Zhang Xinying: Several Insights into Atheism and the Sinicization of Religion from the Perspective of the "Second Integration"
[Editor's Note] General Secretary Xi Jinping first proposed the important viewpoint of combining the basic tenets of Marxism with China’s specific realities and with China’s fine traditional culture at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China. The Resolution of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee and the report to the 20th CPC National Congress reiterated these "two combinations" [1]. The most critical theoretical breakthrough of the "two combinations" lies in the "second combination." On June 2, 2023, at a symposium on cultural inheritance and development, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "The 'second combination' is another liberation of the mind [2], enabling us to fully utilize the precious resources of China’s fine traditional culture within a broader cultural space to explore theoretical and institutional innovations oriented toward the future." He emphasized that Chinese culture has a long history and Chinese civilization is extensive and profound. Only by comprehensively and deeply understanding the history of Chinese civilization can we more effectively promote the creative transformation and innovative development of China’s fine traditional culture, more vigorously advance the development of socialist culture with Chinese characteristics, and build a modern civilization for the Chinese nation. To study and implement the spirit of this important speech, the editorial department of Science and Atheism organized a special symposium on "The 'Second Combination' and Atheism" on July 9. Among the contributions, the speech by Research Fellow Zhang Xinying, former Deputy Director of the Institute of World Religions at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), was titled "Several Perceptions on Atheism and the Sinicization of Religion from the Perspective of the 'Second Combination'." The main contents are as follows.
Today, as the entire Party deeply conducts thematic education on studying and implementing Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, it is the bounden duty of China's Marxist religious studies researchers to earnestly study and grasp the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important speech at the symposium on cultural inheritance and development, and to truly comprehend the profound meaning of "the 'second combination' is another liberation of the mind." Moreover, it provides us with a rare opportunity to further reflect on and answer a series of theoretical questions. These questions concern how to achieve the unification of inheriting and promoting China’s fine traditional culture with the dissemination and popularization of Marxist atheism, and how to promote these alongside the persistence in the direction of the Sinicization of religion in the construction of a modern civilization for the Chinese nation. This holds practical significance for enriching and deepening the theoretical and practical innovation of the "second combination." Key points include: given that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism are generally regarded as the "three pillars" of traditional Chinese culture, can we consider that China’s fine traditional culture contains certain religious components? How should we understand the role and significance of atheistic elements within China’s fine traditional culture? Can the concepts and forms of belief in traditional Chinese culture provide beneficial historical and cultural resources for the future Sinicization of religion in our country?
Each of the above questions could be the subject of a long treatise; here, I can only offer some fragmentary perceptions in a cursory manner.
First, we should recognize that the representative concepts and iconic spirit of China’s fine traditional culture, which General Secretary Xi Jinping has cited many times, were almost all produced during the "Axial Age" by a group of pre-Qin thinkers, primarily Confucian. Many of these concepts were the result of their distillation and summarization of the development path and historical experience of the Huaxia [3] nation since the Three Dynasties [4]. General Secretary Xi Jinping repeatedly emphasizes the superior characteristics of China’s five-thousand-plus years of civilization and attaches great importance to tracing the civilizational achievements of the Huaxia ancestors through archaeological discoveries. This is to demonstrate that the excellent connotations of traditional Chinese culture gradually took shape as early as the ancient period, showing that "China’s fine traditional culture has a long history and is extensive and profound; it is the crystallization of the wisdom of Chinese civilization." To be fair, most of the basic concepts of the core values that the Chinese nation still reveres and follows today were determined and recognized two or three thousand years ago. At that time, neither Buddhism nor Taoism had yet appeared on the Chinese landscape in their complete religious forms. Rather, it was Confucian thought that preset the political-ethical and social-moral principles and norms for the future development of Buddhism and Taoism in China. (These principles and norms later solidified under the names of supernatural "Heaven" and transcendental "Way of Heaven" [5] into "ritual teachings" [6] dogmas and sacrificial systems with a state-religious character, and began to move toward their opposite as "theocratic" shackles binding the people—but that is a separate issue.) Confucianism also prepared an open and inclusive potential for its own absorption of epistemological and methodological nourishment from Buddhism and Taoism. Therefore, saying that the "three teachings" of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism are the "three pillars" of traditional Chinese culture is actually conditional and must not be understood simplistically outside of time and space. We cannot sever the roots of intellectual history, nor limit our discussion of "traditional Chinese culture" solely to the conditions of the middle and late periods of Chinese feudal society, identifying "fine traditional culture" only within a local historical framework—let alone upholding the cultural dross that reflects the backward and decadent state of feudal society as "fine traditional culture." That would not be an inheritance or promotion of fine traditional culture, but merely a farce by a small number of people "fishing in troubled waters" [7] for personal gain.
