Is religion universal? Do all societies have religion?

How would we define religion?

What are its key ingredients?

What is the opposite of religion?

[slide 2]

In week one, and since, we encountered Max Weber. We noted that his social scientific method was
relatively unique at the time. In order to understand how history unfolds in the ways it does, he
held, one must get to grips with the motivations for human action. The key to those motivations lie
primarily in the specific value systems they abide by- Calvinism or Confucianism for example. Weber
has been immensely influential within a variety of social scientific disciplines. We’ll be returning to
him, yet again, briefly, later on. But there was another theorist, this time French, not German, who
has been perhaps equally influential- Emile Durkheim. Although, there has been perhaps more
disagreement over the implications of his theories than over the implications of Weber’s. Durkheim
has been especially important for the social scientific study of religion. So today we will begin there-
with Durkheim’s theory of religion.

Part 1

In his introduction to the Penguin Classics 2008 English translation of Durkheim’s Elementary Forms
of the Religious Life (first published en français in 1912), Mark Cladis employs a striking image to
explain Durkheim’s approach to religion as outlined in that foundational social scientific text. The
image is that of an unspecified group of human beings at unspecified point in prehistory, somewhere
in the Australian outback, because that is where Durkheim understood the most elementary forms
of religion to be in evidence, on account of the widespread practice of what has been called
Totemism- for Durkheim, humanity’s first religion. The scene begins with a campfire, with just a few
people gathered around it.

[slide 3]

More people are drawn to the light and warmth of the fire. As the gathering grows, the murmur of
conversation, the risky but exciting presence of other bodies, faces, voices, perhaps the effects of a
mildly intoxicating beverage too, produces an emotive, embodied sense of being part of something
inexplicably larger than oneself. [slide 4]. This sense of ecstatic, social wonder, in Durkheim’s term
‘collective effervescence’, or ‘a certain rush of energy’ that comes from outside of ourselves, is
potentially both wonderful and terrifying. It is beyond one’s everyday means-to-end, rational,
pursuit of everyday survival- food, comfort, sex- but is also perhaps unnerving, in being beyond
oneself, beyond one’s control. Where does the force of these moments of effervescence come
from? What or who is producing it? What is this energy I am feeling, or that is feeling me? etc.

slide 5

This sense of unbridled connection begins to make more sense in our imaginary Durkheimian
scenario, when a kangaroo suddenly hops by, emerging from the darkness into the light and warmth
of the fire, before disappearing again into the night. Someone suggests that it must have been the
Kangaroo that was making them feel the way they do. The suggestion concentrates, crystallises the
slightly unnerving sense of beyond-ness into a singular source. The feeling is shaped, domesticated
somewhat but also becomes more tangible and clear. The group agrees that the Kangaroo was the
source of their collective effervescence.
slide 6

The next time there is such a gathering, similar feelings of social electricity arise, but no kangaroo
appears. Nonetheless, it is agreed, after some slightly forced reasoning by the original person-
probably man, given the history of human religion- who suggested the theory of the kangaroo, that
despite its apparent absence, the kangaroo is nonetheless acting upon them from afar. As the
gatherings continue, this understanding is elaborated further. The kangaroo is the source not only of
inexplicable feelings, but of victories and misfortunes too. The kangaroo not only acts upon them
from afar but is always watching, and must be thanked and kept happy in order that the feelings
continue and good things rather than bad happen to those gathered. The originator of the kangaroo
theory puts himself forward as the chief representative of the group to the Kangaroo who is now the
central symbolic of a growing system of thought and practice.

[slide 7]

The chief priest and his associates take charge of the acts of gifting the Kangaroo God and
interpreting what Kangaroo God wants from the group. The high priest’s offspring become next in
line for the role of high priest and so a sacred lineage is born. The kangaroo thus becomes the
central signifier in a symbolic system which is used to interpret not only feelings of connection but
natural and manmade disasters and victories, other feelings, such as anger, sadness, love, and the
actions and ailments of others- meanness, madness, ill-health. Durkheim argues nonetheless that
above all else it is feelings of togetherness which are both the origins and ultimate object of what he
calls ‘religion’. When the kangaroo cult come together in the name of the kangaroo, to the degree
that they form a religion, it is the feelings of collective effervescence of such occasions which
reaffirm the power and presence of the kangaroo god.

