Here's a New York Times article that was most likely penned by a reporter
who accepts the tales told by deluded and/or lying missionaries as being
accurate.
One cannot help but detect a persistent puffery in every figure included.
Not only are substantiatable figures mentioned but also grandiose and
[unevidenced] estimates are mentioned (though carefully disclaimed to
avoid embarrassment should reliable figures disagree) one cannot help but
suspect that this is the work of missionaries who almost universally
overestimate their impact on the world.
Missionaries are by definition folks on a head trip with delusions of
grandeur. Remember, they imagine themselves to be god's appointed agents
and are in the grips of debilitating mental illness. Mentally healthy
people do not imagine ridiculously grandiose and imaginary "missions
in life" and one can expect head tripping missionaries to overstate
and over-imaginative their successes in keeping with the delusions of
grandeur that permeate their lives.
One also must wonder how many of the so-called Christians are merely
political rebels against the Communist government who know that western
Christian missionaries are quite naive and are a source of manpower and
funding to be exploited. In Poland -- before the downfall of the Communist
government during the "Solidarity" era -- Catholic Church membership
skyrocketed but with the overthrow of the old oppressive government and the
return of day-to-day life it dropped back off to pre-overthrow levels or
lower.
One can therefore conclude that Church attendance had little to do with
religious conviction but filled the need for human companionship and
comfort during difficult times. One cannot help but wonder if this is
not also the case in China.
One also must wonder to what extent these organizations are infiltrated
by anti-chinese intelligence organizations who feel quite free to use
missionary movements as cover. While the Red Chinese government is hardly
to be supported, it is no surprise if they protect themselves from spies
and foreign operatives as does every nation on earth.
Another thing fueling the Christian movement would be the universal appeal
of "forbidden fruit." No doubt the government makes a mistake by
suppressing the churches because this simply gives them an unjustified
aura of importance. Showcasing them would do more to destroy them than
anything else. Madness does not look good in the light of day but it is
sometimes attractive in the darkness of clandestine cellars.
Sincerely,
China's Churches: Glad, and Bitter, Tidings
NANJING -- New Bibles stream forth from a computerized printing press in
this onetime southern capital at a rate of two and a half million a year, for
sale to Christians all over China.
Since opening in 1988, the publishing company, a joint venture of the
Government-approved Protestant Church and a global charity, United Bible
Societies, has shipped out 18 million inexpensive Bibles, an astonishing turn
in a country that only a few decades ago tried to stamp out religion for good.
The Bibles are quickly bought and eagerly used. In downtown Nanjing on any
Sunday morning at St. Paul's Church, one of the city's seven legal Protestant
churches, the pews overflow with more than 1,000 worshipers at each of two
services, while hundreds more watch from another building on closed-circuit
television.
With hymns, a sermon and closing recitation of the Lord's Prayer, the
services here and at thousands of other churches around the country have the
rhythms of mainstream Protestant services anywhere. Like many urban churches,
this one has a preponderance of older women, some of whom were Christian
before the Communist takeover in 1949, but around the country many men and
women, young and old, are embracing Jesus Christ.
Such open, joyous displays of worship were unusual in the 1950's, as the
Communists reshaped China, and unthinkable during Mao's Cultural Revolution of
1966-1976, when churches were burned and those Christians who were not jailed
could only hold clandestine prayer meetings, and dared not own a Bible.
Yet even as Bibles flow and churchgoers worship, at least scores of
Protestant and Catholic leaders are held in in labor camps or jails for
refusing to bow to Government control. While the confirmed number of
imprisoned Christians appears to be lower than is often asserted abroad, their
travails are a telling sign that religion here is not truly free.
Just last month, security agents reportedly razed an unapproved Catholic
church in Fujian, while in Hebei, to the north, they arrested a pro-Vatican
bishop who was too energetically promoting his faith. Last fall, the leader of
a fervent born-again sect known as the Weepers was sentenced to a three-year
term for disturbing public order.
Millions of other Christians who reject the official church must practice
their faith with a wary eye, and even those who embrace the Government cannot
publicly proclaim or spread their faith as they might wish to.
The charge of religious persecution -- of Christians and also Tibetan
Buddhists and some Muslim groups -- has emerged as perhaps the most potent
human rights issue in Chinese-American relations, one President Clinton cannot
avoid as he prepares to visit Beijing. Clinton is under pressure in Congress
to raise the issue. In March, as the House passed a human-rights resolution,
Representative Chris Smith, Republican of New Jersey, declared that Beijing's
tight control over religion "is totally unacceptable and ought to be
condemned."
Critics in the West point to the restrictions and repression as evidence of
systematic persecution, while the Government's defenders here point, instead,
to the relative freedom most Christians now enjoy.
