Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tivert | Hacker News Reader

> ...Christianity, which by some estimates is China’s fastest-growing religion, promotes Western values and ideals like human rights that conflict with the aims of China’s authoritarian government and Mr. Xi’s embrace of traditional Chinese culture and Confucian teachings that emphasize obedience and order.

> But the government’s heavy-handed efforts to obliterate several high-profile churches have been met with resistance among Christians....

> “If you see the police, national security or community workers greet them with gentleness,” Wen Hongbin, an elder at Xishuipang, told the congregation. “If they try to grab the microphone, I ask the brothers sitting in the front row to please stop them.” ...

> Independent churches like Early Rain, with more than 500 members, have attracted large followings in recent years, especially among white-collar workers seeking an escape from rampant materialism at the center of modern Chinese life.

> While sermons at state-sanctioned churches are often tightly scripted, independent churches boom with searing indictments of corrupt officials and rousing calls to protect the rights of the poor....

> “I saw injustices in society,” Mr. Gu said. “I saw that the government’s promotion of China as a just country that enforces laws in a civilized manner was all a lie.”

> Worried for his own safety, Mr. Gu recently closed his business, hoping to avoid government scrutiny. He said he has grown fearful as he has watched the police arrest his friends.

These people are much braver than I am, and I wish them peace and strength to overcome these trials.

> ...Christianity, which by some estimates is China’s fastest-growing religion, promotes Western values and ideals like human rights that conflict with the aims of China’s authoritarian government

This is the part that confuses me.

I'm not sure what Christianity intrinsically promotes (ask 12 Christians and I suspect you'll receive 13 conflicting opinions). But practically speaking, governments and ruling classes have used it for nearly two-thousand years to promote social order and subservience.

It's been used to justify the Crusades, and slavery. Within living memory it's been used to justify Jim Crow laws, and the Salvation Army used as a tool against labor union organizing. It's been used to promote leftist regimes in Catholic South America, and the far-right "Protestant work ethic" class structure in the USA. It's been used everywhere to enforce a social order based on strict sexual norms and patriarchal gender roles.

Christianity became one of the Top Two religions on earth, precisely because of how malleable it is. In other words, in practice, it tends to promote whatever the ruling class in a given place and time WANT it to promote. It's been that way since Emperor Constantine.

So why try to violently suppress it? That's never been an effective strategy. Just co-opt it, and make it promote whatever Chinese/Confucian values you want like everyone else does.

You also had William Wilberforce and Oliver Cromwell. Co-option can only go so far: they have state run churches, but those don't appeal to people. See also Dissenters in England during the industrial revolution.

China has party-authorized Christian churches with exactly your goal in mind. This crackdown is on unauthorized churches.

For an example of how they frame it in propaganda: http://en.people.cn/n/2014/0807/c90882-8766262.html

It matches what’s written in the OP article: “The government has focused its campaign on unofficial Christian churches that promote ideas like social justice or have been critical of the party’s grip on society.”

And knowing what’s documented about the CIA activities in the past, which include using religion(1) I fully understand that attitude.

1) See https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview but also what was yearx before: https://www.npr.org/2010/06/05/127500908/cia-fight-against-c...

Focused ? Why that word ? That's very different from only unofficial churches ?

This is a fact that comes back in the stories of Chinese people very often: it doesn't matter how "approved"/legal or tolerated something is. Parts of the government go after it. Parts of the party are in open war with eachother, to the point that they send child services after eachothers' children, police after restaurants that commit the crime of allowing political rivals to eat there, and then there's the occasional moral panic, which is the most disruptive. Every now and them some fact will make the news, through social media most often.

This may be quality of goods (food for children happened once, but has likewise happened with houses, animal feed, ...), relationship stuff (e.g. a young couple, a girls pictures "leaking", in some cases outright racism (romeo and juliet couple), ...) someone dying from exhaustion while gaming, a few people very sick or dead from food poisoning, hospitals getting caught abusing psychological patients, ... and then the police will take "action".

By that of course we mean arresting hundreds whose only crime is to be in the same street as where the news event happened. Or arrest everyone under 16 out after 18h. Or arrest everyone including owner and customers in every internet cafe, or real cafe. Or ...

They're innocent. Doesn't matter of course. They get convicted. And yet, under normal circumstances, anyone in China will tell you it's absurd what you get away with.

You have a grave misreading of the history of Christianity. It was used as a control device when it was centrally controlled and delivered (like all religions)...the invention of the printing press changed all of that with the Reformation. Once the knowledge was spread through the people and open to interpretations, the general direction of Christianity (despite all the faults of modern movements) has trended towards equality and freedom, which is much in line with the Gospels. Martin Luther and John Calvin had a profound impact, and once you saw those movements you began to see all the modern western values emerge, from economics to political freedom.

In Chinese history it's a little different. The Taiping rebellion was a militant uprising against the ruling Manchus by a Christian Millenarian sect known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the mid 19th century.

It was the bloodiest war of the 19th century, and the bloodiest civil war in history, with an estimated 20-70 million killed.

