Locating Religion and Secularity in East Asia Through Global Processes: Early Modern Jesuit Religious Encounters

Abstract

The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization. While most of the recent scholarly work on the globalization of the categories of religion and secularity focuses on the second Western hegemonic phase of globalization, this essay focuses on the early modern phase of globalization before Western hegemony.The central premise of this paper is that in order to understand the social construction of religion and secularity in East Asia today we need to take a long durée historical approach, which takes into account the colonial encounters between the Christian West and East Asia during three different and distinct phases of globalization. 1 The first phase of globalization, before Western hegemony, which in East Asia lasted from the mid-sixteenth-century to the late eighteenth-century, was shaped primarily by the encounters between the Jesuits and other Catholic religious orders and the religions and cultures of East Asia. Although the categories of religion and secularity had not yet acquired a stable and identifiable form during this early modern phase, those early modern colonial encounters, which are the main focus of this paper, played a significant role in the emergence of the categories in the West in the transition from the first to the second phase of globalization.The second phase of globalization, the phase of Western hegemony proper, lasted roughly from the end of the 18th century to the 1960s. It was during this phase that the categories of religion and secularity entered East Asian discourses, in and through the formation of secular nation states, contributing in the process to the reorganization of the pre-existing religious field in different directions.Starting from the 1960s, we can distinguish a third phase of globalization, which initiates what we can now recognize as our contemporary global age, after Western hegemony. From the perspective of this paper, significant for this phase is the fact that the categories of religion and secularity have been subject to all kinds of critical, reflexive, post-colonial deconstruction and that the religious field in East Asia is being transformed by newly emerging global dynamics, now affecting simultaneously the entire globe.

A Sinicized World Religion?: Chinese Christianity at the Contemporary Moment of Globalization

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China: Some Exceptions of Secularization Thesis

“…Among them, some important phrases are: "to promote social harmony", "to promote economic development", "to foster social ethos" all focus on public influence of religion; "not to promote religious fervor" points directly to attendance of religion; "to cultivate religious ethos", "to recover the qualities of nonprofit organizations", "to create a pure worship environment" all imply belief in religion. The authoritative viewpoints on secularization offered by Berger (1967Berger ( , 1997Berger ( , 1999Berger ( , 2014 focus on public influence of religion, attendance of religion, and belief in religion; Finke and Stark (1992) and Stark and Finke (2000) mainly focus on attendance of religion; Stark and Bainbridge (1985) mainly focus on belief in religion; (Martin 1969;Warner 2010) focuses on public influence of religion, and attendance of religion; Norris and Inglehart (2004) mainly focus on public influence of religion; Bruce (2002Bruce ( , 2016, Voas andChaves (2016, 2018), Crockett and Voas (2006), and Brauer (2018) all mainly focus on attendance of religion; Schewel (2018) mainly focuses on public influence of religion; Casanova (1994Casanova ( , 2018aCasanova ( , 2018b mainly focuses on the importance of studying secularization and the value of studying East Asian religion in post-secular global age. This article attempts to propose several new aspects to secularization theory that emerged in Chinese society through analyzing the religious policy itself.…”