review of religion and chinese society 1 (2014) 13-28
brill.com/rrcs
Secular Belief, Religious Belonging in China
Richard Madsen
University of California, San Diego
[email protected]
Abstract
A recent Gallup poll found that almost half of China’s people are atheists. However,
surveys conducted by Fenggang Yang and others show that as much as 85 percent of
the population periodically engages in religious practices. How can we reconcile
reports of widespread atheism with those of widespread religious practice?
An answer is to be found in the social nature of Chinese religion—it is more about
belonging than belief. Rituals and sacred myths meaningfully anchor persons to
families and communities. The collapse of the commune and danwei systems has
made the search for non-state-controlled community forms more pressing than
ever. These alternative forms are typically established through myth and ritual. This
is true as much for Christian forms of community as for traditional Chinese folk
forms. Belonging in China is religious even though, as a result of sixty years of
Communist indoctrination, belief is secular. The contradiction between secular
belief and religious belonging creates tensions, and in the long run it is unclear how
they will be resolved.
Keywords
religious belief – belonging – atheism
中国的世俗信仰与宗教归属
赵文词
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/22143955-04102003
14
Madsen
摘要
最近一次的盖洛普调查发现, 中国人中几乎有一半是无神论者。不过, 杨凤
岗和其他一些学者进行的研究发现, 85%的中国人时常参与宗教活动。我们
怎么来解释这些研究发现呢, 即广泛的无神论与大量的宗教活动 同时并存?
从中国宗教的社会本质中可以发现一个答案——更多地是关乎归属而非
信仰。仪式和神圣神话在意义上将个人联系固定到家庭和共同体中。公社
和单位系统的解体, 使得研究非国有共同体成为了当务之急。这些替代形式
通常是由神话和仪式建立的。对于共同体的基督宗教形式和传统中国民间
形式都是如此。即便在60年的共产主义灌输之后, 归属还是宗教性的, 而信
仰是世俗的。世俗信仰与宗教归属之间的矛盾造成了张力, 从长远看仍无法
预知该问题是否能得以解决。
关键词
宗教信仰, 宗教归属, 无神论
A recent Gallup poll found that almost half of China’s people (47 percent)
say that they are “convinced atheists”—the highest rate of atheism in
the world (WIN-Gallup International 2012). However, surveys conducted by
Yang Fenggang and others show high levels of religious practice: as much as
85 percent of the population carry out rituals to honor ancestors, seek out good
fortune, ward off evil, celebrate festivals, and accumulate merit for a good
afterlife (Yang 2010). Ethnographers also have documented the construction
of many churches and temples, as well as elaborate festivals, rituals for healing, and the cultivation of mystical forces of qi (Dean 1993). How can we
reconcile reports of widespread atheism with those of widespread religious
practice?1
An answer is to be found in the social nature of indigenous Chinese religion:
it is more about belonging than belief. Rituals and sacred myths meaningfully
anchor persons to families and communities. The collapse of the commune
and state industrial work-unit systems has made the search for non-statecontrolled community forms more pressing than ever. These alternative forms
are typically established through myth and ritual. But participants in the
1 For the best recent analysis and categorization of Chinese religious practices, see the recent
work of Adam Yuet Chau (2011).
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myth-telling and ritual performance might understand them in very diverse
ways, including skepticism about the truth of the myths and efficacy of the
rituals. Nevertheless, to be part of the community, they practice them anyway.
If among the middle classes of the West it is now common for religion to be
“belief without belonging,” in China it may be just as common for it to be
belonging without belief (see Davie 1994).
Of course, the Chinese religious consciousness is not completely devoid of
belief. Many among the 53 percent who do not claim to be committed atheists
obviously still believe in the presence of spirits and the efficacy of traditional
rituals. Indigenous popular religion does not have systematic creeds, but especially in urban areas there are Christians and Buddhists who profess faith in a
set of systematic dogmas or “noble truths,” and they attend study groups to
gain a deeper understanding of these doctrines. Nonetheless, I will argue that
many people who do carry on religious practices—especially those of indigenous popular religion, but also the more formalized practices of Christianity,
Buddhism, and Daoism—do so without fully believing in the practical efficacy
of the rituals or the literal truth of the doctrines. They do so because they want
to be part of a community of practitioners.
