Catholicism has long been seen as a special challenge, because the Roman Catholic Church is a global organisation with priests and bishops under the authority of a foreign leader. Hence the establishment of the China Patriotic Catholic Association as an organisational structure controlled by Beijing not the Vatican.

The equivalent body for Protestants is the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The three ‘selves’ are not a reference to the Holy Trinity, but stand for self-governance, self-support and self-propagation – which, again, is all about cutting off religion in China from foreign influence.

With Xi Jinping clamping down on real and perceived sources of dissent, China’s Christians have not been spared. While the oppressive methods used to ‘re-educate’ Muslim Uighurs in China’s far west have been making headlines over here, the state is waging a much broader campaign of ideological conformity.

Further reading

He's trying, but China's Church is too big for Xi to suppress

By Jonathan Aitken

Consider the following from Jonathan Tam for Asia Dialogue:

“China continues to try to control Protestantism domestically. The official plan laid out by the China Christian Council and Three-Self Patriotic Movement on 28 March 2018 for the ‘Sinicisation of Christianity’ involves attempting to make Protestantism more patriotic and reflective of China’s history and culture over the next five years. While the general destination is set, it remains unclear what a ‘Sinicised’ form of Christianity would look like precisely.”

I’m not sure that the Chinese Communist Party is in the strongest of moral positions to preach about China’s history and culture, given how much of it they destroyed during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. It’s also worth noting that Christianity has been in China a lot longer than communism. In fact, the Church of the East reached China in the 7th century.

These days, most westerners have never heard of this ancient branch of Christianity – or else they confuse it with the Orthodox Churches of countries like Greece and Russia. It is, in fact, the result of a much earlier schism in the 5th Century, after which it spread eastwards into Persia and beyond, whereas what we think of as mainstream Christianity went broadly westwards into what was the Roman Empire.

The fortunes of these two early wings of Christianity greatly diverged – and today only a few fragments the Church of the East remain. Nevertheless, its history is a reminder that Christianity is not intrinsically western, let alone European.

That said, in more recent times, it was western missionaries who reintroduced Christianity to China. One could also argue that Protestantism is Christianity at its most western – and that its emphasis on the believer’s personal relationship with God is the spiritual foundation of western individualism and, therefore, liberalism. Of course, there are other facets to the multi-stranded Protestant tradition – for instance the strong collective identities of groups like the Amish. 

Protestantism is also organisationally and culturally adaptable. Churches that were planted in, say, Africa by starchy Victorian missionaries have remained Christian (often fiercely so) but have become thoroughly African.

The question, therefore, is not whether Chinese Protestantism will ‘Sinicise’, but whether it does so along the lines desired by the government – and which it appears increasing determined to impose.

Further reading

The dark side of China's Social Credit System

By Peter Franklin

Jonathan Tam questions whether the state can succeed. To build “a Sinicised Version of Christianity, effectively from scratch”, he says, requires both “time… and an active intellectual community”. He argues that the state does not have enough of either at its disposal:

“China does not have a monopoly over the development of a Chinese version of Christianity. There are two major competitors. The first of these are the foreign seminaries and universities in the West that are currently developing increasingly globalised and cross-cultural theologies…

“The second competitor is ethnic Chinese seminaries, the number of which is growing within the Chinese diaspora in countries like America and Canada. In addition, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore serve as Chinese intellectual hubs that maintain a fair degree of academic autonomy. As a result, the overseas Chinese have already been developing their own brand of Chinese Christianity, interlaced with their Chinese identity.”

If it can’t exert enough influence, will the government opt for outright persecution instead? We may not see Chinese Christians herded en masse into re-education camps, but policy instruments such as the Social Credit System could make life very difficult for non-conformists of whatever kind.

Perhaps Xi Jinping will look to the West for a different solution. If communism can’t check Christianity, then perhaps rampant materialism will do the job instead.

