deviation Actions
Description
I at first did not want to touch the subject of religion at all, for two reasons. One, it is a bit of a political hotspot as well as bugbear in sinology, and two it is really freaking hard to get data let alone show that data in any way that doesn’t come across as a giant jumbled mess. In the end though I decided it better to try, because a lot of the tenseness around this subject is the result of not having good data or representations, or really anything at all, and so leaving the matter of religion a blank space would just be enabling current problems.
Now, when people talk about religion in China these days they are almost always (if they are a foreigner especially) talking about Abrahamism, notably Christianity and (to a lesser extent) Islam. Every month someone publishes a report on some site or evangelical platform talking about how some-such company has sold over 10 million Bibles or how China may or may not have the most Christians in the world in 20XX and it gives a bit of a skewed view of things. Likewise, this map gives a limited, and thus skewed, view of things, and so the upcoming text is required to read it properly. For that reason this map will only be posted on DeviantArt for now, so that the required text will always be with it.
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NOTE: Colors denote plurality of population as X, rather than majority.
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There is a fundamental problem in creating religious maps for China like one would typically do for the Euro-Arabian world. For the latter the division is rather simple and can be visualized along ethnic and national borders. Syncretism rarely needs to be shown and the differences between the ideas and ecclesiarchal forms of the religions are relatively easy to spot.
This could not be further from the truth in China. As far back as the Shang (1600 BCE - 1046 BCE), and even in the earliest days of Chinese shamanism, totemism, and “wuism”[1], although there were a number of central religious ideas China had an extremely syncretic approach to every group that it came into contact with. By the time of the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE) to the time of the Six Dynasties (220 CE – 589 CE), when China’s folk traditions had begun to solidify into a larger continuous mass, and had long absorbed the more “secular” ideas of living such as Daoism and Confucianism, they came to head with their first large foreign religious groups, Hinduism and Buddhism.
The result was Hinduism’s complete consumption and absorption by China and Buddhism’s meshing and changing into a different form of itself that now makes up the core of modern Mahayana. This period established a precedent for religion in China. Traditional Chinese Culture (TCC) could not only be syncretic, but universally syncretic whenever it came into contact with foreign faiths. The result would be the absorption of easily consumable parts into TCC, the spinning off of the more committed and hardcore followers of the foreign faith into their own heavily Chinese influenced form of the faith (which then gets muddied up with TCC as it then adopts parts of TCC as well, the transformation of the androgynous Bodhisattva Avalokitasvara to the Lady/Goddess Guanyin being a popular example of this[2]), and the state clamping down and snuffing out any left overs that it felt threatened by.
Now, the space within which this syncretism and spinning off occurs can be seen as roughly analogous to, but larger than, the Sinic cultural/ethnic zone. For the sake of this map I have labeled this rough space the “Shen Region”, after the term “Shenism” (Shénjiào, 神教) which is another term used to refer to the religious and worshiping aspects of TCC. So, this is nice and all, but what does this really have to do with understanding the religious state of affairs in the NOW or how a lot of contemporary articles on the subject of religious growth are somehow missing something and skewing the picture?
At this point either you’ll look up at the map and realize something, or I’ll point it out to you right now:
Almost all of Christianity and Islam in China is within the Shen Region.
This is the rather crucial factor that is missing in a lot of talks and thoughts regarding the rise of Christianity in China, and even the greater religious revival in China that has been going on since the beginning of the 2000s. While yes, for example, attendance to Buddhist temples has grown by five times in the past decade, it has been met by an ever increasingly laudation of TCC in Buddhism and a Sinicization of Buddhist figures and writings by converts and re-converts. The growth in Guanyin worshiping sites and statues alongside Buddhist monasteries, for instance, is just one example of this[3].
The same can be seen in Christianity and Islam. In Islam we see the emergence of a Sufism that goes so far as to see Confucius and Laozi as prophets from a once staunchly Sunni population. In Christianity we see the rise of female healers and leaders and the rise of one of the most feminine forms of Christianity in a way in opposition to the Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiarchies on the other side of the world[4], and even to the confusion of some Baptists and Evangelicals, only to be more shocked when they find those same Chinese Christians praying to the Goddess Mazu and performing animal sacrifices. Across Islam and Christianity we see a bridging of the gap between the One God and Triune God that we rarely see elsewhere, and a growing conception and faith in an a-numerical God that bears more and more resemblance to the Vairocana Buddha.
Likewise we see increasing references and normalization of Abrahamist and Traditional cultural references side by side in Chinese literature. In modern literature hearing Cao Cao and the Serpent in Eden referenced in the same breath is no longer odd or worthy of reprisal as it would have been even 40 years ago. Finding a Party official that can quote some of Mencius’ Commentaries one moment and the Book of Proverbs the next is increasingly like finding a dime a dozen, and finding an artist that would play with traditional Chinese styles and biblical and quranic symbolism is as simple as walking to the nearest gaggle of painters.
Then, we also see examples of government crackdown, we see the government intervening in the religious succession within the Catholic church, we see crosses being torn down and burned in Wenzhou, churches being demolished by the hundreds, people forced to eat during Ramadan, Imams and Priests arrested, men being forcibly shaved in violation of their religious rite, secret congregations raided, and so on. Scenes that in some might evoke images of the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecutions that China once ran.
Putting this increase in professing Christians and Muslims in cultural and historical context helps get across what is happening, and what likely will happen, far better than just a map can. The Abrahamists are growing indeed, but at the same time they are playing out a fate that has been met by other religions that have met China head on. They enter, they syncretize, they spin off and sinizice, and the bits that government does not approve of (namely anything that could risk becoming a parallel government) are squashed. While this process has some flair to it and we can get lost in the moment of it, it is still something that also takes place across generations. What this new-er TCC with some Christian and Islamic flair will look like is still an unknown, as is what these Sinicized Christianities and Islams will look like, but one thing is for certain, it sure ain’t gonna be you Grandpa’s religion.
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[1] The primordial form of diviners in China. Does technically mean “shaman”, but the scope is much broader than what we would normally call shamans in the West.
[2] Funny thing about Guanyin, in many ways she has become the poster child of syncretism. First she syncretized bits of TCC and the nascent Mahayana Buddhism, then through the legend of Mazu (who was supposedly one of her forms on Earth) she syncretized the bits of Taoism that weren’t already TCC back into TCC and THEN she syncretized Theravada Buddhism in by being (according to some) a herald of the Maitreya! There was a sort of Virgin Mary / Guanyin / Mother of Heaven cult around for a while that went a step further but they aren’t really a thing anymore.
Maybe they’ll come back.
[3] Not that I’m complaining myself. Some of these statues are absolutely gorgeous, especially the Statue at Sanya which stands a bit taller than the Statue of Liberty and the area around it has been turned into more or less a walk in shrine the size of a small town. It’s hard to get across in words, especially when the giant road of flower beds is in bloom and the rosewood beams that dot the shrine are covered in freshly inked prayer sheets.
[4] Anglicans and Episcopalians are free to laugh maniacally at the Catholics and Orthodox right now.