Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report
by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200
million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by
mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history. [1] If you read a
single news article about China this year, make sure it is this one.
I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and
that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric
religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what
Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past
200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the
world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the
western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with
immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East.
China, devoured by hunger so many times in its history, now feels a spiritual
hunger beneath the neon exterior of its suddenly great cities. Four hundred
million Chinese on the prosperous coast have moved from poverty to affluence in
a single generation, and 10 million to 15 million new migrants come from the
countryside each year, the greatest movement of people in history. Despite a
government stance that hovers somewhere between discouragement and persecution,
more than 100 million of them have embraced a faith that regards this life as
mere preparation for the next world. Given the immense effort the Chinese have
devoted to achieving a tolerable life in the present world, this may seem
anomalous. On the contrary: it is the great migration of peoples that prepares
the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of
Europe during the Middle Ages.
Last month's murder of reverend Bae Hyung-kyu, the leader of the missionaries
still held hostage by Taliban kidnappers in Afghanistan, drew world attention
to the work of South Korean Christians, who make up nearly 30% of that nation's
population and send more evangelists to the world than any country except the
United States. This is only a first tremor of the earthquake to come, as
Chinese Christians turn their attention outward. Years ago I speculated that if
Mecca ever is razed, it will be by an African army marching north; now the
greatest danger to Islam is the prospect of a Chinese army marching west.
People do not live in a spiritual vacuum; where a spiritual vacuum exists, as
in western Europe and the former Soviet Empire, people simply die, or fail to
breed. In the traditional world, people see themselves as part of nature,
unchangeable and constant, and worship their surroundings, their ancestors and
themselves. When war or economics tear people away from their roots in
traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral.
Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling
individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which
transcends race and nation. In China, communism leveled traditional society,
and erased the great Confucian idea of society as an extension of the loyalties
and responsibility of families. Children informing on their parents during the
Cultural Revolution put paid to that.
Now the great migrations throw into the urban melting pot a half-dozen language
groups who once lived isolated from one another. Not for more than a thousand
years have so many people in the same place had such good reason to view as
ephemeral all that they long considered to be fixed, and to ask themselves:
"What is the purpose of my life?"
The World Christian Database offers by far the largest estimate of the number
of Chinese Christians at 111 million, of whom 90% are Protestant, mostly
Pentecostals. Other estimates are considerably lower, but no matter; what
counts is the growth rate. This uniquely American denomination, which claims
the inspiration to speak in tongues like Jesus' own disciples and to prophesy,
is the world's fastest-growing religious movement. In contrast to Catholicism,
which has a very long historic presence in China but whose growth has been
slow, charismatic Protestantism has found its natural element in an atmosphere
of official suppression. Barred from churches, Chinese began worshipping in
homes, and five major "house church" movements and countless smaller ones now
minister to as many as 100 million Christians. [2] This quasi-underground
movement may now exceed in adherents the 75 million members of the Chinese
Communist Party; in a generation it will be the most powerful force in the
country.
While the Catholic Church has worked patiently for independence from the
Chinese government, which sponsors a "Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association"
with government-appointed bishops, the evangelicals have no infrastructure to
suppress and no hierarchy to protect. In contrast to Catholic caution, John
Allen observes, "Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less
frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform
before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs."
Allen adds:
The most audacious even dream of carrying the gospel beyond
the borders of China, along the old Silk Road into the Muslim world, in a
campaign known as "Back to Jerusalem". As [Time correspondent David] Aikman
explains in Jesus in Beijing, some Chinese evangelicals and Pentecostals
believe that the basic movement of the gospel for the last 2,000 years has been
westward: from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to Europe, from Europe to
America, and from America to China. Now, they believe, it's their turn to
complete the loop by carrying the gospel to Muslim lands, eventually arriving
in Jerusalem. Once that happens, they believe, the gospel will have been
preached to the entire world.
Aikman reports that two
Protestant seminaries secretly are training missionaries for deployment in
Muslim countries.
Where traditional society remains entrenched in China's most backward regions,
Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China's western
border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If
Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, I have argued in the
past, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial
expansion. But Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers,
whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on
the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class
in China's cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated.
Islam has a thousand-year presence in China and has grown by natural increase
rather than conversion; evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in
China a generation ago.
China's Protestants evangelized at the risk of liberty and sometimes life, and
possess a sort of fervor not seen in Christian ranks for centuries. Their
pastors have been beaten and jailed, and they have had to create their own
institutions through the "house church" movement. Two years ago I warned that
China would have to wait for democracy. [3] I wrote:
For a people to
govern itself, it first must want to govern itself and want to do so with a
passion. It also must know how to do so. Democracy requires an act of faith, or
rather a whole set of acts of faith. The individual citizen must believe that a
representative sitting far away in the capital will listen to his views, and
know how to band together with other citizens to make their views known. That
is why so-called civil society, the capillary network of associations that
manage the ordinary affairs of life, is so essential to democracy. Americans
elect their local school boards, create volunteer fire brigades and raise and
spend tax dollars at the local level to provide parks or sewers.
China's network of house churches may turn out to be the leaven of democracy,
like the radical Puritans of England who became the Congregationalists of New
England. Freedom of worship is the first precondition for democracy, for it
makes possible freedom of conscience. The fearless evangelists at the
grassroots of China will, in the fullness of time, do more to bring US-style
democracy to the world than all the nation-building bluster of President George
W Bush and his advisers.
Notes
1. The
uphill journey of Catholicism in China, August 2, 2007,
National Catholic Reporter.
2. See Luke Wesley, "Is the Chinese Church predominantly Pentecostal?" in
American Journal of Pentecostal Studies 7:2 (2004).
3. China
must wait for democracy, Asia Times Online, September 27,
2005.
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