<p><strong>747506 </strong></p><p>SCP0010.1177/0037768617747506Social Compass<strong>Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices </strong></p><p><em>research-article</em>2018l </p><p>social compass </p><p><em>Article </em></p><p>Social Compass <br>2018, Vol. 65(1) 79–96 © The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: <a href="/goto?url=https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions" target="_blank">sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav </a></p><p>httpDs:O//dIo:i1.o0r.g1/1107.171/0770/30707376786681671774477550066 </p><p><a href="/goto?url=https://journals.sagepub.com/home/scp" target="_blank">journals.sagepub.com/home/scp </a></p><p><strong>Restoring religion through collective memory: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices after the Cultural Revolution </strong></p><p><strong>Ke-hsien HUANG </strong></p><p>National Taiwan University, Taiwan </p><p><strong>Abstract </strong></p><p>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. </p><p><strong>Keywords </strong></p><p>Christianity in China, collective memory, mnemonic practices, Pentecostalism, True Jesus Church </p><p><strong>Corresponding author: </strong></p><p>Ke-hsien Huang, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Taipei, 10617, Taiwan. <a href="mailto:[email protected]" target="_blank">Email: [email protected] </a></p><p>80 </p><p><em>Social Compass 65(1) </em></p><p><strong>Résumé </strong></p><p>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. </p><p><strong>Mots-clés </strong></p><p>christianisme chinois, mémoire collective, pentecôtisme, pratiques mnémoniques, Véritable Jésus Église </p><p>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 </p><p><em>Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices </em></p><p>81 </p><p>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. </p><p><strong>How Chinese Christian revivals happened </strong></p><p>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). <br>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). <br>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. </p><p><strong>Studying religious collective memory </strong></p><p>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, </p><p>82 </p><p><em>Social Compass 65(1) </em></p><p>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. </p><p><em>Beyond the Durkheimian legacy: Actors engaging in mnemonic practices </em></p><p>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 </p><p><em>Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices </em></p><p>83 </p><p>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, <em>Imagined Communities</em>, 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. <br>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. </p><p><em>Fighting Pentecostal schism through collective memory </em></p><p>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 </p><p>84 </p><p><em>Social Compass 65(1) </em></p><p>mystics’ ‘rediscovery’ of the sacred past, and turn it into ‘successive additions to this tradition’, (Halbwachs, 1992: 112) which dogmatists proceed to guard. <br>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. </p><p><strong>Method </strong></p><p>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. <br>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 </p><p><em>Huang: How Chinese Pentecostals engage in mnemonic practices </em></p><p>85 </p><p>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. </p><p><strong>True Jesus Church and its past remembered </strong></p><p>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 Beijing 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 baptism in running water). The members claimed exclusivist salvation, zealously engaging in the task of converting other Christian groups. The abundance of Pentecostal practices characterize the group the most: faith healing, exorcism, receiving prophetic messages in dreams or prayers, prophesizing, speaking in tongues, 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. </p><p><em>Paul and Isaac Wei: The sacred father–son duo </em></p><p>In the TJC believers’ memories, the establishment and later development of the TJC has been closely related to the efforts of a highly venerated <em>father–son duo</em>. While the father </p><p>was the <em>founding mystic </em>of the TJC, his son <em>institutionalized charisma </em>as he endeavored </p><p>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, imperialismtainted, 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. <br>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 </p><p>86 </p><p><em>Social Compass 65(1) </em></p><p>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 Spiritguided 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 <em>The Prevailing Way </em>(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’. </p>