Honors Theses
Date of Award
2008
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Croft Institute for International Studies
First Advisor
Gang Guo
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
In the late 1970s, China emerged from its Cultural Revolution as a society ostensibly free from religion. In the subsequent years, however, religious belief has grown at an astounding rate, so much so that by the year 2005, around 31.4% of Chinese adults identified themselves as religious. Given the size of China’s population, this percentage translates to over three hundred million believers. Perhaps most remarkably, not only traditional religions such as Buddhism but foreign ones—Protestantism in particular—have reflected this increase. Such rapid growth has often astonished observers and left them struggling to explain the phenomenon: in a largely secular society with an atheistic government, what is attracting people to religion? The Chinese government recognizes five official religions Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam—but 1 have focused my study on only three of these: Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Buddhism is currently China s largest religion and remains its most influential. Protestantism has been the fastest growing religion over the past three decades, and both Chinese and foreign scholars have performed extensive research on the phenomenon. Finally, while Catholicism lacks both Buddhism’s prestige and Protestantism’s growth, to many Western observers it remains closely linked with Protestantism, with the two religions often being discussed together as “Christianity.” While many scholars provided various explanations for this remarkable growth over the last thirty years, very few appear to have actually tested these hypotheses against statistical data. I have, therefore, selected nine of the hypotheses, which fall into two broad theories, and attempt to test their validity using the 1993 Survey on Social Mobility and Social Change in China, a country-wide probability survey that includes a question about religious belief. I have divided this thesis into two parts: the first section compaies the history of these three religions since the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949, while the second section uses statistical data from the 1993 survey to test the validity of the nine different hypotheses about the appeal of religion in post-Mao China. The analysis of these hypotheses shows that while China s religious are largely young and female, from rural areas and with low-levels of education, religious believers are actually, on the whole, little different from the general population.
Recommended Citation
Rogers, Megan Christine, "At the Roots of Faith: A Comparative Analysis of the History and Appeal of Buddhism and Christianity in Comtemporary China" (2008). Honors Theses. 2410.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/2410
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