If we see Chinese religion as more a matter of community belonging than
spiritual belief, we might gain a clearer perspective on how and why religion in
China has been both growing and transforming. Old forms of community are
dying and new forms gestating, and this liminal situation is reflected in the
kaleidoscopic interplay of old and new forms of religion.
Religion in Premodern Chinese Communities
As C. K. Yang put it, the main form of religion in premodern Chinese society
was “diffused religion, with its theology, rituals, and organization intimately
merged with the concepts and structure of secular institutions and other
aspects of the social order” (Yang 1961:20). The first and foremost religious site
was the family, whose identity and continuity was maintained through worship of its ancestors. Individual families were linked into larger communities,
first by worship of common-lineage ancestors, and then through worship of
the many community gods that oversaw settlements of multiple lineages. The
entrance room of a home, where tablets of the ancestors were kept, was not a
chapel set apart from ordinary life; it also served as the room in which to entertain guests, eat meals, and enjoy other family functions. Likewise, a community’s temple—typically the most beautiful building in the community and the
product of generations of labor—was not just a center for worshiping the gods,
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but a genuine community center, where local affairs were settled, business
ventures carried out, and all manner of recreation engaged in. It was not so
much a matter of religion merging with “secular” institutions (as C. K. Yang
puts it, perhaps too much under the spell of his generation’s structural-functionalist sociology) as of religion being a dimension of institutions that cannot
be understood through the modern distinction between secular and religious.
Religion itself was of ‘this world’—what we in the West mean by ‘secular.’ And
this-worldly events were ‘religious.’ Neither a family nor a larger community
could be understood as a collection of individuals whose actions could be
described in terms of a vulgar empiricism. The family and community included
generations of the dead as well as the living. They were connected with the
larger imperial state not only by political ties but through parallel hierarchies
of deities, imagined in the form of imperial bureaucrats, extending upward to
the Jade Emperor. Even the most mundane chores of ordinary life always had
extra dimensions that opened onto a larger world of fate and fortune revealed
through myths of gods, ghosts, and ancestors. Community rituals, from the
family celebrations of the spring festival to the large community temple fairs,
were blendings of worship, commerce, and play. Religion was secular. The secular was religious.
Even when people left home and traveled on far pilgrimages to distant
sacred mountains or famous shrines, they usually did so not to benefit themselves alone, but also their families and communities. The main form of community was of course the local family-centered agricultural community,
connected to a larger marketing area, not simply through webs of commerce
but through cooperation among its many temples. But there were alternative
forms of community, including monasteries for those who had “left the family”
and lay associations formed of individuals who sought a way of life other than
that possible within the confines of the local village. Although monasteries
and lay ‘sectarian’ associations were constituted through devotion to the
Buddha, various bodhisattvas, or deities like the Unborn Eternal Mother, they
were just as fundamentally constituted by a way of life—the monastic rules,
rhythms of study, meditation, chanting, bodily exercises, and ’inner alchemy.’
Exactly which non-visible beings and forces stood behind and justified these
practices could be understood in many different ways. There was often lively
internal speculation and debate about such matters, but what counted in the
end was a community of common practice. Communities did not split up nor
were they persecuted over ‘heresy.’ The exact content of belief did not seem
to matter much. What did matter was ‘deviant teaching’ (xiejiao 邪教), which
was deviant (in the eyes of the state) insofar as it was connected with deviant
practice—with ways of life that might contradict the obligations of family
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members toward one another or, especially, might lead to organized rebellions
against the emperor (Liu 1990).
So much for ‘traditional’ indigenous popular religion. But didn’t Christianity
offer an alternative pattern? I would argue that it is less an alternative than
one might think. The formal Christian doctrines are monotheistic and are at
odds with the polytheism of Chinese popular religion. But for many Chinese
Christians too, the practices of community are more important than the
beliefs, and these communal religious practices are not radically different from
those of other Chinese religions.
When Christianity was brought to China in the seventeenth century, it
largely conformed to indigenous Chinese patterns of life. Although the missionaries propagated definite beliefs in the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, and so
on, they also integrated their teaching with the fabric of Chinese communities.
