A Besieged Boom

From Hardship to Growth

Christianity in China ¹ looks back on a long history, with the first evidence of Christians dating back to the seventh century. These so-called Nestorian Christians, from the Assyrian Church of the East, brought a faith that became known as Jingjiao (景教, “Luminous Religion”) and lasted six centuries in China, linked strongly to the Tang and the later Mongolian Yuan dynasties. By the fourteenth century, the Jingjiao Christians had disappeared without a trace. Catholic Christianity arrived in two waves, first in the thirteenth century with Franciscan and other missionaries sent by Rome during the Mongolian period, and again with Jesuit missionaries during the Ming dynasty from the late sixteenth century on. Only this latter attempt lasted, but Catholics remained a tiny minority. Protestantism entered China with Robert Morrison from the London Missionary Society in 1807. Yet, like Catholicism, and despite a large number of missionaries, Protestant Christianity remained marginal. Perceiving the faith as yet another import of the colonial powers, the people saw Christian converts as giving up their Chinese-ness and Christian missionaries as abetting Western aggression against China. A process of increasing independence from Western Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century bore little fruit as China was caught up in civil war and Japanese colonization. The hardship for Christians deepened further from 1949 onwards, when they were regularly attacked as backward, superstitious, and allied to the West. China’s confrontation with the USA in the Korean War led to the ejection of all Christian missionaries. During the rule of Mao, through several waves of political campaigns and culminating in the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), all religious activities were systematically suppressed. Only after Mao’s death and Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power in 1978 did the government gradually legalize religious activities. Since then, Christianity has grown at a rate comparable to the nation’s economic growth, with average annual growth around 10%.

Statistics on the number of Christians in China vary significantly and may be shaped by political interests. An occasionally offered official number sets the size of Christianity at around 23 million. ² This number explicitly does not include Christians outside the registered churches. Research by the US-based Pew Research Center on global Christianity (Dec. 2011) estimated that in 2010 there were around 67 million Christians in China, including around 9 million Catholic Christians. ³ If we conservatively assume an annual growth rate of 5% since then, we may assume nearly 100 million Christians by the end of 2018. The Global Christian Encyclopedia estimated 102 million Christians in 2015. ⁴ A draft of the newest edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia (to be published in 2020) estimates that by 2020 there will be around 112 million Christians. We may safely assume that today China has 90 to 100 million Christians, or around 6 to 7% of the population.

Official and Independent Churches

Chinese Christianity consists of various Christian groups with much intra-Christian division. A first division is between Protestants and Catholics, which the government treats as two different religions. The separation between these two Christian traditions runs deep because of significant terminological differences. The other dominant division is between official Christianity (i.e., officially registered with the State Administration of Religious Affairs and, since 2018, with the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party) and non-registered Christianity. On the Catholic side, the non-registered church is the church affiliated with Rome. It stands in contrast to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which rejects the legal and administrative authority of Rome. However, an agreement between the Vatican and Beijing regarding the appointment of bishops, signed in September 2018, has brought some degree of rapprochement. On the Protestant side, the non-registered church is sometimes called the “underground” or “house” church, but a better name is simply “independent Christianity”: The name “house church,” although convenient in its use, is often inappropriate because many of these churches have grown beyond what a typical family’s apartment can accommodate. “Underground church” is similarly misleading—these churches are hardly underground. If members know where to gather, the public security bureau will know as well. “Independent Christianity” stresses not simply independence from the state and from official registration, but also congregational and denominational independence. This stands in contrast to churches under the umbrella of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), which is tightly controlled by the government. Independent Christianity is in itself very diverse and includes all shapes of spiritual orientation, from fundamentalist through moderate evangelical to charismatic. Although there are loose connections among independent congregations, they lack permanent structures. This is partly because any such structure would be suppressed by state security; it is also due to widespread suspicion about trans-congregational authority.

Factors for the Growth of Christianity in China

A multitude of factors have been suggested as contributing to the rapid growth of Christianity (see also the article on “The Church as Family” in this issue). ⁵ The length of this article allows only the highlighting of a few key points.

