One of the last great efforts at state-sponsored atheism is a failure.
And not just any kind of failure. China has enforced its anti-religion policy through decades of repression, coercion and persecution, but the lack of success is spectacular, according to a major new study.
No more than 15 percent of adults in the world's most populous country are "real atheists." 85 percent of the Chinese either hold some religious beliefs or practice some kind of religion, according to the Chinese Spiritual Life Survey.
Members of the Chinese Communist Party and Youth League are required to be atheists, yet 17 percent of them self-identified with a religion and 65 percent indicated they had engaged in religious practices in the last year, reported sociologist Fenggang Yang of Purdue University, a lead researcher in the project.
The notion of China as a secular nation with little or no religion is "silly," said sociologist Rodney Stark of Baylor University, another principal investigator.
"It's a pretty religious bunch of folks if you follow what they're doing," he said.
Buddhist, Christian Growth
In a nation with few sources of independent data on religion, the spiritual life survey represents one of the best pictures to date of the Chinese religious landscape. The 2007 survey involved a random national sample of 7,021 people ages 16 and older in 56 locales throughout mainland China.
The results find a middle ground between the official government figure of 100 million religious believers and extreme projections of growth that estimate the number of Christians has become as high as 130 million.
Among the findings:
• Buddhism is the largest religion in China, with about 18 percent, or 185 million people, self-identifying as Buddhists. Another 31 percent of respondents reported having at least one Buddhist belief or participating in at least one Buddhist practice. More than 12 percent of Chinese Communist Party members self-identified as Buddhists.
• About 3.2 percent of the population, or 33 million adults, self-identified as Christians. Again, however, an additional 40 million people said they believed in the existence of Jesus Christ or participated in Christian activities.
• Among popular religious practices, the results indicate up to 754 million people practice ancestor worship, including attending and maintaining ancestral temples, venerating ancestor tablets at home or visiting graves to honor ancestral spirits. About 145 million people observed fengshui restrictions or consulted a fengshui master in the past year.
The actual numbers may be even higher. Religious affiliation still can have consequences in China, from loss of jobs to prison, so researchers note that participants may be reluctant even in an anonymous survey to identify with religion. That is a particular concern with faiths such as Christianity that have been special objects of attack by authorities.
Using one model testing that theory, researchers found a closer ballpark estimate of Chinese Christians may be in "the low 60 millions," Stark said.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
So far, the Chinese government has not made a major effort to push back against the religious growth, observers said.
The official atheism policy remains unchanged. From kindergarten to college, the Chinese people are subjected to "atheistic indoctrination" in both curricular and extracurricular activities, Yang said. And there are still prominent instances of repression. Believers, particularly those from banned religions, can find themselves under house arrest or in labor camps.
Yet signs of religious growth are evident from college campuses to city streets. Some "house churches" have 3,000 to 4,000 members.
"For the most part, it's kind of a little bit like, don't ask, don't tell," Stark said.
Yang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue, said many government officials "are in a state of denial. They still insist there are only about 100 million religious believers."
Other officials, he said, are not sure what to do. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, following 13 years of brutal measures taken to eliminate religion, some officials came to a realization "religion can't be stopped," Yang said.
Also mediating against further restrictions on religion is a lack of public support. There are few social pressures against faith, Yang said. In the spiritual life survey, less than a quarter of respondents agreed with the statement that "Christianity is a Western religion, hence it is not suitable for Chinese people."
In addition, political and economic changes allowing greater freedom also have created "sufficient social space" for the practice of religion, Yang said.
The Chinese government appears to have few options left to halt the growth of religion.
"This is a trend that is hard to stop," Yang said. "In fact, it is almost impossible to stop."
David Briggs writes the Ahead of the Trend column for the Association of Religion Data Archives.
Follow David Briggs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ReligionData
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"Godless Communism" was a catchphrase to scare people into believing atheists are the evil in the world. I know, I'll probably get flack for saying that, but it's the truth. If anything, the Communists were of the "Stateist" religion, substituting state and government power for any other power. It was during the "Cold War" that "In God We Trust" got put on our bills and "under God" got shoved into the Pledge of Allegiance. Our motto used to be "E Pluribus Unum".
