Atheist Religion and Worldly Redemption in China: The 1922 Anti-Christian Movement

Abstract: The Anti-Christian Movement started out as a nationalist and cultural movement. Although scientific rationality invalidated theistic religion for many New Culturalist intellectuals, they shared the aspiration for the creation of an atheist religion that related personal moral rectitude to the worldly redemption of national salvation. Following the intervention of the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party, the Movement took a political turn with a communist overtone. The political atheist religion of communism progressively overshadowed the atheist religion that stressed individual moral improvement. The latter was considered to be too impotent to bring about sociopolitical changes in comparison to political organization and mobilization that communism promised to concretize. As such, the shift of the intellectual and political paradigms in which the Anti-Christian Movement developed in a time scope of five years presented a panorama of the trajectory of the New Culture Movement, and its political legacy continued to inform China’s propaganda of faith after 1949.