i agree descriptively with this. i simply don’t think it is useful at all to say that he modern japanese or korean state has any correspondence to the tribal chiefdoms of the earlier periods. the modern japanese state definitely is rooted in the tokugawa. one could say its roots go back to the heinan-nara, if you want to push it (japan as a unitary state under the emperor in theory if not fact at least).

The Mongols encountered Christians and members of other religions as they expanded out of NE Asia around the 13th century CE, but my perception is that this was pretty peripheral. Individuals converted, Genghis Khan inquired of them, but the expansion and formation of the structure that ruled in Mongol expansion had a solid enough basis of its own that it didn’t need and wasn’t profoundly influenced by these religions in its own functioning.

hm. this is defensible, but i would deny your use of the word peripheral. several of the tribes which the mongols assimilated into what later became mongol were at least nominally christian by the time of the assimilation (naiman, kerait, some tatars). what i’m pointing to is that the mongol identity as we understand it emerged simultaneously with the rise of genghis khan. the analogy here would be the zulus. before the rise of shaka the zulu were simply a small tribe among many. after shaka and dingane the zulu identity absorbed many other groups who became zulu. the same happened with the ‘mongol’ identity, it absorbed many tribes in what we today call mongolia. some of these were christian. their christianity was loose enough that it dissipated soon enough, so that the mongols converted to lamaism were generally shamanistic. these mongols would have been the descendants of many tribes, not just the small mongol group around 1200.

Among the Japanese, it is hard to say that they are liminal confucians given the really pervasive and express role that Confucianism has in contemporary daily life there (see, e.g., T.R. Reid’s “Confucius Lives Next Door” account of his life in Japan).

no, it is not hard to say they are liminal. they are clearly liminal in relation to the chinese and koreans. classic confucianism, or at least the sort which emerged after the song restoration, privileges civilian over military power. this did not happen in japan, rather, the samurai were confucianized during the tokugawa period. they created a new synthetic version of confucianism which deviated sharply from the neo-confucian ‘orthodoxy’ with the koreans under the joseon perfected (the japanese also tended to deemphasize some of the extreme familialism of neo-confucianism because of the importance of bonds between lords and retainers/vassals). the liminality of the japanese then simply rests on the comparison with the vietnamese. one can debate the details, but since the vietnamese attempted to replicate many aspects of chinese civilian bureaucratic state i would give the nod to them on that score. though i think it might be plausible to argue that the median japanese was/is more confucian than the median vietnamese, but the vietnamese elite more thoroughly accepted the norms chinese high culture than the japanese did.

Pre-Medieval church and state relations in Europe and the Near East are pretty complex. Most of the Roman era and most of the time during the Jewish Kingdoms there was official state support for religion, but that support wasn’t limited to a particular cult. The Romans had many competing religious cults and the philosophy and politics had strong currents that were not firmly rooted in religious ideas. The Justinian Code (which was a digest of earlier Roman judicial decisions from the pagan era) doesn’t appeal to divine authority in its exposition of legal rules (in sharp contast to the legal system of the Goths, e.g., which was not organized on a rationalist basis and had trials by combat, etc.). Jewish Kings built non-Jewish temples for their wives. For a few generations from Constantine on, Roman religious policy was very similar to that of the U.S. First Amendment free exercise clause with an established Christian Church. The Hittites preserved and honored pre-Hittite religious practice as well as their own, just as the Semitic Akkadians preserved and respected pre-Akkadian Sumerian religious practice.

first, i know all of this, and alluded to it explicitly when i note that the distinction with xtian and islam is their monopolization (though i might dispute whether or not politics in rome was rooted in religious ideas, as like the chinese they often viewed that they were subject to divine favor). you don’t need to throw redundant facts into the discussion, so the crux is this portion: Constantine on, Roman religious policy was very similar to that of the U.S. First Amendment free exercise clause with an established Christian Church. i disagree with this strenuously

1) the central state beginning with constantine was very deeply involved with disputes within early christianity. constantius ii patronized the arian faction at the expense of the athanasians. the rise and fall of patronage tracked clearly the political order at the highest summit.