For those who didn't know this, look it up. Those addenda were put in arbitrarily, to "differentiate" us from those "Damned atheist Commies", where atheism wasn't what Communism was about, in the first place
"This is a trend that is hard to stop," Yang said. "In fact, it is almost impossible to stop."
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So contraception is on track to become a sin in China?
OMFG! I hope they have a plan to import resources from another planet.
The great socialist dictatorships were their own religion, they stripped people of the basic right of having no religion. They made their system so important that it couldn't stand any other competition, hence the official adoption of atheism as a pretext to abolish any other form of political philosophy.
This is the first sentence of the definition for the word 'Atheism' from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a peer-reviewed, constantly updated and maintained wiki that only allows experts in the field to submit revisions.
I'm perfectly happy to let atheism win on its "natural" merits - of which it has very many - over religion. I wish more people were atheist, but force is not the means of choice to produce sweeping results. Only a continual unraveling of the human need for discovery will do that.
Atheism is an absence of theistic belief. There isn't any doctrine, nor could there be one under the definition, as far as an individual's lack of theistic belief is concerned. And that's all atheism is.
But the more egregious mischaracterization is that Communist doctrines have a great deal in common with pure atheism, when in fact Communist Doctrines are virtually identical psychological blueprints with doctrinaire religions like Christianity itself. This is brilliantly discussed in the famous book: "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. Communist Doctrine replaces the Godhead with the charismatic leader: Lenin, Kim Il-sung, Mao, and others -- and elevates them, particularly after their deaths, to Savior-staus State Deities complete with supernatural powers. So, in Communist doctrine, there IS a "God" in the apotheosisation of their departed Leaders. You can easily search on YouTube and watch the North Koreans, Chinese and Stalin-era Russians going through exactly the same sort of rituals and religious frenzy you see everyday in Christian churches.
So, not only do I think the term "Atheist Doctrine" is a deliberate and calculated attempt at an affront, I think it's clear that people who really know their salt recognize this as the uninformed aspersion it is.
keep on dreaming
But caution: we're not talking about science, philosophy, logic or any other topic. We're talking about the human state of having no theistic belief. Those other areas might involve "doctrines" if any individuals use certain materials as such, but that isn't a reflection of anyone's absence of theistic belief, and this is the game that the theists try to play. Now, show us an "Atheist Doctrine."
The article claims that state-sponsored atheism is a failure. We can also say that state-sponsored religion is a failure of astronomical proportions. That also wasn't mentioned.
atheists are an interesting bunch. look deep atheists are made not born.
china tried with its political agenda. in america religion does the best job of creating atheists.
There's a huge difference between 18% as the most dominant religion, and what we have: an obnoxious oppressive majority religion that tries to force everyone to believe what they believe with lies, shame and threats of imaginary eternal damnation.
I don't think Dawkins, Hitchens and their fellow travellers have an adequate answer to that question.
As I understand it, they say it's because of a glitch in our wiring that creating some sort of hallucinogenic desire and imagination - or it's because we are conscious of, and thus fear, our own extinction.
These seem to be inadequate explanations to me.
So - if there is no such thing as transcendental reality, can anyone explain why people seem to continue to gravitate towards embracing such a thing, even in the face of state sponsored hostility?
And for those who say/think Buddhism is not a transcendental religion, you're just ignorant of the facts. The largest group of Buddhists in the world - and particularly in China - are Pure Land Buddhists who believe in transcendental Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and a transcendental Pure Land, too.
So who has a cogent explanation for this phenomenon, not based in snark?
if you're interested in the question of atheism vs consciousness, there is a great new book called "Punk Science" http://www.amazon.com/Punk-Science-Inside-Mind-God/dp/1905047932 where a physicist talks about the disconnect between the understanding of consciousness and atheism. personally, i feel the atheist materialism in china was always destined to be unsustainable, because of the rich and diverse traditions in chinese thought (particularly in song and tang). If one examines the intersection of dharmic tradition, daoic philosophy (as well as magic, folk practice), and manicheanism it becomes very interesting. taoism itself is arguably a form of chinese "shamanism" (i am well aware of loaded anthropological implication) that was later codified and logicised. this is very interesting as taoism was borrowed in order to describe the metaphysics of esoteric and zen buddhism. chinese cinema (including hong kong) shows at the minimum a concern with dharmic and taoic events well up until the 1990s. obviously chinese literature well up until the modern period show a direct link to the influences of this thought on chinese culture.
atheism (unless buffered by steadfast secular humanism) can and does become a nihlism of sorts.
nihlism implicitly rejects the experiences of consciousness which is a valid part of human existence.
