SCP0010.1177/0037768617747506Social CompassHuang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 747506research-article2018l

social compass Article

Social Compass 2018, Vol. 65(1) 79­–96 Restoring religion through © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: collective memory: How sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617747506DOI: 10.1177/0037768617747506 Chinese Pentecostals engage journals.sagepub.com/home/scp in mnemonic practices after the

Ke-hsien HUANG National University, Taiwan

Abstract has experienced remarkable religious revivals since the Cultural Revolution. I argue that the revivals rely on religious elites summoning collective memory to restore religion, among other factors. In addition, a micro-level perspective is taken, to see how collective memory, more than a group’s collective representation, is the product and resources of religious elites in pursuit of their own interest; the remembrance of the sacred past is a contested, unfolding process of key actors engaging in varied mnemonic practices. Through data collected from long-term fieldwork, I demonstrate how Chinese Pentecostals, after lengthy political suppression, use religious collective memory to rebuild the national community, strengthen the leadership by proving their orthodox character, and fight against mystical separatists. In conclusion, I explain why religious collective memory matters in the case of China in particular, where the state tends to repress religious institutionalization, and Chinese people emphasize the importance of orthodoxy lineage.

Keywords in China, collective memory, mnemonic practices, , True Church

Corresponding author: Ke-hsien Huang, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei, 10617, Taiwan. Email: [email protected] 80 Social Compass 65(1)

Résumé La Chine a connu des renouveaux religieux marquants après la Révolution culturelle. J’avance que ces renouveaux s’appuient entre autres sur l’évocation par les élites religieuses de la mémoire collective comme outil de restauration du religieux. De plus, en ciblant sa perspective sur le niveau micro, cet article analyse comment la mémoire collective du groupe – et non simplement sa représentation collective – constitue à la fois le produit et les ressources des élites religieuses dans la recherche de leur propre intérêt. Le souvenir du passé sacré implique un processus contesté et en développement mettant en scène des acteurs qui s’engagent dans des pratiques mnémoniques variées. Grâce à des données recueillies lors d’un travail de terrain sur le long terme, je démontre comment certains pentecôtistes chinois, après une longue répression politique, mobilisent la mémoire collective pour reconstruire leur communauté nationale, renforcer leur leadership en légitimant leur orientation orthodoxe, et lutter contre les séparatistes mystiques. En conclusion, j’explique pourquoi la mémoire collective est un enjeu particulièrement important pour la Chine, où l’État tend à réprimer l’institutionnalisation religieuse, et où les pratiquants insistent sur l’importance de la lignée orthodoxe.

Mots-clés christianisme chinois, mémoire collective, pentecôtisme, pratiques mnémoniques, Véritable Jésus Église

Religion has been one of the longest memory-preserving communities in human history, where sacred stories about past events and ancient heroes of the faith are remembered regularly. It has survived natural disasters and political persecutions, continuing to unite believers in shared tradition passed down through generations. The communist rule in China before the open reform era is regarded as one of the most thorough, brutal political attempts to eliminate religious communities, posing serious challenges to the longest memory-bearing communities. After the communists rose to power in 1949, the authorities tried various means to decrease the influence and membership of every religion to achieve the ultimate goal of replacing ‘the opiate of the masses’ with communist scientific atheism. Faiths were condemned as feudal superstitions or imperial poisons; places of worship were confiscated and the founding of new ones was banned; religious personnel were under the strict control of the Party or persecuted as counterrevolutionaries; the number of believers decreased sharply as they gave up the old practices or beliefs, or went underground. This anti-religious campaign reached its peak in the Cultural Revolution, when the communists proudly proclaimed the membership numbers for some religions, like , was zero, and many areas became model zones of religious extinction. Accordingly, it was said religion could only be found in a museum rather than reality, while science and atheism were dominating communist China. However, once the policy on religion completely shifted in 1978, religions in China revived very quickly, with the most remarkable case being that of Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 81

Protestantism. This surprising speed may send China on its way to becoming the next Christianized superpower in the near future, accommodating ‘the largest evangelical Protestant community of any country in the world’ (Lambert, 2006: 19). Many wonder how these Chinese Christian revivals happened.

How Chinese Christian revivals happened Scholars have shown these successful revivals have benefitted largely from more Chinese people seeking out a faith to satisfy their needs, including mundane and spiritual ones. Observers on the ground notice that this rapidly growing Christianity in today’s China appears to be Pentecostal, not in the sense of its theology but in its practices in religious living. Despite the lack of familiarity with the three waves of charismatic Christianity as well as their doctrinal breaks from mainstream churches, these Chinese have been improvising spiritual practices (including faith-healing, exorcism, apocalyptic messages, prophesizing and spiritual possession) to solve the mundane problems in believers’ dire everyday life (Huang, 2017). Scholars describe such localized faiths as practical Christianity (Oblau, 2011), practice-led Pentecostalism (Kao, 2009), or popular Christianity (Lian, 2010). Spiritually, this Pentecostal-style Christianity also provides comfort to many Chinese people – with the ideological break from radical Maoism, a spiritual vacuum has emerged that needs to be filled by religions (Tang, 2008). Some scholars apply the deprivation theory that would explain that the lack of various material resources in 1980s rural China was responsible for igniting the evangelistic fire in villages (Hunter and Chan, 1993). So too young urbanites, troubled by uncertainty in their lives provoked by a globalized market, find spiritual peace and comfort in the Christian faith (Yang, 2005). In addition to receiver-side explanations, provider-side conditions should be recognized in order to fully understand the inquiry. In a context in which the state has relaxed religious regulations (Yang, 2012), some scholars discuss how Christian groups localize a faith hitherto considered as foreign, making it an available, indigenous choice for Chinese spiritual seekers (Bays, 2012; Madsen, 2010). Other scholars also recognize that, with entrepreneurial spirit, religious leaders use their increasing economic resources, social influence and political skills to better facilitate religious development (Cao, 2007; Huang, 2014). However, it still remains a mystery how the church could be revived from scratch just after the Cultural Revolution, when so little resources were available for the first Christian devotees. In this article, I argue they still enjoy an even more powerful asset to use in restoring the church: collective memory shared by former believers.