As is well known, the Jesuits accepted the rituals that symbolized the solidarity
and continuity of family life. They saw them as ‘merely’ ancestor veneration,
not ancestor worship, a view made plausible by the this-worldliness of such
ritual practices. For their part, the Jesuits’ rivals, such as the Dominicans, saw
the ancestor rituals as worship. But even when they forced their converts to
give up traditional practices, they still organized the Catholics into familycentered communities with ways of life basically the same as other Chinese
communities, only with those ways of life now symbolized by supposedly
orthodox Catholic rituals. The Kangxi emperor was willing to declare the
Catholic faith, as propagated by the Jesuits, an orthodox teaching, but when
the pope ruled against the Jesuits, emperors declared Catholicism to be a ‘heterodox’ teaching. Yet even then the Catholic practice was subsumed into the
pattern of ‘heterodox sects,’ a kind of community form that was quite at home
in the Chinese world of alternative communities. There were no quarrels about
alternative metaphysical doctrines, such as the Trinity, just quarrels over variations in lived social practices (Madsen 2001).
Religion in the Transformation of Early Twentieth-Century
Chinese Communities
The transformations of Chinese religion in the twentieth century were caused
not mainly by the arrival of new ideas, such as liberalism, positivism, and
‘scientific socialism,’ but by transformations in the forms of Chinese community because of the breakdown of the imperial order and concomitant war,
revolution, industrialization, and urbanization. Vincent Goossaert and David
Palmer have brilliantly analyzed this in their book on The Religious Question in
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Modern China, and I only need to give a brief summary here (Goossaert and
Palmer 2011).
The story is not of a decline of religion but of a reshaping of its forms in
concert with societal changes. As China developed new institutions for organizing the economy and managing government, corresponding religious institutions were developed. Modeled after Western forms of Christian organization,
these consisted of institutionalized forms of Daoism and Buddhism with centralized hierarchies and congregational boundaries that separated religious
practices from ordinary life. Such ‘disembedded’ forms of religion could be
(at least in theory) better managed by a rationalized central government
(Goossaert 2008).
But these centralized, hierarchical, disembedded forms of indigenous
Chinese religions did not have a major impact on Chinese culture. The diffused
communal religiosity of local villages persisted, but it was not static. New variations on traditional practices were embraced by mobile people uprooted
from local communities and connected to the more cosmopolitan life of the
cities. Many of these new forms took the shape of ‘redemptive societies,’ which
brought together millions people from throughout China (and eventually
throughout East Asia) under the inspiration of charismatic leaders who promised paths to salvation in a chaotic world. The beliefs of these societies, such
as the Unity Way (Yiguandao 一貫道) were typically syncretistic, combining
Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, and even Christianity. This mishmash of
doctrines, however, was not usually very systematic. It did not need to make
intellectual sense, because doctrine was not all that important. What was
important were forms of communication with spiritual forces through rituals
of spirit writing and meditation, and forms of community that gave members
mutual encouragement to cultivate moral discipline under daunting circumstances (Goossaert and Palmer 2011:201–202).
Meanwhile, new forms of Christianity flourished in new milieus. Under the
tutelage of Western missionaries, mainline Protestant Christianity developed
strong followings mostly among urban Chinese, including some intellectuals,
especially those educated in the Christian colleges, and business classes. These
fellowships did emphasize assent to doctrine, at least to the degree followed by
similar mainline denominations in the United States and Europe. An eventually even more dynamic Christian form, however, developed indigenously,
among rural people and lower classes in the cities. This form was fairly thin on
intellectual doctrine and strong on Pentecostal-style ecstatic experience. It
enabled new forms of community and promised new possibilities of hope for
displaced peoples. Meanwhile, Catholic Christianity maintained its roots in
rural communities where whole lineages or whole villages were Catholic and
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religious practices were diffused throughout the whole range of family and
community life.
Religion under Chinese Communism
More pertinent to the argument of this essay, however, is the transformation in
religion that took place after 1949 during the first three decades of Communist
control. The Chinese Communists adopted Stalinist policies for controlling
and eventually eliminating religion. These policies had been designed for eliminating the power and influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and were not
especially appropriate for China, but adopting them was a condition for joining the international communist club in the 1950s. The policies included writing a constitution that proclaimed freedom of religious belief but used the
Communist Party apparatus to control and undermine the belief. To pursue
these goals, the Party would mandate the arrest, imprisonment, and even execution of top religious leaders, not ostensibly for practicing religion but for
being counterrevolutionary. Then it would create associations of pro-regime
clergy and laity to take over religious leadership. Meanwhile, the government
would have confiscated most property controlled by the religious institutions
and stripped away all of their educational and social welfare functions. Thus
hollowed out, religion presumably would gradually die.
