Posted on 05/06/2014 11:00:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Questions abound over the recent vicious actions of the Chinese government towards Christians in the prosperous Zhejiang Province just south of Shanghai. The actions of the government during the fortnight after Easter against both Protestants and Catholics are unprecedented in recent decades and, justifiably, have received world attention.
As with all actions in a country as vast as China, whose government could never be accused of transparency, it is difficult to discover who is making the decisions and what they hope to achieve. But one issue that has surprised many people outside China is both the size of its Christian population and the ruthlessness, born only of fear, that the government’s violence displays.
A recent claim by a US-based Chinese academic to London’s Telegraph newspaper – that China would have the largest Christian population in the world by 2030 – was not only exaggerated but also factually wrong. Will Brazil (200 million Christians) and Nigeria (85 million Christians), for example, simply stop producing Christians in the next 15 years?
The reality is that no one knows how many Christians there are in China. In fact, there’s good reason why Christians do not declare their growth. Just look at what’s happened in Zhejiang in the last fortnight, where the growth of the Christian community has been declared “unsustainable” by the authorities who have command of assessments of the “sustainability” of faith communities.
Put your head up as a Christian in China and it will be cut off. Catholics have maintained a standard figure for their own numbers for three decades. It was 12 million in 1980, 12 million in 1990, 12 million in 2000 and – surprise, surprise – it was 12 million in 2010. No one in any religion declares real figures in China. It only attracts government attention and then persecution.
That there is a massive growth spurt among Christians in China is indisputable. What has not been addressed is what has made the exponential growth among Protestants possible, far outstripping the growth among Catholics.
But it’s not something the officials know anything about because they have such a rudimentary and uninformed view of what Christianity is that they are the last to know what’s happening. For example, only the Chinese government thinks that Protestants and Catholics are separate religions.
They are two of the five it recognizes along with Buddhism, Islam and its homegrown religion, Daoism. No one else in the world thinks Protestants and Catholics are anything but parts of Christianity.
Whatever one is to make of the uninformed view that the Chinese authorities have, Protestant Christianity is growing far more quickly and extensively than Catholicism. Why?
Maybe the Chinese authorities have something to tell us. After Mao Zedong’s victory in 1949, China was established along lines that the Communists learned about from their then friends, the Soviet Union, and the real maker of 20th Century Communism, Vladimir Lenin, the founder and first father of the Soviet Union.
The Chinese Government manages religious groups through the Religious Affairs Bureau, a department of the Communist Party’s United Front organization for controlling the country’s disparate movements, groups and institutions such as Protestants and Catholics.
The Catholic Church in China, divided as it remains, is caught: its strength is its weakness. Everywhere in the world and with local variations in China, its universality (with an accepted pattern of worldwide relationships), its institutions (parishes, seminaries, welfare services, publishing houses), its statuses (clergy and religious) and its ceremonies (the sacraments) are visible and remain the continuous and coherent identifications that draw or repel membership and participation.
In a Communist country, they are an easy target for a Leninist administration intent on detailed control. And then, when some comply with government structures while other Catholics see those acting in such a way as cowardly and cooperating with the enemy, many form the view that rather than complicate their lives, they leave the established and regulated Church well alone.
The same applied to Protestant denominations and was institutionalized through the three self- movements (self–government, self–financing and self-propagation; or no foreign missioners). This approach run through the United Front’s Religious Affairs Bureau captured the attention and controlled the practices of Protestant Christians throughout the People’s Republic.
But the recent explosion in Protestant Christian numbers has happened outside this rubric. Most of the buildings, churches and Christian gathering points have been built on local initiative without government authorization. And most of the communities around the often triumphalist buildings that have been damaged or demolished in recent times in China began life as small communities of little more than a dozen people – gathering in friend’s homes outside the net of government supervision.
Protestant Christianity, in contrast to the institution-based approach to community building familiar to Catholics, has thrived on its nimble, light-footed and adaptable response to local opportunities. In China, it has grown out of small communities sharing prayer, Bible study and videos at home or in a work place. At times, Christian businessmen and manufacturers have workplace Christian groups that form and meet for prayer and Bible study on their business premises.
