SUBORDINATION, SEPARATION, AND AUTONOMY: CHINESE PROTESTANT APPROACHES TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RELIGION AND STATE

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-164
Author(s):  
Pan-Chiu Lai

ABSTRACTIn the history of the religion-state relationship in China, a model of subordination of religion to the state has been dominant for centuries. In recent years, some Chinese Protestant churches have advocated the model of separation of church and state. Through a historical and theological analysis, this study argues that in order to relieve the tensions between Chinese Protestantism and the contemporary Chinese government, a better conceptual alternative is to reconsider the issue in terms of autonomy rather than separation or subordination, and to argue for legally allowing the coexistence of both official and nonofficial churches and grant different degrees of autonomy to each.

Author(s):  
Arne Bugge Amundsen ◽  
Michael Rosie

Religion has played a key part in the development of both Scotland and Norway, in terms of local governance and the organisation of social structure and hierarchies, identity and popular history, yet both countries are now largely secularised. This chapter explores religious denominations and affiliations: Norway’s history of compulsory affiliation with the Lutheran Church, and Scotland’s religious pluralism, where political affiliations often served to reduce religious tensions. The markedly different relationship between Church and State; Scotland’s Reformation being a largely populist movement with conflict and open protest continuing for two centuries contrasting with Norway where few tensions arose and religion and state remained closely interwoven. Monarchical and political union had an impact on religious practise in both countries, with differing levels of ideological and administrative control being negotiated by Church authorities over education systems and welfare in local communities. The chapter touches upon the route of both countries out of and beyond Protestantism towards increasing secularisation, facilitated by the continuing renegotiation of the relationship between Church and State in both countries and the lessening of Church influence on areas such as education.


This volume charts the development of protestant Dissent between the passing of the Toleration Act (1689) and the repealing of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828). The long eighteenth century was a period in which Dissenters slowly moved from a position of being a persecuted minority to achieving a degree of acceptance and, eventually, full political rights. The first part of the volume considers the history of various Dissenting traditions inside England. There are separate chapters devoted to Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers—the denominations that traced their history before this period—and also to Methodists, who emerged as one of the denominations of ‘New Dissent’ during the eighteenth century. The second part explores the ways in which these traditions developed outside England. It considers the complexities of being a Dissenter in Wales and Ireland, where the state church was Episcopalian, as well as in Scotland, where it was Presbyterian. It also looks at the development of Dissent across the Atlantic, where the relationship between Church and state was rather more loose. The third part is devoted to revivalist movements and their impact, with a particular emphasis on the importance of missionary societies for spreading protestant Christianity from the late eighteenth century onwards. The fourth part looks at Dissenters’ relationship to the British state and their involvement in campaigns to abolish the slave trade. The final part discusses how Dissenters lived: the theology they developed and their attitudes towards Scripture; the importance of both sermons and singing; their involvement in education and print culture; and the ways in which they expressed their faith materially through their buildings.


2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Wildan Sena Utama

This book investigates how culture, particularly national culture, in Indonesia has been shaped by the government policies from the Dutch colonial period in 1900s to the Reformation era in 2000s. It is an attempt to show the relationship between the state and culture around the process of production, circulation, regulation and reception of cultural policy through different regimes. Although this book discusses government policy, the author has realized that the book needs to overcome contradictions and confusions of cultural discourse by incorporating people as explanatory element. Many aspect of culturality may be influenced by the state, but according to Jones, “it is a field that is not stable and easy to shift that facilitates resistance, and is able to turn against the state, market and other institutions” (p. 31). Jones employs two postcolonial cultural policy tools to review the history of cultural policy in Indonesia: authoritarian cultural policy and command culture. The first means that the state has assumption if majority of citizen do not have capability to inspirit a responsible citizenship and need a state’s direction in the choice of their culture. On the contrary, command culture shows that the cultural idea that is planned in fact always been placing the state as center in planning, creating policy and revising cultural practice.


