Author: Andrew Sullivan

Richard Madsen notices that, according to a recent Gallup poll, 47% of the Chinese population claims to be atheist – yet other surveys demonstrate that nearly 85% of the country “carry out rituals to honor ancestors, seek out good fortune, ward off evil, celebrate festivals, and accumulate merit for a good afterlife.” So what gives?

An answer is to be found in the social nature of indigenous Chinese religion—it is more about belonging than belief. The collapse of the commune and state industrial work unit systems has made the search for forms of community not controlled by the state more pressing than ever. These alternative forms are typically established through myth and ritual, which meaningfully anchor persons to families and communities. But participants in the myth-telling and ritual performance might understand them in very diverse ways, including skepticism about the truth of the myths that they tell and the efficacy of the rituals in which they engage. However, in order to remain members of the wider community, they practice them despite their doubts. If among the middle classes of the West it is now common for religion to take the form of “belief without belonging,” in China it may just as commonly take the form of belonging without belief.

If we see Chinese religion as a matter of community belonging rather than one of spiritual belief, we might gain a clearer perspective on how and why religion in China has been growing and transforming. Old forms of community are dying and new forms are yet to be born—a liminal situation reflected in the kaleidoscopic interplay of old and new forms of religion.

 

Relatedly, the Chinese Communist Party may be moving on from its longstanding treatment of religion as purely a threat to stability:

 

The view that religion represents a positive force in civil society is gaining ground, not only among religious believers, but also within the Communist Party itself, in part thanks to the patient and often courageous work of the epistemic community of Chinese scholars who have studied closely and objectively religious life and its evolutions, and who have focused in particular on the philanthropic activities of religious associations during the Republican period and among overseas Chinese communities.

The government’s facilitation of growing involvement on the part of religious organizations in philanthropy and disaster relief, including health care and poverty alleviation, indicates that the Party has listened to these scholars and understood the significance for society of religious adherents’ beliefs and values, and as a result has changed its approach to religion’s place in contemporary China. The Party increasingly looks at it as a resource not incompatible with progress and capable of contributing to social stability. Local government support for the rebuilding of Buddhist temples and for the expansion of the latter’s charities stand as a good example of this new appreciation. The newfound appraisal of traditional rituals known as popular beliefs represent another instance of this change of perspective in the state’s relationship with religion: dismissed until the 1970s as “feudal superstitions,” they are embraced today as a “national heritage” worthy of support.

The Muslim community in particular is making gains:

As one of China’s five official religions, Islam has gained much vigor in the three decades since the reform. In the process of urbanization, for example, rural Muslim migrants reenergized existing Muslim communities in cities like Guangzhou. New Muslim communities in urban centers have also grown at an unprecedented rate. The growing ties between Chinese Muslims and the heartland of the Islamic world are deemed useful within the framework of “building the religious/cultural stage to sing the economic opera” (文化搭台，经济唱戏). Hui Muslims, as the largest Muslim ethnic minority, have particularly benefited from the tide of religious revival and have played an important role in micro-level business activities in the China-Middle East trade because of their religious affinity and knowledge of Arabic.

Rachel Nuwer describes the work of art historian Paul Koudounaris, whose book, Heavenly Bodies, documents how the bones of Christian martyrs in Roman catacombs were transformed into bejeweled relics, which were displayed in churches throughout Europe. How Vatican investigators determined which remains belonged to a departed saint:

[T]he process of ascertaining which of the thousands of skeletons belonged to a martyr was a nebulous one. If they found “M.” engraved next to a corpse, they took it to stand for “martyr,” ignoring the fact that the initial could also stand for “Marcus,” one of the most popular names in ancient Rome. If any vials of dehydrated sediment turned up with the bones, they assumed it must be a martyr’s blood rather than perfume, which the Romans often left on graves in the way we leave flowers today. The Church also believed that the bones of martyrs cast off a golden glow and a faintly sweet smell, and teams of psychics would journey through the corporeal tunnels, slip into a trance and point out skeletons from which they perceived a telling aura. After identifying a skeleton as holy, the Vatican then decided who was who and issued the title of martyr.

Once a skeleton was selected, highly-skilled monks and nuns would prepare it for presentation to a congregation, a process that could take up to three years:

Each convent would develop its own flair for enshrouding the bones in gold, gems and fine fabrics. The women and men who decorated the skeletons did so anonymously, for the most part. But as Koudounaris studied more and more bodies, he began recognizing the handiwork of particular convents or individuals. “Even if I couldn’t come up with the name of a specific decorator, I could look at certain relics and tie them stylistically to her handiwork,” he says.

Nuns were often renowned for their achievements in clothmaking. They spun fine mesh gauze, which they used to delicately wrap each bone. This prevented dust from settling on the fragile material and created a medium for attaching decorations. Local nobles often donated personal garments, which the nuns would lovingly slip onto the corpse and then cut out peepholes so people could see the bones beneath. Likewise, jewels and gold were often donated or paid for by a private enterprise. To add a personal touch, some sisters slipped their own rings onto a skeleton’s fingers.

Read the recent Dish thread on relics, “Saints on Display,” here.