Bored witless with waiting under the sharp gaze of his bodyguards, my eyes focused on some kitschy paintings of medieval Sinhalese warriors on top of elephants. After a week of touring government offices, I knew these were ubiquitous, though I didn’t give the tubby monk further thought.

This was my first brush with something that did not compute with my limited knowledge of Buddhism. As a child in the sixties I had seen shocking footage of Thich Quang Duc (1897-1963) – calmly immolating himself at a Saigon intersection in June 1963, in protest at the corrupt regime of South Vietnam’s president Diem. If there were any violence in Buddhism, it seemed of the self-sacrificial kind. Many of my older ‘hippy’ contemporaries dabbled with Buddhism, without knowing much about its history or its Asian cultural heartlands. The cruelties of the Vietnam War indirectly heightened the international attractions of this ‘religion of peace’.

Buddhism has two major schools of doctrine and practice. The earliest version, known as the Theravadian[1.  From the BBC’s guide to religions: “Theravada Buddhism is strongest in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Burma (Myanmar). It is sometimes called ‘Southern Buddhism’. The name means ‘the doctrine of the elders’ – the elders being the senior Buddhist monks. This school of Buddhism believes that it has remained closest to the original teachings of the Buddha.”], is common to ‘southern’ nations such as Myanmar (formerly Burma), Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, as well as Sri Lanka as a kind of outlier. The larger reformed school (Mahayana[2.  Again from the BBC: “Mahayana Buddhism is not a single group but a collection of Buddhist traditions: Zen Buddhism, Pure Land Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism are all forms of Mahayana Buddhism… Mahayana talks a great deal about the bodhisattva (the ‘enlightenment being’) as being the ideal way for a Buddhist to live.”]) is dominant in ‘northern’ China, Tibet, Korea and Japan.

In recent years, three countries in the Theravadian camp have spawned highly militant Buddhist movements: Sri Lanka, which is 70% Buddhist, Myanmar (88%) and Thailand (93%). They feed off each other, with cross-fertilisation between Sri Lankan and Burmese monks who then influence trends in Thailand. Paradoxically, while there is a Malay Muslim insurgent problem in southern Thailand[3.  “Spurred by Myanmar radicals, Thai Buddhists push for state religion status” from Reuters, November 2015], there is not in either Myanmar or Sri Lanka. The first two countries illustrate the paradox of a religious majority feeling deeply threatened by minorities, and then practising epic violence against them.

I visited Sri Lanka in the immediate aftermath of Rajapaksa’s final onslaught against the (Hindu) Tamil Tigers – following various failed peace gambits and to end a conflict which had begun in 1983. Some of his generals used their desktop computers to show live-feed battlefield drone footage of the final bloodbath on the Nanthi Kadal lagoon, the culmination of the army’s northern offensive in May 2009 when about five thousand Tigers were slaughtered. I met some of the survivors in army rehabilitation centres for captured child soldiers, most of them boys and girls in their late teens or early twenties, in some cases with shrapnel injuries to their faces and limbs.

The Tamil Tigers were the sharp terrorist end of a much greater perceived threat to the majority Sinhalese from all religious minorities. There may have only been three million Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, but there are 60 million more across the sea in Tamil Nadu in southern India.

But even as the war was wound down, Sri Lankan military commanders muttered darkly about ‘jihadists’ (slightly under two million Sri Lankans are Muslims) and there have recently been Buddhist attacks on the even smaller number of Christians (1.2 million, the majority are Roman Catholics). The main instigators are monks from an association called Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power Force) which was founded in 2012. This is also opposed to the ‘blasphemies’ accompanying western liberal modernity epitomised by a ‘Buddha Bar’ in a fancy hotel (Vice report).

Something ominously similar is afoot in Myanmar. As in Sri Lanka, deep history is enlisted to show that everywhere Buddhism is in retreat, from Afghanistan to Turkey via Indonesia. It has been displaced by a triumphal Islam, which since 9/11 has also been widely conflated with violent jihadism.

