1 Is “Belief” Relevant in Chinese Popular Religion?

During the Maoist era, popular religious practices (temple cults, pilgrimages, spirit mediumism, etc.) were considered “feudal superstitions” (fengjian mixin 封建迷信) and were suppressed. During the reform era (since the late 1970s), however, a lot of these traditional popular-religious practices have been revived. Nowadays, when a Shaanbei peasant says that he or she “‘believes in’ [i.e., practices] superstition” (jiang mixin 講迷信 or even xin mixin 信迷信) there is often no sense of fear or embarrassment as there would have been during the Maoist era; the term “superstition” (mixin 迷信) has apparently been purged of its negative and derogatory connotations and become as normal as the word “customs” (fengsu 風俗).

Looking at the rate at which temples and religious practices have been revived in Shaanbei during the reform era (late 1970s to the present day), the impression one gets is that Shaanbei people are very religious. But what is the nature of Shaanbei people’s religious beliefs? Perhaps we should question the very concept of “belief” in the Chinese popular religious context, as the concept carries with it enormous Judeo-Christian, credo-centric theological baggage. It is always extremely difficult to determine people’s beliefs. Inference from behavior ignores possible discrepancy between belief and practice (even if this is unavoidable in all studies on religious practices). Direct interrogation may elicit falsehood. Concurring with R.F. Johnston’s skepticism about Chinese religiosity, Arthur P. Wolf warned that it “should never be thought that people believe everything they tell the visiting anthropologist. Some do; others do not.”³ How do we “fill in” the discrepancy between, on the one hand, actually experienced beliefs, and, on the other hand, beliefs constructed by the anthropologist from statements solicited from the informants about their beliefs? Even more radically, Rodney Needham has famously asserted that unless a culture has a set of vocabulary to express and talk about religious belief we cannot assume that this culture has such thing as belief or the people actually “experience belief.”⁴ To these skepticisms I would add that even if the natives have a language for belief and really believe what they say they believe, we might still have the problem of explicating the nature of that belief.

It is not difficult to imagine that the tenor of belief in a monotheistic God would be qualitatively different from a religiosity based on a variety of deities and spirits, as is the case in Chinese popular religion. But that is still assuming a phenomenological equivalence between “believing in God” and “believing in gods, goddesses, and spirits,” premised on more or less analogous psychological states. This is the kind of functionalist fallacy the early anthropologist Franz Boas fought against when he opposed the tendency in ethnological museums to display the “same category” of artifacts from different cultures side by side because of their functional equivalence and evolutionary progression.⁵ For Boas, it would not do to put a New Guinea stick hoe next to a Chinese flat-blade hoe just because both are agricultural instruments. He argued that the significance and meaning of one category of artifacts cannot be understood without putting them within the total context of the culture from which they come, so he advocated displaying all of each particular culture’s artifacts together organically and in relation to one another. Therefore in his view, Kwakiutl religious beliefs and practices could only be understood in the context of the whole repertoire of Kwakiutl culture and not when mechanically juxtaposed and compared with religious beliefs and practices of other cultures. While comparative studies (e.g., comparative religion) have tremendous value when done properly and judiciously, I think we should take Boas’ advice seriously and not extract facile “categories” of seemingly similar phenomena out of context from very different cultural settings. In our case I suggest that we investigate the nature of belief in the context of Shaanbei society and culture. In an important sense this article is about how embedded religious ideas and practices are in their cultural and sociopolitical milieu.

