CRASSH

Because of the wide variety of ways the Chinese were engaged in religious practices on the eve of the great transition from the traditional dynastic period to the modern period, it is often very difficult to make blanket statements about the exact impact of secularism and modernity on Chinese religious practices. Did religion decline generally? Did Buddhism suffer as much as Daoism? To what extent was Chinese Buddhism ‘Protestantised’? Why did all attempts to ‘congregationalise’ Chinese religious communities fail? Was the Communist party-state atheist or simply intolerant of rival social organisations (which religious organisations invariably were)? My paper examines programmatically the impact of secularism and modernity on the five modalities of doing religion (scriptural/discursive, self-cultivational, liturgical, immediate-practical and social-relational) that prevailed in late imperial China to see how differently each modality fared throughout the 20th century.