Paradoxically, the rising outcry abroad comes as Christianity in China,
especially evangelical Protestantism, is growing explosively. The Rev. Don
Argue, recent president of the National Association of Evangelicals in the
United States, says China may be experiencing "the single greatest Revival in
the history of Christianity."
Much of that growth has occurred with official acquiescence, and though
they remain a small minority in a giant country, millions of Chinese people
like Zhang Linmei, a 32-year-old worshiper at St. Paul's, find the same
comfort in religion that Christians do anywhere, without worrying much about
politics.
"I feel life is meaningless in society at large," Zhang said after services
as she picked up her 5-year-old daughter, dressed in her finest, from Sunday
school.
"This is the only reliable place in my life," Zhang added.
"The situation for religion is in many ways the best it's been since 1949,"
said Richard Madsen, an expert on Chinese religion at the University of
California at San Diego. Though the Government still controls their growth and
closely monitors their activities, he said, the official churches enjoy more
autonomy Wednesday than in the past.
Even the illegal churches -- unregistered Protestant churches and openly
pro-Vatican Catholic groups -- function without serious trouble in many
places, Dr. Madsen and others say. But those who refuse to pledge support to
the Government and its apparatus of religious control, and those with
unorthodox or ecstatic styles of worship, can face harsh repression. The
situation is similar for other major religions here, including Buddhists and
Muslims. Many believers now enjoy relative freedom, but Tibetan Buddhists who
consider the Dalai Lama their leader face repression.
The History: After Repression, A Major Revival
In 1949, there were fewer than one million Protestants here. In 1979, three
years after the end of the Cultural Revolution when Maoist mobs attacked
churches and the homes of believers, only three Protestant churches were open
in all of China. Estimates of the number of Christians in China's population
of 1.2 billion range from about 15 million to 35 million, or some believe,
many more. Chinese church officials say there are 12 million Protestants, and
outside experts like Dr. Madsen say the actual number may be at least 20
million and rising. More than 12,000 official Protestant churches are open
and, again by official estimates, Christians without access to churches or
professional pastors meet in some 25,000 homes or other meeting points. These
estimates ignore groups that the Government regards as criminal, and are
believed to understate the total greatly.
The legions of Protestants include new converts like Xu Wenju, a 74-year-
old widow in Beijing who first attended a large official church in 1995 at the
urging of a neighbor and, she says, found spiritual sustenance. She was soon
baptized and now says that she feels healthier, and that her family has become
more harmonious.
It includes those born into Christian families like Dr. Wu, a 75-year-old
retired physician in Beijing who read the Bible at age 6 and has wanted to
spread the Gospel ever since.
Chafing at the controls of the official church, he was jailed for over a
year in the 1950's, he said, and he still prefers a house church, as the
illegal gatherings are known.
In 1992 the police came to his house and took his religious books and
tapes, said Dr. Wu, who declined to give his full name. But they left him his
personal Bible, telling him, "You can believe but you cannot preach."
It includes a 30-year-old economics student in Beijing, Li, who said a
friend had introduced the Gospel to her. She, too, attends a small house
church, not for political reasons but because, she said, "I think there is
more a feeling of love, and more opportunity for fellowship."
Officials say Catholics now number four million, while outside researchers
say the true total may be closer to 10 million, with many secretly accepting
the Pope as the true head of their church.
The peculiar hybrid state of Christianity here reflects the general
obsession of the Communist Party with control: virtually any organization,
whether political or social or religious, must gain party approval.
The party is an officially atheist organization that asserts that religion
will eventually wither away. But in a policy spelled out in the early 1980's,
the Government officially guarantees freedom of religion -- within prescribed
boundaries including a required allegiance to the state, adherence to certain
styles of worship and limits on church construction, evangelizing and the
baptism of children, among other rules.
For those willing to accommodate, the 1990's seem a golden time.
"From our perspective, now is the best period ever for implementing the
policy of religious freedom," said Han Wenzao, who as president of the China
Christian Council is the national leader of the official Protestant church and
a prime link to the Communist Government. "The criterion should be, is the
word of God being propagated or not? It is and it's good."
Han, who is 75 and has his office in the Jinling Union Seminary of Nanjing,
says he became a devout Christian at a missionary college though he was never
ordained. He helped create the official, "patriotic" Protestant church here
during the period after the Communist takeover in 1949, when, he says, it was
politically necessary to repudiate the "imperialist" sponsorship of foreign
missionaries. The willing believers joined in a generic, nondenominational
church.
Han and other official leaders are bitterly denounced as sell-outs and
"fake Christians" by some who reject the notion of saluting an atheistic
state, and who often suffered terribly for refusing to cooperate.
