IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM...PRETEND YOU WERE MISUNDERSTOOD...:

When opium can be benign: China's Communist Party, reconsidering Marx's words, is starting to wonder whether there might not be a use for religion after all (The Economist print edition, 2/01/07)

Officially, the party regards folk religion as superstition, the public practice of which is illegal. But in many rural areas officials now bend the rules. In Yulin prefecture, with 3.4m people, there are 106 officially registered places of worship and many more that are not officially sanctioned. Most are not part of the five mainstream religions (China regards the two Christian traditions, Catholicism and Protestantism, as separate) that the party recognises. But Yulin has allowed the Black Dragon Temple to affiliate itself with the government-sponsored Taoist Association. This gives it a cloak of legitimacy. So too does an arboretum that Mr Wang has planted with temple funds (at the dragon's request, he says, but it also helps him show officials how the village is contributing to government efforts to stop the desert encroaching).

Local officials themselves benefit from the greater tolerance. For all the party's dictatorial ways, government officers are often fearful of triggering unrest by enforcing unpopular policies that are not all that vital to the party's interests (hence the increasingly patchy implementation of population control). Demonstrations in an official's jurisdiction can do far more damage to his career than turning a blind eye to popular religion--so long as such activity does not directly challenge the party.

There are also more tangible rewards. In his book "Miraculous Response", Adam Yuet Chau of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says that temples applying for official registration typically have to treat local officials to banquets. Officials, he adds, support temples that pay them respect and tribute. They also gain financially from taxes levied on merchants who do business at temple fairs. Policemen invited to maintain order at these occasions are paid with cash, good food and liquor.

In the view of local officials, Mr Chau argues, temples play the same kind of role as commercial enterprises. They generate prosperity for the local economy and income for the local government. This is especially true of the Black Dragon Temple, which says it attracts 200,000 people to its ten-day summer fair (the Black Dragon himself, villagers say, has also shown up in the form of an unusually shaped cloud).

Evidence of China's religious revival can be seen throughout the countryside in the form of lavish new temples, halls for ancestor worship, churches and mosques (except in the far western province of Xinjiang, where the government worries that Islam is intertwined with ethnic separatism and keeps tighter rein). Officially there are more than 100m religious believers in China (see table), or about 10% of the population. But experts say the real number is very much higher.

This does not mean that China has embraced religious freedom. Some religions--Tibetan Buddhism, Islam as practised in Xinjiang, Catholicism and "house church" Protestantism, which involves informal gatherings of believers outside registered churches--are still subject to tight controls because of the party's fears that their followers might have an anti-government bent. A seven-year-old crackdown on Falun Gong, a quasi-Buddhist sect that flourished in the 1990s, is still being pursued with ruthless intensity. Many Falun Gong practitioners, as well as lesser numbers of followers of other faiths who refuse to accept state attempts to regulate their religions, are imprisoned in labour camps.

Within the party, however, debate is growing about whether it should take a different approach to religion. This does not mean being more liberal towards what it regards as anti-government activities. But it could mean toning down the party's atheist rhetoric and showing stronger support for faiths that have deep historical roots among the ethnic Han majority. The party is acutely aware that its own ideology holds little attraction for most ordinary people. Given that many are drawn to other beliefs, it might do better to try to win over public opinion by actively supporting these beliefs rather than grudgingly tolerating them or cracking down.

Pan Yue, then a senior official dealing with economic reforms and now deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Administration, argued in an article published in 2001 that the party's traditional view of religion was wrong. Marx, he said, did not mean to imply that religion was a bad thing when he referred to it as the opium of the people. Religion, he said, could just as easily exist in socialist societies as it does in capitalist ones. He also singled out Buddhism and Taoism for having helped to bolster social stability through successive Chinese dynasties. Stability being of paramount concern to the party today, Mr Pan's message was clear.

Sounds like the failing Darwinists pretending their ideology is compatible with religion too.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 1, 2007 2:20 PM