Studying religious collective memory For religion, joining the present to the past has long been considered part of collective rites in believers’ gatherings. Sociologically, recalling the past together reaffirms participants’ shared commonness that is tied to something bigger and deeper than their temporal, trivial existence; social belonging and moral awakening may thus be forged in the commemoration of great historic events or heroic figures (Durkheim, 1995: 380–383, 82 Social Compass 65(1)

429). Through the entrance into the sacred past cloaked by mythology or shared history, believers fulfill their deep desire for religious nostalgia by returning to the eternal present (Eliade, 1959: 65). A modern pioneer on religious collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs, continued the Durkheimian legacy by further identifying the uniqueness of religious collective memory as fixed and resistant against influences emanating from outside. Believers pay constant attention to the time in which their religion is created and in which they perceive no mixture between the religious and profane. Religious collective memory ‘obliges others to adapt themselves to its dominant representation or it systematically ignores them’, and they appear instable and inferior in front of its permanence and centrality (Halbwachs, 1992: 92). Recently, the study of religious collective memory has continued with Danièle Hervieu-Léger, a renowned French sociologist of religion. Hervieu-Léger poignantly defines religion as a ‘chain of memory’ in which the sacred past and present-day believers are connected, thus facilitating the invocation of a tradition to legitimate the act of believing (Hervieu-Léger, 2000; also see Ji, 2005). Hervieu-Léger’s main concern is to investigate how religion, as a chain of memory, functions in the context of European secularization, being embodied as modern societies filled with varied discontinuities and memories being fragmented. Despite its loss of all-encompassing influence at the level of society, religious collective memory can still effectively support different forms of smaller groups like religious utopias, voluntary associations with elective fraternity, and ethnic religions (Hervieu-Léger, 2000: 143–162). Hervieu-Léger and Ji focus on how religious collective memory functions in collective entities as a whole (group, organization or society), and consider the impact of recent social change on its function.

Beyond the Durkheimian legacy: Actors engaging in mnemonic practices However, in the Durkheimian shadow, the actual process of making religion a chain of memory and the role of actors in it has been marginalized or even dismissed. The previous focus of religious collective memory studies has been biased toward the methodologically collectivistic end, as opposed to the individualistic one (Olick, 1999) and functionalist explanation. On the one hand, the memory process within a religious group seems to be a default reproduction of a static sacred past. Little attention has been paid to adjustment to change. This diminishes the ability for existing perspectives to properly tackle many empirical cases facing shifting circumstances, including my case of Chinese Pentecostalism, a group suddenly disintegrated due to a dramatic change of political regimes. How can such a disrupted community be restored through collective memory? In order to explain this process, I must raise the second problem of the existing perspective by adding individualistic insights. The collectivist overtone risks seeing religious believers as cultural dopes that automatically store a pre-given, action-determining collective memory. What religious believers can do to the collective memory, and how, is little known, and the malleable, contentious, and evolvable character of collective memory (Zelizer, 1995; Olick and Robins, 1998) has been neglected. To address these weaknesses, I attempt to adopt a more micro-level lens that takes the remembrance of the sacred past as a contested, unfolding process enacted by Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 83 key actors engaging in varied mnemonic practices (Zerubavel, 1997: 81–99; Fine, 1996; Olick and Robbins, 1998). In his classic on nationalism first published in 1983, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson also delicately elaborates on how national communities have been constructed, with technological aids such as printing, through tactful manipulation of remembering and forgetting; folklore, songs, newspapers, novels, maps and museums are deployed in order to manufacture a national shared past of ‘our own’ (Anderson, 2006). This pioneering literature leads me to investigate how the restoration of the disintegrated religion depends on those older people in the clergy who remain as de facto custodians of a religious collective memory that survives political persecution. I will show these figures in the clergy tactfully use a materialized form of the memory to summon up fragmentary remnants of autobiographic memory about the faith. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that, once the national faith community is successfully revived, they and other emerging local leaders start to engage in varying mnemonic practices that link them to the religious collective memory. Scholars on reputation have shown mnemonic workers engage in practices of finding critical historical records, thus maintaining relationships with influential memory-preserving parties or institutions (Lang and Lang, 1988; Fine, 1996; De Nora, 1995). These practices help with the creation of favorable images mirroring cultural concerns and ideologies, meanwhile realizing the interest of the workers (Olick and Robbins, 1998: 131; Schwartz, 2000). In a similar vein, religious mnemonic practices among the Chinese Pentecostals I investigated not only reflect their communal concerns and desire for denominational orthodoxy lineage and national unity, which had persisted before the communists destroyed and continued to forbid them, but also further their personal interest of strengthening leadership by embedding themselves into the collective memory they attempted to bring back and protect.

