Rodney Stark is the Distinguished Professor of the Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University and Honorary Professor of Sociology at Peking University in Beijing. He is the author or co-author of 36 books in 17 different languages, including the best-selling The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

Xiuhua Wang received her BA and MA from Renmin University of China in Beijing and is now working towards her Ph.D. in sociology at Baylor University. She has published several papers in American scholarly journals and at present is exploring the role of gender in conversions to Christianity in China. 

CHAPTER 1

The New Religious Awakening in China

Through much of the twentieth century, it was widely believed among Western intellectuals that the Chinese were immune to religion—an immunity that long preceded the Communist rise to power. When, in 1934, Edgar Snow quipped that "in Russia, religion is the opium of the people, but in China, opium is the religion of the people," many academic and media "experts" chuckled in agreement and dismissed the several million Chinese claimed as converts by Christian missionaries as nothing but "rice Christians"—cynical souls who had frequented the missions for the benefits they provided. According to Harvard's John K. Fairbank, by the 1940s it had "become evident that few Chinese people were likely to become Christians and that the missionaries' long-continued effort, if measured in numbers of converts, had failed." His Columbia colleague, Morton Fried, was of similar mind: "All information considered, China seems unlikely ever to see Christianity accepted by a significant segment of the population."

In 1949 the Chinese Communist Party came to power and soon expelled all Western missionaries. Then, in 1966 came the Cultural Revolution, which banned religion. All temples, pagodas, shrines, mosques, and churches were destroyed or converted to secular uses. It was widely agreed that China soon would be a model of the fully secularized, postreligious society.

But it wasn't to be. Instead, faith in a coming postreligious China was revealed as the opium of Western intellectuals. In the past thirty years, after several decades of severe repression, religion has been springing up everywhere in China. Tens of thousands of temples have been reopened or rebuilt. Millions more have returned to Buddhism, and once again huge numbers of Chinese are pursuing their traditional folk religions and worshipping at their ancestral shrines. As Daniel Over-myer described it, "wherever local conditions permit, religious activities come bubbling to the surface, festivals to the gods are held, traditional funerals and burial rituals are restored, destroyed images and shrines are replaced, priests appear to perform rituals, and congregations meet to worship."

Meanwhile, tens of millions of Chinese have embraced Christianity—thousands more convert every day and more than forty new churches open every week (not counting new underground congregations). If this trend were to hold for even another decade, there would be more Christians in China than in any other nation in the world.

Some of this Chinese religious activity could be called a revival—the return of participation in the folk religion, for example. But the rapid expansion of Christianity is something new in Chinese history. Thus, it may be more appropriate to call what is going on in China today a religious "awakening."

Unfortunately, most discussions of the religious developments in China have not been based on reliable statistics, properly interpreted. This has encouraged a good deal of nonsense. Some experts say there are 16 million Chinese Christians, while others put their number at 200 million. Or, all the textbooks on comparative religion, and most discussions of religion in China, include Taoism as a major faith. Unfortunately, for many scholars a religion consists of a set of writings, rather than an activity engaged in by people; the best data available suggest that there are virtually no Taoists in China.

One purpose of this book is to use reliable statistics to impose discipline on the subject of religion in China. Two surveys provide the statistical heart of this first chapter.

The first, conducted in 2001 by the Research Center for Contemporary China, Peking University, is based on one thousand interviews and was released as part of the World Values Surveys. The sample was selected from a large "master sample" created for another survey in 1998. Persons under age eighteen and older than sixty-five were excluded. The data were gathered by face-to-face interviews with 1,000 Chinese. These data are freely available to anyone.

The second survey was conducted in 2007 by Horizon Ltd., China's largest and most respected polling firm. It consists of a national multistage probability sample of mainland China. Respondents were sixteen or older and had lived at their current residence for at least three months prior to the survey. The data were collected by face-to-face interviews with 7,021 Chinese conducted by Horizon's regular staff of interviewers. The data were made available to the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The remainder of this chapter draws upon these surveys to portray the religious landscape of China in broad strokes as a background for what is to come.

The Decline in "Irreligion"

Not so long ago everyone in China was well advised to claim they had no religion, and because government practices are still somewhat antireligious, many religious Chinese continue to conceal their faith, especially to strangers such as survey interviewers. Of even greater importance, most Chinese who currently deny they are religious do so because they have such an odd understanding of what it means to have a religion. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of Chinese honestly tell survey interviewers that they are not religious, even though they also acknowledge that they engage in a whole host of activities that any Western observer would define as religious. For example, the 2007 Horizon survey found that 72 percent of those who said they had no religion had, during the past year, "venerated ancestral spirits by their graves." Ten percent of these same respondents said they believed in the God in Heaven (the Jade Emperor) and 2 percent even said they believed in Jesus. In fact, 22 percent of Chinese who say they believe in Buddhism also say they do not have any religious beliefs. Consider, too, that the folk religion blends elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism with ancestor worship, belief in the Jade Emperor and many other traditional gods, and belief in ghosts and demons. It is housed in a huge number of temples, most of them having been recently rebuilt or restored, where crowds gather to pray and to place offerings of food and incense before images of various gods. But most Chinese seem to believe that this not is a religion! Hence, although the folk religion quite obviously is practiced by thousands of the respondents to the 2007 survey, only 4 out of 7,021 Chinese gave it as their religion, with most of the others involved in folk religion saying they had no religion.

Or, consider the case of Confucianism. Many Chinese officials and academics are adamant that Confucianism is merely a philosophy and definitely not a religion—a claim that has been ratified by many Western scholars. However, when Anna Xiao Dong Sun visited a number of temples in China, she observed many visitors earnestly praying to statues of Confucius...