Although the overwhelming majority of ethnic Burmese are Buddhists, there is a similar sense of threat to that felt by Sinhalese, but from the Muslim Rohingyas in Rakhine state.

As in Sri Lanka, where many Buddhists claim the Tamils were planted on the island as tea workers by the British in the 19th century, many Buddhist Burmese regard the Rohingyas as insidious ‘Bengali squatters’ from Bangladesh, a neighbouring majority Sunni Muslim country with a population of 146 million. In 1982, the military junta stripped the Rohingyas of their Burmese citizenship, which many had held since the British colonial era and which commenced in 1823. Like the Sri Lankan Tamils, the Rohingya were also viewed as beneficiaries of colonialism by oppressed majorities.

To date as a result of ethnic cleansing by the military, over ten thousand Rohingyas have been murdered and a further 680,000 forcibly driven from the country.

Monks are integral to the intolerance, militancy and violence, which in some cases is incited through DVD copies of their sermons. The years straddling Burma’s transition from the military dictatorship established in 1962, to the civilianised rule of Aung San Suu Kyi, saw the rise of successive militant, monk-led Buddhist organisations, as well as Buddhist clergy who opposed military rule.

The first organisation of militant monks was called ‘969’. This is a numerological counterblast to the Muslim ‘786’, signifying ‘Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim’ or ‘in the name of Allah’, which is printed on stickers to indicate that a restaurant or store sells halal food. The 969 movement conducted an aggressive ‘Buy Buddhist’ campaign, which involved boycotting Muslim-owned businesses. The current vehicle for militant Buddhism is the ‘Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion’ (or Ma Ba Tha for short). It claims that Muslims are conspiring to take over the country to destroy Buddhism, by stealthy economic colonisation and intermarriage with, or rape of, young Buddhist women. A 2013 sermon by the prominent monk U Wiratha links the two:

“[Muslims] have a lot of money and no one knows where that money mountain is. They use that money to get our young Buddhist women. They show that money to attract our young women…That money will be used to get a Buddhist-Burmese woman, and she will very soon be coerced or even forced to convert to Islam…And the children born of her will become Bengali Muslims and the ultimate danger to our Buddhist nation, as they will eventually destroy our race and our religion. Once they become overly populous, they will overwhelm us and take over our country and make it an evil Islamic nation”.

As in the Christian tradition, horrific violence can be legitimated in what is also a religion of peace, and by highly religious men at that, with a similar resort to sophistic doctrines of defensive or “just” warfare. As in the Old Testament, there are also plenty of warrior kings in Buddhist history (like Dutugamanu who unified Sri Lanka in the 2nd century BC) who can be enlisted to justify the ‘fight back’. This is especially so in societies with deep communal cleavages, and histories to match, where the slightest incident can be fanned into savage violence.

The recent history of religious persecution is not confined to bad things that happen to Christians and Jews, especially in majority Muslim countries, and sometimes it is religious people who are responsible for the persecuting. Including Buddhists.

Alisdair Macintyre once told the theologian Stanley Hauerwas that he regretted writing that famous last passage of his great 1981 work of moral philosophy, After Virtue. Nonetheless, it was that book, and its stirring final call to action, that summoned together a very diverse collection of admirers. To many of us, that last paragraph felt like a dark prophecy, a warning from history, and a vague, sketchy outline of what the coming resistance might look like.

In terms of its practical effect on me, it was the single most important piece of philosophical writing that I have ever read. And it remains so to this day.

We are entering a time of crisis, claimed Macintyre. The Enlightenment destroyed the idea that human life is imbued with purpose and direction. It took morality away from the community and made it a matter of individual choice, thus replacing morality with individual self-assertion. The final passage reads:

If my account of our moral condition is correct we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.

And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

Rod Dreher’s best selling The Benedict Option (2017) is the latest in a long line of reactions to this passage. Christians, he argues, have lost the culture wars in the United States. And a new form of resistance is called for.

