Zongjiao yu wenming (review)

The seven contributors to this volume, including the two editors, are all members of the faculty at Sichuan University, at either the University's Institute of Religious Studies or the Department of Philosophy.

In regard to all of the essays in this volume, three things should be noted: (1) "Religion" and "Civilization" are understood in both a comparative and a global sense and are viewed from both a historical and a contemporary perspective. (2) The contributors have some degree of familiarity with the Western literature on religion or philosophy, but mostly through very recent (1990s) translations into Chinese (e.g., of the works of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Max Weber, Ernst Cassirer, Paul Tillich, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas). (3) The contributors hold a wide range of attitudes toward the classical Marxist views on religion, from firmly Marxist (chapters 1, 2) to sympathetic toward the Marxist view (chapter 3) to critical of the Marxist view (chapters 4, 5, 7, 10) to silent (chapters 5, 6, 9). One author even offers to attempt a reconstruction of Marxist views on religion (chapter 8). Needless to say, this kind of book could not have been published during the era of Mao Zedong (1949-1976).

Chapter 1, "The Demarcation between Religion and Civilization," by Zhang Qin, affirms the classical Marxist view: "Engels says, 'All religions dominate people's daily lives and control their external living; they are the reflections of people's mental illusions. Insofar as these reflections are concerned, people's power takes the form of supra-human power'" (p. 5). And to this, Marx added his famous observation: "Religion is the groaning of the oppressed peoples; it represents the sentiments of a world without feelings; it reflects the spirit of a world devoid of spirit. In that sense, religion serves as an opiate of the masses." Another feature of the classical Marxist view of religion is that it represents an ideology—and this belief is held by almost all of the authors in this book. By ideology is meant that religion has to be understood within its historical context (e.g., the Protestant Reformation is to be viewed in relation to the political and economic circumstances of sixteenth-century Europe and the Catholic Church).

Chapter 2, "The Evolution of Religion and Civilization," also by Zhang Qin, discusses the distinction between primitive and modern, "human-made" religion: the former lacks a consciousness of itself and is without class conflict, while the latter is self-conscious and involves class conflict. Thus, in modern religion, social forces are turned into objects of awe and worship. Hence, God is but the heavenly light of the ruling class on earth. The conflicts between earthly rulers and the people reflect the prevailing social alienation. Zhang then discusses the present-day world, the chief features of which are the conflict as well as the coexistence between capitalist and socialist societies.

In chapter 3, "Religion and Society," Ran Changguang, although sympathetic to the classical Marxist interpretation, criticizes its view of religion as an "opiate of the masses" (p. 161). Ran feels that such a biased view of religion sounds rather too "creed-like" (p. 159). (In China today, to say that something is "creed-like" is to give it a negative connotation, meaning that one is not viewing something in the proper concrete, historical sense). Essentially, this chapter discusses the intimate relation between religion and the economic evolution of society. Following this premise, the progress of religion is traced from tribal to clan to world status. The ancient Romans wanted to see a world religion based on a divinity other than the divinities of the clan. Eventually, Christianity evolved into a world religion (p. 77). But during the medieval period in Europe...