China can't control its 'cults'
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 5:46AM ARTICLE: The Bishop from Beijing: Rome must be wary of China’s meddlesome puppet priests, By Doug Bandow, The National Review, January 4, 2007
Good story on the struggle of the Catholic Church in China. As I wrote near the end of BFA, China is on the pathway to once again becoming a very religious society.
This naturally scares the Party, especially given China's long history of "cults" (as pretty much all religions are called officially) triggering political unrest (good example, the Boxers).
The Party fears religions for the same reasons it fears the Interent: uncontrollable horizontal connectivity that can theoretically be mobilized against the state.
This thing works itself out in the end, though. As China's consumeristic middle-class grows and demands more protection from an arbitrary state, freedom of religion enters that dialogue. It does so because, as Chinese move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they naturally want more spirituality in their lives.
China's religious scene is already too diverse for the Party to try and co-opt one "official faith" (the sad problem of the Middle East--including Israel), but the CCP may well try that path eventually.
But expect the CCP to continue to try and control church leadership selections (like it does with Catholics). Will this grant them control over the faithful? Didn't work for the dictatorial John Paul II with American Catholics (okay, most American Catholics), so why would we expect it to go any better with Beijing?
Religion is about group control only in hard economic times. Once you go from Gap to Core, then it becomes increasingly about individual fulfillment.
That's the Pope's problem with Americans.
That's Israel's problem with its secular, post-Zionist citizenry.
And that'll be Beijing's problem with Christianity eventually.
Thanks to Rod Montgomery for sending this.
Reader Comments (5)
Turning to the PRC, the problem of religion cannot be separated from the problem of the Cultural Revolution. The eviscerating of traditional chinese social traditions and religious faiths has had a long term destabilizing effect on chinese society. But to rescind the State's power to rerun the Cultural Revolution is to throw away power. That, I believe, is the takeaway from the recent persecution of the Qi'Gong sect so much in the news (I won't name them in hope that this post won't get blacklisted by the great firewall). Without blowing off the dust on the repressive techniques from that era and reapplying them to the task of destroying this movement, the present regime might not have made it to this point.
Spiritually, communism is rotten to the core. All it offers in the case of the PRC is the assurance that good economic times will flow. But nobody can guarantee permanent good times. Mistakes accumulate that can only be rectified by recession, temporary contraction, and the closure of businesses that should never have been started or have long outlived their usefulness. What are the spiritual reserves which will allow for the quiet acceptance of such correctives? The PRC system offers none and thus must distort and cheat their way to growth with ever more grotesque measures. This only ensures an increased severity and duration when the inevitable correction happens.