Fighting Pentecostal schism through collective memory Religious mnemonic practices are deployed to not only strengthen leadership but also to fight the religious schism caused by charismatic mystics. In the Pentecostal case, this question becomes even more relevant. The liberating spirit of Pentecostal faith as a spiritual energy has been illustrated and observed most clearly in its worship services filled with the abundance of emotions and spontaneity (Robbins, 2004: 125–126; Meyer, 2010: 122). This easily leads to a schism based on the claim of God-given vision. In many cases of Pentecostalism, one has seen how their leaders use organizational skills, adopt new interpretations on the classics, or introduce different faith practices to control Spirit-led practices and thus protect the integrity of the community. How does this type of battle between routinized dogmatists and charismatic mystics proceed? The Durkheimian scholars have briefly touched on this issue, particularly Halbwachs (1992: 100–116), who contends that, in history, the interaction between dogmatists and mystics serves as a driving force of religious evolution. While dogmatists endeavor to continue the traditional and institutionalized ways the faith has been conducted, charismatic mystics call for direct contact with the divine and return to the sacred time of the religious origin. However, the Church is considered to find ways eventually to make peace with 84 Social Compass 65(1) mystics’ ‘rediscovery’ of the sacred past, and turn it into ‘successive additions to this tradition’, (Halbwachs, 1992: 112) which dogmatists proceed to guard. Halbwachs’ argument remains collectivist in tone without paying much attention to the mnemonic practices that agents, whether dogmatists or mystics, engage in on the ground for winning the battle. Here, I will demonstrate that clergypersons reassert the collective memory, recollecting the tainted past of schism-incurring charismatic leaders (such as proclaiming failed prophecy or committing adultery), and thus their heterodoxy status is confirmed and the integrity of the religious community upheld. In fact, this Pentecostal tension is echoed by Halbwachs’ analysis of religion: he emphasizes the distinction between dogmatists and mystics’ religious tendencies and the ending of the mutual conflict as the incorporation or institutionalization of mystic inspirations into the Church. However, mystic inspirations can cause lethal damages to a religious community; what religious elites can do is to fight back mystics or tackle the problems these mystics cause. My case will display how collective memory is mobilized by these elites to cope with the situation. In sum, I will use data I collected from my fieldwork to illustrate how a Chinese Pentecostal community disintegrated by political forces were revived by appealing to its collective memory, particularly through the medium of a commemorative album, how religious elites strengthen the leadership by resorting to collective memory to prove themselves as religiously orthodox, and in what way the religious leaders make use of collective memory to fight against mystical separatists.

Method The qualitative data used was collected during a nine-month period from 2010 to 2013 through itinerant fieldwork on the networks of the True Jesus Church (TJC) across seventeen Chinese provincial-level areas. This methodological design is intended to understand better the overall configuration of the TJC community in China and how members in different regions sustain the faith’s identity through mutual communications and frequent interactions. Specifically, the way I conducted fieldwork was to start with a core church of a certain area (usually a province-wide region), where I conducted participant observation. During my stay, I took part in regular religious services, home visits, informal conversations with believers, and particularly occasions involving multiple churches (such as seminars, meetings, and trips). I also followed local leaders – mostly well-respected senior elders in the region – as they performed their routine church work, paid pastoral visits to neighboring churches, met other Christian leaders or religious officials, and even made long-distance visits to the TJC in other areas. If my presence at the occasion was not allowed, I asked local leaders to describe the meeting retrospectively. After ten days or more, I moved on to the next location. During my itinerant fieldwork intended to grasp today’s development of the TJC, I came to understand how memory about the church matters with regards to members’ religious identification of who they are and what tradition they belong to. While a few local churches have stored archive data about their history, most have still relied on the elderly to impart the religious history to younger generations in oral fashion. Thus, with the help of local leaders, I convened focus groups in which the prestigious elderly were invited to share with me the oral history of the church. Moreover, paying visits to Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 85 theological training camps organized underground gave me a chance to collect handouts from the church history classes. Itinerant fieldwork, oral history heard in interviews, and written archive data together construct a triangular perspective that facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of the TJC mnemonic practices.

True Jesus Church and its past remembered The TJC is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest Pentecostal group in China, with millions of members (Anderson, 2004: 132). Since its establishment in in 1917, it has prevailed in rural areas due to its popular spiritual practices and other indigenized characteristics (Lian, 2010: 51–57). Founded amid the anti-foreign atmosphere ignited by the continuing invasion of Western imperialism, it began as an independent church fulfilling the principles of self-governance, self-support (financial independence) and self-propagation (Bays, 1996). Based on interpreting the Bible literally, the founders instituted several strong sectarian doctrines (including observing the Sabbath day, and immersion in running water). The members claimed exclusivist , zealously engaging in the task of converting other Christian groups. The abundance of Pentecostal practices characterize the group the most: , exorcism, receiving prophetic messages in dreams or prayers, prophesizing, , and others (Tang, 2006: 93–222). While the doctrines of the TJC claim these ‘spiritual gifts’ could be bestowed to every member, they, in reality, were monopolized by charismatic patriarchs in ways with regards to the manipulation of collective memory, which I show in the following.

