Religion is often considered a big deal in dating in America. There are whole dating websites devoted to members of a single religion. Along with one’s political affiliation, religious belief is often a significant factor in the selection of a life partner. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Shared values are important in a meaningful relationship, and one’s religion and politics are, in America, a reasonable indicator of one’s value scheme.
So how does the situation stand in China? There is a religion area in the CLM profile checklist: how much weight should one give to this? If the woman self-describes as atheist or agnostic and you are a Christian, will this create a problem? What about a Buddhist? And what exactly does it mean to be a Christian in China anyway?
The truth about religious belief in China admits of no simple answer. I was reminded of this by an essay in the New York Review of Books critiquing four recent books about religion in China (titles below). The article starts with a brief history lesson worth repeating: “Although China is often perceived even by Chinese as an atheist nation, yet for millennia the country was held together by its spiritual life, a shared system of ritual and belief that helped unite a country divided by harsh geography and mutually incomprehensible dialects. By the end of the nineteenth century, China had a million temples. Beginning in 1898 with reforms of the Dowager Empress, the attitude towards religion grew much more hostile and after the 1911 revolution, China turned against its traditional religious/spiritual systems. Even before the Communist takeover in 1949 half of the country’s one million temples had been converted to other uses or destroyed; over the next thirty years virtually all the rest were wiped out.”
According to the author of the review, the impact of this onslaught against religion has been devastating. As in the West, religion in China had served as an important check on natural human selfishness. The complete loss of the moral force of religion combined with the arrival of an amoral economic system (capitalism) founded on self-interest has provided the conditions for a perfect moral storm. The result is that “the Chinese now live in a nation without an accepted code of moral obligations.” The latest evidence of this is perhaps the tragedy of Yue Yue, where a child who had been run over by a car not once but twice was ignored by dozens of passerby and left to die in the street. Society abhors a vacuum as much as nature, and to a large degree it is religion that has stepped in to fill this value void, so much so that, “It’s no exaggeration to say that China is in the grip of a religious revival analogous to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century.”
You can view the article to see some of the statistics on the growth of religion in contemporary China. It is pretty impressive. But what does all this mean with respect to dating Chinese women?
To begin, most Chinese are still pretty “suibian” (whatever: 随便) when it comes to religion. Even if atheism is listed in the profile box, it is usually not a committed atheism such as you are likely to find in an American who self-describes as an atheist. In part this has to do with a different conception of truth. When it comes to issues of value–be it morality, religion, or politics—we in the West tend to have a dualistic conception of truth. A claim is either true or it is not; abortion is either moral or immoral. But this is simply not how the Chinese view the world. Although I’ve written about this, I would recommend two excellent books—Lin Yu Tang’s “My Country and My People” and Richard Nisbett’s “The Geography of Thought”—as a defense of the claim that truth is simply conceived of differently in the East. Just because one claim is true does not mean its opposite is false. Each claim may contain part of the truth, or from a wider perspective each may be equally true, or equally false. In any case, you are simply not going to find a lot of moral absolutism in Chinese thought, and this applies to the situation of religious belief (or lack thereof). The woman who checks the atheist or agnostic box has probably been to her share of Buddhist and Taoist temples.
The situation does not change that much when you move from agnosticism/atheism to Buddhism, which in my survey is the most popular positive religious view that is checked in the profiles. The typical Chinese Buddhist has little concern with the doctrines of Buddhism. Don’t expect and understanding or even knowledge of such fundamentals as the four noble truths or the eight fold path. Instead, to be a Buddhist or Taoist means little more than going to a temple on a semi-regular basis and thinking Buddha or Lao Tzu a pretty bright guy.
About the only place where the answer in the profile box is likely to be an issue is if “Christian” is marked, as it increasingly is these days. Those who mark Christian are much more likely to be serious about their Christianity than the atheists or Buddhists are about their respective creeds, although even here this is more the result of Chinese pragmatism than American absolutism. As was explained to me by a recent convert to Christianity with whom I exchanged quite a few e-mails, the main reason her and her friends converted to Catholicism was the need for a moral foundation, not any belief in the inherent truth of the system. Which reminds me of one last story about religion and China worth telling (and which I got from James Fallows’s blog). It seems the Chinese were building a railroad in Saudia Arabia over some sacred ground. Since only Muslims could walk on the ground, the completion of the project seemed endangered—until the Chinese all converted to Islam.
Recent books about religion in China:
The Religious Question in Modern China by Vincent Goosaert and David A. Palmer (University of Chicago)
Religion in China:Survival and Revival under Communist Rule by Fenggang Yang (Oxford)
God is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China by Liao Yiwu (HarperOne)
Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China by Lian Xi (Yale University Press)
Great story about building the railway in China. No different than changing the style of clothing for a few months.
It is all on the surface for an outside observer - a foreigner - to see while the real stuff is happening out of sight and beyond the understanding of those who don't know. Saying and doing things to accomodate foreigners does not require giving up any personal belief.