Chapter 1 Becoming “Patriotic” for God
Why Churches Join State-Sanctioned Protestant Organizations
In: Shades of Gray in the Changing Religious Markets of ChinaSearch for other papers by Ke-hsien in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
This chapter tackles the empirical question of how and why, since the 1990s, many former unregistered churches became officially sanctioned religious sites by joining the Three Self Patriotic Movement. By particularly focusing on fieldwork experience among True Jesus Churches (tjc), a Chinese-initiated denomination with a long history, this research illustrates the vulnerability of the dichotomous framework of Chinese Christianity, in which official groups are portrayed as secularized and politically-oriented and unregistered ones as religious and non-political. This account portrays a new generation of church leaders who have been socialized with the logic of bureaucracy and are adept at dealing with the state. They rely on previous experiences as leaders in local affairs or industry and exhibit a level of comfort in interacting with the state that their predecessors rarely had. Nevertheless, the analysis presented here makes it clear that while many young tjc leaders are happy to negotiate with the state, they do so out of religious motivations and with the goal of benefitting the church.