In this country, Macintyre’s philosophical cry bounced around in academic circles during the back end of the 20th century, emerging into mainstream politics during the beginnings of this one. It was John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (1991), heavily influenced by Macintyre, that led to the whole Red Tory then Blue Labour movements. It was Macintyre’s analysis that inspired the theologian Philip Blond to help persuade David Cameron to start talking about “the big society”. Likewise, the thinking of people such as the excellent Maurice Glassman still owes a great deal to the debates that a number of Cambridge theologians (including Rowan Williams) had in the 1980’s following After Virtue.

But Macintyre’s reception in the United States has been very different. Whereas in Britain, the political influence of After Virtue has been on those who have been seeking to bring new life to society in general, with the conservative Christian Rod Dreher (and with Stanley Hauerwas too), the After Virtue legacy has taken on a more sectarian and inward-looking turn.

Public culture has become irredeemable, Dreher argues, it has been captured by the forces of individualism and liberalism, and there is no way to build communities of moral purpose in such hostile territory. The Benedict Option represents a tactical withdrawal, an attempt by serious Christians to regroup in community, to construct an ark with which to ride out the storm and from there to present a challenge to mainstream culture.

This is why I admire Dreher: he is one of the few conservative Christians to recognise and publicly to admit that the United States is not really a Christian country at all, that it worships a god that has been made in its own image – that is, it worships itself. And that capitalism and a belief in the total freedom of the individual is not the unmitigated good that the Christian Right has so often trumpeted.

All this is very brave of Dreher. I just watched an interview he gave to Fox News explaining his position. The interviewer wore a look of total confusion, failing completely to understand how a conservative Christian such as Dreher could think of the United States as enemy territory. Such has been the elision of Christianity and American nationalism for so many.

As Dreher rightly argues, much that passes for orthodox Christianity in American life is really a moralistic version of Deism. And this pale reflection of traditional Christianity has itself been hollowed out by the continual march of market-driven acquisitiveness. It is good that conservatives are beginning to wake up to the fact that that the market is not their friend. And I don’t suppose the interviewer from Fox would be any better disposed to the Benedict Option if he were to discover that Macintyre was originally a Marxist.

Of course, things are considerably worse for religious believers here in Europe. Different, but worse. Iceland is now preparing to make circumcision illegal – and a survey out this week by the National Secular Society indicates that 62% of Britons agree with them. In France, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, the burqa has been banned. Ofsted the UK education inspection body, now wants to regulate what is taught at Orthodox Jewish schools in North London. Halal meat is being banned. Christians are sacked for wearing the cross as jewellery at work.

Throughout Europe, the state, under the increasingly confident influence of secular liberalism, continues a malign programme of interfering in the lives of religious believers and seeking to marginalise them from the public sphere. Perhaps more religious believers on this side of the pond, too, should wake up and appreciate that the modern liberal state is no longer a friend to religious belief. Liberal in both the social and the economic sense, the modern social consensus is built around the freedom of the individual.

That is why Christians in America couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. And they were right not to. But Trump is clearly not the answer either. Indeed, as Dreher rightly insists, Trump is just another symptom of the deepening problem. There are no good options left. And so all people of faith have to prepare for the dark days that are to come.

Dreher is wrong about a lot, though. Like so many American conservatives, he is creepily obsessed with homosexuality. His analysis of Freud is risible. And unlike the pacifist Hauerwas, he doesn’t understand that the greatest corruption of public Christianity in the US comes from the American war machine. Jesus didn’t care all that much about sex. And said nothing whatsoever about homosexuality. But he cared a great deal about loving your enemies.

The fixation that American conservatives have with sex is a convenient way for them to avoid a much harder and challenging question: the unchristian obsession they have with guns and bombs. I would prefer my Benedict Option to look a bit more like that proposed by the extraordinary Dorothy Day who founded a number of Catholic communities of resistance committed to non-violence and feeding the poor. But in the context of the scale of the incoming crisis, this may look like haggling over the details.