But first let us look at the concept of belief in a classic Biblical passage: “Go out all over the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; he who refuses belief will be condemned.”⁶ As is evident in this key passage in the New Testament, one’s belief in the gospel (there is God and Jesus Christ is the savior, etc.) is central to Christian religiosity and to one’s ontological status, i.e., saved or condemned. During the course of my fieldwork in Shaanbei, however, I seldom encountered any explicit talk of “belief in deities.” Shaanbei people do have the word for the verb “believe” (xiangxin 相信) as used in “I believe what you are saying,” but they do not say “I believe in the Black Dragon King” or “I believe in gods and goddesses.” Most important, they do not have the noun “belief” (as in “you have the right to hold your religious beliefs”) or “faith” to refer to the totality of their “beliefs.” In contemporary elite discourse in China there is the word “belief” or “conviction” (xinyang 信仰), but I have never heard Shaanbei people use it. So was Rodney Needham right, that because Shaanbei people do not have a language for religious belief they therefore do not think it is important and they do not experience belief as a psychological state? Needham might have given too much weight to linguistic representations as signs or proof of mental states, for there are many things in life that are too elusive to be captured by linguistic conventions (especially affective states such as those that might be involved in interactions with spirits). But we should heed his skepticism regarding an overly facile identification of a familiar psychological state (i.e., “belief”) in otherwise unfamiliar places (a lesson similar to the one we draw from Boas). It goes without saying that when I use words in this article such as “believe,” “believer,” “worship,” “worshiper,” or “pray” the reader needs to be aware of the considerable linguistic compromise necessary in describing Chinese popular religious practices in the English language; these are merely linguistic shorthand.

2 Magical Efficacy and Thanksgiving

Even though Shaanbei people do not say that they “believe” in their deities, they act as if they do. For example, they visit the deities (sometimes through the deities’ spirit mediums)⁷ and pray for divine intervention when they have serious problems (e.g., a serious drought, an illness that the doctors cannot cure); they spread stories of the deities’ divine powers; they express gratitude to the deities by staging temple festivals and donating money to the temple. Most Shaanbei people maintain some kind of relationship with a number of deities, and these relationships often last a lifetime and across generations.

The single most important concept in understanding the Shaanbei deity-worshiper relationship is ling 靈 (magical efficacy).⁸ It refers to the ability of the deity to respond (ying 應) to the worshipers’ problems by, for example, curing an ill family member, pointing to the right direction for conducting business, enlightening one on a knotty personal dilemma, bringing down ample rain after a bad drought, and so forth. Therefore, we can characterize Shaanbei popular religion as essentially a religion of efficacious response (lingying 靈應). If we reject the possibility of real divine power, we have to examine how ling is socioculturally constructed. [In fact, even when we accept the possibility of real divine power we will still need to explain how this power is understood and acted upon by social actors, the latter again being a sociocultural construct.] Even though ling is constructed by people, people’s experience of ling is real and is a social fact. A deity is ling because people experience its power and therefore say that it is ling. One deity is more popular and “powerful” than another because more people say the first one is more ling. This does not mean the first deity is more powerful or higher in rank than the second one in the locally-significant pantheon; it just means that the first deity responds more readily to people’s requests for divine intervention. In fact, higher-ranking deities are often considered too distant and “haughty” to be responding to humble mortals’ calls for help.

The more people experience a deity’s ling, the more ling is attributed to the deity, which in turn contributes to the intensity of people’s experience of the deity’s ling, and so on. One deity’s decline in popularity is usually caused by the rise in people’s ling claims for another deity and the subsequent defection of incense money to the other deity. On the one hand, ling is a deity’s power in the abstract. On the other hand, ling inheres in concrete relationships, between the deity and an individual worshiper or between the deity and a community. It is meaningful to worshipers mostly in the second sense, because ling in the abstract is only latent power, not manifest power, and the only meaningful way a deity manifests his or her power is through aiding a worshiper who is in trouble or who needs the blessing to weather life’s many trials and tribulations. An allegedly powerful deity whom a person has nonetheless never consulted is without significance to this particular person. Like social relationships, the relationships people have with deities also need maintenance and frequent renewal, hence the obligatory visits to the temple in the first lunar month of the Chinese New Year and on the deity’s birthday. Shaanbei people refer to these visits to the deity as “paying respect to the deity” (jingshen 敬神).