In China, however, the problem was that most religious practice was still
diffused in community life and not organized into centralized hierarchical
institutions. The Stalinist practice was (partially) effective against the Catholic
Church and mainline Protestant churches, but not against most grassroots
communal religious practice. Much of the latter was categorized under the
rubric of ‘feudal superstition’ and was to be combatted with atheist scientific
education. But if such religion was more a matter of belonging than belief,
atheist education would not affect it much (Madsen 2014).
What did affect the practices of local communal religion was the transformation of local communities through land reform, collectivization, and the
organization of ‘people’s communes.’ The confiscation of temple properties
and the regimentation of collective life left few resources and little time for the
religious dimension of family or community life. Later, during the Cultural
Revolution, red guards carried out violent attacks on the ‘four olds,’ which
included religious symbols and activities. To solidify communal cohesion and
political loyalty, the state then created its own rituals of studying Mao’s works
and worshiping Mao. But for most people at the grassroots level, these new
rituals were homologous with the traditional ones, more a matter of belonging
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than belief. People memorized and chanted sections from Mao’s ‘constantly
read writings,’ just like they memorize and chant certain Buddhist sutras, without necessarily understanding what they meant. They carried out the rituals,
such as the loyalty dances, because that was what they had to do, while harboring a wide variety of attitudes about the alleged wisdom and power of Mao.
In the early 1970s, especially after the demise of Lin Biao, the government
downplayed the Mao cult. The Red Guard attacks were a thing of the past, but
tight state control over community life continued, both in the countryside and
in the cities. In the countryside, the collapse of the old Maoist rituals and a
slight loosening of surveillance and control opened the way to surreptitiously
renewed forms of the old community worship. Not only did traditional funeral
rituals and other sorts of family celebrations begin to return (albeit in a lowkey manner), but there is evidence that grassroots indigenous Christianity
began to expand, especially in those areas where temples had been destroyed.
It was as if people wanted to embed ritual into their communal life, and now
found Christianity attractive because it did not require elaborate temples.
Even during the high tide of the Maoist era, then, religion had not been
eradicated. In accordance with the Party line, increasing percentages of the
population may have denied the existence of gods (was profession of atheism
a kind of ritual too—something everyone says without knowing what it
means?), but they did not need to believe in gods to cherish diffusely embedded practices that connected them to their forebears and affirmed their connections to family and community. The totalizing ideology and organization of
Mao-era communism imposed alternative forms of community and ritual and
for a while made it virtually impossible to publicly practice anything else. But
these alternative forms proved to be unsustainable. The Reform era created
both the opportunity and the need for new forms of community at all levels of
the society. Diffused within these new forms were myths and rituals. As in the
past, differentiations that obtain in the modern West between secular and religious did not obtain in China. The secular was religious and the religious secular. But since community forms had changed, even when old ritual forms seem
to have been revived, the meaning of those forms may have changed.
Community and Religion in the Reform Era
Echoing Marx’s notion that the material base determines the cultural superstructure, Mao Zedong wrote that religion was one of the bonds that tied
poverty-stricken peasants to an exploitative class structure, and when class
oppression ended they would cast religion aside. “It is the peasants who made
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the idols with their own hands, and when the time comes they will cast aside
the idols with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for
them prematurely” (Mao 1965:44). But during the Reform era, when peasants
were liberated from direct subservience to the economic plans of the partystate, they have begun instead to remake their old idols and insert them into
newly built temples. They continue to need new bonds of community.
In the ‘socialist market economy’ of the Reform Era, older and newer forms
of community coexist in an uneasy mixture. With the decollectivization of
agriculture and the dismantling of the commune system, families and local
communities need to take care of themselves by establishing new mutually
supportive relationships. They also want to compete with one another within
common frames of reference. Thus the rituals practiced during weddings and
funerals become more important, and because of a desire of families to outdo
one another, these rituals become steadily more elaborate. It is the same with
the rebuilding of local temples. The public spaces in front of the local Party
headquarters no longer mean as much when the Party has lost control of much
of local life. Deity temples once provided public spaces for community discussion, community commerce, and community entertainment and they do so
once again. And with increasing affluence, communities vie with one another
to build bigger and better temples.