Yuan Xiangchen, also known as Allen Yuan, 84, is one of the best-known
leaders of the house church movement. He simply says: "The head of the church
is not any agency or person. The head of the Church is Christ."
"The official church is led by the Communists," he added. "That's why we
worship at home."
Yuan, like many of the more defiant figures here, spent more than 20 years
in jail for his beliefs, and in recent years has faced on-and-off curbs on his
travel and work. At present, he is allowed to preach to up to several dozen
followers in a dingy room, with a picture of the Rev. Billy Graham tacked on
the wall, in an alleyway in the center of Beijing -- one of dozens such
illegal gatherings that Beijing authorities suffer to exist, under a tight
watch.
In an interview last month, Yuan said he was forbidden to collect money
from worshipers, and he added that controls were often more stringent on house
churches in rural areas. More recently, security officials have warned him not
to speak to reporters.
The Politics: Beijing Accommodates To a Rising Tide
While for those in prison the situation is all too stark, the religious
picture in China Wednesday is often painted in shades of gray.
The printing press outside Nanjing can produce millions of Bibles, for
example, a clear boon to the church. But the press, the Nanjing Amity Printing
Company, must reach agreement each year with the Government's Religious
Affairs Bureau over how many Bibles it can actually print -- well below its
capacity -- and the books can only be sold in churches, not in bookstores.
Yet officials have also allowed the press to supply more than 1.2 million
Bibles, through an American missionary group led by Ned Graham, a son of Billy
Graham, to unapproved house churches.
In the 1980's, as religious activity began to recover here, outside
evangelical groups had begun smuggling many Bibles into the country in
suitcases. One of the major smugglers was Doug Sutphen.
Then, Sutphen's East Gates Ministries, from the Seattle area, negotiated a
deal in which it bought Nanjing Bibles to distribute outside official
channels. He later handed over the organization to Ned Graham.
"I see no need for smuggling any more," said Sutphen, who now dreams of
some day arranging -- legally -- for a Christian television station in China.
Graham has not responded to requests for an interview.
To illustrate another gray area: officially, evangelizing is forbidden in
China. The definition has become blurred, though, as officials struggle to co-
opt rapidly spreading Protestantism, especially in rural areas.
During a surprise visit several weeks ago to the Saint James Protestant
Church in Yichang, a city on the Yangtze River in Hubei, the pastor, the Rev.
Zhu Zhigao, said that tens of thousands of people in the surrounding mountains
had become Christian through person-to-person contact or under the influence
of Hong Kong radio programs.
So his church has brought in groups of rural Christian leaders, two groups
of 40 each in the last year, for two-month training sessions, to serve as lay
ministers in their villages. Among other things, he shows them imported
videotapes about Christianity. And he distributes Bibles from the Nanjing
press.
One of the Government's greatest fears is the breakaway emergence of an
unorthodox sect that might seriously challenge public order -- at the extreme,
something like the Taiping Rebellion of the mid-1800's, which began with a
charismatic Christian sect leader, and eventually conquered half of China,
with Nanjing as its capital.
From the Government's perspective, then, giving mainstream, if limited,
theological training to leaders of a budding rural church is preferable to
letting them forge their own paths, possibly into what the Government
considers illegal cults.
"I feel very free to spread the Gospel," said Zhu, who also
serves on local Governmental bodies.
The Catholics have a seemingly clear litmus test: do they accept the
leadership of the National Patriotic Catholic Movement and its selection of
bishops, or do they, like Catholics in other countries, reserve those roles
for the Pope? Some of the most pro-Vatican bishops and priests are persecuted
or jailed. Yet there are many permutations.
Many priests in the official church say they remain privately loyal to the
Vatican. The Vatican, for its part, says that while many newer priests and
bishops are not legally ordained, they are true Catholics with the spiritual
power to celebrate Mass and perform other sacred duties -- "valid but not
licit" is the tortured phrase used by the Vatican to describe their status.The
Vatican has even granted secret approval to some official church leaders, Dr.
Madsen says.
For many years, to help meet the acute shortage of theology teachers, China
has allowed groups of Vatican-ordained priests, from Hong Kong, Taiwan and
elsewhere, to teach in official seminaries in China, according to church
officials in Hong Kong. Groups of official Chinese priests have also studied
in the Vatican-run seminary in Hong Kong.
The Repression: Jail Still Awaits The Defiant
And still the repression of some Christians continues, to different degrees
among the country's far-flung regions.
The number of people in jails or labor camps for their religious activity
is a matter of dispute, but loose assertions abroad that thousands are in
prison appear to be exaggerated.
