The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia by Kenneth Dean & Peter van der Veer

Author:Kenneth Dean & Peter van der Veer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Conclusion

As previous policies on communal religion proved to be failures in many aspects, the Chinese government has come to realize that they, as stated in the Opinion, “have to face up to the objective reality that folk belief will exist for a long time.” The temples of communal religion pose new problems for the rapid urbanization of China on top of many existing issues. The Chinese government has, therefore, co-opted the concept of “folk belief” and has been experimenting with the legalization of territorial temples as “site of folk belief activity” across the country. Those local experiments suggest that the central government could very soon issue new national regulations on communal religion.

Yet the new move is just the extension of the “cultural turn,” not necessarily a paradigm shift in secular governance of religion. It did not fundamentally break new ground in legalization of communal religion. “Site of folk belief activity” is a major advance but it is not essentially different from previous legal niches. The government also insists on the difference between “religion” and “folk belief” and has not removed the discourse of “superstition” from official proclamations, indicating the lingering influence of twentieth-century secular nationalism. The new designation “site of folk belief activity” nevertheless, for its potential to include territorial temples, could lead to certain new developments in the relations of local communities to the state with regard to communal religion. It could also potentially change the landscape of communal religion as well as communal religion’s relationship to other religious traditions. In particular, it could have real impacts on the operation of Daoist associations and therefore has provoked a strong negative response from the latter.

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