Despite the great variety of deities worshiped in Shaanbei, there seem to be some very basic principles or postulates that inform Shaanbei people’s religious beliefs and practices and form the core of their religiosity. These basic postulates are:

1. That there are gods (or that it does not hurt to assume that there are gods);

2. That people should respect the gods and do whatever pleases the gods (e.g., building them beautiful temples, celebrating their birthdays) and should not do anything that displeases the gods (e.g., blasphemy);

3. That the gods can bless people and help them solve their problems;

4. That people should show their gratitude for the gods’ blessing and divine assistance by donating incense money, burning spirit paper, presenting laudatory thanksgiving plaques or flags, spreading the gods’ names, and so forth;

5. That some gods possess more efficacy than others (or have specialized areas of efficacious expertise); and

6. That one is allowed or even encouraged to seek help from a number of different gods provided that one does not forget to give thanks to all of them once the problem is solved.

These six basic postulates underlie most of Shaanbei people’s religious beliefs and practices, even though they are not systematically laid out as I have done here. For example, all temple festivals are expressly to celebrate the gods’ birthdays, to show gratitude for a year’s peace and prosperity or a good harvest, or simply to make the gods happy.

Even though the popular religious landscape in Shaanbei consists of a large number of deities, sacred sites, and religious specialists, each Shaanbei person’s set of meaningful deities, sacred sites, and religious specialists is a limited one. The makeup of each person’s “religious habitus”⁹—that is, his attitudes toward, and behavior concerning deities, sacred sites, religious specialists, religious rituals, and supernatural forces in general—is determined by whether or not, in what way, and to what degree the events in his personal life have brought him, in a meaningful way, to which of the deities, sacred sites, and religious specialists. It also goes without saying that each person’s religious habitus changes over time. Because of their lack of life’s many responsibilities and experience with deities’ assistance, children and young people tend to treat deities with less respect, and they also know much less about different deities’ legends and magical exploits.

In his study of individual variations of religious belief and unbelief among Taiwanese villagers, the anthropologist Stevan Harrell also provided a useful, person-centered perspective on Chinese religiosity.¹⁰ Among the villagers he interviewed, Harrell found four basic types of believers (or what I would call believers with four basic kinds of “religious habitus”): intellectual believers, true believers, nonbelievers, and practical believers. Intellectual believers base their beliefs on intellectual coherence and systematic relatedness of religious ideas and practices and are extremely rare; true believers are characterized by their total credulity toward all religious ideas and are rare; nonbelievers are those who completely disregard or ignore the possible truth or usefulness of any religious tenets and are rare as well; and practical believers base their belief on the principle of practical utility and constitute the great majority of Harrell’s interviewees. The religious attitude of the practical believers is one of “half trust and half doubt”¹¹ (in Mandarin banxin banyi 半信半疑) or “better believe than not.” Even though I did not conduct a similar, systematic study of individual variations of Shaanbei people’s degree of belief and unbelief, my impression is that in Shaanbei, too, a great proportion of people are practical believers and far fewer are true believers or nonbelievers. Some Shaanbei urbanites I talked to also expressed the sentiment of practical and selective belief, as some of them told me that insofar as supernatural powers and stories of efficacious responses are concerned, “one should not not believe [what others say about the power of deities and other supernatural occurrences], nor should one believe everything [they say]” (buke buxin, buke quanxin 不可不信, 不可全信). Another saying also testifies to the flexible attitude Shaanbei people hold toward deities and worship: “If you worship (literally, “honor” or “respect”) him, the deity will be there [to help you]; if you don’t worship him, he won’t mind” (jingshen shenzai, bujing buguai 敬神神在, 不敬不怪). Shaanbei people are aware that the supernatural landscape is filled with numerous deities and spirits and it is both unnecessary and impossible to worship them all.¹² But deities specific to a particular community (i.e., a village) are more demanding of the attention and respect from the members of the said community.

