Abstract
Modern Chinese history can be recounted in terms of three seemingly contradictory narratives: forced secularization; religious resilience and revival; and the sacralization of the nation and its secular state. Secularization, de-secularization and sacralization have been simultaneous and often mutually reinforcing processes. Reviewing the relationship between Chinese political movements and religious impulses in the late imperial, Republican, Mao and Reform-eras, we argue that this apparent paradox derives from a uni-linear understanding of secularization vs. desecularization. China’s encounter with secular modernity cannot be adequately understood as a trend towards a “more” or “less” religious society, but ought to be described in terms of a changing configuration of four “poles” of religious subject formation: the sacred–profane and the enchanted–secular. This shifting configuration has led to the sacralization of the Communist Party, the profanation of society, and the growth of an “enchanted underbelly” of religious networks and practices in the local interstices of the nation-state.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Dobbelaere, Secularization.
- 3.
Szonyi, “Secularization Theories,” 313.
- 4.
Ibid., 322.
- 5.
Taylor, A Secular Age, 37–41.
- 6.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 33–44.
- 7.
C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society; Davis, Society and the Supernatural.
- 8.
Zito, Of Body and Brush.
- 9.
De Groot, The Religious System of China ; Naquin, Peking.
- 10.
Vincent Goossaert, “Spirit Writing, Canonization, and the Rise of Divine Saviors.” Late Imperial China 36, no. 2 (2015): 82–125.
- 11.
Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism.
- 12.
Komjathy, Cultivating Perfection.
- 13.
Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, Chapter 4.
- 14.
Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?”
- 15.
See van der Veer (2013), The Modern Spirit of Asia for a contrast with the Indian trajectory of modern sacralization.
- 16.
Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations,” 960.
- 17.
Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization,” 116.
- 18.
Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations,” 954.
- 19.
Svaverud, “Individual Self-Discipline and Collective Freedom.”
- 20.
Dirlik, “The Ideological Foundations,” 955.
- 21.
Ibid., 957.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes.
- 24.
Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation; Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China , Chapters 4 and 5; Poon Shuk Wah, Negotiating Religion ; Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking; Palmer, “Chinese Redemptive Societies”; Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China.
- 25.
Landsberger, “Mao as the Kitchen God,” 206; Dutton, “Mango Mao”; Ajmer, “Political Ritual,” 221–27.
- 26.
Kiely, The Compelling Ideal; Lifton, Thought Reform; Whyte, Small Groups; Madsen, Morality and Power; and Ter Haar, “China’s Inner Demons.”
- 27.
Marx, Capital, 529–30, quoted in Cheng, Creating the New Man, 15–20.
- 28.
Ibid., 13.
- 29.
Frank, “N. G. Chernyshevsky: A Russian Utopia,” 84.
- 30.
Svaverud, “Individual Self-Discipline and Collective Freedom,” 219.
- 31.
Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question, 173.
- 32.
Ibid., 174.
- 33.
Bakken, The Exemplary Society; Palmer and Ning, “The Resurrection of Lei Feng.”
- 34.
Chan, Madsen and Unger, Chen Village; Yan, Private Life Under Socialism.
- 35.
Rofel, Desiring China ; Farquhar, Appetites.
- 36.
Barmé, Shades of Mao.
- 37.
Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China , Chapter 11; Lizhu and Whitehead, “Fate and Fortune”; Iskra, “Strengthening the Nation through Self-Discovery: The Body-Heart-Soul Movement in the PRC,” Ph.D. diss., University of Hong Kong, 2019.
- 38.
Dean, Taoist Ritual; Dean, “Local Communal Religion.”
- 39.
Ashiwa and Wank, Making Religion , Making the State; Palmer, Qigong Fever.
- 40.
Dobbelaere, “China Challenges Secularizarion Theory,” 363–64; Palmer, “China’s Religious Danwei.”
- 41.
Yang, “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets.”
- 42.
Dynon, “Four Civilizations,” 107.
- 43.
Winiger and Palmer, “Neo-socialist Governmentality, Spiritual Civilization and the China Dream,” forthcoming.
- 44.
Bateson and Bateson, Angels Fear, 148.
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Palmer, D.A., Winiger, F. (2019). Secularization, Sacralization and Subject Formation in Modern China. In: Dean, K., van der Veer, P. (eds) The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia. Global Diversities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89369-3_5
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