Paul and Isaac Wei: The sacred father–son duo In the TJC believers’ memories, the establishment and later development of the TJC has been closely related to the efforts of a highly venerated father–son duo. While the father was the founding mystic of the TJC, his son institutionalized charisma as he endeavored to build up a national community. Paul Wei, the God-chosen founder of the church in 1917, represents well the anti-foreign, Pentecostal, sectarian tendencies of the TJC described above. Being a former, little-educated merchant who had been a pious Christian, he started a mission of ‘correcting all nations and religions’. It was said that he alone was led by the Holy Spirit to receive a ‘legitimate’ baptism of immersing himself in a river near Beijing. After he was gifted to speak in tongues, he helped his audiences listening to his sermons to ‘receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit’, too. With allegedly direct communication with God, he proclaimed sectarian doctrines inspired by God (such as observing the Sabbath day instead of Sunday, receiving the full-immersion baptism in opening water, and praying for tongues and other Pentecostal gifts). In his eyes, mainstream Christianity was a ‘fake church’ that was corrupted, imperialism- tainted, and strayed from the truth. In his short evangelical career after founding the TJC, he often rushed into mission churches and debated with missionaries, while curing illness and exorcizing demons to prove the accompaniment of the divine power. After Paul Wei’s death in 1919, his religiously talented son, Isaac, not only inherited the legacy but even successfully developed the church into a national community which 86 Social Compass 65(1) was well administrated under his autocratic leadership. While embarking on evangelical missions to convert Christians and impoverished peasants, Isaac successfully extended the faith far beyond the territory Paul had reached. In addition to being gifted with Spirit- guided inspiration and practices, Isaac was good at systematizing his father’s and his own inspired doctrines. He compiled his father’s and his own reflections on the Bible into The Prevailing Way (a title adopted from a Confucian classic), in which Christian teachings were syncretized with Confucian terms. The commentary was made the only official reference book for teaching the Bible in many churches, particularly in North China. By 1949, the TJC already formed a large community across the whole of China consisting of over 700 churches with 125,000 members (Ying, 2009: 77). The Wei duo, with the militant mystic Paul as founder and the charisma-routinizing builder Isaac as long-time national chairperson, were so venerated by TJC members that there spread a saying in the church that one should ‘follow only the Wei family on the pathway into the heaven’.

Disintegrated communities in political upheavals Once the Communist Party rose to power in 1949, the TJC’s development turned sour, with a terrible mutual engagement in the beginning. At that time, the communists planned to construct a government-sanctioned organization to bridge official religious populations and the state, which later became the Three-Self Patriotic Organization (TSPM). Prime Minister Enlai Zhou wanted the then TJC chairman Isaac Wei to facilitate the national TSPM organization, since the group was regarded as the best example of a Christian independent church having nothing to do with foreign missions (Zheng, 2012: 1–2). Yet Isaac Wei declined the invitation, probably because of his ideological affinity with the defeated Nationalist Party, and even refused to join this state offshoot that would taint the Christian faith in his eyes. The disobedience obviously caused the TJC to fall into disfavor, and later resulted in its punishment by the state. In January 1951, the official periodical was suspended, and any information about the TJC was only allowed to be spread in the government-sanctioned Christian magazine, The Heavenly Wind. The next year, Isaac Wei was forced to publish an article of self-criticism in the magazine to confess his faults of being infected by the residual poison of capitalism, feudalism and imperialism and thus leading his church astray without contributing to the state-honored TSPM task. The final blow came in 1958, when the TJC General Assembly was defined as a counterrevolutionary organization and banned in the Anti-Rightist Movement, the major leaders were sentenced to jail for years, many of the TJC’s properties were confiscated, and local congregations were dissolved. Starting from 1966, the Cultural Revolution aimed to eradicate the ‘four olds’: old culture, old habits, old thoughts, and old customs. Churches were destroyed, Bibles and other religious books were burned, and ministers were humiliated in public sessions in this class struggle. No religious activities were allowed, at least not in public. More local experiences from my elder informants may fill in the gaps in our understanding of how the faith continued during the time of the persecution from 1958 to 1976: with no public gathering, original religious networks still operated, but through one-on-one, personal contacts. Stigmatized members refrained from mentioning their Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 87 religious past publicly, and even actively proved their conversion to communist atheism in front of the cadre. Bibles and religious materials were confiscated if found. Nevertheless, simple religious practices still persisted sporadically at the individual level, particularly in times of need. Believers would find a good time or space which avoided others’ notice to pray in tongues. For example, Shannxi members did so amid herds of goats, whose sound of bleating covered that of prayer; a Fujian deacon told me that the best time to pray was during thunderstorms; remote caves and hills with few human traces were ideal locations, too. Some religious leaders learned from political classes taught by local cadres, making their congregants interact as early underground communists did. A Nanjing elder said, ‘We were just like the communists working like a single thread. My upper end came to see me when I was very sick, and I paid a visit to my lower end when he was in trouble; we prayed in the house briefly and silently’. During the difficult span of nearly two decades, a TJC member could only keep the faith through simple prayer for solving immediate problems by oneself or with a few trusted fellow believers and family members; there were no collective activities or rituals connecting believers with the religious past and thus consolidating a community, except for in a few remote villages where leaders themselves and a very high portion of villagers were religious.