One of the most visible material manifestations of people’s gratitude for the deities’ divine interventions is the thanksgiving dedicatory banner/flag (jinqi 錦旗) or plaque (bian 匾) that a grateful worshiper gives to the temple after the deity has responded favorably to his or her requests (e.g., a son, a speedy recovery, a good exam result, etc.). There is a set format to the inscriptions on these banners and plaques (see Figures 23.1 to 23.5).¹³ The first line is to name the deity to which this thanksgiving banner or plaque is addressed, often specifying the name of the temple or the temple site (since many deities in Shaanbei share the same name but are actually different deities). The middle line in much bigger characters is the thanksgiving phrase, often one of the following stock expressions (there is clearly no need to be innovative): youqiu biying 有求必應 (whatever you beg for, there will be a response), shenling xianying 神靈顯應 (the divine efficacy has been manifested), and baoda shen’en or dabao shen’en 報答神恩/答報神恩 (in gratitude for divine benevolence).¹⁴ The last line indicates the name of the worshiper and the date and year of the dedication. Below is one example of a dedicatory plaque (transcribed from the text shown in Figure 23.4):

View Full Size

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

Below is my translation:

View Full Size

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Thanksgiving dedicatory banners/flags hanging next to the deity statue in a temple

All photos by the author except otherwise noted

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

A large thanksgiving dedicatory banner. 2016

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Three stylish dedicatory plaques hung outside a temple hall

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

A dedicatory plaque thanking the Water Goddess of Dongyangshan for having cured this worshiper’s esophageal cancer. This temple is the only place in Shaanbei in my experience that has dedicatory plaques detailing the medical problem in question.

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

The cost of these dedicatory banners and plaques can vary enormously, ranging from a few dozen yuan to a few tens of thousands (e.g., a large wooden plaque penned by a well-known calligrapher and inscribed by a master carpenter). These dedicatory banners and plaques are always given to the temple together with monetary donations as ex-voto donations (huanyuan bushi 還願布施) or in the form of ex-voto opera performances (yuanxi 願戯) (as short as one episode or as long as a whole hours-long piece) or ex-voto story-telling performances (yuanshu 願書) (ranging from shorter episodes to multi-day serials)¹⁵ In fact, one can say that these ex-voto donations are more of the “substance” of the thanks-giving whereas the dedicatory banners and plaques are there to announce and highlight these donations, with the added benefit of being visible for all to see for a period of time (more substantial and beautiful banners and plaques and those from dignitaries are prominently displayed whereas small and more ordinary ones are quickly covered over by newer ones).

Most worshipers will choose to bring the thanksgiving dedicatory banners and plaques to the temple during the annual temple festival in order to demonstrate to the largest audience possible their gratitude to the deity. In order to further attract the attention of other festival-goers so as to maximize the “performance” of this thanksgiving (and the divine efficacy of the deity), the temple association has a shawm band of four or five members (one on small, suona 嗩吶 shawm, one on big shawm, one on cymbals, one or two on drum(s)) at the ready to ostentatiously accompany the donor from some distance outside the temple hall (e.g., twenty meters) all the way to the temple hall (see Figures 23.5–23.6). The donor would hold a tray lined with a yellow sheet of paper stating his name and the amount of donation, on top of which is the donation in cash.

View Full Size

A shawm band playing a piece accompanying the donation of thanksgiving incense money by a worshiper, who is carrying the money in cash as well as a dedicatory banner into the temple hall

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

A worshiper registering his donation to the temple (200 yuan) during the annual temple festival

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

3 Temple Festivals as Thanksgiving and Collective Testimonies

As tradition dictates, Shaanbei people stage temple festivals at least twice a year, one during the Lunar New Year and the other for the deity’s birthday. These temple festivals are organized by temple associations (hui), which comprise a small group of responsible and generally respectable adult men who are approved by the deity through divination. On the First Month Fifteenth the association oversees the communal festival at the temple. The temple festival on the deity’s birthday is a much larger event, lasting typically for three days, and thus requires much more organizational effort. Depending on the level of prosperity of the temple community, different folk performing arts are staged for the deity as well as for the community. If the temple commands a large sum of donations, the temple association will invite an opera troupe to perform folk opera, the culturally ideal choice for temple festivals in honor of deities’ birthdays. But if the temple endowment is modest, the temple association will then only invite a folk music band or a storyteller to enliven the atmosphere. Lots of firecrackers are also a must. The goal of every temple festival, like that of other festive occasions such as weddings and funerals, is to produce “excitement and fun” (honghuo 紅火), which I have characterized as “red-hot sociality.” Red-hot sociality produced at a temple festival is an exterior sign of the success of the temple cult and the general prosperity of the community supporting the cult (see Figures 23.7 to 23.9).