[slide 8]

Of course, there are many other such gatherings across the prehistorical landscape of our
Durkheimian picture of the origin and nature of religion. We can imagine that in other gatherings, it
was not a kangaroo that hopped by that fateful night but another animal. Or to be less flippant, a
different entity or set of entities came to be understood as the source of collective effervescence
elsewhere. Nonetheless, to stick with our analogy, the Wallabee cult became attached to the
Wallabee god in a similar way to the kangaroo cult and the kangaroo god. Rather than being led by a
high priest and communicating with their god through sacrifice, they centre perhaps around a
charismatic guru who is understood to embody the spirit of the Wallabee god. Comparing the two
groups, the means and modes of communing with, representing and organising around their gods
may differ but the basic structural constituents of their religion is the same: effervescence,
representation and mediation. Nonetheless, each group is very much invested in the differences
between the way they representant and engage with their gods. And we can speculate as to
whether this is more or less likely to lead to war, exchange or simply what Gregory Bateson called
cultural schismogenesis: the symbolic system surrounding each god is refined and adapted in
dynamic interaction with the rival system, similarities are occluded for example and differences
overemphasised.

Now this is of course a fictional account. However, for me, and hopefully for you, it presents a
foundational theory of anthropology of religion in more vividly understandable terms than those
often used to convey Durkheim’s ideas. It also helps us understand how other anthropological
theories of religion differ from Durkheim’s, again in a more vivid way. The scenario hopefully
illustrates for example, Durkheim’s central equation that ‘religion is society worshipping itself’. We
can also see why Durkheim says religion is the origin of society. 1

[slide 9]

Kangaroo and campfire imagery also demonstrates the argument of Durkheimian anthropologist
Maurice Bloch- who is in fact related to Durkheim- that ‘religion is central but nothing special’. What
we call ‘religion’, Bloch argues, is really just where what he calls the ‘transactional’ and
‘transcendent’ aspects of life meet. The transactional is composed of everyday interactions which
involve what we can call means to end reasoning- e.g. ‘x causes y causes z’, or ‘in order for x to
happen I need to do this’. This kind of reasoning characterises everyday, mundane interaction.

The transcendental concerns the dialect between symbolic representation of the origins and root of
society and our experience of this symbolic order that goes well beyond our individual existence. I.e.,
the campfire and kangaroo scenario we just explored. So, you can perhaps see that there is no
necessary reason why the religious in Maurice Bloch’s, or ultimately Emile Durkheim’s,
understanding should be populated by conventional figures of ‘religion’- priests and priestess, gods,
demons, miracles etc. [We can however think about why these kinds of figures might be particularly
apt for mediating society as distributed, unbounded affect and as a set of representations, as a
symbolic order.] Indeed, that will partly be the direction in which the remainder of this term’s
lectures will go in: thinking about how Durkheim’s basic conception of ‘religion’ as the interaction
between energetic social forces and collective representations of those forces can and does exceed
the boundaries of that which is designated as ‘religion’ in the modern world. We’re going to think
especially about how the crowd- that original figure in Durkheim’s theory, gathered around our
fictional campfire- in today’s world becomes the basis of social phenomena that- though explicitly
presented as ‘secular’- we might nonetheless understand as possessing religious characteristics.

1
. Durkheim’s depictions of Australian Aboriginal totemism are notoriously factually inaccurate and tinged with
social-evolutionist ideas. Nonetheless, Cladis’ illustration distils perhaps his most fertile theoretical points, with
regard to “religion”, and the ones most influential in today's anthropology. Cladis begins “with the Darwinian
horde - an amorphous group of early humans driven largely by biological urges”:

Mostly, this population is dispersed, pursuing such utilitarian activities as hunting and gathering. Imagine,
however, that one evening they gather as a group, huddled around a fire, and experience a sort of social
electricity generated by their collectivity, or what Durkheim called efflorescence. They had experienced
something like it before, but this time it is different, because this time they were able to name it. As the
shadows lengthened, they had caught sight of a fleeing Kangaroo, thus revealing the source of the group’s
effervescence, indeed the basis of the members’ lives: it is the Kangaroo, and they are the people of the
Kangaroo. Now everything changes. With a name- with an identity- comes social membership and the
distinction between insiders and outsiders. The universe can now be divided into that which belongs to the
Kangaroo and that which does not, and from this spring all other classification systems. And with social identity
come social ideals: hence these hitherto biologically driven creatures are transformed into socially creative
humans. All this springs from a concrete, tangible symbol of their own unity. We have reached the beginning
of society, and it commences with the birth of religion: the totem as a symbolic, religious representation of the
community (Cladis in Durkheim 2001:xix).