Except now their inhabitants are not really peasants any more. They are
mobile workers, most of whom spend most of their time in the cities doing
industrial labor. Yet under the hukou system they cannot usually become permanent urban residents. They still have to maintain a connection to their local
communities and to their natal families. This leads to changing patterns of religious practice.
Participation in an expanded market economy generates more income than
needed for basic food and shelter. Money is then used to buy symbols of social
status. Some of this, of course, is self-centered—luxury clothes, watches, cars.
But much status-symbol spending is used to build those cooperative relationships that are so necessary to attaining some stable success in China today.
One set of important relationships is one’s extended networks of kin. The best
kind of status symbols to distribute in kin networks are those that reflect the
kind of good taste that is acknowledged by the recipients. A common denominator of tasteful symbolism among kinship groups based in the countryside is
the expression of the classical virtue of filial piety. One way to build or rebuild
such relationships is through constructing or reconstructing a beautiful ancestor temple in one’s home community. Along with the physical temple-building,
there is the solemn construction of new lineage genealogies, the final revision
of which is accompanied by chanting Buddhist monks.
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Thus, especially in southern China, there has been a remarkable upsurge in
ancestor temple-building. The residents of Chen Village near Shenzhen, for
instance, have recently spent two million yuan on a new ancestor temple. Its
ceilings shine with gold leaf and its walls are adorned with classical paintings.
In front, of course, is an altar with tablets of the Chen community’s ancestors
flanked by burning incense and offerings of flowers (Chan, Madsen, and Unger
2009). In Wenzhou, in villages that have produced wealthy native sons, there
are truly huge ancestor temples, in some cases constructed to look like the
entrance to Tiananmen! Although these are ostensibly community affairs and
everybody from the lineage makes at least a token contribution, successful
businessmen put up most of the money. In my fieldwork, I heard several such
businessmen playfully contending with one another over who had put up the
biggest temple (Madsen, 2014). In Fujian, Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce has described
the construction of ancestor temples with money from successful relatives in
Singapore (Kuah-Pearce 2011).
Usually these ancestor temples are flanked by a deity temple containing
images of an assortment of gods such as Lord Guan. There is usually space in
front of this temple for performances of Chinese opera at periodic temple fairs.
During such fairs, spirit writing, fire walking, and other expressions of ecstatic
possession often take place. Do people think that there are really still-living
ancestors behind the ancestor tablets, or real deities subsumed within the
idols, or real spirits possessing the spirit writers? It is very plausible that many
of the people who participate in such activities would be content to respond
that they were “committed atheists” on a questionnaire. But while participating in a temple ritual they might also temporarily suspend disbelief, just as
Alfred Schutz says one “suspends belief” in ordinary reality when attending a
theatrical performance (Schutz 1967:226–228).
In any case, building temples, participating in rituals, and celebrating festivals fulfill so many social functions that belief in their ultimate meaning may
be beside the point. The temples, rituals, and festivals are so popular because
they have multiple potential uses for negotiating the need for building communities in rapidly changing environments. Different environments constitute different ‘micro-moral ecologies’ that need to be negotiated by different
forms of community. For example, Chen Village has now rented out all its land
to factories and is now home to fifty thousand migrant workers. The Chens
enjoy a good life based on the rents and they want to maintain their identity by
showing the world that they are distinct from those fifty thousand outsiders
who are living on their land. The ancestor hall serves this purpose and it
also, as in times past, serves as a community center where retired men sit and
gossip and women play mahjong. In Wenzhou, the ancestor halls also serve as
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community centers, with rooms for many sorts of meetings and even badminton courts for recreation. Residents even post signs above the entrance saying
“community center”—a fig leaf rendering the building non-religious in the
eyes of local authorities. But unlike in Chen Village, there are actually few people using the center because most members of the community are away in the
city. The ancestor temple is an anchor of community, but except for occasions
like the spring festival, it is a widely dispersed network, not a face-to-face community. Nonetheless, villagers who sojourn in the city still belong to the village
because they do not have an urban hukou. The temple gives them something to
be proud of while affirming their connection to one another via a common
home. The ancestor temples in Fujian described by Kuah-Pearce are the center
of even more far-flung networks extending all the way to Singapore. The
Singaporean Chinese build the temples to ‘return to their roots’ while shoring
up networks that can help them in their business dealings with China.