View Full Size

Crowds of worshipers and visitors at the annual Black Dragon King Temple festival. 2016

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

Worshipers at the Black Dragon King Temple festival bring offerings to the temple halls. 2016

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

View Full Size

A folk opera performance at the Black Dragon King Temple festival. 2016

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

When visiting a deity or consulting a deity through a spirit medium, Shaanbei people normally donate some incense money and make a vow to contribute more incense money, bring gifts, or sponsor folk opera or story-telling performances at the temple festival if the deity (sometimes through possessing the medium) helps the patient recover. Of course, illness is far from being the only problem Shaanbei people bring to the deities. Other problems include marriage prospects, changing jobs, promotion, travel or business plans, lawsuits, interpersonal problems, missing persons or goods, or any other troubles. Many Shaanbei people attend temple festivals specifically to honor their vows by bringing the promised amount of incense money donation. Occasionally personal troubles are diagnosed by mediums or deities to be caused by a former dishonored vow, sometimes even from past generations.

When Shaanbei people are not troubled by any specific problems, they go to the deities to give thanks and to pray for their continual blessing. The most commonly used phrases in the prayers are “[We or I] implore Your Venerability to bless/protect us so that we will have good fortune, every endeavor will go smoothly, and we will be free from trouble (qiu ni laorenjia baoyou zanmen dajidali pingpinganan 求你老人家保佑咱們大吉大利平平安安). The “we” (zanmen 咱們) in this prayer generally refers to the immediate family of the person praying, and that is why the expression “our whole family/household” (zanmen quanjia 咱們全家) is often used instead. This “we” almost never refers to the larger descent group, the village, let alone even large collectivities such as province or nation. Even when the prayer (as in a rain prayer) refers specifically to “the myriad masses” (wanmin 萬民), the implied objects of blessing are still the numerous families and their members.¹⁶

Shaanbei people usually make the above-mentioned generalized requests on two different occasions: during the first lunar month and on a particular deity’s birthday. The first thing many Shaanbei villagers do in the morning of the first day of the first lunar month is to pay respect to the local deity (usually at the village temple). On the fifteenth of the First Month yangge 秧歌 troupes¹⁷ of different villages and towns (and nowadays also schools) visit the temples and pray for blessing for the year, but this particular celebration is generally considered part of the New Year’s festivities. And then there are the temple festivals celebrating the deities’ birthdays. Shaanbei people say they go to a temple to “pay respect to the deity” (jingshen 敬神) instead of “worship” (bai 拜, the term more commonly employed in coastal southeastern China, including Fujian, Taiwan, Guangdong, and Hong Kong).

All temple festivals entail some kind of pilgrimage, when people from outside of the regular temple community come to pay homage to the deity, meet old friends and relatives, and enjoy the excitement and fun. Daughters who have married out come back to their natal villages, and parents visit their daughters when their in-laws’ villages are having temple festivals. When long-distance pilgrimage is involved and the number of outside visitors is high, the temple associations have to arrange accommodation for them. Large temples often have dormitories or build temporary structures for pilgrims. Sometimes when a large number of pilgrims come from one particular locale they will organize into groups to take care of themselves. A famous example of a locale-based pilgrimage organization is the “eight big congregations” (badahui 八大會) for going to Baiyunshan 白雲山 (the White Cloud Mountain) in Jia 佳 County. Because the temple festival at Baiyunshan is so crowded, different congregations in different areas have to arrive on different days to be accommodated, fed, and received properly.

