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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   30773 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality; the only places that successfully curtail premarital sex do so explicitly through a religious point of view.

Confucianism. You could ad-hoc define it as a religion along with communism, liberalism, etc., but then the statement is tautologically true.

Confucianism as not-a-religion is a pretty modern frame; while westerners have been confused about it for a while it does include substantial ritual/preternatural commitments as traditionally practiced. See 'Chinese rites controversy' for further information.

Also look up the "triple tradition." Confucianism, much like modern humanist atheism, succeeded because it was deeply embedded in the Buddhist and Taoist religious frameworks.

While the word 'religion' isn't indigenous to this context, there is definitely a Chinese sense that the Confucian school, so to speak, is the same sort of thing as Daoism or Buddhism. This is depicted allegorically, and indeed forms the 'three traditions', as you term them.

Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West. Daoism is 道教 (dàojiào, 'teaching of the way'), Buddhism is 佛教 (fójiào, 'teaching of the Buddha'), Christianity is 基督教 (jīdūjiào, 'teaching of Jesus', this term tends to have a more Protestant connotation), Catholicism is 天主教 (tiānzhujiào, 'teaching of the lord of heaven'), Protestantism specifically is 新教 (xīnjiào, 'new teaching'), Islam is 伊斯蘭教 (yīsīlánjiào, 'teaching of Islam', they just transliterated the name directly; 回, huí, is also common for Chinese Muslims as an ethnicity), and so on.

The point is that linguistically these all seem to be treated like different species of the one family - they are all types of jiào. Not all ideologies or systems of belief are jiào. For instance, communism, liberalism, and fascism, in Chinese, are all called 主義 (zhuyì, which means 'position' or 'doctrine'). The word jiào suggests something roughly similar to our word 'religion'.

The historical context, as hydroacetylene alludes to, is that Matteo Ricci and some of the early Jesuits in China really didn't want Confucianism to be a religion, because they liked Confucianism. If Confucianism is not a religion then Chinese people don't have to give it up in order to become Christians, which is obviously very helpful if you want to convert a bunch of elite Confucians, as Ricci did. (This is also why the name for Catholicism is so bizarre - Ricci tried to equate God with ancient Chinese belief in Heaven or some kind of Lord of Heaven, in order to make the case to the Chinese that embracing Christianity would be consistent with the ways of their ancestors. Interestingly, some modern Chinese Christians try to make a similar move - people like Yuan Zhiming preach pseudohistorical theories whereby ancient Chinese were prophetically proto-Christian. For instance, Zhiming argues that the Chinese character for 'greed', 婪 (lán), depicts a woman standing beneath two trees, suggesting some ancient lost knowledge of the Eden narrative.)

If you ask me, I'm not totally without sympathy for Ricci's approach - a Chinese convert to Christianity is not obligated to abandon everything taught by Confucius, but only those things incompatible with the gospel. Everything else may be retained, and that may well end up being an awful lot. But "Confucianism is a different religion, therefore it must all be thrown out" and "Confucianism is not a religion, therefore it's all fine" are both lazy shortcuts. They're attempts to shortcut past real discernment of the content of a teaching with the cheap label 'religion'.

Even so, if we have to use the label for convenience, I'd say Confucianism is more like a religion than it is not.

I think I'd be more wary about calling Confucianism a religion or religion-like without bounding what is meant by religion and Confucianism respectively.

Speaking of language, the Chinese term for Confucianism is 儒教 (rújiào) - the former character means 'scholar', and the latter means 'teaching', 'school', or sometimes 'religion'. Confucianism is the teaching of the scholars. I bring this up because it's similar to the names of schools that are uncontestedly considered 'religions' in the West.

It is true that Confucius has a temple, and he was himself strict about the preservation of the rites of Zhou and other traditional religious institutions, and many aspects of Confucian thought has seeped into Chinese folk religion; the Classic of Changes literally originates from treatises on divination...

But when I read most works in the Confucian school I get a different sense -- that it is "religious" to the extent that all political systems and philosophies in classical antiquity are religious, and it is less overtly religious than many of its contemporaries!

樊遲問知。子曰。務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。

Analects 6:22. Fan Chi asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, "To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom."

子不語怪，力，亂，神。

Analects 7:21. The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.

On the other hand, many of the Socratic dialogues reference gods and the divine much more directly than the Confucian classics do, but I think we would still consider Euthyphro more of a philosophical work than a religious one, right?

Regardless the ancients would have drawn less stark a divide than we would regarding the secular and the religious, if they did so at all.