Thus ancestor temples, and for that matter, local deity temples are multipurpose institutions. Their meaning for participants is protean, adaptable to
many purposes in many different contexts. Yet even when the institutions are
being used for this-worldly, ‘secular’ purposes, they still point beyond the
immediate, the instrumental and pragmatic. This ‘religious’ dimension is what
gives them their protean multipurposefulness. But the religious dimension
does not have to include a literal belief in gods.
What about Christianity, growing like wildfire throughout China? Isn’t this a
matter of real belief rather than belonging? For some people it certainly is a
matter of belief, but for many others, belonging is the most important. In the
Catholic villages that I studied in Northern China, villagers, most of whom had
been baptized as infants and were heirs to a long line of Catholics, made a
distinction between ‘true believers’ and ‘lukewarm Catholics.’ The former
attended church services regularly and upheld most of the commandments.
The latter did not. Yet even the lukewarm identified themselves as Catholics,
and at the very least they would have to be buried as Catholics because there
was no other way they could remain connected with their community and
their ancestors (Madsen 1998). For the rapidly growing networks of evangelical
Protestant Christians, membership is the result of voluntary acceptance of
faith in Jesus. Most of these Christians would undoubtedly say that they believe
in God. But even here, the belief is less a matter of assent to doctrines and
more a matter of profound emotional experiences—receiving the spirit in
the company of a congregation—than of doctrinal affirmation. And Christian
networks are wide, flexible communities whose members can receive the
Spirit while praying in small groups without relying on fancy localized temples (Madsen 2010). This kind of flexible, far-flung community with, as it were,
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portable roots, is an emergent kind of community that fits the circumstances
of a mobile population in the era of reform. So with Christianity as well as with
popular religion, the spread of new religious practices is due more to the development of new forms of community than to the plausibility of new forms
of belief.
As mentioned in the introduction, this is not to say that belief plays no
role for any people under any circumstances in Chinese development. The
rapid churning of the socialist market economy leaves many people dislocated and confused, in search of answers to questions of meaning and fate.
Naturally, some people seek out religious teachings that might provide such
answers. Many others carry out rituals for protection from evil spirits and
healing from physical and mental maladies ‘just in case’ these might
actually work.
But the socioeconomic churning produces a churning of beliefs and a
churning of the ambivalent mixture of belief and unbelief. Although this
would need to be confirmed by further research, my impression is that the
beliefs of many believers are not stable. People try out one set of ideas for a
while and then shift to others. They also combine apparently contradictory
beliefs from Daoism, Buddhism, and even Christianity into syncretistic packages. A social advantage of this is a relative paucity of consistent religious fundamentalism. Once again, the consistency of religious affiliation depends on
the consistency of one’s community attachments and the practical relevance
of those attachments in negotiating the complexities of ordinary life rather
than on commonly shared consistent religious beliefs.
Chinese Culture and Religious Development
Notwithstanding the rise of religious individualism in the West, there still
remains of course a great deal of religious belong in the United States and
Western Europe, and even in strong communal forms of Judaism and
Christianity that might be considered ‘fundamentalist’ one can often see a precedence of belonging over belief. In their recent book American Grace, Robert
Putnam and David Campbell (2010:23) have noted that many observant Jews
say that they do not believe in God. I observed the same phenomenon in my
fieldwork in an orthodox Jewish synagogue (Madsen 2009). Even while being
willing to take on extremely demanding forms of moral and spiritual discipline
for the sake of maintaining their traditions and their community, some congregants said that they did not believe in God. Tanya Luhrmann’s rich ethnography of an evangelical Christian community also found many pious congregants
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who were at least agnostic about God’s existence (Luhrmann 2012). One might
argue, however, that Chinese culture and maybe East Asian culture in general,
especially because of their traditional grounding in what Tu Weiming calls
“immanent transcendence” found in a devotion to “concrete humanity,” are
particularly friendly to nonbelieving religion (Tu 2010).