First, and perhaps most importantly, Christianity has successfully absorbed many elements of traditional Chinese culture and religion, similar to the successful connection in the Korean context with both Confucian and shamanist elements. ⁶ Religious scholars see an elective affinity between evangelical Christianity and Confucianism on one side, and between Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity and shamanism/Daoism on the other side. People in China embrace Christianity as an extension of their traditional beliefs, offering concrete prayers and practices of healing and of divine intervention in life’s difficulties, but in a Christian form that is more universalistic, more compatible with a modern context, more linked to a vibrant community life and (for many) more effective. When people are interviewed about what led them to the Christian faith, experiences of answered prayers and of miraculous healing rank highly. People turn to the Christian faith because it works—it responds practically to their needs.

Second, people become Christian because of what they see as Christianity’s moral strength. The past century has brought tremendous disillusionment, with several radical changes in dominant values: empire, republic, turmoil of the civil war and the Second World War, communist victory, ideological campaigns of the first decades under Mao, the Cultural Revolution, and, finally, the economic liberalization of the last four decades, with getting rich suddenly declared virtuous. The validity of moral values seems short-lived, and people yearn for lasting values. The ruling party, eager to dominate all aspects of life but disqualified by decades of hegemony and rampant corruption, is unable to provide them. In such a moral vacuum, Christianity offers a powerful alternative that appears new and untainted by the past.

Third, the years of economic growth have led to significant wealth, but equally to a sense of disillusionment, spiritual emptiness, and relational deprivation. Many people are discovering that getting rich has come at the price of spiritual deprivation and the breakdown of traditional communal togetherness. Uprooted individuals living apart from their traditional network find an alternative community in Christian fellowship.

The organizational form of Protestant churches is a further reason for Christianity’s rapid spread. Churches are independent of any superior institutional authority and thus flexible to spread along family, kinship, work, and business connections. Chinese Christians are strongly evangelistic, actively reaching out to spread their faith.

Christianity has grown both among the masses (rural and urban) and among the elite. ⁷ Many critical intellectuals regard the political rulers as stuck in a tragic circle, where historical change leads only to new autocratic rulers with quasi-divine status. ⁸ Some of these voices were active in the democratic student movement, which tragically ended in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Today some of the former leaders self-critically admit that their movement would have led only to renewed dictatorship if not accompanied by a more fundamental—namely, spiritual—change. They find in Christianity the necessary spiritual soil in which democracy can grow because only a society with these roots recognizes the pervasiveness of sin and understands the need for limitation of power, for example, as historically happening in the American constitution with its system of checks and balances. ⁹

The Empire Strikes Back

It is with this background, as Christianity assumes significant social prestige and as more people from the social elite—even members of the Communist Party—become believers, that Chinese authorities are increasingly perceiving Christians as a threat and are responding with tightened ideological control and repression. Observers regard the level of political repression since Xi Jinping assumed power in 2012 as second only to the campaigns under Mao.

In the past few decades, several campaigns have tried to assimilate Christianity (and other religions) into the goals of the Communist Party. In the late 1990s, it was the program of “theological reconstruction” launched by the late Bishop Ting; ¹⁰ today it is the program of the so-called sinicization (中国化, zhong guo hua) of Christianity. This latter is a thinly veiled integration of religious life into the work of the party, as the following quote from the director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs shows: “We must guide Christians to support the CPC‘s leadership and the socialist system, to put the interests of the nation and the interest of the people first … and to resolutely resist all sorts of heresies and all illegal and unlawful activities that make use of Christianity. We must guide Christians … to integrate individual dreams into the national dream.” ¹¹ Recently, large-scale destruction of church buildings and removals of crosses on registered churches have accompanied these ideological campaigns. Many independent churches, among them the well-known Zion Church in Beijing and the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, have been closed, with leading members and pastors detained. Authorities have installed cameras in churches to identify participants and to restrict children (anyone under 18) from joining church activities. The impact of these repressive campaigns cannot yet be assessed. The restriction on young people attending church, in particular, may undermine the nurturing of the next generation of Christians. On the other hand, Christianity has grown to a numerical size that offers resilience against government pressure; these campaigns, then, may lead simply to deeper alienation from the state.