Restoring religion through collective memory The disintegrated religious community was soon restored once the state allowed religious activities at the end of the 1970s. Millions of believers, whether old members or new converts, gathered under the rubric of the TJC as a large national network of faith. The surprisingly successful restoration project benefited greatly from mobilization of the religious collective memory by the remaining TJC leaders or their descendants. One materialized form of collective memory played a key role in this process: The Commemorative Volume on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Founding of the True Jesus Church (referred to hereafter as the Commemorative). Collective memory scholars have been well aware of the importance of the materiality of memory traces in remembering the past in modern times (Zelizer, 1995: 232–324). Anderson also documents that colonial states materialize national identity by concentrating archaeological efforts in building museums or by manufacturing postage stamps and schoolroom textbooks (2006: 182). Here, I will show that the materialized form of memory with symbolic power has been utilized by religious elites to facilitate the restorative process.

The reminder of a national community where you once belonged Every decade since its establishment in 1917, the TJC General Assembly have had a tradition of publishing a commemorative volume on the founding to record the process of how this denomination was founded. The Commemorative published in 1947 is the most complete, and the last one edited by the General Assembly in China. It included how the sacred name of the True Jesus Church was initially inspired by God, how the founder Paul Wei received inspiration on the ‘unique truth’ of the church’s sectarian doctrines, how his son Isaac Wei succeeded in performing miracles and discovered 88 Social Compass 65(1)

‘spiritual meanings’ buried deep in the Bible through his interpretation. In addition, the Commemorative summarized the number of the TJC membership, listing the address and personnel of every church. Interestingly, the first few pages of the volume were filled with dozens of signatures and congratulatory phrases by celebrities from all walks of life, including the then Premier. Editing Commemorative on the Thirtieth could be seen as a process of institutionalizing the TJC collective memory by ‘canonizing’ the Wei family in the halo of the divine as well as with secular endorsement. During the era of political turmoil discussed above, most copies of the Commemorative were confiscated, with the few exceptions later serving as a key to the national revival in the mid-1970s. After the preceding political turmoil, the earliest restoration started in Fujian Province, where the local TJC enjoyed less persecution due to the coastal tradition of religious diversity and lax political governance. The province also harbored a few TJC national representatives, and the goal of restoring the ‘past glory’ of the national community had never died there. The former president of the Fujian branch, Elder Chen, assigned a sailor evangelist from Jiangsu, Brother Palm, with a mission of rediscovering the TJC in other provinces. In addition to travel expenses, Chen gave him a necessary means to the mission goal: a surviving copy of the Commemorative. According to its list of chapel addresses and local leaders, he spent three years, 1978–1980, restoring contacts among the TJC across the provinces and facilitating the rebuilding of congregations by following the Fujian branch’s path of recovery. Brother Palm rekindled the grouping of local believers in nearly twenty provinces, while being sent to prison many times because of local officials’ misunderstanding or for conducting illegal trans-local religious activities. During the period of the ban on the TJC, many former leaders or their descendants whom he met joined the TSPM while forsaking or forgetting distinct sectarian beliefs (such as speaking in tongues, baptism in open water, or Sabbath day observance). They initially refused to receive a foreign stranger like him, but the Commemorative granted him access and spiritual legitimacy. This long lost book reminded them of their religious past and the community they once belonged to.

The reminder of a forgotten root Brother Palm was still continuing his mission at age 87 when I met him recently in Jiangsu. He had just returned from a visit to Sichuan to reclaim the TJC identity of a local church in southern Sichuan by taking a train journey of more than eighteen hours alone. To understand how Palm’s work has reconnected the previous TJC members in detail, I later went to the newly reclaimed church in southern Sichuan. Female Deacon Liu there expressed that the church where she took the leadership from her father was reinitiated in the 1980s and forced to adapt to the TSPM standards by leaving the religious legacy she had inherited yet knew little about. She still remembered the scenes of the spiritual convocation in which sisters performed ‘spiritual dancing’ and spoke in tongues; her father used to proudly tell her it was Isaac Wei who baptized her in a river during the Japanese War, corresponding doctrinally to what was described in a local hymn about baptism in open water which she recalled from her childhood. However, all these memories made no sense, and she kept bemoaning the fact that ‘God’s spirit has departed from our church now’, until Palm’s arrival with the Commemorative. ‘Now I have returned to the original root; we have been found by our family’. The TSPM has continually tried to totally assimilate this church, but she now strongly asserts that ‘our Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 89 history and background cannot be changed’. Liu spent most of that day singing hymns unique to the TJC (in plain language written by early TJC workers set to local folk melodies) together with my companions from Chongqing. This anecdote also reminds us of what Anderson calls ‘unisonance’ (2006: 145). These believers in Sichuan have no idea who the visitors like Brother Palm and I may be and ‘nothing connects’ between the two groups but imagined sound. However, singing the same hymn for unisonality do realize the imagined community that have ceased for decades. Tales about the Commemorative helping with the rebuilding of the TJC are told in other areas, too. A female deacon, now hosting a church within an earthen dwelling in the Loess Plateau in Northwest China, visited the last executor of the national General Assembly in Wuhan in the early 1980s, who was still strictly monitored by the state. With his help, she smuggled out another of the few surviving copies of the Commemorative, and printed dozens of copies to send to other provincial leaders. Reading the book that emphasized how the Wei father–son duo was chosen by God to found and develop the TJC, several elders in Henan thought that it was necessary to have direct kin of the Wei family resume the leadership in order to rebuild the national community. Thus, they went to see Jacob Wei, the third son of Isaac. Jacob had just retired from teaching at an elementary school, and had little knowledge about the Bible and the church, having avoided religion out of fear after the persecution of his father. The book, filled with his grandfather’s and father’s miraculous anecdotes allegedly softened his stubborn heart and convinced him to lead the TJC. Of course, it was the religious elite who took the initiative and mobilized various resources to rebuild the national community; however, the Commemorative, as a materialized form of collective memory, served as a critical means at their disposal to reconnect individuals’ memory fragments to the old tradition and summon their religious sectarian identity.