As is especially clear in Cladis’ example, in Durkheim’s model there are two basic forms of unity: the felt unity
of collective effervesce and the symbolic unity of a collective representations. The history of Durkheim-
influenced anthropology can be understood in terms of those beginning their analyses with “representation”
and those who begin with “experience”.
Part 2

So how might we apply Durkheim’s model to what is known as ‘Chinese Religion’. Before doing that,
you should know that in its formative stages the modern study of Chinese Religion was centred
around a particular question, namely: ‘does a Chinese Religion exist?’.

Leading the yes camp was LSE’s own Maurice Freedman- details. Freedman argued that despite the
surface appearance of regional variation there was a basic structural unity which underlay all
manifestations of traditional religion in China. Leading the no camp was Arthur Wolf- details. Wolf
argued that given the myriad different and varied beliefs- concerning the soul and its afterlife,
proper ritual procedure, the variance in gods and goddesses worshipped by area- there was no
meaningful sense in which China could be described in terms of a single religion.

Let’s consider a little further what Freedman meant by a basic structural unity. Drawing upon a
classic village ethnography in Taiwan written by David Jordan, Freedman argued that the pantheon
of deities stretching across and often beyond China proper could be categorised into three types:
Gods, ghosts and ancestors. Drawing on a basic Durkheimian principle he furthermore argued that
this tripartite division reflected social reality. Social reality is less equivalent here to Durkheim’s
messy concept of ‘collective efflorescence’ and, given that Freedman was heavily influenced by the
Structuralist Theory of the time, more social structure. This social structure was not too different
from Fei Xiaotong’s model of the traditional Chinese ego structure. The most intimate social sphere
of Chinese rural life Freedman argued was the family. This sphere is represented by ancestors who
continue and are the continuation of the family line. The second sphere of intimacy is the village
community as a whole. This sphere is represented by gods, who have community-wide influence. If a
particular family is especially influential, it should be noted, their ancestors can become gods.

The final sphere, the least intimate is that of strangers, and particular lone strangers disconnected
from any recognised community- cast outs such as bandits, prostitutes and the unknown dead. This
sphere is represented by ghosts, wandering, lonely, hungry ghosts. This ghosts a propitiated
appeased, as most of you will know, with ghost festivals and on certain days of certain months.
Ancestors are embodied in ancestral tablets in the home, gods in communal temples, ghosts usually
with little makeshift shrines.

Since the 1970s, the Wolf-Freedman debate became less polemical, less dichotomous, but each side
has its more recent representatives. Robert Weller for example, as we’ll see further in a moment,
shows how the representational structures Freedman described nonetheless give rise to multiple
and contradictory interpretations, especially as the social structure itself changes in China with
modernization etc. Perhaps more on the Freedman side of the debate, than Wolf’s, our own Stephan
Feuchtwang in a book I’ve already mentioned describes what he calls the ‘Imperial Metaphor’. That
is, even more directly that it reflects the social structures of village life, the traditional Chinese
pantheon looks and works, in many ways, similarly to the Imperial Chinese State. We noted already
that the kitchen god for example who watches the family from his place in the kitchen throughout
the year, then reports to the Jade Emperor in very similar ways to petty officials reporting to the
earthly emperor.

However, Feuchtwang also draws out the Chinese traditional pantheon’s heterodoxy elements and
ever-present potential to inspire rebellion. Lets look further at this aspect.