You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches, but maybe you can understand why they get nervous when Christians start getting uppity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

> In Chinese history it's a little different. The Taiping rebellion was a militant uprising against the ruling Manchus by a Christian Millenarian sect known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in the mid 19th century.

> You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches [sic], but maybe you can understand why they get nervous when Christians start getting uppity.

That's just a pretext, if anything. This oppression isn't some challenging but benevolent attempt by the Communist Party to protect China from a bloody civil war based on past historical experiences, it's part of systematic campaign to protect the personal and institutional power amassed by China's unelected leaders and keep the country submissive to them.

This is clear when you look these actions in context: the repressive actions against democracy activists before, after, and on June 4th 1989; as well as more recent actions against human rights lawyers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa... ); and even Communist true believers acting outside of party control (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/asia/china-student-... ).

>equality and freedom

How do you know that there are not scriptures in the Bible that could support the opposite?

>Martin Luther and John Calvin

Didn't Martin Luther give rise to the thinking that ultimately resulted in WWII?

And the Calvinists that I personally know still hold to the ideas that women cannot wear pants and are not allowed to go to college.

The answer to your second question is no, unless you believe that a unified Catholic Germany would have stayed out of or won the First World War. I believe you are referring to some quotes by Martin Luther that no Lutheran church propagated or even remembered for the most part. The portions of Luther’s writings that spread through Germany were his large and small catechisms, Smalcald articles, etc., that were contained in the Book of Concord compiled shortly after his death.

As for the Calvinists, I hope you know you associate with very unusual people. There are a lot of Calvinist-founded colleges.

You're correct that it is whatever people need it to be.

But it is also its own thing, not so much ideologically, but that it is a social grouping and and alternate hierarchy of power separate from the state. Every ruler from Constantine on has had trouble with the Church to some degree, as the Church has always laid claim to various social and political powers that rulers would have wanted for themselves.

In this sense, maybe the Chinese Communists are right to be worried, after all many of the functions churches perform in the west are the exclusive domain of the Chinese State. Coopting it would require them to become Christian themselves, which is what happened in the Roman Empire, but only after Christians had become entrenched in the upper levels of society.

>>Christianity became one of the Top Two religions on earth, precisely because of how malleable it is

Christianity i one the top ten religions on earth--or the most popular, depending on how you look at it. :)

But you are right, its interpretation depends on the Pope. While they are Orthodox and Protestants (fragmented), the Vatican sucks the oxygen out of them when it comes to the media and reputation.

What China is doing is very logical: any religion is a threat to their ideology and if you're a leader in China you don't want that. Who needs the Bible when you have the Chinese version of the Manifesto? Or the Pope when you have Xi Jinping?

> What China is doing is very logical:

The ends can never justify such means.

the word logical was used to include "morals aside." China knows what they want and to go there they are smart and dumb ways.

I don’t think morals with respect to shared notions of fundamental human rights can be “put aside” for the sake of discussion.

What is the discussion worth if it doesn’t take into consideration fundamental dignity?

while there is some interpretive leeway, malleability isn’t a feature of christianity, it’s the effect of coercive power attracted to the centralized conduit of control that religion provides.

if christians actually followed christ’s teachings, we’d see a lot more generosity and a lot less wealth disparity and homelessness.

I think you’re making the mistake of equating Christianity and Catholicism. They have the same roots but all of the things you’re assigning to Christianity is really the machinations of ‘The Church’ weilding Christians beliefs as a cudgel for the aspirations of ruling bodies.

There is definitely a fine line between the two that is often blurred, but Christianity at its core is about people who are oppressed finding freedom in faith. It’s one of the reasons it is easy to ‘spread’; every culture on earth has oppressors and oppressed.

I think your other point is super interesting however, in that when the oppressed are ‘free’ and become the majority, Christianity doesn’t have much to offer and then becomes the weapon of the ruling class ( or majority ) keeping people ‘in line’.

> "I think you’re making the mistake of equating Christianity and Catholicism. They have the same roots but all of the things you’re assigning to Christianity is really the machinations of ‘The Church’ weilding Christians beliefs as a cudgel for the aspirations of ruling bodies."

I grew up in the rural South. I assure you churches serving as the cudgel of ruling classes is not limited to a single denomination. Catholics are barely represented here, the pattern is nevertheless the same.

I think you'll find that historically, due to the interference from Rome, Catholicism was the denomination that resisted this the most, and that this was in fact a large part of the reason for Protestantism to come into existence in the first place.

I think part of the answer is that these churches are tied to Western missionary movements pushing a Western reading of Christianity (not so much on purpose as because that's "Christianity" to them).

> So why try to violently suppress it? That's never been an effective strategy. Just co-opt it, and make it promote whatever Chinese/Confucian values you want like everyone else does.

They also do that. The problem, from the regimes perspective, is that international Christianity (including and with assistance of domestic Christians already indoctrinated into the foreign varieties) keeps sabotaging their efforts to co-opt Christianity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com