Christianity in China

In the early 21st century, Christianity in China is a diverse, growing, and small but resilient force. Estimates vary, but one informed report speculates that the number of Christians is perhaps 5 percent of the population, in any case giving China one of the largest Christian populations in the world. Historically, like Buddhism in earlier times and Marxism in the 20th century, both of which also came from outside China, Christianity has become Chinese in many forms: as doctrine and theology, as institutions, as communities, and as spiritual experience. In the 16th century, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci argued for a Sino-Christian synthesis based on the natural theology that God had placed in Confucian classics as well as the Bible. After the emperor proscribed Christianity and expelled foreign missions in 1724, Catholic village communities grew by melding Christianity into local Chinese religions. In the century after the Opium Wars of the 1840s, Protestant and Catholic missionaries and Chinese Christians established a network of churches, seminaries, schools, universities, hospitals, and publishing houses, which all made key contributions to the emerging Chinese nation. At the same time, independent Chinese evangelicals attracted large followings based on their own readings of the Bible. After 1949 the new People’s Republic of China once again expelled foreign missions and campaigned to suppress or control all religions except officially sanctioned groups. Yet the number of Christians still rose, mainly in the countryside. When the post-1978 reforms brought a loss of faith in Marxism and a spiritual crisis, Catholic and mainline Protestant churches thrived, as did “underground churches,” but the fastest growing groups were independent evangelicals and Pentecostals, again especially in the countryside. In short, over the centuries there have been many and often competing Chinese Christianities. For many millions, Christianity was a spiritual experience and daily practice which gave meaning to life. Doubters saw Christianity as a foreign religion incompatible with Chinese culture, while China’s rulers, both before and after the 1949 revolution, assumed that it was their responsibility to regulate all religions, especially ones they saw as foreign. Nationalists charged that Christianity entered China by what they called imperialist “gunboat diplomacy,” accused converts of being “rice Christians,” and charged that “one more Christian is one less Chinese.” In recent decades, perhaps no other field in Chinese studies has changed more than the study of Christianity. The earliest scholars, often missionaries or their sympathizers, wrote reverentially of struggles to create a Chinese church and plant the seeds of Christianity. Recent scholarship centers on Chinese Christianities as independent and authentic entities, not as versions of western Christianity; on missions as part of Chinese society; on grassroots communities that practice Christianity as a Chinese folk or popular religion; on Christianities which enlarge rather than replace Chinese identities; and on lived experience as much as on orthodoxy and doctrine.