While the aspects of the pantheon which reflect the imperial state work in similar ways to that state,
there are underlying ‘demonic’ elements which often work via command structures rather than
Confucian moral exemplification. Local gods are often not literati types but fierce-looking warriors
who are often thought to get the job done- for good or ill- better than their more civilised
counterparts. These military types in turn can inspire military uprisings such as the boxer rebellion
we’ll look at next week. Also present in the divine hierarchy, but absent in the earthly imperial one,
are women. Goddesses are often more powerful and more loved than gods. What’s more, they are
often deified precisely for their (partial) defiance of the patriarchal order. Both Guanyin and Mazu
died childless virgins. Like their masculine counterparts, they too could inspire rebellions such as the
White Lotus rebellions based on egalitarian utopias like the Pure Land directly in contrast to the
strict hierarchies of the Chinese state.

Unlike human officials, gods could be punished as well as demoted or promoted by the communities
they served. Tudi Gong, a lowly but ubiquitous earth god, responsible among other things for the
weather, was and in Taiwan still is subject to physical punishments of his statues for example, if he
does not grant what his worshippers desire. As we’ll see in a moment, lone ghosts, often the dead
continuation of amoral or even immoral individuals, are worshipped too. And finally, perhaps the
most obvious sign that the celestial pantheon is not a mere passive reflection of earthly realities- the
metaphor has outlasted the imperium. Though that is not to say it does not continue to respond to
changing political realties today.

So, if Freedman painted the traditional Chinese pantheon as a relatively static representation of a
relatively static social reality, studies since then have complexified that picture and shown how the
gods can affect social, political realties as much as reflect them.

One such changing reality is the growth of individualism. This slide [24] shows a decline in the
frequency of average given names per birth cohort over 60 years. It also shows the increase in the
number of unique names given to new-borns in China. This is argued to be evidence for the rise in
individualism.

If individualism has been on the increase in China, it has been for perhaps longer in Taiwan. It is in
this context that Robert Weller describes the rise of the 18 Lords Temple, shiba wanggong miao, in
Today’s New Taipei City, on the northern tip of the island. The temple was originally a very small
shrine built to please the ghosts of 17 human corpses and a dog washed up on a nearby coast. The
dog was still alive but so loyal to its dead masters that it jumped into the grave dug for them to be
buried alongside them. In the 1980s the shrine became increasingly popular. Why? Because the
ghosts it housed, Weller argues, were more amenable to the kinds of self-centred, amoral or even
immoral requests that arose with the decline of rural communities and rapid incorporation of
Taiwan into the global neoliberal economy. The community pressured the government to rebuild the
shrine, into a temple. Previously a site only for social outcasts, by the late 80s Weller estimates, it
was the most popular place of worship in Taiwan. In an age of lonely, amoral individuals lowly
ghosts, even dog ghosts, can become powerful gods capable of gathering enough human support to
move the government’s hand.

So- we may want to nuance and tailor our model to accommodate these complex Chinese and
Taiwanese realities. Not necessarily in the terribly drawn way demonstrated here! (26).

Okay, a further couple of notes to close this section. Often analyses of Chinese religion that employ
Durkheimian models often set up a conceptual hierarchy. It is we the analysts that know that gods,
goddesses and the like are in fact obscure reflections of social reality. We know, to quote Durkheim,
the ‘religion is society worshipping itself’. Religion to those we study, on the other hand, is the
worship of ontologically real gods. They ‘believe’ in the reality of their gods and are unaware of their
emotional, social origins. We’ll develop this point further in a moment, but it seems this
understanding of religion as naïve belief in god(s) is based upon Christianity, which is not at all a
universal way in which humans relate to the divine.

A closer look at Chinese religion reveals things to be more complex. There seems often to be a
recognition among worshippers themselves, that gods are dependent for their existence upon
human action and recognition. The quote showed here conveys this point. It is also conveyed, I
think, in an interesting way by the practice of giving god statues black faces. Why is this done?
Stephen Sangren, another anthropologist of Chinese Religion, argues that the blackness is supposed
to represent the soot from burnt incense that popular gods generally become covered in. So the
practice of making statues with blackened faces to begin with demonstrates, I think, a recognition
that the power of each god is at least partly a function of human attention. There is an
understanding here of the interdependency of gods and humans which is close to our Durkheimian
model and is totally absent from orthodox forms of Judeo-Christian religion in which God is absolute
and in no way dependent upon creation for his existence.

