*Sightings*
5/12/2011
— Fenggang Yang
On Easter Sunday, Shouwang (show-won) Church in Beijing planned to hold an
outdoor worship service in a plaza amid high-rise office and commercial
buildings. However the police sealed off the plaza and dispelled gathering
congregants, as they had done twice before. Thirty six of the congregants
were taken to police stations for interrogation.
Two Sundays earlier, 159 church members were rounded up in police buses and
taken to police stations. While in custody, these Christians sang hymns
together and shared the ¢â‚¬Å“good news ¢â‚¬ with the policemen when they were not
being interrogated. The quiet confrontations between Shouwang Church and the
Chinese government have received much media attention in the United States,
Canada and Europe, but so far the media have offered little to understand
the burgeoning ¢â‚¬Å“house church ¢â‚¬ phenomenon in China.
Shouwang ¢â‚¬â„¢s confrontation with the government is not a political protest. It
represents a spiritual revolution that has been sweeping the vast land of
China. Shouwang is one of the large ¢â‚¬Å“house churches ¢â‚¬ in Beijing with about a
thousand members, a majority of whom are college-educated young
professionals who have converted to Christianity within the last two
decades. Until the end of the 1980s, Christianity in China was very much a
rural phenomenon and most Christians were old and feeble and had little
formal education.
The phenomenon of ¢â‚¬Å“house churches ¢â‚¬ has mushroomed in urban areas since 1989,
a fateful year that marks a turning point in Chinese history. The
student-led pro-democracy movement was violently crushed by the Communist
authorities who sent tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.
The 6 ·4 Tiananmen Incident, as it is commonly remembered by the Chinese,
triggered a spiritual exodus from the Communist orthodoxy. Since then, while
Chinese society has been transitioning to a market economy, many individuals
have converted to Christianity. The founding pastor of Shouwang Church, Jin
Tianming, was a college student at Tsinghua University in 1986-1991. After
graduating, Tianming has dedicated himself to evangelism.
Like hundreds of ¢â‚¬Å“house churches ¢â‚¬ in Beijing that were formed in the 1990s,
Shouwang started at Jin ¢â‚¬â„¢s apartment in 1993. When the Bible study and
fellowship group grew to over two or three dozen people, it split into two
groups, which in turn split further to accommodate the growth of the
congregation. As a growing number of fellowship members got married and had
children, it was no longer feasible to hold gatherings only at people ¢â‚¬â„¢s
homes. Therefore, in 2005, a dozen or so fellowship groups conglomerated
into one congregation and rented a large hall in an office building to hold
Sunday school and worship services.
In 2006, Shouwang sought to register with the government as an independent
church. However, the Religious Affairs Bureau of Beijing refused the
registration unless Shouwang joined the Three-Self Patriotic Movement
Committee (TSPM), the government-sanctioned body overseeing all Christian
congregations. The literal meaning of ¢â‚¬Å“three-selfs ¢â‚¬ is ¢â‚¬Å“self-governance,
self-support, and self propagation. ¢â‚¬ In reality, however, the TSPM was
established as part of the control apparatus of the Communist authorities.
After TSPM forced all churches to cut off ties with Western churches, it
further disbanded all denominations in 1957. This means that one could be a
Christian in China but it is illegal to be a Baptist, an Episcopalian, a
Lutheran, a Presbyterian, or a Methodist. As a reaction to the forced ¢â‚¬Å“union
service ¢â‚¬ under TSPM, some Christian leaders and believers simply stopped
attending church and began to worship at home. The ¢â‚¬Å“house church ¢â‚¬ was born,
and the ¢â‚¬Å“house church Christians ¢â‚¬ held steadfast in the political turmoil
from the 1950s to the 1970s and led Christian revivals since the
1970s. Shouwang
leaders consider themselves spiritual heirs of the ¢â‚¬Å“house churches, ¢â‚¬ and
thus will not compromise the church ¢â‚¬â„¢s independence to join the TSPM.
On the other hand, the Chinese Communist authorities continue to cling to
the religious policy that was initially formulated in the 1950s. Since 2008,
the government has made multiple attempts to break down Shouwang and other
large ¢â‚¬Å“house churches. ¢â‚¬ Three weeks ago, the church was evicted from their
rental place. As the last hope to win back their constitutional right of
religious belief, Shouwang has gone public. But as of now, the plaza has
been off limits to the Shouwang Church on Sundays. This and other ¢â‚¬Å“public
squares ¢â‚¬ have been sealed off under Communist rule in China.
*References*
Fenggang Yang, ¢â‚¬Å“Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald ¢â‚¬â„¢s: Conversion to
Christianity in Urban China, ¢â‚¬ *Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion*44 (4,
2005): 423-441.
—. *Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive
Identities* (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999).
*Fenggang Yang* is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center on
Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University. For more information, see
http://www.purdue.edu/crcs/.
———-
Can American Muslims be both loyal to their tradition and full participants
in American civil society? In this month ¢â‚¬â„¢s Religion & Culture Web
Forum<http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/webforum/032011/Moerman.pdf>,
Vincent J. Cornell argues that an embrace of the tenets of Shari ¢â‚¬Ëœa
fundamentalism has led even would-be moderate Muslim leaders to reject the
principles of American constitutional democracy. Consequently, they advocate
(often unintentionally) a retreat from full participation in American civil
society into sectarianism and ¢â‚¬Å“millet multiculturalism. ¢â‚¬ Against this tend,
says Cornell, it is necessary for Muslim thinkers to find an ¢â‚¬Å“overlapping
consensus ¢â‚¬ between Shari ¢â‚¬Ëœa and constitutionalism ¢â‚¬”one that gives warrant for
the exercise of ¢â‚¬Å“unsupervised reason. ¢â‚¬
———-
*Sightings* comes from the Martin Marty
Center<http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/>at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.
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***
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