The Chinese state formally recognises – and attempts to regulate – five religions: Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. It is interesting to see the last two treated as separate religions, but then the Chinese state is more interested in control than Christian unity.
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.
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.
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