2) if you are making an analogy to the USA because many of these christian emperors before the late 4th century maintained the customary titles of being priests of ancient pagan cults, and continued to subsidize the traditional temples, i’m not sure if it works. they were not neutral, they simply could not deny the authority that institutional paganism retained among the cultural elite, especially the western aristocracy. unlike the american federal gov., the roman empire had two established streams of religion. a christian one which was developing into what we’d term orthodoxy, and an older pagan one which rested upon accumulated cultural capital. between the death of valentinian i and the death of theodosis i that capital was rapidly expended to the point where christianity managed to claim exclusive access to the elite power structure, and the state subsidies for and symbolic acknowledge of pagan institutions disappeared. organized elite paganism persisted for some generations through the support of conservative wealthy senators, but after 400 this class rapidly christianized, and by the late 5th century paganism was the purview of rustics and intellectual philosophers, with no broad based elite support.

The Mongols encountered Christians and members of other religions as they expanded out of NE Asia around the 13th century CE, but my perception is that this was pretty peripheral. Individuals converted, Genghis Khan inquired of them, but the expansion and formation of the structure that ruled in Mongol expansion had a solid enough basis of its own that it didn’t need and wasn’t profoundly influenced by these religions in its own functioning.

I omit reference to Vietnam because I don’t know its history well enough to talk about it. Among the Japanese, it is hard to say that they are liminal confucians given the really pervasive and express role that Confucianism has in contemporary daily life there (see, e.g., T.R. Reid’s “Confucius Lives Next Door” account of his life in Japan).

Pre-Medieval church and state relations in Europe and the Near East are pretty complex. Most of the Roman era and most of the time during the Jewish Kingdoms there was official state support for religion, but that support wasn’t limited to a particular cult. The Romans had many competing religious cults and the philosophy and politics had strong currents that were not firmly rooted in religious ideas. The Justinian Code (which was a digest of earlier Roman judicial decisions from the pagan era) doesn’t appeal to divine authority in its exposition of legal rules (in sharp contast to the legal system of the Goths, e.g., which was not organized on a rationalist basis and had trials by combat, etc.). Jewish Kings built non-Jewish temples for their wives. For a few generations from Constantine on, Roman religious policy was very similar to that of the U.S. First Amendment free exercise clause with an established Christian Church. The Hittites preserved and honored pre-Hittite religious practice as well as their own, just as the Semitic Akkadians preserved and respected pre-Akkadian Sumerian religious practice.

just so you know, in the WVS wave 5, 18% of chinese are atheists, and 17% of taiwanese.

Separation of church and state is quite recent among historically Christian countries — the French Revolution and the American Bill of Rights are really the first time that it appears in post-Roman European history, and in the rest of Europe has often been a 20th century phenomena.

i don’t think that there was separation of ‘church and state’ in any pre-modern society. the shift from paganism to xtianity in 4th century rome was marked by a diversion of customary subsidies from the state to christian churches instead of pagan temples. the main issue with christianity and islam in particular isn’t that they mix church & state, it has been their history of monopolization of exclusive access and patronization from on high.

Japan and China and Korea and the Mongol empire all had well established states before they were reached by modern religious sects such as Christians, Muslims or Buddhists or Indo-European polytheists.

this is clearly false in all cases except china. mongol ethnogenesis occurred in the 13th century, and involved the absorption of christian groups (one of genghis khan’s daughter converted to christianity upon marriage to her tatar christian husband). the states which we understand as korea and japan emerged concurrently and just subsequent to the rise of buddhism. though you’re free to elaborate your chronology with explicit dates instead of asserting, perhaps you start the root of the modern korean state earlier than i do (i place it between 500-1000 in the transition between silla and goreyo). the japanese state i date to the time of the fujiwaras.

In Japan, China and Korea,

don’t forget vietnam! if you include japan, i think you need to include vietnam. unlike korea both have their non-confucian high culture element at tension with confucianism. but unlike japanese the vietnamese accepted civilian bureaucratic confucianism. arguably the japanese are more the liminal confucians than the vietnamese.