In fact, Sangren argues that people are so aware that the divine are reliant on the living for their
continued existence that this is what motivates traditionally filial sons to worship at the graves of the
ancestors, generation after generation. By demanding that sons recognise that they owe their existence
to their predecessors (i.e., ‘filial piety’), socialisation within (rural) Chinese and Taiwanese society
produces the desire for ‘author[ship] of one’s own being’ (Sangren 2009: 256). Thus, while officially sons
are obliged to feed their ancestors, given that they gave them life, it is also true that the continued
existence of these ancestors is dependent upon these sons’ offerings. From the former perspective, the
son acts out his recognition that he is the product of his lineage. This gives rise to the latter perspective,
the son enacting his fantasy of self-authorship through feeding the loins that birthed him, thus becoming
author of himself and resisting the alienating feeling of being entirely produced by society (Sangren 2013:
183).

Even more clearly, there has been a longstanding Confucian understanding that what we might
retrospectively call ‘religion’ is central to the reproduction of society. More specifically even a cheap
and cursory glance at the writings of Xunzi remind us that ritual is central to this process. (28).

Taking account of Xunzi’s emphasis, and remembering everything we have discussed so far about
the unruliness of religious representations and their changing and unpredictable relations with
human communities and individuals, we could perhaps further develop our model, like so: (29).

In part two we considered Chinese religious practice, representation and thought using the model
we introduced in part one. In part three, we will consider what happens when this dynamic- the
dialectic between social energy, affect, relations, emotions and social representations, which
Durkheim understood to be the beating heart of society, becomes reframed as only one part of
society, alongside the domains of politics, economics, and science, and indeed compared to these,
the least important part.

So, within the study of religion, by the mid-twentieth century, Max Weber’s approach had become
predominant. We may remember that Weber emphasised in particular the role of ideas and the
value systems they are part of in driving human action and ultimately historical change. The
influence of Weber in the study of religion has particular come down to us through the influential
work of American cultural Anthropology, and in Particular Clifford Geertz. Here is his famous
definition of religion:
“A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting
moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those
conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”
(1973[1966]: 90).

What accounts for the predominance of understandings of religion within the Social Sciences in
terms of symbolic systems? Here we come to Talal Asad’s foundational critique of Geertzian
approaches to religion:

• Colonialism: Relativization of the Catholic Church as a worldly institution

• Protestant Reformation: internal faith over external ritual

• Scientific Revolution: Decline in authority of the church, & belief transformed from ‘belief
in’ to ‘belief that’

• Meaning of ‘religion’ (religio) transformed from the vows and rituals of monastic life to a
distinct domain of different societies in opposition to ‘politics’, ‘science’, ‘economics’ etc

• The concept of ‘religion’ is not universal, the imposition of social scientific definitions onto
non-Western societies is a form of conceptual colonialism

We may note that according to our third reading for this week, the Jesuits imposed an
understanding of ‘religion’ as a separate category of social life upon Confucius, turning a taken for
granted aspect of Chinese reality as a whole into an ‘ism’, into a doctrine founded by a single man,
with adherents and priests etc. However, if you read Nicholas Standaert’s critique of Jensen, you’ll
find that the Jesuits did nothing of the kind. Rather, it was through the Jesuits attempts to convince
their pope tat Confucianism was secular and compatible with Christian belief that they helped define
religion in its modern sense and its necessary complementary opposite, ‘secularism’.

Jason Josephson traces the eventual importation of the modern concept of religion as an inner-
focused set of beliefs in a symbolic system officiated by priests and adhered to by believers into
China via Japan. However, this was not just a passive reception, he argues. Rather, the dichotomy of
religion v secularity becomes a trichotomy: religion, secularism and superstition. Starting with the
short-lived republican regime and intensified under Mao, this trichotomy entered mass
consciousness through education and mass campaigns. In the dubitable surveys of religion put out
by the CCP often those who go to temples and ask for or repay gods, goddesses, and ghosts for
various favours and blessings often do not reply to the question ‘are you religious?’ with the answer
‘yes’. Some are reported, when asked, to say ‘I do not believe in religion, I believe in superstition’. So
the term ‘religion’ has certainly not translated perfectly.