4 Blasphemy and Communal Hegemony

Insofar as the village temple belongs to the village community, the village as a whole worships the village deities as a community of believers. Membership in this community is assumed but also reaffirmed through personal worship, donation of incense money, participation in temple festivals, the sharing of the sacrifice, and other activities related to the deities. When it seems that everyone in the village is a member of the community of believers (disregarding the level of commitment and involvement), the worship of the village deities has achieved what can be called communal hegemony.

A community of believers does not prohibit its members from seeking help from deities outside or participating in other such communities, but it would sanction against the absence of its members from its own communal worship. Conflicts between Christian converts and other villagers over temple festival fees are a good example of such sanctions. When there are explicit nonbelievers or blasphemers who challenge the power or even the existence of the deities and the validity of others’ beliefs, the community of believers often employs coercive measures to attempt to bring these people back in line. They will recount stories of divine retribution and warn of bad death and suffering for the nonbelievers and their families. This kind of communal coercion is a very common practice among believers of Chinese popular religion and seems to be effective in at least subduing dissenting voices within the community if not actually stamping out unbelief.

View Full Size

A sculpture in a temple hall showing the punishment for any would-be blasphemer (the eyes of the blasphemer being gouged out by the eagle). 2016

• Download Figure
• Download figure as PowerPoint slide

As in many other Shaanbei temple revivals in the early 1980s, the initial period of the rebuilding and reviving of the Black Dragon King (Heilong dawang 黑龍大王) Temple also relied on the power of communal coercion. Here I give only one story relating to what had happened to a man who played an active role in destroying the Black Dragon King Temple during the Cultural Revolution.

Before Liberation, the Heilongdawang Temple (at that time a much more modest building compared to today’s splendid temple complex) was run by three neighboring villages. During collectivization these three villages became three brigades, and when the directive to “destroy the four olds” (po sijiu 破四舊) came from the commune in 1966, the brigades decided to take down the temple and use the much-needed building materials for civic purposes. They divided up the job; one brigade was to take down the main temple building, the other the entrance hallway, and the third the opera stage. A young man from one of the brigades, a small-team leader, was in charge of the operation on the main building, where the Heilongdawang statue stood. In a flare of revolutionary zeal, he led the charge on Heilongdawang by hitting the large clay statue on the neck with his hoe, knocking off the statue’s head. The operation on the whole was very smooth; there was no drama of Red Guards storming the temple, clashing with protective peasants, as had happened in some parts of Shaanbei. No one sensed any ominous happenings looming ahead and indeed nothing bad happened after the temple was taken down, until quite a few years later.

Sometime in the mid-70s villagers were called to help build the runway of the nearby military airport. The same man, now in his late thirties and still a small-team leader, was in charge of leading a group of men to blast rocks on the riverbank. Three holes full of dynamite were ignited but only two went off. They waited for a long while for the third to explode, but it didn’t. The women came with lunch so the men stopped working. Lunch in hand, the team leader was finally overcome by curiosity and went over to the third hole to check what had gone wrong—only to have his head blasted off.

Sometime after this tragedy, people began to comment on the causal link between this man’s rash attack on Heilongdawang and his subsequent bloody and sudden death. The story of divine retribution quickly became a household tale in the area. Some even added the details: the head was blown from the neck at exactly the spot where he had struck Heilongdawang’s neck with his hoe. Today, the man’s three sons and their families still live in the shadow of this incident and the village’s communal discourse of divine retribution. The villagers all think that it was because of the father’s bad deeds that the third son is a half-witted village idiot and the other two married sons have only daughters but no sons. The blasphemer’s descendants have essentially become semi-outcasts in their own village.

The principle of correspondence (homology) is very common in these divine retribution stories (e.g., a head for a head). Another story related to me was about a Party secretary in another community who said, during the temple-destruction campaign of the Cultural Revolution, that he “didn’t piss” (buniao 不尿, Shaanbei dialect expression for “not being afraid of”) the local god. He died of urine poisoning soon afterwards because he couldn’t urinate.

