RELIGION IN CHINA

The world has fewer officially atheist states now than it did twenty years ago, when the Soviet Union and the communist powers of the Warsaw Pact were still in business. One of those still standing is China. But religion is getting stronger there at the grassroots level, and it is also gaining more acceptance from the regime. The Economist reports:

The revival of the Black Dragon Temple's fortunes is part of a resurgence of religious or quasi-religious activity across China that—notwithstanding occasional crackdowns—is transforming the social and political landscape of many parts of the countryside. Religion is also attracting many people in the cities, where the party's atheist ideology has traditionally held stronger sway.

The resurgence encompasses ancient folk religions and ancestor worship, along with the organised religions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam (among ethnic minorities) and, most strikingly, given its foreign origins and relatively short history in China, Christianity. In the face of this onslaught, the party is beginning to rethink its approach to religion. It now acknowledges that it may even have its uses...

Officially, the party regards folk religion as superstition, the public practice of which is illegal. But in many rural areas officials now bend the rules. In Yulin prefecture, with 3.4m people, there are 106 officially registered places of worship and many more that are not officially sanctioned...

Evidence of China's religious revival can be seen throughout the countryside in the form of lavish new temples, halls for ancestor worship, churches and mosques (except in the far western province of Xinjiang, where the government worries that Islam is intertwined with ethnic separatism and keeps tighter rein). Officially there are more than 100m religious believers in China (see table), or about 10% of the population. But experts say the real number is very much higher.

Christianity in particular is flourishing:

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who visited China in October, wrote afterwards in the Times that there was now a sense in China that civil society needed religion, with its motivated volunteers. During his trip he remarked on an “astonishing and quite unpredictable explosion” in Christian numbers in China in recent years.

If the growth of Christianity in China continues at the rates it has recently sustained, within our lifetimes China will be a predominantly Christian nation. A likely scenario? Perhaps not; but definitely possible.

In that case, would the American evangelicals-- who are already in a sense second-class citizens here, forced to pay, as it were, the jizya to an elite that teaches their own children in a fashion contrary to their faith-- begin to feel divided loyalties? It is incongruous that the world's most populous and dynamic (predominantly) Christian country is also the world's richest, when Jesus said that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." In a newly converted China, American Christians could see much to admire.