Investigation And Analysis Of The Christian Faith In Wuchuan County

In the past 30 years, China has been in the accelerating transition of the community. While China's economic development has made remarkable achievements, the community organizational structure has been rebuilt, interpersonal relationships and values have also been badly hit, folk beliefs are gradually recovering. In Wuchuan County, the rapid growth of Christianity has aroused great concerns. The author is not a Christian, so this paper is not a missionary article, neither is a criticism of the Christian work. I just use the ethnographic researching methods to study the Wuchuan County Christian faith which is a social phenomena. The purposes of the article,on one hand , is to right people's Christian faith; on the other hand, is to think about how to guide the local Christian faith to contribute to a harmonious socialist society.Because in the Christian researching field in rural areas, comparing with the questionnaires, interviews, participation and data collection methods are more credible.So the author used field survey method, individual interviews,case studies approaches.Early in 1928 years, there were Swedish missionary pastors to the town of Wuchuan County to do missionary work, therefore, the Christian faith in Wuchuan County has a long history. The number of Christian believers in Wuchuan County increased from 267 to 4707, from the end of 1987 to the end of 2008,within 22 years,which was an increase of 4440 people. At present, the Christian faith is the most influential religious beliefs in Wuchuan County,and the number of believers accounts for 2.68% of the whole population of the county.The Ten Commandments of Moses in Bible has been a code of conduct which the local believers abide, to some degree, plays a positive role to bind morality and stable society. However, because most of the local believers are insufficiently educated, many religious believers hold a clear utilitarian and pragmatic attitude, and even have considerable blindness. In this case, it can easily leads to confusion between the Christian faith and secular superstition.In the developing process,Christianity of Wuchuan County is gradually localized and secularized. So while serving the positive social function ,it also shows some negative effects. The author believes that in order to adjust religions including Christianity to the socialist society, we should set aside our differences and diversity, strengthen the work about the believers and the clergy's and religious groups'self-construction while respecting freedom of religious beliefs.As a special study, this article mainly discusses the following fronts: the spreading history of Christianity in Wuchuan County, as well as the activity characteristics in Wuchuan County; The reason why Christian culture survived in northern China, is the blending and conflict with local culture; How to view both the positive and negative social functions of Christian faith; Thinking about how to correctly guide the Christian faith to contribute to harmonious socialist society.This paper is the understanding which comes from direct participant and observation more than 20 years.Due to limited capacity, it is impossible to state the Christianity of Wuchuan county comprehensively, but still try to show the statement of Christian faith in an ordinary town in northern China during the social transition, so as to provide a concrete case for domestic ethnology study.