It is indeed odd that a socialist like me finds common cause with an American conservative like Rod Dreher. But the faith we share is under threat. We both diagnose liberalism as the common enemy. And opposition makes for unlikely bedfellows.

Another Christian thinker in this Free Minds series...

Free minds: Michael Schluter - the untiring advocate of an alternative to the materialism of Left and Right

By Tim Montgomerie

And yet, as the China-expert Ian Johnson says in a Five Books interview, “we can’t understand China without understanding religion in China.”

Indeed, it can be argued that religion is more important in China than in the West, because the country’s government has shut off so many secular sources of meaning:

“There are people in China who are looking for values and answers to basic moral questions. Some find it in humanism or in democracy or in human rights, but the government has largely made these taboo topics.”

Interviewed by Alec Ash, Johnson provides a number of valuable insights. Here’s one example:

“Chinese hate it when people say that China is the factory of the world – they view it as an insult. With thousands of years of civilization, they say we’re more than a factory for Apple products, we have a lot of culture and values to contribute to world civilization.”

And yet that heritage has been subject to successive campaigns of destruction that Westerners can barely imagine. In the late 19th century, there were a million temples in China. A hundred years later they were almost all gone:

“By the end of the Cultural Revolution, more or less all places of worship in China had been either destroyed, closed or repurposed, so that there was no functioning temple, church or mosque in all of China.”

Communism was responsible for much of the destruction, but half the temples had already been destroyed before the Communists took over – victims of earlier spasms of revolutionary modernisation and military conflict.

At the same time that China began to reorganise its economy along semi-capitalist lines, Johnson hints that some figures within the government saw religion as a way of recovering China’s identity. For instance, he tell the story of a young Communist official at the start of this reform period:

“His first assignment outside of Beijing after the Cultural Revolution, in the early 1980s, was in Hebei province, in Zhengding, a town that’s now very close to Beijing by the new high speed rail. He was sent there in 1982 to be the deputy county chief, and worked with a Buddhist monk who was trying to rebuild a temple. The two of them did quite a bit of work together. Nowadays this isn’t so uncommon, but at the time it was quite new, and sort of edgy…

“He remained in close touch with the monk for many years afterwards.”

And the name of this official? Xi Jinping… yes, that one.

Johnson is not suggesting that Xi is a secret Buddhist, “but there are good indications he was at least sympathetic or curious about Chinese religion.”

If that’s true, then one has to ask what he counts as Chinese religion. The Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian traditions would seem to qualify. But what about Islam and Christianity? Both of those have been in China for well over a thousand years, but Islam is associated with separatism in the far west of the country (as is the Tibetan form of Buddhism), while the rapid growth of Christianity further east presents a different kind of challenge.

Under Xi, there have been crackdowns – for instance, on the 1,500 churches in Zhejiang province that had their crosses forcibly removed. Johnson cautions against excessive alarm, noting that “only one church was demolished… all the others are still functioning.” However, he does fear that the government’s top-down management of religion could be storing up trouble for the future:

“What I worry most about religion in China is that because the government is picking winners and losers, and because there is so little inter-faith dialogue and many prejudices, if for whatever reason there is less authoritarian control there could be religious violence in China.”

The obvious answer is less top-down control and more inter-faith dialogue. But then a strong, self-managing civil society has never been a communist objective.

An alternative view on China's future moral character

Is President Xi a moralist like Gertrude Himmelfarb?

By Michael Burleigh

In the north-east of Nigeria, Boko Haram continues to target local Christian communities mercilessly. Over three years have passed since they declared a caliphate in the region, and abductions, forced conversions, rape, pillaging and murder remain commonplace. The perpetrators are the herdsmen of the Muslim Fulani Tribe. They come at day and night with machetes and hack the unarmed Christian villagers to death. Whole villages are razed to the ground, the churches burnt. Local policemen and the army, placed in the region to ‘protect’ the Christians, instead choose to overlook the atrocities. Indeed, they often aid the Fulani herdsmen, supplying weapons and vehicles; the national government is run by a Fulani President and the whole situation is mired in corruption and complicity.