Of course, Buddhism and Taoism played a huge and far-reaching historical role in expanding and reinforcing the structure of "one honored [orthodoxy] and multiple [components]" in Chinese thought and culture. Buddhism, in particular, provided a successful example of "the latecomer taking the lead," showing how a foreign religion could eventually melt into a part of the religious landscape under the saturation of traditional Chinese culture. Fundamentally speaking, the receptive existence of Buddhism and Taoism during the long history of "Confucian China" since the Han Dynasty was primarily due to their use of "sacrosanct" and "mysterious" qualities to assist and protect the dissemination and consolidation of Confucian political, social, and ethical norms involving the resonance between Heaven and man and the unity of family and state. In the latter part of this historical path, Chinese religions—from theory to practice—increasingly and spontaneously moved toward the "unity of the three teachings." To a certain extent, this reflects the objective effect of Confucianism’s efforts to further maintain its status as the mainstream ideology in the late feudal period. Therefore, if we are to look for religious components within China’s fine traditional culture, while we might mention with some reservation that the Confucian belief in Heaven established a customary and "unconsciously utilized" [8] rationality and authority for the social norms of the Chinese people, what should be discovered first is the "rising stars" like Buddhism and Taoism. These religions made proactive adjustments to keep pace with the times [9] to establish and improve belief forms that submitted to and supported the state political system and mainstream ideological culture. This is the most practically valuable fine tradition of Chinese religion within the system of traditional Chinese culture. In the New Era of the development of Chinese civilization, critically inheriting and creatively developing this tradition—giving it new content that conforms to the direction of historical progress and facilitating a new leap in the Sinicization of religion—will be a qualified "test paper" submitted to the country and the people by our work in the religious field under the guidance of the "second combination" policy.
Second, a certain perspective suggests that the fundamental color of traditional Chinese culture is humanistic rather than "theocentric." In this sense, traditional Chinese culture can be considered to have a "natural" atheistic tendency. As mentioned earlier, the core values of China’s fine traditional culture were basically established and expounded by pre-Qin thinkers, mainly Confucians. At that time, institutionalized religions widely accepted by society had not yet emerged, and the religious consciousness of the pre-Qin masters, including their "conception of gods," presented a state that relatively belonged to "pre-human-made religion." Because the corresponding system of religious theism was not yet complete, if one insists on there being a so-called "atheistic" thought at this time, it could only manifest as a dissenting "theory of gods." The precious quality of this "conception of gods" or "theory of gods" does not lie—nor could it lie—in the complete denial of the existence of supernatural "gods" and "divine power" by transcending the stage of historical development. Rather, it lies in dissolving the boundary between "the divine" and "the human," reducing the "god-human relationship" to an ideal orientation of real social relations, and establishing different forms of identity between "human nature" and "divinity," or "human desires" and "divine blessings," ultimately fulfilling the function of serving human secular life. "Establishing teachings through the way of the gods" [10] is the manifestation of this "conception of gods" in official policy. Moreover, these "conceptions of gods" and "theories of gods" accumulated from the "pre-human-made religion" period of Chinese civilization were used by later Confucian scholar-officials in the era when Buddhism and Taoism rose to prominence. They served as implicit guidance for questioning and refuting certain religious theological theories and secular superstitious behaviors attached to those religions, without any sense of contradiction. It is precisely in the formation, interpretation, and application of the unique "conception of gods" of the Chinese nation that traditional Chinese culture reveals its humanistic background in shaping the belief patterns of the Chinese people.