Nonetheless, our very own Hans Steinmuller, among others, reports on the affects these
categorizations have had on every day lives. He describes an awkwardness and embarrassment
which surrounds the continued practices associated with Confucianism. They are self-conscious
about practices surrounding death, weddings, and every other practice or festive occasion in which
traditional understandings and customs are invoked. While this is true for the modern day
peasantry, in what Steinmuller calls a ‘double embarrassment’, elites, in contrast are embarrassed
about the Maoist campaigns to stamp out religion and superstition as uncosmopolitan. Importantly,
Hans argues that it is this sense of mutual embarrassment with ‘popular Confucianism’ and its
suppression that becomes a unifying communal force. Where before communities unified around
shared practices, today they unify around shared embarrassment over those practices. So the
categorization of traditional customs as superstition or religion in the twentieth century has had
longstanding effects on the lives and sense of self of many Chinese people.

We can think of this categorization as having the following effects: a shift from inclusive, practice-
based, bottom-up Chinese Religion to doctrinal, top-down ‘religions in China’. An image which helps
me picture, the former, Chinese Religion is that of three mountains. At the top they may be very
distinct from an elite, clerical perspective- but for the masses they are very much complementary
and interwoven in practice. Government policy and statistics from 1912 on, reflect a very different
understanding. There are five officially permitted religions in China with Buddhism and Taoism being
two of them. These latter two have had to remake themselves in the image of the Christian-inspired
definition of religion which Asad critiqued. That is with a clergy, a clear set of text-based doctrine
and believers. This hasn’t exactly worked out- and as noted earlier many ordinary Chinese who may
visit a Buddhist temple or employ the services of a Daoist priest will nonetheless not necessarily
identify themselves as religious, Buddhist or Daoist on a survey. Government statistics then don’t
usually reflect the true nature of rejuvenated, post-reform Chinese Religion today. And perhaps that
is ultimately their purpose- to suggest that China is less religious than it is?

It is worth making a note finally- from this chaotic slide- that Vincent Gossaert in a reading on your
further reading list, puts a specific date on the moment when Confucianism came to be seen from a
relativist rather than world-encompassing perspective: the Summer of 1898. This was the date of the
so-called Hundred Day Reforms, or 戊戌變法, Wùxū Biànfǎ, which we’ll cover in better detail next
week. Kang Youwei, his protégé Liangqichao, and the Guangxu emperor proposed at this time the
transformation of temples into schools. The debate that ensued, Gossaert claims, shifts these
thinkers from an original anti-clericalism- that is a traditional elite mistrust of Daoist and Buddhist
priests and their potential to propagate heterodox understandings and practices- to an anti-
superstition campaign. Out of the latter, Kang Youwei in particular developed the notion of
Confucianism as the ‘National Religion’ of China. The Buddhist monk Taixu and the Daoist master
Cheng Yingning in turn tried to turn their teachings into national religions too. It is perhaps ironic
that of the three it was Confucianism, the inheritor of imperial orthodoxy, that came to be
particularly associated with ‘superstition’, the lesser of the religion-superstition distinction,
notwithstanding the re-favouring of Confucianism under Xi, which we’ll discuss at the end.
Gossaert’s article is subtitled, ‘The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?’ This conveys his point
that over this period the understanding of Chinese religion went from an internalist one which
contrasted orthodoxy with heterodoxy to an externalist, relativist one which contrasted one
doctrinal, nationalist religion with another one. Needless to say, this parallels the development from
empire consciousness to national consciousness.

Part Four. I mentioned earlier that the modern category of ‘religion’ is inseparable from that of
‘secularism’, secularism and religion as categorical understandings of the world, arise together. But
what is secularism and how does it arise? In this section we answer that question.

There are roughly three versions of secularization theory. The first is most intuitive, but least
supported by the evidence of the last three decades, evidence that is of the so-called ‘return of
religion’.

Secularization Theory (1): Declining belief

• With Modernization Religious Belief declines due to:

 • Better Quality of Life: healthcare, security, economy

• Education: rationalisation, exposure, relativization

• Individualization: no longer bound by community values

Critique of this theory, which goes back to foundational theorists of modernity (e.g. Emile Durkheim,
Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud):

“The world today, with some exceptions…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places
more so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists
loosely labelled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken” (Peter L. Berger (former secularization
theorist))

Secularization Theory (2): Differentiation

• Secularization is more specifically about the public sphere- a secular society is one in which
religion and politics are structurally differentiated.