BTW, I really think that using the word "atheism" is a red herring for any ongoing discussion. Certainly Buddhism and Taoism are not god-based systems of thought. However they both posit and discuss transcendental reality.
Folks are often mis-labelled "atheists", when what their really are is militant, or strict, materialists. They assert that the only reality is physical reality - which is observable by our senses or our scientific instruments. Their watchword is empiricism.
Now there's nothing wrong with that per se. It doesn't make such people lesser creatures, morally speaking. And really, there's no rascal like a religious rascal.
But if, in fact, we do live in a transcendental universe, one that has both material and immaterial components, then the militant materialists are simply wrong in their views.
The persistence of the transcendental perspective in a society that does everything it can to wean people from it, points towards the real possibility that the materialists might well be wrong in their a priori assumption.
Further, their insistence that a mystic or transcendentalist "prove" his position empirically is meaningless - because the tools of empiricism and materialism (science) aren't really useful in the non-material sphere, if such a sphere exists.
The jury is definitely out on this one.
We are alive, we believe, because we think and perceive an amazing complex reality. However, with our limited human capacity whichever way we try to grasp it, the experience of life is astounding and can lead us to madness, despair, but also awe and wonder.
However, science allows us to explore the reality around us and to incrementally improve our understanding of it. Religion presumes to know it all already. Religion works the wrong way around - from a pre-conceived conclusion towards the questions - rather than science which goes the other way.
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Well, that's not an answer. But it is a reasonably humble (and socratic) admission that we don't know the answer at this point in time.
This is why I think that the vehemence of the militant materialists (Dawkins, Hitchens, etc) is just as much a "religious" position as that of the cleric. There's really no basis for the vehemence, is there?
What you are saying is that the tools of science are better tools for investigating the question than the tools of the mystic. I see no justification for that position either. Scientific methods are useful for investigating the material part of the universe. If there is actually another immaterial part, as transcendentalists of all types assert, those scientific tools don't seem to be well fitted to the task.
Of course, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But Buddhism and atheism is not incompatible. Many Buddhists are atheists.
Atheism is not a doctrine, it is a lack of belief - specifically a lack of belief in a deity. Any "atheist indoctrination" one could conceive is simply dispelling myths perpetuated by other religions, namely creator or heavenly father myths.
Buddhism doesn't involve the belief in a god and is quite compatible with atheism. Stating that 18% of the country is Buddhist means that 33% of the country could very well be atheist. This is only interesting considering China's "atheist indoctrination" is really "anti-religion indoctrination" which means the Chinese techniques are failing. (although it is worth noting we're all born atheist and indoctrinated into religion - it doesn't work the other way around)
Ancestor worship doesn't involve a belief in a deity and therefore doesn't constitute theism. Not to mention it is often a part of Buddhism and often more of a tradition than a religion.
Perhaps the headline should read "the rising ripple of 3.2% Christianity in China is splashing against the wall of atheism".
In the article, Briggs' joins the likes of Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Fox News, the 700 Club and others who trumpeted the "130 million Chinese Christians" claim in the lead up to the 2008 Bejing Olympics and beyond, hoping to illuminate Evangelical aspirations in the light of the summer games. The number, perhaps representing a 'missionary milestone' for Evangelicals, is anecdotal, uncorroborated and referenced nowhere in the data of respectable surveys.
Other surveys, similar in scope and design to the Pew-funded CSLS, report similar empirical polling numbers for self-identifying Christians in China. One such study leader, a protege of Billy Graham, was taken aback at the frosty reception he received from American Evangelicals when his announcement declined to swell projections beyond the 'hard' polling data :
http://www.assistnews.net/STORIES/2007/s07100011.htm