Meeting all over Eastern China in clusters of no more than 12, groups gather for what Catholics would call primary evangelization. Two-hour Bible study programs conducted over two to three months and often aided by a Chinese version of the Alpha Course provide a neat and compact way to introduce Christianity. The Alpha Course is a 12-part video series first created by an Anglican priest in London, Nicky Gumble, that has gone worldwide and has a Catholic version.
These groups are unencumbered and unregulated by the Religious Affairs Bureau. Multiply the dozen members of these groups by thousands of such small groups in homes and work places and you reach hundreds of thousands pretty quickly. But when you get to that scale, as China has in the last 20 years, it’s not long until you need a larger, dedicated building – a church. That’s where these emergent communities have run into the brick wall of the Religious Affairs Bureau and the fear that the entire Chinese political leadership has had of any group, especially a religious one, that it can’t control.
- Fr Michael Kelly SJ is executive director of ucanews.com and is based in Bangkok.
So the point is that smaller cell based churches are more able to adapt than the big infrastructure churches like Roman Catholicism to persecution.
What is interesting to me is that at times and in places Roman Catholics have demonstrated the ability to go underground quite effectively. I am thinking of the former Soviet states.
Also, the Lutheran synods in mainland China have some of the same issues. There is a clergy, that typically needs some sort of hierarchy. But they have changed to accommodate the situation and are much more infrastructure independent than most Western Synods.
I suspect that the Catholic church could do something similar. Of course the requirements of oversight from the Vatican is an issue in China. They are very sensitive about foreign oversight of religion.
Sigh. Don’t even bring the subject up.
You’re wasting your time.
You’ll see it mentioned many more times in the future.
>They have The Bible. Therein lies their faith.<
.
Yeah. And every city block will have their “own true” interpretation of that bible.
Hundreds of them.
There are two chruches in China; the Patriotic Catholic Church with licit sacraments, but following the line of State dogma, and the Underground Catholic Church following Catholic dogma.
This is the underground: http://www.cardinalkungfoundation.org/rc/RCrelfreedom.php
It is a very tenuous and frightening situation for those who defy the government.
The priests and bishops of the underground are routinely imprisoned, tortured and kept under house arrest if not killed.
http://www.cardinalkungfoundation.org/rc/RCrelfreedom.php#2
“Catholicism is not popular in China because the underground churches where Christ is flourishing don’t have priests and popes to tell them what to believe.”
Abortion and contraception - which are the defacto law in China - that’s why Protestantism is more popular.
Dr. Thorne, perhaps you are unfamiliar with Hong Xiuquan. He was a Chinese man who had to learn about Christianity directly from the bible. He accomplished many great things, as he purged demons from China. His record is far from evil; he may well have laid the ground work for later Christians. But he got caught up in a war that resulted in more deaths than either World War... 20 million directly killed; 50 million eventually died. He also inspired Mao Tse-Tung.
From Wikipedia, “The Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping.”
The movement’s founder, Hong Xiuquan, had tried and failed to earn his shengyuan civil service degree numerous times. After one such failure in 1836, Hong overheard a Chinese Protestant missionary (Liang Fa) preaching and took home some Chinese translations of Bible tracts which had been translated by Robert Morrison, including a pamphlet titled “Good Words for Exhorting the Age” by Liang Fa. “Hong and his cousin were both baptized in accordance with Liang’s directions.[9] The missionary was probably Edwin Stevens of New England, who operated illegally in China.[10] In 1843, after Hong’s final failure at the exams, he had what some regard as a nervous breakdown and others as a mystical revelation, connecting his in-depth readings of the Christian tracts to strange dreams he had been having for the past six years. In his dreams, a bearded man with golden hair and a black robe called himself Jehovah, gave him a sword, and taught him to slay demons beside a younger man whom Hong addressed as “Elder Brother”.[11]
Hong Xiuquan came to believe that the figures in his dreams were God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son, and that they were revealing his destiny as a slayer of demons and the leader of a new Heavenly Kingdom on Earth.[12] The demons were later interpreted by him to be the Qing and false religions.
