EVEN A DRUID GETS ONE RIGHT ONCE IN AWHILE (via Tom Morin):

A society that does not allow crosses or veils in public is a dangerous one (Rowan Williams, 10/27/06, Times of London)

COMING BACK from a fortnight in China at the beginning of this week, into the middle of what felt like a general panic about the role of religion in society, had a slightly surreal feel to it. The proverbial visitor from Mars might have imagined that the greatest immediate threat to British society was religious war, fomented by “faith schools”, cheered on by thousands of veiled women and the Bishops’ Benches in the House of Lords. Commentators were solemnly asking if it were not time for Britain to become a properly secular society.

The odd thing was to come into this straight from a context where people were asking the opposite question. Wasn’t it time that China stopped being a certain kind of secular society? The political and intellectual world that is emerging in the new China is having to cope with a vacuum where cohesive social morality ought to be, a vacuum shaped by the past 50 years of Chinese history.

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The culture of total state provision collapsed during and after the Cultural Revolution; under Deng Xiaoping, the new tolerance of capitalist enterprise fostered a driven and selfish climate; the one-child policy designed to save China from demographic disaster resulted in an ageing population, a generation of children both indulged and crippled with expectations — and a record of forced abortion and sterilisation. Frustrations about not having the “ right” to a male child intensified a contempt for women’s dignity among the uneducated public.

And now the approach of party and government to social cohesion has dramatically changed. NGOs working in China agree that their freedom to operate is far greater than ten years ago; indeed, there is a real burgeoning of new and local NGOs, as fresh issues are identified (not least around the welfare of children and the disabled). Government is pragmatic enough to work out when to back these.

Among such initiatives are a good many that are rooted in the Christian Church. The Chinese Government now repeats regularly that religion is essential to the “harmonious society” it aims to create — the sort of statement that would have been unthinkable ten or fifteen years ago. Of course, it is religion on the Government’s terms. What China means by religious freedom is not unrestricted liberty of association. Before the visit to China, we were told that we should see only what the Government allowed us to, and that we would be conscripted into a propagandist agenda that ignored the continuing repression of religion.

You cannot be unaware that religious activity is controlled by strict regulation and that the manifold possibilities of infringing these regulations give ample opportunity for malicious or corrupt officials to intimidate, imprison and maltreat supposed “offenders” who (deliberately or accidentally) fail to go through the motions of registering. But, for all the undoubted scandal of this, it is simply not possible to say now that there is a general strategy to eliminate religious belief or practice.

Which makes it more liberal than Europe.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 29, 2006 8:30 PM