(Photo of Saint Munditia’s relics, found in St. Peter’s Church in Munich, Germany, via Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew O’Hehir watched God Loves Uganda:

[Murdered Ugandan LGBT activist] David Kato and other victimized and persecuted LGBT people in Uganda and other heavily evangelized African nations seem to be paying the price for the fact that [preacher] Lou Engle and people like him are gradually losing the culture wars at home. Uganda is their biggest success so far, but the long-term vision involves a wave of Christian revival that will sweep out of Africa into the first world, driving back the apparently victorious forces of secularism. But even Engle and his movement, although they strongly oppose gay-rights legislation, did not propose the death penalty for homosexuals. Credit for that belongs in large part to Scott Lively, an unhinged American “ex-gay” leader whose extended rants about how gays had caused the Nazi holocaust (exactly how I do not know) and now sought the destruction of traditional African family life found an enormous audience among Ugandan officials, politicians and teachers.

In May, John G. Stackhouse, Jr. criticized this argument:

From first to last, the anti-homosexuality campaign in Uganda is attributed to the imposition of Western values. But anti-homosexuality is clearly not a distinctive Western value. It is rife in tribal cultures in Africa and already in the outlook of Ugandans when the recent wave of American evangelical extremists arrived. Only such facts can explain the receptivity given to such people as Scott Lively (who apparently spoke for five hours with the Ugandan Parliament) and the resulting widespread and violent anti-homosexuality in government and popular media. By comparison, when evangelicals did dominate North American societies in the nineteenth century, sodomy was illegal, but was not punished by anything approaching life imprisonment, let alone the death penalty. So the tired trope of imperialistic foreigners corrupting the noble savages rears its head again and must once again be dispatched by a little careful thought.

In an interview earlier this year with Queerty, Williams discussed what inspired him to make the film:

I have a strong religious background, and grew up singing in the choir of my family church.  I have always been interested in the power of religion as a force for both good and evil.  My last film [Music by Prudence] took place in Zimbabwe and, while I was shooting there, I was struck by how popular conservative Christianity is in sub-Saharan Africa. After I read about Uganda’s now famous “Kill the Gays” bill, I wanted to explore the religious forces behind it.  I’m not interested in films that preach to the converted— I always wanted to make a film that starts a dialogue within the religious community.

Previous Dish coverage of gay persecution in Uganda here, here and here.

In an excerpt from his new book Perv, Jesse Bering illustrates the ongoing debate over sexual deviancy’s relation to mental illness:

[T]here was the tale of Armin Meiwes. That name might dimly light up in your frontal lobes as a distant headliner best forgotten, but to remind you—and apologies for doing so—Meiwes, a computer repairman by trade, was the German cannibalistic sexual sadist who, in the spring of 2001, found a willingly edible sexual masochist for himself named Bernd Jürgen Brandes. “Looking for a well-built 18- to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed,” read Meiwes’s personal ad on the Cannibal Café website (which, you’ll probably be glad to know, is a website no more). And Brandes, it seems, was looking to be thoroughly digested. That old psychopath Cupid couldn’t have arranged for a more tragic crossing of these lovers’ paths. … From the video footage—the whole awful thing was taped from start to finish—it’s apparent that Meiwes (the eater) didn’t coerce Brandes (the eatee) at all. If anything, the coercion was done by the masochist, not the sadist. Brandes even begged a hesitating Meiwes to bite off his penis. …

I’m by no means suggesting that both the S and the M parts of this equation weren’t disturbed men. You don’t need to be a mental health expert to see that. Yet when we try to apply the ”DSM- 5’s” criteria of pain and non-consent, there’s some tension here, since Meiwes had explicitly sought out a consenting adult partner. And when you combine consent with a masochist’s apparent death wish, well, you can see how a forensic psychiatrist’s job can be daunting.

Bering discusses what he learned from writing his book:

Over the 18 long months in which it was in production, Perv … evolved from being a light scientific treatment of weird sex to a book with an actual moral message. And that message turned out to be embarrassingly obvious, really. As a society, we’ve been dawdling over the irrelevant questions of what’s “normal” and “natural” for far too long. To make any real moral traction, we must abandon the rhetoric of righteousness and instead turn our efforts to clarifying, using science rather than scripture, laws, or even (and especially) our own gut feelings, how a sexual act or orientation is harmful to those involved. In my book, at least, doing harm is the only thing that makes a person a pervert.

Last year he answered a bunch of Ask Anything questions surrounding his previous book, Why is the Penis Shaped Like That? Meanwhile, on the video seen above:

Zoo is a 2007 documentary film based on the life and death of Kenneth Pinyan, an American man who died of peritonitis due to perforation of the colon after engaging in receptive anal sex with a horse. The film’s public debut was at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, where it was one of 16 winners out of 856 candidates. Following Sundance, it was selected as one of the top five American films to be presented at the prestigious Directors Fortnight sidebar at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

The film was made with co-operation of the two men who took Pinyan to the hospital, as well as other friends of his, in the attempt to explore the life and death of the man, as well as those who came to the farm near Enumclaw for similar reasons, beyond the public understanding of the media. It does contain explicit material of sexual activities, but only in the view of video footage shown on a small television screen.

Part one is above. The rest is here.