Consolidating leadership through collective memory Once the national community has been rebuilt and reimagined, local leaders are engaged in frequent contacts with each other or even overseas guests, through which they may receive the abundant providence of religious goods (copies of the Bible, its commentaries, and hymn books), economic support, experienced advice, and, most importantly, the sense of belonging to a larger or even global TJC family. Choosing the right ones to interact with, which increases the legitimacy of the leadership, matters as much as the interactions themselves. Thus, it is critical for local leaders to carefully link their identity, and especially the way they introduce themselves to others, to the TJC’s past leadership and activities. They do this by using their ancestral or other historical connections, in order to demonstrate that they belong in the continuing stream of the church’s lineage of orthodoxy. Even for those who are not leaders, but are merely visiting others, self-introduction in a manner that links appropriately to the collective memory is vital in order to be accepted as guests.

Proving orthodox character by linking to collective memory During my fieldwork, countless encounters among different leaders were witnessed. The participants usually started by recalling a presumably shared religious memory. Doing so not only ensures whether the other party is on the ‘orthodox’ side but also displays one’s prestigious genealogy: a widespread story about a dramatic miracle, an influential meeting 90 Social Compass 65(1) to change certain doctrines, and well-respected spiritual predecessors. If the other party disagrees with the narrative through which the past is remembered, the two would end the encounter immediately, with no accommodation provided for guests and no further contact allowed. For example, the interactions sometimes did not proceed so smoothly because each party remembered in different ways how Isaac Wei, the controversial former national leader of the TJC, came up with the critical commentary, the Prevailing Way, in the 1940s. I, as a young stranger from afar, was often asked questions like ‘what are your roots and foundations?’ Initially, I did not know how to answer. Elder Yu, one of my key informants who accompanied me on my first field trip, recommended that I introduce myself in the following way: my great grandfather was the TJC Taiwanese representative attending the seventh National Congress in Shanghai in 1931. As a result, I was usually well received by many local elites, since many listeners’ ancestors or predecessors had also attended that gathering. As for Yu, who converted to the TJC after marrying the daughter of the last national executor of the General Assembly in Wuhan, he would describe in detail how he accompanied his father-in-law, who was crippled due to his mistreatment in prison, to negotiate with state officials over church disputes and seek more religious freedom. Tracing oneself back to renowned, legitimate religious genealogies linked to the shared memory guarantees being accepted and thus constructing a relationship, and is also a solid stepping stone toward further development. The emphasis on a leader’s ‘right’ genealogy and inheritance reflect the Confucian idea of the orthodoxy of Tao (translated as the Way or the Word), as Mencius first discussed when referring to himself as the present inheritor of ancient sages and Confucius (Mencius, 2009: 166–167). Elder Niu, whose father was Isaac Wei’s brother- in-law and one of the most important leaders in the early TJC, said that early TJC leaders saw this religious community united as ‘one Spirit’ which flows through a lineage of orthodoxy, revealing ‘the Tao’ to the inheritor in the lineage. She added, ‘Religious brotherhood of love may freely flow between us, while the Spirit-inspired Tao may be identical’. Talking about the collective memory and introducing one’s ancestral or historical linkage to the religious lineage serve to ensure that the parties involved share the same Tao and Spirit. In Wuhan of Hubei Province, a female preacher in her 60s was accused of misinterpreting the Bible; she defended her correctness to me by describing how her father had inherited the truth while following Isaac Wei to evangelize to villagers in rural Hubei, and then how her father passed down the truth through education in church and family. ‘My Tao has been widely recognized; it was what Deacon Xiong (her father) spread, which was directly passed down from Isaac Wei, as everyone knew. It is the pure, orthodox teaching’. A Fujian pastor commented proudly that the church there was ‘the most complete’ because they had sheltered some TJC national leader. ‘We have never stopped worshipping God along with this remnant branch (the former national leader), and we maintain the integrity and legacy of the orthodox Tao’.

