Diverse efficacy and moral complexity: the religious revival in rural China

Abstract

Religion plays an active role in rural societies in China. Most research on the religious resurgence in China since the 1980s has focused on the restoration of temples and the resumption of rituals, how religious services and commodities were commercialized, and how local elites or religious specialists have fuelled the revival. This study focuses on the motivation of rural believers and aims to explore how they practice religion in their daily life. Within this local context, popular religion is defined as the set of religious practices embedded in rural life and contrasted with the Buddhist and Christian institutional forms of religious revival. During 11 months of fieldwork in a northern county, I observed people's religious practices in temples and churches. There was a distinction between people's informal practices and the institutions' formal teachings and rites. My findings suggest that religious revival first took place through the religious practices of daily-practical modality in order to meet people's need for immediate results in their everyday lives. At a later point religious revival followed the desire for institutional forms of discipline and knowledge. The revival thus exhibited tensions between these modalities of efficacy-based religiosity and the dharma-based religiosity centred on liturgical and scriptural modalities. Monks and pastors strove to carry forward the standardisation process through their insistence on liturgical and scriptural disciplines and to educate the congregation in the importance of attending sermons to acquire orthodox knowledge. This led to the rise of religious awareness of being distinctly Buddhist or Christian and to the formation of small yet intimate communities of mutual support based on those religions. This became the new appeal of institutional forms. It not only led believers to the path of dharma-based religiosity, but also highlighted the value of self-cultivation within an overt moral order. Rural people explored diverse religious forms that allowed the cultivation of morality and the moral self. This was in response to increasing social mobility and individualism as the rural village community fell apart. While believers sought efficacy from deities, they also received confirmation of particular moral codes confirmed by their experience of efficacy. This was based on their understanding that deities only bless the good. Buddhism and Christianity exploited this concern by enacting severe religious sanctions and disciplines to consolidate the higher moral standard set for believers. Within this diversity a gender division remained as women assumed spiritual responsibility on behalf of the family and men carried out obligations to ancestors. Women represented the majority of religious participants but instead of passive acceptance of "traditional" practices, they showed initiatives in selecting the modality they would adopt, doing volunteer work, studying orthodox knowledge and following ritual disciplines. Their freedom to choose among diverse religious activities and their willingness to devote themselves to a higher cause have brought transformations of rural religious lives. Because popular religion is embedded in rural life, doing popular religion is an everyday pattern of living. The easy access to a temple or church and the continued stigmatization of the rural backwardness of religious traditions generated popular drives to express this diversity of religious transformation. Even though the rural societies are undergoing a process of social mobility and urbanization, popular religion continues to be central to people's lives: it may simulate traditional approaches to deal with life's uncertainties, but it exists in new forms that pursue diverse expressions of religious identity and knowledge. Show more