Author(s):  
Michael A. Gomez

This prologue provides an overview of the history of early and medieval West Africa. During this period, the rise of Islam, the relationship of women to political power, the growth and influence of the domestically enslaved, and the invention and evolution of empire were all unfolding. In contrast to notions of an early Africa timeless and unchanging in its social and cultural categories and conventions, here was a western Savannah and Sahel that from the third/ninth through the tenth/sixteenth centuries witnessed political innovation as well as the evolution of such mutually constitutive categories as race, slavery, ethnicity, caste, and gendered notions of power. By the period's end, these categories assume significations not unlike their more contemporary connotations. All of these transformations were engaged with the apparatus of the state and its progression from the city-state to the empire. The transition consistently featured minimalist notions of governance replicated by successive dynasties, providing a continuity of structure as a mechanism of legitimization. Replication had its limits, however, and would ultimately prove inadequate in addressing unforeseen challenges.


Author(s):  
Brian Neve

This chapter revisits and explores the production history of director King Vidor’s independently made movie, Our Daily Bread (1934), its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the box office. It further considers the relationship between the film and contemporary advocacy of cooperative activity as a response to the Great Depression, notably by the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign for the state governorship. It also assesses the movie in relation to Vidor’s own cooperative vision through its emphasis on individuals and community as a solution to the Great Depression and the significant absence of the state in this agency.


Author(s):  
Dillon Mahoney

This chapter traces the development of Kenya’s tourism and handicraft industries from their roots in 20th century British colonialism to provide some of the broader history of Kenya’s tourism and co-operative development, their emergence in Mombasa, and their relationships with local governments. I draw on archival as well as ethnographic data collected just before the 2002 demolition of Mombasa’s roadside kiosks, which form the starting point for the larger longitudinal study. I focus on the array of experiences of Mombasa’s roadside traders of diverse backgrounds as they struggle with the privatization and segregation of urban residential and commercial space both before and after the demolitions. The economy was radically altered as the roadsides were “cleaned” and a new wave of economic formalization characterized the relationship between small-scale businesspeople and the state. For many entrepreneurs invested in the global crafts trade, this was the final straw that pushed them toward new technologies, jumping scales into global markets, and investing in export and wholesale businesses that were not spatially dependent upon a connection to the city center.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-736
Author(s):  
Paul Monod

AbstractWhy did the English Nonjuror Richard Rawlinson promote the 1729–30 English translation of Pietro Giannone's Civil History of Naples? The Nonjurors in England espoused ecclesiastical independency from the state, which they derived from the thought of Restoration High Churchmen and from the French Gallican Louis Ellies Du Pin. Giannone, a Neapolitan lawyer, proposed a similar “two powers” model of strict autonomy for both church and state. Giannone's concept was later rejected by enlightened writers like Viscount Bolingbroke and Edward Gibbon, who associated it with high church prejudices. It was defended by the Dissenter Joseph Priestley, who combined it with his own theory of religious sociability. The impact of Giannone on the Nonjurors and on Priestley illuminates the complex religious background to what is often seen as a fundamentally secular doctrine: the separation of church and state.


2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 136-152
Author(s):  
Akira Nishimura

This paper asks whether public commemorations in contemporary Japan are post-secular or not. More precisely, it investigates the postwar history of the relationship between such commemorations and the principle of keeping religion and government separate, as embodied in the constitution. Referring to several contemporary cases, I provide an overview of the discourses and actual conditions of the separation of religion and state at Chidorigafuchi National Cemetery (Chidorigafuchi Kokuritsu Senbotsusha Boen 千鳥ヶ淵国立戦没者墓苑) and Yasukuni Shrine (Yasukuni Jinja 靖国神社). In conclusion, I point out on one hand that the non-denominational expressions seen in Chidorigafuchi and other facilities show a distinctive kind of religious expression. On the other hand, I underscore that the excessive avoidance of religious participation by government officials derives from the Yasukuni issue and related legal trials. I explain the relationship of those phenomena in terms of two types of secularization: natural secularization and artificial secularization.


1955 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Kreider

Since the dawn of the Christian era the relationship between church and state has been one of the pivotal issues of western civilization. Men have offered a variety of answers to this problem. The much- persecuted Anabaptists of the 16th century presented one set of answers, radical for their age, which called for a decisive separation of the church from the state and complete freedom for the church to pursue its vocation in the world. The Anabaptists were a distressing annoyance to the civil authorities. This movement posed for the 16th century the acute problem: how should religious dissent be handled?


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