Materializing the favored collective memory In addition to preparing how to position their own identity in relation to the collective religious memory, religious elites tend to materialize the collective memory connecting them to the orthodoxy. Editing commemorative volumes, as I mentioned earlier, is a Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 91 common way for a local TJC church to celebrate its founding; tales are recorded about how those early legendary workers came to the locale and were assisted by the then leader, passing down the authority to the current one. In Hubei Province, the leader spent tens of thousands of dollars on erecting two giant pieces of marble in front of the chapel, on which the general history of the TJC and his own history of being chosen to lead this local church were separately engraved. When I visited northern Jiangsu, I saw that almost every TJC church stored dozens of copies of Historical Investigation of The True Jesus Church, a book written by a historian and published by a government-sanctioned publisher in 2006. When asked why they kept such an abstruse book filled with historical details, the local elder replied, ‘This is the family genealogy of our TJC, and every believer should have one’. He then purposely flipped the book to the page where his name appears, showing me he was part of a written TJC history.

Manipulating collective memory about allies and enemies Tales can be told differently, and even written history can be manipulated, when these leaders need to. When I went to Fujian province, I encountered the event of the largest schism in decades. In the first few days, Deacon Kuo, who was my host during my stay in the Putian area, asked me to take out a notebook and then told me things he said ‘should be recorded in your notebook and written into the TJC history by you to let the world know’. His subject involved Elder Zhu, a pioneer in religious work after the Cultural Revolution. ‘He is just like the betrayer, Judas, against Jesus. He occupied the committee and forbade our men from speaking . . . He also had an affair with some woman outside his marriage . . . The Holy Spirit has already departed from him. That’s why he has been weak for a while. He has cancer’. Two days later, he pulled me aside secretly and asked me to remove from my written account the ‘bad things Elder Zhu has done . . . since Elder Zhu has just repented. He deserves forgiveness from God’. It turned out that Elder Zhu’s first son, taking leadership during the serious illness of his father, had just agreed to take ‘his churches’ back to rejoin the camp of Deacon Kuo. As for another elder who still stood in opposition against him, Kuo brought me a copy of a recent commemorative volume of this elder’s church. He wanted me to pay extra attention to the section called ‘Remembering the Past through Pictures’, and asked if I found something weird. He later explained, ‘You can see how arrogant he has always been. The pictures included here are all about him traveling around China and abroad. The pictures of his father’s funeral also show that he forced church members to kneel down to worship his father as an idol. This is blasphemous’. These interpretations were also presented in Kuo’s sermon during the annual spiritual convocation to make the congregants remember the past in the way that distinguishes between religious allies and enemies. Thus, the formation and reformation of religious collective memory depends on power struggles among religious elites.

Fighting against separatists through collective memory As a religion filled with charismatic leaders who each emerge with their own visions, prophecies and unique spiritual inspiration, the TJC always has to cope with the 92 Social Compass 65(1) disturbances they cause in the religious community. Mnemonic work that can reassure the community about who possesses the orthodox status is one of the most efficient ways to reject unwanted, allegedly Spirit-led practices or claims as heterodoxy. For example, there emerged a powerful ‘witch-like’ charismatic faith-healer, Deacon Maria, in the late 1980s in southern Jiangsu, who ‘was always claiming Spirit-revealed inspirations about everyday mundane stuff, such as which type of vegetable and what style of cabinet to buy’. She eventually established a separate TJC meeting point which she claimed was the ‘True True Jesus Church’ to display its spiritual distinction from the traditional TJC. This schism caused a temporary massive exit of the membership from the nearby TJC. However, Sister Chang, the only surviving family member of the late Jiangsu representative in the TJC national general assembly, stepped up to organize a campaign against ‘those who go astray from the orthodox of the TJC’, and thus restored the faithfulness of members to the local TJC. In a bible study she led on the five major doctrines of the TJC, she shared notes taken from listening to her father’s sermons decades ago; she also told many old tales recorded in the Commemorative of how early faith betrayers who had falsely called on God’ s power to split the (TJC) church ended up miserable later in life. Another way to counterbalance schisms is to taint the reputation of separatist leaders by revealing their secular transgressions, which had originally been hidden for the sake of the church’s integrity. The ‘secret past’ revealed includes forbidden behaviors (such as smoking and drinking alcohol), earning money in unjust ways (for example, managing an entertainment business or pocketing church donations), and involvement in immoral sexual relationships. Many of these male charismatic leaders exiting from the TJC were reputed to be ‘surrounded by sisters’ and to have sexual relationships with women in order to ‘save them from the devil’. These failings during the leaders’ religious work is cited to show that it is the Devil’s rather than God’s spirit that they were summoning. After Elder Chao from northeast China departed the TJC community, his ex-coworkers started to spread news about a previous accident in which a believer strangely fell to his death from a chapel during a spiritual convocation he was sent to serve; this event was regarded as implying ‘his inner spirit was evil early on’.

Remembering the sacred duo differently to cope with a failed prophecy In the greatest crisis for the TJC after the Cultural Revolution, one can again see similar mnemonic work that attempts to mitigate a present problem by bringing out hidden memories. In the mid-1990s, Jacob Wei, a successor to his persecuted father Isaac Wei and his founder grandfather Paul Wei, started to proclaim the second coming of Jesus at the end of the millennium. To support this, he claimed he ‘was inspired by the Holy Spirit’ based on interpreting certain Biblical lines. This caused a huge apocalyptic fever, in which many believers abandoned their fields or jobs and stayed together within chapels to live communally. The state also noticed the socially disturbing apocalyptic message and attempted to stop the dissemination of the news. In the end, the prophecy failed. Jacob Wei escaped from the police, who targeted him as an ‘evil cult leader’, and the TJC group was seriously damaged, as members lost faith. Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices 93