Two major human rights groups, Amnesty International, based in London, and
Human Rights Watch, in New York, both say -- while admitting to deep
uncertainties -- that they find solid evidence only that scores of people are
now in some form of long-term detention for their Christian activities:
several dozen Catholic leaders, and a similar number of Protestants, are
thought to be held.
Imprisonment is increasingly reserved for major organizers and leaders,
while brief detentions and fines have been the more common penalty levied
against illegal Christian groups, said Arlette Laduguie of Amnesty
International. But she warned that information even on some recent large-scale
crackdowns, like the arrests of hundreds of Roman Catholics last year in
Jiangxi Province as part of a campaign against a powerful illegal movement,
may not emerge for many months.
Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom in Washington and
one of the sharpest American critics of China, said that on the basis of
various field reports her group believes that at least 500 Christian leaders
are serving sentences, while at least another 500 followers are detained at
any given time, justifying her published statements that thousands are under
arrest.
Conflict and arrests may have intensified in the mid-1990's as the
Government, faced with an explosive spread of Christian groups and a shortage
of reliable pastors, made a strong new push to require all religious groups to
register with authorities. Those refusing have often been hounded.
While the registration drive is notorious among the house churches and
their international supporters, it is actually good for Christianity, asserted
Han, the official Protestant leader.
"When you register, your legal status is protected," Han said. "That's
something we wanted," he said -- to provide a defense against the lawless
persecution seen in the past. The argument is rejected by those who just wish
to be left alone.
Han admitted that local officials sometimes improperly harass the church,
and said he had on several occasions called on national authorities to rectify
a local problem.
"At the grass-roots or country level, there are still some people who
cannot understand the central Government's policy of religious freedom," he
said. He adds that local officials sometimes have trouble distinguishing
cults, which are banned, from genuine Christian groups.
On that question, the definition of a cult, opinions differ. Han's
sympathies do not extend to the likes of Xu Yongze, the Weepers leader
recently sentenced to three years.
Xu's followers are said to cry, sometimes for days, until they find a
vision. Han said Xu's views were heresy, caused mental disorders and
disturbances to neighbors, and were a violation of the law.
The very drive for conformity is part of the problem, rights advocates say.
In its effort to define acceptable beliefs and limit how religion can be
publicly expressed, China violates international standards of religious
freedom as laid out in international charters and resolutions.
"The right to believe what you want and the right to publicly manifest that
belief when and where and with whom you want is what's at stake," said Mickey
Siegal, a Human Rights Watch researcher in New York.
Another problem altogether is discrimination even against legal Christians,
who usually cannot hold senior positions in Government or the vast state-run
economy. This reflects a more fundamental trait of China: high office is still
almost entirely reserved for members of the Communist Party -- who are not
supposed to adopt Christianity or any other religion.
The Contrast: Evangelical Fire, Official Moderation
Recent Sunday services at St. Paul's Church in Nanjing exemplified the
moderate, hybrid style of Protestantism that is promoted by Government
agencies. In what could have been a scene at an American Presbyterian or
Lutheran church, the members shared prayers and the Apostle's Creed, and they
sang hymns with the robed choir. The recited verses from Acts and Psalms, and
watched as six men from an ethnic minority group in Yunan, here on an
exchange, sang a hymn in thanks for the hospitality.
They listened to a pleasant 20-minute sermon by the middle-aged Pastor Lin
De'en, telling the story of a man who on his deathbed finally appreciated the
Christianity of his wife and son, and concluding with an ode to the value of
personal worship: it will help you become modest, honest, patient and love one
another.
Some of the house churches, in contrast, have the fiery spirit and orations
of a revival meeting, the passion fed by a shared sense of persecution. Some
also have links with foreign evangelists who slip into China, in unknown
numbers, to exhort their brethren, sometimes with just the kinds of messages
the Government most abhors.
At a recent house church service in a central Chinese city that, to protect
the preacher, cannot be identified, two such missionaries, an Asian woman and
a European man, showed up unannounced and were given the podium.
"The early Christians were persecuted too," the Asian said. "We all must go
out and spread the word!"
"We must take the word of Jesus to Tibet and Xinjiang," she said, referring
to the mainly Buddhist and Muslim border regions.
The European man took over. "They burn down a church every week, but the
church is not made of wood," he said. "Let us go out and plant one million
house churches," he said to the crowd of perhaps 50. "It will turn China
upside down! God give us China or we die!"
The Chinese pastor took over, his air a bit more moderate. "It's true, we
should all go out and start new house churches," he said. But he added, "If
you go to the official church, then don't come here."
Wednesday, June 17, 1998
Return to The Skeptic Tank's main Index page.
Caroline
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Copyright
1998 The New York Times
The views and opinions stated within this web page are those of the
author or authors which wrote them and may not reflect the views and
opinions of the ISP or account user which hosts the web page.