Consider the contemporary religious renaissance in Taiwan. Since the 1980s,
concomitant with Taiwan’s economic takeoff and transition to democracy,
there has been a remarkable growth of humanist Buddhist movements and
the development of what I have called ‘reformist Daoism’ (Madsen 2007).
These movements especially appeal to the urban middle classes, and they
build community and give meaning and purpose to mobile people facing
the insecurities of economic change and political uncertainty. But these movements have not taken a ‘fundamentalist’ turn as similar movements have taken
at times of change and uncertainty in other parts of the world. Although often
competitive, they have been basically irenic, cooperative with outsiders and
averse to demonizing those who disagree. This may be because they are
forms of religionless religion that privilege communal moral practice over theistic belief.
Grand Master Xing Yun, the founder of Buddha’s Light Mountain
(Foguangshan 佛光山), says explicitly that “we do not believe the Buddha is
a god,” only a man who discovered the path to enlightenment and showed
the way for us to follow.2 Leaders of Tzu Chi and Dharma Drum Mountain
say the same. At the same time, they devote themselves earnestly to Buddhist
practices, including meditation and the cultivation of compassion, through
pushing themselves to help wider and wider circles of others, circles extending far beyond the family and including people who might be considered
enemies. In doing so they create networks of communities that encompass
the whole globe, and that incidentally constitute a source of moral support
and fellowship for diasporic Taiwanese around the world. These are new
forms of community, much more dispersed than any in premodern China,
but drawing upon old traditions while interpreting them for a modern
world.
This is not to say that they are purely atheistic. Individual members probably display a wide range of views about the nature of the Buddha and the efficacy of rituals. Buddha’s Light Mountain in particular is like a spiritual
supermarket, offering symbols and rituals appealing to a wide range of practitioners. They are products of a mixed consciousness, a hybrid combination of
2 During a meeting with the author.
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Madsen
belief and unbelief in what Charles Taylor calls a ‘secular age’ in which every
reflexive modern person, theist or atheist, has to consider his or her position in
the light of multiple possibilities (Taylor 2007).
One can see this hybridity even more clearly in the case of the Xing Tian
Gong, a popular Daoist deity temple in Taibei. Its altar contains several deity
statues, but the main one is Lord Guan. The temple carries out a full range of
Daoist rituals and attracts participants from throughout Taibei. It also supports
a modern hospital and professionalized organizations for philanthropy. Based
on the writings of its founder, its official literature emphasizes that the statues
on the altar do not really contain deities, but are symbols of the moral virtues
traditionally attributed to these figures. The rituals are ways of expressing and
deepening commitment to these moral virtues (basically the classic Confucian
virtues). The rituals include casting oracle blocks as a means of divination, to
ask the gods about one’s fate. The official literature tells the participants that
their fate is in their own hands, dependent on their own efforts at moral cultivation. But the seriousness with which many participants cast the blocks indicates that they think it possible that the gods really do influence their fate
(Madsen 2007:104–129).
Such a hybrid consciousness is probably common in all religious traditions,
but it causes more tensions within Abrahamic traditions that call for belief in
a single jealous God. There, the battle between belief and doubt can produce
existential crises and ‘dark nights of the soul,’ and movements to purify belief
by separating true believers from infidels have sometimes turned violent. But
while suffering almost every kind of conflict and calamity, Chinese history has
not produced strictly religious wars. Religious differences have tended to be
resolved by syncretistically incorporating diverse beliefs. The conflicts between
orthodoxy and heterodoxy have mainly been matters not of doctrine but of
different kinds of ethical praxis. The really important aspect of religious practice has been the kind of morality it encourages and the kind of community it
supports. One could argue that it is basically the same with Abrahamic religions, but they have more often been tempted to raise their eyes to the heavens
and make theological disputes a focus for social action.
Focused on building moral community within concrete humanity, Chinese
religions are more easily poised to embrace the multiple beliefs within the
“immanent frame” (Taylor 2007:534–593) of a secular age—including theoretical atheism jostling side by side with the possibility that there may be some
reality behind the traditional gods after all—but they remain always focused
on the pragmatic requirements of finding new forms of community in a
dynamic modern world.
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