Two Protestant Assemblies in Tianjin: In Search of Markers of Certainty

This article is based on fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2017 at two Protestant places of worship in Tianjin, a city to the southeast of Beijing: an official church and a “domestic gathering point.” Based on the observation of eighty-three services as well as exchanges with preachers and worshippers, this study was conducted in a context of religious growth, particularly in the case of Protestantism, that saw the multiplication of public gatherings despite restrictions. The analysis shows how, in a context where references to the past cannot be mobilized to make sense of present experiences, preachers and witnesses draw on the Bible and its “true stories” to propose a less equivocal understanding of situations encountered in everyday life. In this way, the Bible offers new linguistic models that enable new forms of interpretation, at a distance from the uncertainties but also the ideological rigidities of the language available in twenty-first-century China. It also offers reference points that, freed from notions of doubt, can absorb the expression of all sorts of anxieties and uncertainties. The figure of the “false believer” and that of the bad fellow citizen are thus deplored for the same evil: false pretenses. Language, often denounced as misleading and full of dissimulation, is here used to name and contain such suspicions and to develop shared references and interpretations deemed less ambivalent.