There have been many books about the introduction of Protestant Christianity to modern China, but most have been about the works of Western missionaries and their institutions. There have been journal articles and book chapters about indigenous forms of popular Christianity and indigenous preachers. But the impression one might get from reading the Western literature is that this form of Christianity was of secondary importance. Perhaps for Western scholars of Christianity, Chinese popular Christianity is a little embarrassing. Borrowing from early twentieth-century Pentecostal revivals, Chinese popular Christianity was emotional rather than rational. It attracted the lower classes rather than urban elites. It preached that the world was soon coming to an end, and therefore stressed personal conversion rather than patient, organized attempts to solve social problems. As the preacher Wang Mingdao put it, it taught “redemption, resurrection, miracles and prophesies” (p. 129). And it was strongly antiforeign. Wang Mingdao wrote that “60 to 70 percent, even 80 to 90 percent of the [foreign missionary] church leaders and preachers” were “false masters.”
In hindsight, this popular Christianity may have been the most important development of Christianity in China. Most of the spectacular growth of Christianity in China over the past generation—from less than a million in 1949, the number of Christians has suddenly exploded to 50 million or more—has its roots in this unruly, disreputable cousin to the earnest, modernizing, reform-minded work of liberal Protestants in the early twentieth century.
Lian Xi has written the first full-length history of popular Protestant Christianity in China. He traces its origins back to the early nineteenth century, and sees the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom as its first spectacular manifestation. Indeed, he sees echoes of the Taipings in some twentieth-century Christian movements. Most of the book is devoted to indigenous Christian movements from the early twentieth century down to 1949, but there is a chapter devoted to the movements' suppression under Mao and their subsequent rebirth and rapid development during the reform era of the People's Republic of China. Finally, there is an afterword placing Chinese popular Christianity into the context of messianic Christianity worldwide.
Half of the main chapters focus on important assemblies and movements: the True Jesus Church, founded in 1917, “the first durable indigenous Protestant sect in China,” which “throve on its exuberant Pentecostalism, apocalyptic convictions, and opportune denunciations of missionary Christianity amidst mounting anti-imperialist sentiments”; the Jesus Family, whose most distinctive feature was a “utopian pursuit of Christian communalism, one that found its triumph over poverty and wartime miseries in shared Pentecostal ecstasies”; the Shandong Revival, “complete with trances, visions, ‘tongues’ and prophesies” (p. 9). Other chapters tell the stories of important leaders and evangelists: Wang Mingdao, “whose unflinching, fundamentalist opposition to liberalism in Western-controlled churches endeared him to the grassroots Christians buffeted by surging anti-foreignism” (p. 9); John Sung, “the most electrifying revivalist of twentieth-century China” who was “reputed to have proselytized one hundred thousand Chinese during the 1930s” (p. 10); and, finally, Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) the founder of the Little Flock and a “leading Chinese theologian of the twentieth century” (p. 10).
These leaders and their movements are presented sympathetically, but with due attention to their warts, which are often the most vivid parts of their histories. Like contemporary American entrepreneurial evangelists, some of the most popular Chinese preachers were prone to scandals over money and sex. Yet there is no denying the passion, determination, and bravery of these preachers and the faith and trust of their followers.
In the author's analysis, the strength of Chinese indigenous Christianity came from its resonance with traditional Chinese religious culture and its appropriateness to the historical circumstances of a China in chaos. Even as indigenous Christians rejected the false gods of China, they affirmed the basics of the Chinese religious imagination: a world of demons that could be exorcised, of miracles that a powerful deity could accomplish, the possibility of ecstatic visions that could guide the way toward salvation, and hope for a millennium when the world would be made new. Not just beliefs but the social forms of indigenous Christian organization drew on old Chinese historical precedents. The contemporary historical context added to the plausibility of popular Christianity. While liberal, Western-educated Christians promoted efforts at progressive reform of economic and political institutions, war and revolution made Chinese society seem beyond all reform. To people for whom neither liberal democracy nor state socialism have brought any real benefits, redemption through the Spirit may be the most plausible hope of all.
Current Christian revivals in China build on the foundation of early twentieth-century popular Christianity. The author does an excellent job of summarizing these new Christian movements and gives us a capacity to understand them in much greater depth through their links to historical and cultural genealogies. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the burgeoning of Christianity in China today.
China is part of a wave of popular, mainly Pentecostal-style Christianity that is sweeping the whole world, especially the global South. An adequate explanation of these movements would require a more robust sociological framework than the author is able to provide in his short afterword. But his rich and subtle historical account can eventually make a big contribution to such frameworks.