And Confucianism is also -- I think more commonly -- referred to as 儒家 rujia (家 jia, lit. family/home, in this case meaning "school of thought"). Other contemporary examples of this usage include 法家 fajia (the Legalists) and 墨家 mojia (the Mohists), part of the Hundred Schools of Thought which we identify nowadays as primarily political or philosophical schools rather than religious ones, even if these philosophical schools were bound at the time to various superstitions and religions as well.

This is not to obfuscate the mystical parts of Confucianism, of course. The Classics referencing rites implies a certain belief in the validity of those rites, and we have further developments (e.g. 理學 lixue, often translated as neo-Confucianism) that have a more explicit focus on the metaphysical. But I would still put it as that Confucian thought is a largely humanistic school of moral philosophy that was nevertheless grounded in a superstitious and religious society, and thus utilises the assumptions and language of that society.

Thanks for the more detailed explanation. Yeah I remember reading some about this in my World Religions class way back in the day. Also, the book Christ the Eternal Dao goes into some of this proto-Christian theory which I find quite interesting.

@AlexanderTurok great writeup here!

Also side note, I appreciate your refreshingly different viewpoints on here. Don't let the haters get you down.

(This is a long tangent, please forgive me.)

There are different versions of that theory, some of which are obviously nonsense. You can find more of Yuan Zhiming's version here. (His whole book is here if you can read Chinese.) Much of it is nonsense and some of it is just obviously falsehood. For instance, dào does not actually mean the same thing as Greek logos. It's true that logos in John 1:1 is translated as dào in some translations, but this is a somewhat free translation. In their more natural senses, dào means 'path' and logos means 'word'. Translating "in the beginning the dào was with God and the dào was God" is not being terribly literal with the words, but is an attempt to convey some of the same meaning in a different cultural context.

However, there are some attempts to inculturate Christianity in Asian cultures by looking for pre-Christian or proto-Christian resonances that I'm much more sympathetic to. Arguably the same thing happened in Europe - they found points of connection or resonance with pre-Christian philosophy, in order to reconcile Christianity with existing cultural and intellectual heritages. Plato or Aristotle or Homer didn't get thrown out entirely, and where there were commonalities, as with Greek conceptions of virtue, or philosophers verging on quasi-monotheistic ideas, they emphasised those.

One example I'm a little fond of is from Inazo Nitobe's infamous Bushido: The Soul of Japan. While this book is often disliked for being the source of a lot of romanticised, historically inaccurate information about samurai, I think it's fascinating because Nitobe himself was a convert to Christianity who was educated in the West, and indeed the book shows an erudite understanding of the Western canon. What Nitobe wanted to do was find some way to reconcile his Christian faith with a strong affirmation of Japanese tradition and nationhood. He does this by asserting, if not quite a proto-Christianity, at least ways in which God made himself known to the ancient Japanese, which would prepare them for the fullness of revelation later. Thus he writes:

Should any of my allusions to religious subjects and to religious workers be thought slighting, I trust my attitude towards Christianity itself will not be questioned. It is with ecclesiastical methods and with the forms which obscure the teachings of Christ, and not with the teachings themselves, that I have little sympathy. I believe in the religion taught by Him and handed down to us in the New Testament, as well as in the law written in the heart. Further, I believe that God hath made a testament which maybe called “old” with every people and nation,—Gentile or Jew, Christian or Heathen.

[...]

One cause of the failure of mission work is that most of the missionaries are grossly ignorant of our history—“What do we care for heathen records?” some say—and consequently estrange their religion from the habits of thought we and our forefathers have been accustomed to for centuries past. Mocking a nation’s history!—as though the career of any people—even of the lowest African savages possessing no record—were not a page in the general history of mankind, written by the hand of God Himself. The very lost races are a palimpsest to be deciphered by a seeing eye. To a philosophic and pious mind, the races themselves are marks of Divine chirography clearly traced in black and white as on their skin; and if this simile holds good, the yellow race forms a precious page inscribed in hieroglyphics of gold! Ignoring the past career of a people, missionaries claim that Christianity is a new religion, whereas, to my mind, it is an “old, old story,” which, if presented in intelligible words,—that is to say, if expressed in the vocabulary familiar in the moral development of a people—will find easy lodgment in their hearts, irrespective of race or nationality. Christianity in its American or English form—with more of Anglo-Saxon freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its founder—is a poor scion to graft on Bushido stock. Should the propagator of the new faith uproot the entire stock, root and branches, and plant the seeds of the Gospel on the ravaged soil? Such a heroic process may be possible—in Hawaii, where, it is alleged, the church militant had complete success in amassing spoils of wealth itself, and in annihilating the aboriginal race: such a process is most decidedly impossible in Japan—nay, it is a process which Jesus himself would never have employed in founding his kingdom on earth.

[...]

