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Restoring Religion Through Collective Memory: How Chinese 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 Cultural Revolution Ke-hsien HUANG National Taiwan University, Taiwan Abstract China 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 Christianity in China, collective memory, mnemonic practices, Pentecostalism, True Jesus 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 Protestantism, 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 Christians 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;
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