Is Chinese (Lack of) Religion Exceptional?

Abstract

China is widely considered to be the least religious country in the world or a country where “religion” has never existed. The historical, anthropological, and sociological evidence makes it clear that religion is not absent from China and that, indeed, the vast majority of Chinese people have some type of belief or practice that anthropologists or sociologists would define as religious. However, most Chinese people do not consider such beliefs or practices to be religious. In this chapter, I formulate a substantive definition of religion and adopt a bottom-up methodology to demonstrate that, in everyday practices and conceptions, as shown by historical and ethnographic data, the basic building blocks of religion in China are much the same as elsewhere. It is at the higher-level modes of organization of these basic building blocks—institutionally, conceptually, and politically—that we find unique patterns in different cultures and civilizations, in China as elsewhere.