It has been predicted—and predictions have been corroborated by the events of the last half century—that the moral system of Feudal Japan, like its castles and its armories, will crumble into dust, and new ethics rise phoenix-like to lead New Japan in her path of progress. Desirable and probable as the fulfilment of such a prophecy is, we must not forget that a phoenix rises only from its own ashes, and that it is not a bird of passage, neither does it fly on pinions borrowed from other birds. “The Kingdom of God is within you.” It does not come rolling down the mountains, however lofty; it does not come sailing across the seas, however broad. “God has granted,” says the Koran, “to every people a prophet in its own tongue.” The seeds of the Kingdom, as vouched for and apprehended by the Japanese mind, blossomed in Bushido. Now its days are closing—sad to say, before its full fruition—and we turn in every direction for other sources of sweetness and light, of strength and comfort, but among them there is as yet nothing found to take its place. The profit and loss philosophy of Utilitarians and Materialists finds favor among logic-choppers with half a soul. The only other ethical system which is powerful enough to cope with Utilitarianism and Materialism is Christianity, in comparison with which Bushido, it must be confessed, is like “a dimly burning wick” which the Messiah was proclaimed not to quench but to fan into a flame.

To Nitobe's credit, he does not present some nonsensical theory of historical origins - rather, he thinks that God has, in each culture prepared the ground in certain ways, and that the gospel must be planted in that native soil.

We may not want to go the full way with him, and we may not want to automatically or thoughtlessly proclaim every culture a repository of divine revelation, but in broad strokes, I have a lot of sympathy for this approach. Start by looking for whatever elements of grace or truth are found in the pre-Christian culture, because God is very unlikely to have left that culture with nothing - and then look to the gospel to redeem and perfect the rest, rather than obliterate it.

(I'm fond of of "logic-choppers with half a soul" as a criticism of utilitarians. Ha! Forgive my pettiness.)

logos means 'word'

And "Stimme" means voice, and "Pravda" means truth, and "Rta" mean order, and yet their derived terms overlap strongly with its and each other. In this case the concepts, if not the words, seem to be by shared descent, but I wouldnt be surprised if the chinese have something like it as well.

I like this! I'm definitely a big fan of the idea that there is a separate "old" testament sent to all nations, that Christ fulfills. IMO it's a huge shame that the Western Church hasn't embraced that more.

Without getting too biographical, I work in a Christian field with a heavily Chinese population, and I find there's something very clarifying in the way people born and raised in non-Christian cultures receive the gospel. It forces you to think a lot about culture, nationality, Christianity, and the interactions between them all. Nowhere does the gospel obliterate or destroy the base culture - instead, I prefer to think of it in similar terms to C. S. Lewis, where the gospel refines and enhances whatever praiseworthy, God-given elements exist in the base.

In Mere Christianity he uses metaphors of light and salt for the way that the gospel enhances individual personalities:

Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible. Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him that in your country people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply "In that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same: because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else." But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. (Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration, because you can, after all, kill the other tastes by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can.)

And then in That Hideous Strength he applies something like this to nations. He has the idea that every nation or culture has what he calls a 'haunting', the hint of its redeemed self, and these hauntings are naturally all different. The only one he names is Britain's, which he calls 'Logres', but he goes on:

“You’re right, Sir,” he said with a smile. “I was forgetting what you have warned me always to remember. This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There’s no special privilege for England — no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.”

“But this,” said MacPhee, “seems a very round-about way of saying that there’s good and bad men everywhere.”

“It’s not a way of saying that at all,” answered Dimble. “You see, MacPhee, if one is thinking simply of goodness in the abstract, one soon reaches the fatal idea of something standardised — some common kind of life to which all nations ought to progress. Of course, there are universal rules to which all goodness must conform. But that’s only the grammar of virtue. It’s not there that the sap is. He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same: how much less two Saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China — why, then it will be spring.

Now we might quibble the specific details, or go back and forth about what the real essence of Britain or France or China is, but I wouldn't want to get bogged down on that. Probably Lewis and his characters are struggling to express something very rich and complicated. But I have found this idea helpful in the past.

And in that light I interpret people like Inazo Nitobe, or Yuan Zhiming, however clumsily or even incompetently, as trying to articulate the divine haunting of Japan or of China, and in that way find not only themselves, but also their entire peoples in God's plan of salvation.

(And it should probably be noted that the latter quit his ministry and asked forgiveness after a rape accusation, so I'm including moral as well as intellectual incompetence.)

In Revelation 21:24-26, we are told, of the New Jerusalem, that "the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it", and that "people will bring into it the glory and honour of the nations". I'd like to believe that every nation has its own particular glory, its own particular honour, and that as part of the world's salvation, all of these will be brought to the altar before God.

I love this, thanks for sharing. Very curious about your work now, if you want to DM.

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