• This increases specifically with the rise of nationalism and the Westphalian world
order

• The nation is necessarily a secular body, religion is acceptable as long as it does not
enter the public sphere or interfere with the foundations of multi-national secular
world order

• Developments following the Hundred days’ Reforms a good example of this. But also
US legal separation of church and state (so perhaps an example of Secularization 2,
but not 1)

Secularization Theory (3): Self-Bounding

Taylor’s notion of the secular is about disenchantment:

The porosity of the human self

Religion becomes about belief because no-one experiences the divine as a taken for granted aspect
of our reality

This is about the built environment as much as a shift in ideas

Even ‘believers’ are secular in this sense

So how might we synthesise and think through these notions in relation to Chinese Religion and its
possible end in the twentieth century? I think this chapter, ‘Secularization, Sacralization and Subject
Formation in Modern China’, by David Palmer and Fabian Winiger. There, they suggest a graph on
which we can chart historical change in China in relation to the issues we’ve discussed today. One
axis is defined by the sacred on one end and the profane on the other. If we remember, this is a
Durkheimian notion with the sacred representing the collective and the profane the individual. They
are also defined in terms of accessibility. The sacred kangaroo becomes taboo- it can’t be eaten and
sight of it is either auspicious or disastrous. It stands in contrast to everyday representations which
are part of mundane transactional social life. The mundane representations can also become
sacralised depending on the context- think of Bloch’s elderly Malagasy informant. The other axis is
that of enchantment and the secular. Thinking back to Charles Taylor, an enchanted world is one in
which the human self is porous, it is open to the influences, good and bad, of non-human and supra-
human beings.

So Palmer and Winiger argue that we should understand various periods in Chinese history in terms
of different positions on their secular-sacred chart. During dynastic China, they argue, Chinese
peasant society was enchanted and profane. Selves were open to the myriad forces and beings of
the cosmos- and this porosity was not limited to any special context, but pervaded everyday life. The
imperial court was also enchanted- ministers and emperors seemed to subscribe to many of the
same basic ontological assumptions as the peasant masses. However, the court was also sacred-
heaven is high and the emperor is far away. The imperial court was set apart from society, whilst
also being its foundation and centre. As we’ll discuss in a moment, with the rise of nationalism, and
especially Maoist nationalism, the leader is still sacred, but at least officially is not enchanted-
nationalism has an ostensibly secular basis. The people is composed of human beings only, and
human beings that are bounded, distinct and equal. Thus, the Maoist state operated on the basis
that the people, the proletariat in particular is a sacred- Mao is just a sacred extension, a reflection
of this collective object. Landlords and other reactionaries on the other hand are profane and
secular and as such should be reformed or eliminated.

They contrast this with post-socialist China, and more especially China under Xi. Now, they argue,
there is no expectation that the general populace should reach an enlightened, reformed, perfected
state as there was under Mao- they are left to their own transactional, even hedonistic, devices. The
national body today has been profaned. The state itself in contrast has become a sacred, secular
object- unlike the Maoist state (at least ostensibly, representationally), set apart from the populace.
Xi and his Congress are supposed to be de-corrupted, correctible pure and transcendent but they no
longer pretend to be of, and perhaps even for, the people.

So we’re going to unfold these ideas in greater depth and detail in the weeks to come. But one
question to think through perhaps in advance is, what happens when society is no longer
represented by gods, goddesses, ghosts, or kangaroos, but by ‘the people’, or society itself. Who
then become the priests, priestesses, and clerics? Social Scientists perhaps? This transformation is
usually referred to as ‘nationalism’ and we’re going to look at it closer next week

On both a comparative level.

And specifically as it arose in modern Chinese history.

I leave you finally with part 5, which is a single slide, and which contains a question I thought we
could kick off the classes this afternoon with:

• Compared to his predecessors, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, & Hu Jintao, Xi’s administration
seems more suspicious and critical of Christianity and Islam in particular, the latter suspicion
being evident in the decreased tolerance for Muslim practices in Xinjiang since 2012, the
former in the destruction of Christian churches. At the same time Confucianism, Daoism and
Buddhism are seeing renewed state support.

Why might this be?