The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church is not going to have any influence on the way the CCP governs China. You can’t say the say thing for either Christianity or Islam for most of their history.
The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
>The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
That is argument for particular church-state relationship. The original claim spoke of entanglement (in the present tense!). For reference, the archbishop of Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland has always been appointed by whomever is the head of state since Gustav I Vasa embraced the Protestantism and the church was until recently an official state apparatus and to some extent still is. The Holy See has had negligible effect here since centuries, and some historians maintain that most of the time the influence tended to flow from the state to the Ev. Lut. church than other way around despite the overall symbiosis between the two.
The aspects of political power in such conflicts were not alien to Catholic cardinal Richeliu of France who financed Gustav II Adolf’s war against the Catholic League in Germany while repressing the Huegenots at home.
It is very enlightening to read to the other responses below concerning the history of Confucianism, and I can be convinced China & Confucianism have very different history about the matters we (or I) often pattern-match to religion. And it makes sense that peculiarities of the Taiping rebellion or the CCP’s current positions concerning Catholicism are motivated by them being in contact with European concepts of religion only relatively recently on historical timescales. Yet however:
In my understanding, the conflict between CCP and the Catholic church indicates that the party views Catholicism in terms of national identity and temporal power in ways both different and not so different how Catholicism was viewed in Protestant countries of 17th/18th century. The CCP apparently do not want Catholicism or specifically the Church of Rome’s interpretation to have significant presence in the local thoughtspace, presumably in favor of something else which plausibly serves an analogous role (otherwise there would be no competition about that thoughtspace).
In this case, I find it likely that the parable about fish and water also applies to birds and air: there are both commonalities despite the differences, while water is no air, and the birds have more reason to differentiate the air from the ground. Maybe the Chinese are like more like to rockets in the vacuum of space, but that would take more explaining.
Writing out the argument how there is no entanglement and why the clarity arises (and why linking to Sun Tzu is supposed to back that argument) could possibly help here.
Consequently, the original remark and some of the subsequent discussion reads me to as “booing” all things that get called “religions” and cheering for the Chinese tradition as better for being not a religion.
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
Confucianism is extremely political. If I remember right, when an emperor’s government began to severely fail, their priests practiced rites to determine whether they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and a new emperor should be chosen, opening the way for religiously-legitimated rebellions to replace the distrusted dynasty.
This influence of religion on politics in part explains the reason the CCP is always so worried about, and ruthless towards, any religion that deviates from its ideology du jour.
The Chinese fight Catholicism this way precisely because Catholism is politic in a way that their homegrown religions weren’t.
The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Church is not going to have any influence on the way the CCP governs China. You can’t say the say thing for either Christianity or Islam for most of their history.
The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
>The Church of England still has bishops that vote in the house of lords.
That is argument for particular church-state relationship. The original claim spoke of entanglement (in the present tense!). For reference, the archbishop of Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Finland has always been appointed by whomever is the head of state since Gustav I Vasa embraced the Protestantism and the church was until recently an official state apparatus and to some extent still is. The Holy See has had negligible effect here since centuries, and some historians maintain that most of the time the influence tended to flow from the state to the Ev. Lut. church than other way around despite the overall symbiosis between the two.
The aspects of political power in such conflicts were not alien to Catholic cardinal Richeliu of France who financed Gustav II Adolf’s war against the Catholic League in Germany while repressing the Huegenots at home.
It is very enlightening to read to the other responses below concerning the history of Confucianism, and I can be convinced China & Confucianism have very different history about the matters we (or I) often pattern-match to religion. And it makes sense that peculiarities of the Taiping rebellion or the CCP’s current positions concerning Catholicism are motivated by them being in contact with European concepts of religion only relatively recently on historical timescales. Yet however:
In my understanding, the conflict between CCP and the Catholic church indicates that the party views Catholicism in terms of national identity and temporal power in ways both different and not so different how Catholicism was viewed in Protestant countries of 17th/18th century. The CCP apparently do not want Catholicism or specifically the Church of Rome’s interpretation to have significant presence in the local thoughtspace, presumably in favor of something else which plausibly serves an analogous role (otherwise there would be no competition about that thoughtspace).
In this case, I find it likely that the parable about fish and water also applies to birds and air: there are both commonalities despite the differences, while water is no air, and the birds have more reason to differentiate the air from the ground. Maybe the Chinese are like more like to rockets in the vacuum of space, but that would take more explaining.
Writing out the argument how there is no entanglement and why the clarity arises (and why linking to Sun Tzu is supposed to back that argument) could possibly help here.
Consequently, the original remark and some of the subsequent discussion reads me to as “booing” all things that get called “religions” and cheering for the Chinese tradition as better for being not a religion.
Confucianism is extremely political. If I remember right, when an emperor’s government began to severely fail, their priests practiced rites to determine whether they had lost the Mandate of Heaven and a new emperor should be chosen, opening the way for religiously-legitimated rebellions to replace the distrusted dynasty.
This influence of religion on politics in part explains the reason the CCP is always so worried about, and ruthless towards, any religion that deviates from its ideology du jour.