The only publicity the situation has garnered internationally was in 2014 when 300 Chibok schoolgirls were abducted by Boko Haram. Since then, the western press has chosen to focus on Brexit and Trump while the schoolgirls remain missing. Christians are being murdered and their villages destroyed across Nigeria and the world will continue to turn a blind eye.

***

Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

“We do not argue for religion, but for politicians, diplomats, the military and the media to take religion seriously.”

However, it’s hard to take something seriously if you don’t understand it. For instance, this was the London Evening Standard trying to explain to its readers “why Meghan Markle will need to be baptised before she marries Prince Harry”:

“Meghan will begin the process of becoming a UK citizen and will also need to be baptised and confirmed before the ceremony as she is currently a Protestant.”

I dare say this will come as some surprise to the many Protestant members of the Church of England, not least the Archbishop of Canterbury and Her Majesty the Queen. Suffice it to say, Protestantism per se is not a barrier to getting married in an Anglican church.

In his podcast interview for UnHerd the former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron MP discusses the dangers of not beginning to understand the faith that still drives so many people today – especially from ethnic minority communities and, writing for the Atlantic, HA Hellyer identifies a more serious example and consequence of religious illiteracy within the West. The context was last week’s horrific attack on a mosque in Egypt, which claimed over 300 lives:

“Because the mosque was often frequented by Muslims linked to a Sufi order, the massacre also brought to light the deeply flawed ways Sufism is discussed—both by those who denigrate Sufism and by those who admire it.

“Extremist groups like ISIS promote the idea that Sufism is a heterodox form of Islam, and then go further to declare Sufis legitimate targets.”

It doesn’t help when westerners portray Sufism as an exotic form of Islam:

“While some who portray Sufis as heterodox do so with malicious intent, many fans of Sufism in the West seem to agree that Sufis are heterodox—it’s just a type of heterodoxy that they prefer to the normative mainstream of Islamic thought, which they seem to think is different from Sufism. Ironically, the well-meaning nature of this misinformed perspective echoes the fallacy that extremists promote.

“And it is an extraordinary fallacy… Indeed, the very label of an Egyptian ‘Sufi minority’ being bandied about since the mosque attack is a peculiar one: Sufism isn’t a sect—it’s integral to mainstream Sunni Islam.”

To speak of Sufism as a separate sect of Islam makes about as much sense as speaking of Christian mysticism as a separate sect of Christianity.

That said, one must be careful not to draw exact parallels between different religions – any attempt to do so can be seriously misleading. An especially egregious example is the notion that Islam needs a ‘reformation’, which rather ignores the centuries of conflict and intolerance that followed the Reformation, 500 years ago. Besides, as Hellyer argues, Islam underwent its own ideological convulsion in the early modern era – one that has profound consequences to this day, not least for the Sufis:

“The birth of the purist Salafi movement (which many pejoratively describe as ‘Wahhabism’) saw preachers inspired by the message of 18th-century figure Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab attacking Sufism writ large in an unprecedented way. While presenting themselves as the orthodox, these types of purist Salafis were actually engaging in a heterodox approach. Many of these figures had to ignore or rewrite large chunks of Islamic history in order to present Sufism and Sufis as beyond the pale.”

Hellyer makes it clear that “not… all those who self-describe as ‘Salafi’ claim that Sufism ought to be met with violence.” But he adds that “many, if not most, deny its centrality within Sunni Islam.”

Whether one is a believer or not, religion still matters in the modern world. For secular liberals, concepts like Sufism and Salafism may seem esoteric, but in many places the distinction between them is a matter of life and death.

> THE LATEST UNPACKED PODCAST IS OUT – THE WEEKLY DISCUSSION OF THREE OF PETER FRANKLIN’S COLUMNS