This spiritual phenomenon reflects the objective fact that "gods are created by humans" more directly and clearly than Western religions. It also prompted traditional Chinese religions to focus more on cultivating their own "secularity" and "humanity" to cater to the cultural psychology of the believers. This is how the "theory of gods" with Chinese characteristics in history was incorporated into the development process of ancient Chinese atheistic thought, influenced the theoretical and practical paradigms of traditional Chinese religions, and maintained the vitality of participating in the construction of "non-theocentric" religions with Chinese characteristics through the agency of the traditional "human-god transformation model." Viewed as a whole, even if the "conception of gods" in traditional Chinese culture is not examined from the perspective of atheism research, one cannot deny that it sparkles with an original humanistic light, which is quite different from the "theocentrism" of monotheism in heterogeneous cultures. This is a unique belief character of the Chinese nation, which, like other nations, does not lack religious historical and cultural components. This character determines that the standard for society to choose religious matters is to prioritize satisfying the actual needs of "humans" rather than driving humans to act as servants of "gods."
Those traditional Chinese religions that have continued from the depths of history to the present have been able to evolve into an organic structure of traditional Chinese culture because they can manifest and respond to this unique character. If one believes that this character "possessed the premises for the development toward atheism" (in Engels' words) earlier than Western Protestantism, and if it confirms through the "non-theocentric" promotion of traditional Chinese religions that "for thousands of years, the Chinese nation has followed a path of civilizational development different from that of other countries and nations," then it certainly qualifies to enter the hall of "fine traditional culture." With the invisible shroud of such a value-belief system that prizes real life over the afterlife, once Marxism—which calls on the masses to rely on their own strength to change their status of being exploited and oppressed—reached China, it was indeed more conducive to stimulating the resonance and pursuit of the social-revolutionary ideals of Marxism among the masses of workers and peasants, compared to some foreign national conditions burdened with heavy "theocentric" historical baggage. Although we cannot say that traditional culture containing a humanistic background is directly equivalent to an ally of Marxism, without Chinese Communists drawing support from the spirit and wisdom of China’s fine culture, it would have been impossible for Marxism to combine with China's specific realities and overthrow the "three great mountains" [11] in just one generation. Even the American-German Christian theologian Paul Tillich noticed the compatibility between Confucian thought and communist belief; in his 1957 book Dynamics of Faith, he argued that Confucianism "was a positive condition for the victory of a secular communist faith." Historical experience can be elevated into an incremental source of cultural confidence. If we comprehensively evaluate the ability of China’s fine traditional culture to shape the humanistic "conception of deities" and "conception of religion" of the Chinese nation, and dialectically view and utilize the genes of Chinese civilization carried by its subsequent spiritual and cultural products, we will have more confidence in promoting the creative transformation and innovative development of China’s fine traditional culture in the field of contemporary Chinese religion. We will also have more confidence in advancing the integration of Marxist religious studies on religious phenomena with Chinese characteristics and the propaganda and education of Sinicized Marxist atheism, allowing this grand project of the "second combination" in the New Era to continuously expand toward new horizons.
Third, based on the above perceptions, we can provide a logically affirmative answer to the question of "whether the belief concepts and forms in traditional Chinese culture can provide beneficial historical and cultural resources for the future Sinicization of religion in our country." Our current proposal to persist in the direction of the Sinicization of religion is both a natural extension of the historical path and an elevation of our mission under the new circumstances of the New Era. It requires traditional religions that have already become part of traditional Chinese culture to open a new chapter of "Sinicization" and keep pace with the development of the New Era in all aspects. It also requires foreign religions that entered China later to learn the way of survival from China’s fine traditional culture—that is, how to live in harmony with China's mainstream politics and dominant ideology. This includes re-calibrating the important position that the traditional Chinese value system once held in the history of the "contextualization" and "indigenization" of these religions, which was later interfered with and weakened by various external factors, and achieving a smooth connection with the core socialist values. For these foreign religions, learning from traditional Chinese culture also involves drawing lessons from the instrumental-rational development path in the history of traditional Chinese religions and consciously realizing and playing their own social roles in the construction of Chinese-path modernization. Doing so does not mean that these traditional Chinese religions have already met the new requirements for "Sinicization" in the New Era, or that they can complete the new tasks of "Sinicization" through superficial window-dressing. Rather, the focus is to inspire foreign "monotheistic" religions to actively seek the possibility of acculturation and co-construction with traditional Chinese religions that have already carved out a space for "Sinicization" in history. This search concerns belief concepts and forms, aiming to evolve into genuine "Chinese religions" in terms of cultural characteristics and social functions, until they together become a vivid part of the modern civilization of the Chinese nation. This is the lofty goal that the Sinicization of religion in our country is set to achieve, and it is also a historical and world-significant result that the "second combination" will certainly attain.