A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989 by John Craig William Keating (review)

JOHN CRAIG WILLIAM KEATING, A Protestant Church in Communist China: Moore Memorial Church Shanghai, 1949–1989. Studies in Missionaries and Christianity in China. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012. xii, 305 pp. US$85 (hb). ISBN 978-1-61146-090-2 This book aims to fill a gap in the study of Christianity in China through a case study of a single church that was the largest Protestant church before 1949 (p. 228). Prominently situated across from People’s Square in Shanghai and topped by a huge neon cross, Moore Memorial church (MMC or Mu’en tang 沐恩堂) has been a central site for Chinese Protestantism in the missionary, Mao, and reform eras. Before 1949, MMC missionaries testified against British forces that had killed Chinese, upending claims that all Protestant missionaries supported colonial domination against rising Chinese nationalism. After 1949, the church was a launching pad for Chinese pastors who assumed national leadership in the official ‘‘patriotic’’ religious association for Protestants, the Chinese Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement association (TSPM, or 中國基督教三自愛國運動協會). The book draws on missionary papers written before 1949, official Chinese government documents (including some from the Shanghai Municipal Archives), and Chinese church records, or whatever survived the Cultural Revolution. The author also conducted more than forty interviews in Chinese and in English with surviving church members, leaders, and others associated with the congregation in China and in the United States. Each chapter also references a surprisingly wide array of books and research articles. Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss the history of Protestant Christianity before 1949 and then in 1950 and 1951, when the church ran its own affairs. Chapter 4 examines the key part played by Jiang Changchuan 江長川, an MMC pastor from 1936 to 1941, whom Keating helpfully labels a ‘‘shrewd operator’’ (p. 245) for sending private messages of concern to foreign missionaries at the same time that he was publicly attacking them for foreign imperialism (pp. 95–96). Chapters 5 and 6 cover the church in duress from 1958 to the end of the Mao period in the late 1970s. Chapter 7 discusses the reopening of official churches from 1979 to 1989, and chapter 8 summarizes the book’s findings. One overall finding is that neither severe critics of the official church as a regime ‘‘puppet’’ nor its supporters have gotten the church-state story right (p. 226). After such a tantalizing judgment, however, Keating ultimately finds that MMC people made compromises but were ‘‘genuine’’ Christians (p. 228). While this conclusion is not especially unusual, the book is still helpful for adding new fuel to ongoing debates in church-state relations and offering many details that made reading it a pleasure. Scholars have proposed a range of explanations for the growth of Protestant Christianity, because numbers have exploded more than seven-fold in thirty years, by the most conservative, Party-state estimates (a careful 2011 Pew survey puts the increase at nearly twentyfold in thirty years, to 58 million Protestants in official and unregistered ‘‘house’’ churches). The TSPM claims that the indigenous and united character of the church is responsible for this rapid growth, which Keating dismisses because many official churches retain Western styles of worship, and 228 BOOK REVIEWS services are often divided by denomination within a single church. MMC itself holds ‘‘amalgamated’’ (p. 191) worship services and congregants prefer the Western hymns, rather than Chinese ones (pp. 185–186). Keating also rejects the idea that Protestants who attended illegal gatherings in the 1970s later filled official churches in the 1980s (p. 191), because he imagines that, if this were the case, then in the 1980s illegal gatherings should have ceased while official churches should be full. He ignores the possibility that Chinese who became Christians during the 1970s when no public worship was allowed came to enjoy the ‘‘safety’’ of reopened official churches. New Christians then took their places in unregistered gatherings. Instead, he prefers the explanation that the relaxation of the socio-political climate has allowed Protestant numbers (along with those of other religious groups) to rise, but this does not explain why Chinese should choose Protestant Christianity over many other religious alternatives. Another fascinating dimension...