Christianity, and in particular, monastic Christianity, happened to be in the right place at the right time to be the institution that preserved Western Civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire and was instrumental in the process of European state formation in the Middle Ages. If the Roman Empire had fallen in 100 AD, instead of a few hundred years later, it would probably be as obscure as Manicheism today and Delphic Temples or Platonist Stoic philosophers might have filled a similar role. Separation of church and state is quite recent among historically Christian countries — the French Revolution and the American Bill of Rights are really the first time that it appears in post-Roman European history, and in the rest of Europe has often been a 20th century phenomena.

The polytheistic/Hindu layer of religious belief in South Asia and Europe also was integral to the Indo-European state formation process, and the Islamic empire’s surge had fusion of church and state as a key element of its governing agenda.

Japan and China and Korea and the Mongol empire all had well established states before they were reached by modern religious sects such as Christians, Muslims or Buddhists or Indo-European polytheists. The leaders of each famously, at one time or the other, actually went so far as to interview representatives of different faiths to see what they were all about.

In Japan, China and Korea, Confucianism has serves a lot of the moral consensus and instruction role that state religions once did in Europe. Japanese governments, for example, actively propagandize Confucian doctrine even now, China used to require Confucian scholarship for all bureaucrats which was an ideological as well as an intellectual test, and Korea has the largest number of self-identified Confucianists in the world, an identification that may have become necessary because of the large percentage of the population that was Christian there which made Confucianist ideas no longer simply “normal” or “nothing”.

1. The high level of atheism among the Chinese is to a great extent a reflection of Chinese Communist ideology, which was expressly atheistic. A similar effect is seen in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, even though the government no longer has a policy of atheism.

2. Immigrant community religious affiliation is frequently atypical of that of the source nation.

In the U.S., Hispanic immigrants are far more likely to be Pentecostals than those back home; while African, Arab, Korean and South Asian immigrants are far more likely to be Christians than the people in the source countries, because in each of countries, Christian organizations provide a conduit and connection to the U.S.

In the U.K. and other European countries in contrast, colonial and multinational business ties, rather than religious ones, drive a larger share of immigration. Also, in Europe, many immigrants from colonial countries, particularly Muslim and Hindu ones, were expressly secularists, in part since secularists were exiled or pressured to leave and in part out of commitment to communism or socialism as what seemed most relevant to the needs of their own country and because the left was more anti-colonialist than the right.

3. Immigrant communities are more involved religiously, in part, because religious institutions are an oasis of homeland cultural preservation. In general, people are more religious when the religion is defending a threatened culture. This is one reason that Christian immigrant communities in the U.K. are more vibrant than the moribund Anglican church which represents a culture that is absolutely secure in the U.K. It explains why the Catholic church (which defended Irish culture from Protestant domination for centuries) is vibrant in Ireland and moribund in France and Brazil, where Catholicism is taken for granted and has not defended local culture. It explains why Evangelical churches which defend a minority Southern White culture are more vibrant than mainline white Protestant churches in the U.S. which are part of the establishment culture.

4. Merely non-religious self-identifications are very different conceptually from expressly atheist or agnostic self-identifications. Among the Japanese, for example, many people who follow Shinto and Buddhist religious traditions to the same extent that an American or European “Christmas and Easter Christian” would observe Christian religious traditions would not identify as “religious” or belonging to a religion, while many Americans and Europeans would identify with the majority Christian denomination of their ancestors. Ditto many Chinese folk religionists.

Lots of people who identify as non-religious in the United States believe in god, pray from time to time, and have ill formed but not questioned religious beliefs, despite not feeling an affiliation with a religious denomination. A common rubric is “spirtual but not religious.” Also, lots of non-religious people are truly secular, but merely by default and not as a result of having considered and rejected theism, so they have less to say about it (something you see in lots of people who grew up in secular as opposed to religious families).

In contrast, most self-identified atheists and agnostics, including “New Atheists” came to their views through deliberate philosophical consideration and actively rejected a default religious choice. This carries both a convert’s fervor, and an agenda as opposed to apathy.

5. Re: “In the USA mainstream liberals like Josh Marshall look skeptically upon the ‘odd confluence’ between Christian religious fundamentalists and New Atheists in their attitudes toward Islam.”

