Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation

9. Secularization as Religious Restructuring: Statist Institutionalization of Chinese Buddhism and Its Paradoxes

233 This chapter undertakes to analyze the statist institutionalization of Buddhism in modern China and suggests that there are some paradoxes in the process of secularization, and in the relationship between the state and religion. I would like to show that secularization in China, understood as a state policy to restrain religion, may also produce what is, in essence, contrary to its aim: that is to say, some constructive consequences for religion . In fact, secularization could be understood to be a process of social restructuring, rather than a unidirectional decline of religion or religious institutions. In the sociology of religion, “secularization” is a highly contentious concept with its specific historical roots in Christian Europe. Therefore, I first propose an approach to secularization that focuses on the power relations between religion and the state, so as to be able to clarify the specific political and religious contexts of secularization in modern China. Next, coupling sociological interpretation with a historical perspective, I illustrate how Buddhism was institutionalized, and therefore secularized by the Communist state. Finally, I analyze the paradoxical effects produced in this secularization process when the social conditions of the state-religion interaction changed in the post-Mao era. Rethinking Secularization in a Chinese Context Toward a Theory of Secularization as Religio-Political Struggle Following the resurgence of new religious movements and the revival of traditional religions in many parts of the world since the 1970s, the classical theory of secularization that argued for the decline of religion in mod9 Secularization as Religious Restructuring Statist Institutionalization of Chinese Buddhism and Its Paradoxes Ji Zhe 汲喆 UC-Yang-rev.indd 233 UC-Yang-rev.indd 233 8/27/2008 1:02:00 PM 8/27/2008 1:02:00 PM 234 / Ji Zhe ernization has been openly questioned. More recently, in the last twenty years, a number of scholars have suggested some interesting adjustments to secularization theory. These have included Karel Dobbelaere’s (1981) multidimensional concept of secularization, which proposes that we must distinguish between different levels of secularization—the societal level, the church level, and the individual level—and José Casanova’s (1994) approach to secularization as a set of three independent propositions: the differentiation of the secular sphere from religious norms and institutions, the decline of beliefs and practices, and the relegation of religion to the private sphere. Other scholars have supported the “deinstitutionalized” paradigm of secularization, which argues that the deep differentiation of social structures in modernity and the increase in individual autonomy have led to the marginalization of religious institutions and the privatization of religion in modern society (Luckmann 1967). This understanding of secularization refers not only to the loss of the power of once-dominant religious institutions over the whole society (Martin 1978; Dobbelaere 1987), but also to an overlapping of two tendencies: the “institutional deregulation” of historical religions on the one side, and the proliferation of new social expressions of religion on the other (sects, the New Age movement, personal “bricolage” of beliefs, etc.) as the means by which modern individuals constitute their beliefs (Hervieu-Léger 1993, 1999). To a certain degree, these revisions do alleviate the often glaring discrepancies between classical secularization theory and the actual religious landscape around the globe. However, it would seem that they still cannot resolve an essential problem in existing secularization theory, namely, its entrenched Eurocentrism. Like the classical theory of secularization, which is principally based on the experiences of European Christianity since the Enlightenment, these new secularization theories are fundamentally conceived in and for the Christian West. That is to say, they remain essentially concerned with Western models of religious change, such as the separation between church and state, the distinction between public and the private spheres, and the tension between religious institutions and individualism. They do not account for situations where there is no “church” to speak of or no received separation between public and private, nor do they address the possibility that, in some places in the world, modernity and secularization might produce a new kind of institutionalization, rather than deinstitutionalization or privatization of religion. It would seem that any promising theory of secularization must be able to undergo the trial of a global challenge, and be more open to diverse social configurations and sensitive to particular histories of different reliUC -Yang-rev.indd 234 UC-Yang-rev.indd 234 8/27/2008 1:02:00 PM 8/27/2008 1:02:00 PM Secularization...