Church Of Four Saints: An Anthropological Study Of China Rural Christianity

In the past 20 years, Christianity had a noticeable revival in China. And most believers are from the rural areas. This phenomenon arose many scholars' attention and interests from different disciplines. Their researches have had great achievements. However, these studies are mainly of philosophy and religiosity. Fieldwork study is rather rare. And this is exactly the significance of my study of rural Christianity from the perspective of anthropology.Wuzhuang is an ordinary Han people village by the river of Weihe, a branch of the Yellow River. It has a population of about 3000. And 1/3 of them claim to be Christians, while the others mainly are followers of Fuxi, who is believed as the forefather of Chinese people by the state and the upper class intellectuals, but god of the villages by the local people. Christians in Wuzhuang have a church called Si Ren Tang, meaning Church of Four Saints, who were founders of the church. This church started from the end of 19th century by some missionaries of China Inland Missions. The Jesus Family, a Chinese denomination from Shandong Province, sent some missionaries here in 1930's, who set the fire of spiritual revival in the village and other villages around.As a study focus on Christianity, I paid most attention to the culture of Si Ren Tang and its believers, and their relationship to local belief systems, state power and the power of economic globalization. I found Christians in Wuzhuang developed a whole set of concepts and regulations as to react and interact with those forces. In general, I discussed the following issues:1. The approach of Christianity entering in China rural communities, and its strategy of localization.2. The reaction of rural Christianity to local belief systems and state power.3. The phenomenon of secularization of Christianity and some case studies of anti-secularization.4. The co-relations of believes and politics in rural communities.In a whole, this dissertation is a fieldstudy of Han people rural community, which is based on my 10 months' participant observation. Although it is not necessarily an enthnography in the strict sense of classical one, it conveys my personal understanding of a village, which is also a demonstration of my understanding of modern and tradition, rural and urbanization, globalization and localization.