There is another similar odd confluence between”New Atheists” and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Both reject a great many vestigal and subtle religiously influenced cultural parts of American life (e.g. rejecting celebration of Christmas involving Santa Claus and Christmas Trees), the atheists because it is Christian and the JW’s because these are seen as pagan or Roman Catholic embelishments of the the faith of the early Christian Church.

USE THE SAME AXIS SCALE. The way you have it is harder to read at best, and deceptive if we consider that most people don’t know or won’t bother to see what’s going on beyond the amount of blue on the page. This is particularly relevant in the thumbnails, where it makes it look like there was a massive uptake in the results between the two samples.

Thanks!

Some of this is a rehash of the Muslim League / Jinnah arguments of the 40s. In India, “Muslim” is more a nationality than a religion. Even syncretists and athiests have to pick their religious team. As Jinnah did in the 30s (although only after his duaghter married a Parsi). You can be irreligious, but within a communal framework.

I used to think this was a India-specific thing, but thinking about “Hui” as a nationality, not a religion, in China, and the way Muslim Cham segregate from Hindu Cham, I wonder if it is a Muslim-specific thing. On the other hand, Muslim African Americans don’t identify as a separate nationality from Christian African Americans, so practice varies.

Missionaries entered China much earlier than Formosa, and were influential and tolerated because of their technical knowledge, e.g cannon manufacture. I’m talking Jesuits, not recent American cults. Check when Macau was settled by Portuguese vs when Formosa was settled by Dutch, then get back to me.

#38 Thanks Shane.

Polite question – have you ever been to any part of China? Apart from Taiwan, I mean.

Second polite question – name the current top guy in Taiwan and the platform he was elected on.

#18 – Sorry, I meant Nepalese export.

Having said that, among my own compatriots, were I to characterize “atheists” they would be modally female, a high percentage non-heterosexual, and … this is interesting as I think about it … whiter than the overall US population but less white than the religious people I know who are mainly Jews and Christians.

I think all this concern about whiteness is largely irrelevant, however. White people are pretty much done for anyway, medium and long term. They got lucky with the ozone layer coming back but they just don’t have the admixture for long term population survival, and brown people are born at a higher rate than white people can produce ammo. Or so it is said.

let’s not get into arguments based on no disagreement. i wouldn’t say it’s completely crazy. you seemed to be presenting it as a plausible middle range value when your source even admitted it was a high bound.

Many of the Mongols were Christian and took Christianity to China so the North of China has a longer history of Christianity than the south

this is really irrelevant. christianity predates the mongols, nestorianism was present in xian in the 7th century. the mongols had no greater or less effect on christianity in china from what i know aside from giving more purchase to roman catholics because of their alan mercenaries and such. rather, they probably faciliated islam more because they brought so many central asians as part of their bureaucracy (the majority opinion seems to be that the hui date mostly to this period, not earlier). this would not be theoretically predicted, because as you note many mongols were christian, but at that time few were muslim.

In East Asia, Christianity doesn’t have a state champion, and it has an association with exploitative Westerners, so its persistence and undoubted rise (although still at a low level) is definitely interesting.

i can somewhat agree with this. but please note that the chiang family and lee teng hui were christian. until chen Shui-bian taiwan had not had a non-christian head of time to my knowledge. and from what i have heard the chiang’s somewhat privileged chrisitanity, not there’s a lot of debate how sincerely they were christians in the first place, especially kai-shek and his son. you know korea’s situation, so you must know that the recent protestant presidents of korea in the 1990s and the current one has been accused of favoritism toward christianity (the catholics and ex-catholics between not so much). additionally, hong kong’s christian church did receive some favoritism for a long time, something which abated in the years before transfer.

i can agree with much of your argument. an independent case is singapore, and to a lesser extent malaysia. large chinese xtian minorities have developed there too. though in both cases it is produced a counter-response from the buddhist temples. you can look up the singaporean stuff on singstat; it shows a switch from daosim/folk religion among educated chinese to irreligiosity, christianity, and buddhism. some of the same occurred in taiwan too, in particular a shift from daoism to buddhism. in indonesia most of the chinese are christian now, while in thailand they are theravada buddhist.

i think in china proper christianity has a lot of potential. though south korea probably gives us a window into the theoretical high bound outcome in a confucian society. in some ways taiwan is a worst case scenario, where christianity has been pretty stagnant since hte 70s. singapore is somewhere in the middle. though i am skeptical that there are 100 million christians in an orthodox sense, i’d give a 30% chance that there will be 100 million orthodox christians in china in the next generation. i think xtianity in china is at the beginning of the s-shaped growth curve.