Hong developed a literalist understanding of the Bible, producing a set of his own annotations. He rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, saying “God is the Father and embodies myriads of phenomena; Christ is the Son, who was manifest in the body... The Wind of the Holy Spirit, God, is also a Son... God is one who gives shapes to things, molds things into forms, who created heaven and created earth, who begins and ends all things, yet has no beginning or end himself...” and “God and the Savior are one.”[13]
Very interesting.
“Christ is flourishing don’t have priests and popes to tell them what to believe. They have The Bible. Therein lies their faith. No silly church traditions. No worshiping Mary and other dead humans. Christ alone.”
I thought it was more related to being able to abort a child, desert a wife/family, engage in homosexual behavior, and all that other stuff protestants allow that Catholics don’t...
What would make you think that? Is it because bigoted FRomans (on the pages of FR) keep saying garbage like that?
Is there anything other than [Roman] Catholic bigotry which would lead anyone to "think" the above, particularly in regards to Christianity in China today?
If so, show us how in China your accusations are the basis for the growing 'other-than-officially' 'Catholic' church assemblies.
Otherwise, elsewhere in the world, the most permissive of the so-called "Protestant" congregations are withering on the vine, with membership shrinking much faster than elsewhere among those "other than [Roman] Catholic" ekklesia.
In the United States, if not for immigration from Mexico, the [Roman] Catholic Church would be shrinking much more than most any conservative evangelicals when those latter are seen more in aggregate, though the non-denominational churches do appear to be attracting significant numbers also.
Just recently pope Francis said in regards to persons with homosexual orientation, "who am I to judge?", with him there seeming to myself to not be willing to pronounce judgement in toto on a person, even though the behavior is understood to be "disordered".
Please make certain that you notice such distinctions when or if commentary is made by "Protestants", for there are plenty of those who condemn the behavior itself on biblical grounds, as well they should. Still --- what to do with persons such as homosexuals? How to treat a person with some human decency but not support the sin itself? Many churches are wrestling with that question...with us here needing to recall that Christ loved us while we were (all) yet sinners.
The article here has given us a few clues as to possibly why less structured Christianity has been perceived to be flourishing in comparison to the more highly structured denominational in China -- with none of those reasons including the blanket accusations which you bring.
The article was written by a Jesuit, too. He made no mention of broad-brush accusations of the sort which you have so casually flung around.
Is that Jesuit wrong -- or are you ever more so wrong [here, in what you say]?
Like I said, anyone can go read exactly what was said.
Romanist theological error caused non-Catholic Christians to protest their meeting place being demolished. They should let them have the building, and they would have if they truly knew the Gospel of grace. It’s all right there, sorry if we disagree.
I actually thought I was sticking up for the non-Catholic Christians protesting getting their meeting place demolished, by demonstrating that it’s pretty ridiculous and demeaning to chalk up their reasons as due ‘Romanist theological error.’ I mean come on. Protesting a church getting demolished by the Chinese state is pretty heavy stuff. I was thinking it was pretty cool and brave, and I wondered if that is going to happen here eventually, and then I saw a post that said that they only protested because they are riddled with Romanist theological error.
Freegards
When you take flak, you know you’re over the target.
Taking flak for making loose unfounded allegation isn't being necessarily being "over the target".
Romanist theological error caused non-Catholic Christians to protest their meeting place being demolished.
Not quite. More to the point, the theological error was part of what had lead them to build a fairly grandiose building in that setting, in the first place.
Then, when officials (rightly or wrongly, perhaps a mixture of both?) moved against the building's existence, that resulted in the protests to the building being torn down.
My objection to you was for your choice of words in restating what the man had said.
You skipped a step. That was my objection.
“Not quite. More to the point, the theological error was part of what had lead them to build a fairly grandiose building in that setting, in the first place.”
And yet smaller presumably less grandiose churches were demolished, one of them Catholic. And no protests were reported. Truly strange, on several levels. For sure.
NonCatholic Christians had a bigger church that was also torn down. They protested it. Like how humans do sometimes. The only explanation was Romanist theological error’ of building a grandiose meeting place which caused them to protest like how someone does when they are riddled with Romanist theological error. It’s the only explanation.
Freegards
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