China’s tightening hand on religion, and global theopolitics

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but you know the old saw ‘believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see’? It’s more necessary now than ever. I’m seeing a lot of online commentators and journalists, including Orthodox Christians, get snookered by a report about Chinese Christians being denied funerals which I can’t independently verify, except through an international lobbying and pressure group called CESNUR, which runs the magazine Bitter Winter. A bit more on this later.

There is, in fact, the substantive news from the People’s Republic which indeed should be concerning for all people of faith. The new set of regulations on religious groups which is now in effect in China requires all religious groups to proclaim their loyalty to the state; and it also provides for mechanisms whereby the state may choose to interfere in the selection and comportment of religious officials. The policies are more stringent than those which came before, but they are of the same tenor as policies which have been in place for years now. This should be especially concerning to Christians.

China’s politics are formally – if not substantively – Marxist. They have never been liberal. (In fact, even China’s most respected democrats have not been liberals, which is what endears them to me.) China conforms to a particular illiberal erastian, or cæsaropapist, direction in theopolitics. The Ming and Qing Dynasties also sought to exert governmental control over religious practice, and did so with varying degrees of success, centuries before Marx was born. The government considered these policies necessary considering that the single bloodiest civil war in human history, the Taiping Rebellion, was caused by a millenarian religious movement that opposed the government. This is the historical context in which the new religious regulations need to be considered. Considered, but not necessarily justified.

One of the consequences of the multipolar world we now live in, is that a plethora of illiberal options are presenting themselves to challenge and supplant a liberal international order that is rapidly losing what’s left of its legitimacy. One of these options is the China model.

Those of you who follow my blog will be well aware that I see several intriguing and encouraging trends happening within the ambit or at the margins of the China model, even if I remain ambivalent about the model itself. Things like postal savings banks; reforestation; traditional clothing; traditional pædagogy; slow food; food sovereignty; and the Confucian revival all suggest a reawakening of the third China even as it continues to be governed by the second.

At the same time, the reason why I continue to be ambivalent about the China model despite all these healthy green shoots, is precisely that it rests on a cæsaropapist preference for the relations between religion and the state. The Chinese state is unabashed and overt in its desire to control the appointments of bishops, lamas and imâms. Even if Chinese history points to reasons to sympathise with or better understand this desire for control, at the same time, state control of religion almost always leads to abuses. Even if the story about the state denying religious funerals to believers is false – which, considering the source, I strongly suspect it may be – there are still very good reasons to criticise Zhongnanhai’s new round of regulations on religious activity.

Regarding the source of the funerals story: CESNUR is a ‘non-profit’ run by Massimo Introvigne, a lawyer with ties to the Brazilian intégriste organisation Tradição, Família e Propriedade (or TFP) through its Italian affiliate Alleanza Cattolica. There’s little other way to describe CESNUR but as a kind of international ‘cult lobby’. They represent and advocate for fringe religious movements with bizarre and evil belief systems, which abuse their members and exert totalitarian control over their members’ lives: the Unification Church, the Scientologists, the Eastern Lightning Sect, The Solar Temple and Aum Shinrikyô. They routinely act as a legal defence and pressure group for these groups within Western democracies like France and Germany, and oppose the legal restrictions these governments place on clearly-harmful cults and hæretical groups.

There is a method to CESNUR’s madness, though. CESNUR seems to operate on a principle – if it can be called that – of maximal religious liberty over-against the state, even to the point where said maximal religious liberty infringes on the laws of the state or even commonsense moral laws necessary for a functioning society. Personally I have to wonder – given CESNUR’s links to TFP and other far-right Catholic groups – if the ultimate aim of CESNUR isn’t instead to actively undermine the legitimacy and the credibility of state institutions in sæcular countries. If they are indeed acting as agents of a reactionary intégriste Catholicism, they may using a tactic of ‘heightening the contradictions’ and stressing the limits of religious tolerance in sæcular states, in order to undermine confidence in the idea of sæcular government.

Because of course the reactionary intégriste Catholics are at ultimate odds with the People’s Republic, even though China is not a liberal state. As demonstrated above, it is Marxist-Leninist in form if not in ideology, and its goals are post-liberal: officially the People’s Republic of China is sæcular, but it clearly does have a religious policy which is cæsaropapist in content. The intégristes, who (claim to) desire a state which is subservient to the goals of the Church – a form of papocæsarism – will of course look on the cæsaropapists in Zhongnanhai as their penultimate rivals. It’s a return to the high-mediæval enmity of Henry IV and Gregory VII, or the subsequent rivalry between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

As I’ve said before, Orthodox Christians need to watch these contests between religion and state carefully. However, we shouldn’t be overly-eager to fall on one side or the other. Obviously I can’t give full blessing to the tightening regulation of religion by the Chinese government. But we do live in societies with laws. Neither should we lightly take the side, in the name of ‘religious liberty’, of sectarians, hæretics and radical raskolniki who promote strange and evil doctrines, and abuse women and children to suit their delusional, lascivious and power-hungry ends. Orthodox Christian activist Dr Aleksandr Dvorkin of FECRIS may occasionally paint with too broad a brush and overzealously pursue his anti-cult activities, but his aims and his basic reasoning are fairly sound. We should also ask the intercession of Saint Irenæus of Lyons for those harmed and abused by such sects.

We also have to bear in mind that we witness to a mode of theopolitics which is neither intégriste nor erastian nor sæcular. We witness to a theopolitical harmony the icon of which is the brotherhood of Moses and Aaron, which is currently not evidenced anywhere in reality, but toward which the governments of Russia and several of the Eastern European republics are currently aiming.