Wikipedia – Christian

Japan – 2%
Taiwan 4.5% (majority of whom are Taiwanese aboriginal)
Hong Kong – 8%
Vietnam – 8%
Singapore – 14%
South Korea – 29% (most lived in the north before fleeing south after the war)

I recognise there are a lot of estimates for China. Looking at these figures, however, the idea that 10% of Chinese citizens are Christian doesn’t sound completely crazy. A figure at Japan’s level of 2% would be 26 million. I think it’s unlikely to be at 2% in China because China’s culturally much more open than Japan, that’s the case today and historically. 14% is too high because that would be higher than any of the numbers we have as estimates. I’d go with 8%: 104 million is a realistic figure because it would be similar to Hong Kong and Vietnam.

Many of the Mongols were Christian and took Christianity to China so the North of China has a longer history of Christianity than the south. Colonial influences in Hong Kong and missionaries to the southern and eastern coastal cities, therefore do not present the entire story of Chinese Christianity. Interestingly, South Korean Christianity was an indigenous movement from the beginning – as much as it can be for a religion then based in the West and assisted by Westerners translating and teaching. Christianity first spread among workers (textbook example of Christianity offering something to poor and oppressed) and Yi Sung-hun set up the first prayer house in the late 18th C. The immediate surge of Christians in South Korea after the Korean war came from mass migration of Christians from North to South, rather than Westerners converting Southerners.

In East Asia, Christianity doesn’t have a state champion, and it has an association with exploitative Westerners, so its persistence and undoubted rise (although still at a low level) is definitely interesting. I’m unconvinced that there is anything in the East Asian hardware that keeps the majority irreligious and Chinese non-whites the backbone of atheism*. In this case it may be cultural, Christianity has had to start from scratch in a place where other powerful belief systems have monopoly. There are plenty of poor, oppressed peasants in China.

*Or maybe Christianity is gaining at the expense of other religions rather than or more than it gains at the expense of atheism, so atheism will keep its relatively strong following. Don’t have any data on what the former beliefs of East Asian Christians were.

the word ‘pagan’ is a negation. it doesn’t include things which necessarily share anything in common. hinduism is pagan because it isn’t abrahamic, but really it is a complex religion with a lot of philosophical and institutional robusticity. if roman state paganism had lasted longer it may have developed the same. as it is, christianity overlaid itself on the roman state, and evolved in its own way, which was very different from decentralized ‘primitive christianity.’ there is an argument that india’s non-muslim aspect persisted more robustly than iran’s because the former’s state religion was more dependent on the patrons at the center and commanding heights. in contrast, indian hinduism was distributed enough that the muslim elite couldn’t really decapitate it. too many heads (india also had more strategic depth, evidenced by intact medieval hindu temples in south india).

I guess in the case of Rome the change happened with the help of a totalitarian dictatorship. And the change was in the wrong direction anyway.

pre-modern gov. couldn’t really be totalitarian. didn’t have the means. see this book how it happened in part:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674016033//geneexpressio-20

So you’d pick 4th century Rome as the closest European analogy to modern India. Presumably the Mughal Era would be even closer, since the Muslim’s were actually in charge back then (I’m assuming you’re drawing the analogy between Roman Christianity and Indian Islam.)
Any ideas why Hinduism held out so much better than Roman Paganism?

Also interesting that religious demographics changed like crazy in the last century of the Roman empire even though you say about the presumably similar South Asia: “All the Hemant Mehtas and Alorn Shahas will not change the structural parameters which make atheism, and irreligious attitudes in general, taboo, discouraged, or rare, among South Asians. ” I guess in the case of Rome the change happened with the help of a totalitarian dictatorship. And the change was in the wrong direction anyway.