To repair this huge mistake that caused a massive loss of membership and severely damaged the reputation of the TJC, the remaining leaders engaged in mnemonic work to explain why such a failed prophecy had happened. They revealed the problems of the Wei family, not only Jacob but also his predecessors Paul and Isaac. It was said that Jacob’s failed prophecy was not surprising since the Wei family had had a tradition of ‘being deceived by the evil and self-arrogance’, resulting in repeated claims of the coming of the end day. Paul’s diary allegedly recorded that, before Paul died in the early 1920s, he claimed that Jesus would come in five years. Isaac was also said to have made a similar prophecy before his untimely death. These were neither officially recorded in the Commemorative nor propagated elsewhere, and only a few elders in the elite circle still attested to memories of the events. Now, in order to save the community, these secrets had to be revealed, so as to attribute the failure of the prophecy to the three generations of a leading family having an inherent tendency to ‘be false warners’. Utilizing the skill of ‘reverse ventriloquism’, current elders ‘learned to speak ‘for’ the dead people with whom it was impossible or undesirable to establish a linguistic connection’. (Anderson, 2006: 198) In the collective memory thus orally (re-)constructed among elite TJC elders, despite still recognizing Paul’s receiving of basic doctrines from God and Isaac’s efforts of evangelism and administration, something has changed. Speakers now are much more aware of their weaknesses and faults committed. Several of my interlocutors would come to the conclusion that ‘the more power one receives from God, the more humble he or she must be; otherwise, more disaster would come’. Others, while talking about miracles conducted by the Wei family, emphasize the omnipotence of God, in contrast with the Wei’s status of being mere tools. Boundary-making work has been conducted to retrieve the religious past more subtly in order to tackle the crisis of the failed prophecy in 1999.

Conclusion Although collective memories are shared together in groups, it is only individuals who remember (Halbwachs, 1992). This study has used a Pentecostal church in China to demonstrate how remembering the past has to be embedded within the situation facing individuals, that is, religious leaders as gatekeepers of religious collective memory. These surviving TJC leaders attempted to enact their strong sectarian identity, thus making the best of preserved copies of the materialized forms of the denominational collective memory for restoring the national community. They aimed to strengthen their leadership by holding onto orthodoxy status within the church. The mnemonic strategies include connecting their own constructed identity and forms of self-presentation to the shared collective memory, consolidating the connection by using materialized forms of memory media, and using memory to form alliances. In the face of the threat of a schism due to charismatic mystics, the orthodoxy-proving collective memory can be mobilized, adjusted and reset in order to draw a new boundary against the heterodox enemies. While the individuals experience together the collective spirit in remembering the sacred past, they also adjust the collective memory to meet their personal or communal interests to solve problems in the present. 94 Social Compass 65(1)

In addition, religious collective memory has been shown to be resilient and persistent through this case of the TJC restoration at the national level. Despite the long persecution from the Party-state cumulating at the Cultural Revolution, it took only a few copies of a seemingly unremarkable commemorative volume edited decades ago to summon the old guard and to rebuild the national community. As for the ‘miracle’ of Chinese religious revivals, of course, it is undeniable that the impoverished material situation in rural areas, the spiritual crisis after Maoist ideology died out, and flexible organizational skills of evangelism have all made contributions. However, the remaining collective memory, whether within family lineages, loosely connected circles of acquaintances, or individual believers, has also functioned to regroup ex-TJC members in the revival process, as this study has discussed in the case of the TJC. Because the study is limited to the case of the TJC, I have no intention to generalize these findings and claim religious collective memory has facilitated revival of all religions or Christian groups in China after the Cultural Revolution. However, while religious collective memory does operate in regular activities of every faith community, it is hoped the mnemonic practices demonstrated in detail in this study can help religious scholars further investigate the relationship between collective memory and religion in other traditions and cultural contexts. In addition, this study also pays much more attention to the role of religious elites than that of the laity, who may approach the authorized memory in a distinct way from the bottom up. There could be more issues of memory politics within a local church if one takes a closer look at the laity. Lastly, this study is more confined to the religious realm, and does not consider how non-religious systems (for example, a nation-state aiming for regaining the past glory of an empire like the present Chinese Communist government) interfere in mnemonic practices. In the most recent decade, more religions, including the TJC, have started to join nationalist goals such as ‘co-constructing a harmonious society’ and ‘adapting to socialism’ (Cao, 2012; Dunch, 2008). It is worth investigating how political forces in particular compel religious collective memory to be adjusted to Party-sanctioned social memory.

Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Zhe Ji of Inalco, France, for his generous translating of the abstract into French, as well as the reviewers and editors of Social Compass, who provided helpful comments to revise the draft.

Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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Author biography Ke-hsien HUANG is assistant professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. He received his PhD from Northwestern University and he was a research fellow in 2013–2014 at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious Diversity. He is the author of Homeland, host country, and heaven: A large-scale religious conversion to Christianity among Chinese political refugees in the 1950s. He has published several articles on Chinese Pentecostalism in journals including Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Taiwanese Sociology. His broader research interests include sociology of religion, Christianity and folk beliefs in Taiwan and China, church-state relations, urban underclass, and ethnography. Address: Sociology Department, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei 10617, Taiwan. Email: [email protected]