And here is a third anecdote. Temple boss Lao Wang’s mother, who was in her seventies, was attending the fireworks night at the annual Black Dragon King Temple festival in 1998. That night was when the whole Dragon King Valley was most packed with worshipers and spectators. Those attending must have numbered tens of thousands. The fireworks went as spectacularly as had been expected, and as soon as it ended the crowd began to pour down the narrow valley towards the main road below, people on foot mixing with those riding motorcycles and tractor-trucks carrying passengers. The valley path was narrow, rugged, dark, and completely packed. A motorcycle hit Lao Wang’s mother; she fell; the motorcycle took off without stopping. One of her legs was injured badly and she was hospitalized for many days. Lao Wang was furious at the careless and irresponsible hit-and-run motorcyclist, and he was also furious with the Black Dragon King. For a long time after this incident Lao Wang would, during gatherings of temple officers, rant about how despite the fact that he had been working so hard and for so long as the head of the temple association the Black Dragon King would allow his mother to be injured in such an ignominious and scandalizing way. Lao Wang always had a sharp tongue, and on these ranting occasions he got so emotional that he was often close to cursing the Black Dragon King. The younger temple officers were too scared to say anything. A few older temple officers would try to comfort Lao Wang, especially to rein in his “blasphemous” tirades. It was clear that they were afraid that Lao Wang’s rants would displease the Black Dragon King, which might in turn bring disaster to Lao Wang or the whole community. The belief in deities is as much a personal psychological state as a public discourse. When the majority of a close-knit village community believe in the village deity, it is extremely difficult to publicly present dissenting views, much less knocking down the deity’s statue (the small-team leader was a blasphemer in act rather than in words). Members of the community who believe in the deity thus form a discourse community as well, enforcing a more or less uniform view on the efficacy of the deity, even if allowing different, individualized experience with the deity. If a person states that he doesn’t believe in the deity and something terrible happens to him or his family, the believers will say that the person suffers because the deity is punishing him for his blasphemy and impropriety. Normally, very few people have the nerve or resolve to counter such a strong communal hegemonic force. No one dares to say in public that a particular deity is “not efficacious” (buling 不靈) (though he or she is mostly free to not go to this deity any longer).

This communal coercion dimension of popular religion also partially explains the reluctance of local cadres to crack down on temples and temple activities. Theoretically, because all cadres are Communist Party members and presumably atheists, they should not be afraid of gods and divine retribution. In reality, however, as members of local communities and under the influence of the communal hegemony of believers (who are more often than not their close kin), local cadres are often believers themselves, which makes them unwilling to interfere with popular religious activities. In fact, many village temple bosses are current or ex-village Party secretaries, some devout servants of the village deities making up for having wronged the deities during the Maoist era. It is widely known that the Communist government resorted to physical violence during campaigns against “feudal superstitions”; but too often scholars overlook the element of communal coercion inherent in the maintenance of popular religious communities. People in such closely-knit communities do not care much about private thoughts of disbelief; but any public expressions of such disbelief will surely be punished. Not believing is to not render credit where it’s due and thus threatens the welfare of the entire community.

5 Conclusions

“Belief” as a notion is of course central to all creed-based, confessional religious traditions (most notably Christianity and Islam). But even in these religious traditions “belief” is far from being only a personal psychological state and accompanying religious practices (e.g., private prayers). There is always a community of believers to enact, through their words and actions, the various dimensions of belief as a public performance. In both Christianity and Islam, most prayers are said in groups: with family members at home around the dining table, with other congregants in the church or mosque, with a world-wide imagined community of co-religionists. Similarly, praising God or Allah is a public performance, conforming to historically contingent and socio-culturally specific norms and forms.

The range of practices in Chinese popular-religious life that suggest the existence of some kind of belief (but never to be presumed to be analogous to what might be posited as any “typical” Christian belief) include: burning incense and spirit money; consulting and beseeching deities for divine intervention (sometimes through spirit mediums, divination sets, or a divination chair); organizing and participating in temple festivals celebrating the deities’ birthdays (often involving going on pilgrimages and sponsoring opera performances); spreading stories of the deities’ miraculous responses; etc. All of these activities are public manifestations of the Chinese “giving credit to where it’s due.”