Volume 1: The Battleship Yitian Changes into the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 Chapter 95: The Problem of Civil Religion
The original idea of this "Storm" came to Sun Gang from Briand's beautiful daughter.
This blonde beauty is very filial. She has been living with her father since her mother passed away, taking care of her father's daily life. Under the influence of her father, she is considered a half-expert in shipbuilding. Since she likes Eastern culture, the romantic and unrestrained French people as well as the calm and reserved Oriental people are reflected in her. The Beiyang Shipbuilding Minister and his wife, who often visit Briand, are now very familiar with the father and daughter.
After interacting more with this girl named Lini, I found out that she was actually a devout Christian. Sun Gang, who traveled from the future, was not unfamiliar with Christianity. In his original era, a large group of old ladies in the neighborhood were Christians. He also had a Bible in his hand, which was given to him by a "close friend" in high school. In order to pursue her, he memorized the "Old and New Testaments" very hard and almost changed his religious belief. Later, when she graduated from high school and married a Japanese man, he " recovered" to his original "state". He didn't expect that the effort he put in at that time was actually used in "communication" with the blonde beauty today. It made him sigh with infinite emotion, and also had a feeling of "the sun rises in the east and the rain falls in the west; if the east is not bright, the west will be bright".
Ever since she learned that the Minister of the Beiyang Shipbuilding Bureau was different from other senior officials of the Qing Dynasty and was quite knowledgeable about Jesus Christ, the blonde beauty was happy for a long time. She immediately had the idea of letting Sun Gang "convert". In her opinion, letting a senior official of the Qing Dynasty "throw himself into the arms of God" is of far greater significance than the impact of the battleship under construction on China.
But Sun Gang obviously did not have this "ideological awareness". He had already thrown himself into another extremely warm embrace. Of course, this embrace certainly did not belong to the category of God. If the blonde beauty knew that her own embrace was much more attractive to the Minister of Beiyang Shipbuilding than God, I wonder if she would give up the idea of getting this minister to believe in Christianity.
但是丽妮的“热情”却让孙纲获得了一个灵感。
In Western Christian society, the status of Jesus Christ is supreme. Similarly, in the ancient East, the status of Confucius, the great sage and teacher, was the same, or even better. This great educator who experienced many ups and downs in his life was unable to realize his political ideals until his death. He probably never thought that his words and deeds would be worshipped as gods for thousands of years to come. By the Qing Dynasty, it had been distorted and alienated by feudal rulers of multiple dynasties into a cage of people's ideology. "Confucianism" became "Confucianism", but this "Confucianism" is too different from Christianity.
In the final analysis, it is because the head-on encounter between China and the West is a cultural conflict in a broad sense. This conflict can be said to be a double-edged sword. It can cause great harm to traditional Chinese civilization, but it can also cause ancient Chinese civilization to undergo a transformation that is beneficial to itself. This depends on whether China can take advantage of the situation. In fact, many reformists, including Xue Fucheng and Ding Richang in the 1860s, Li Hongzhang, Zheng Guanying, and Yan Fu in the 1870s, have urged the Chinese people to take advantage of this opportunity to make favorable changes in China.
But those old forces, no matter how much they have suffered, still choose to stick to their old ways and hold on to the tablet of their "leader" Confucius, turning their backs on this "unprecedented change in a thousand years" in order to "respond to ever-changing situations with constancy."
In this regard, Li Hongzhang once lamented that "since Shang Yang and Wang Anshi were executed for their reforms, the officials of later generations have been obeying the law to gain favor. Now, other countries have changed again and again and are thriving, but China is the only one that is so cautious about obeying the law that it does not regret even if it is defeated and extinct. Is it man? Is it heaven? How could it come to this?"
And today, Sun Gang wanted to make fun of these guys who should have rotted away long ago and their old trivial matters.
Of course, he has learned his lesson this time and will never take the lead in doing this.
Only later did he realize that the joke was a bit too much.
After he came back from Lini that day, he was inspired to read some recent court bulletins and the history and current situation of foreign missionaries' activities in China obtained from the Beiyang Military Intelligence Office. Only then did he understand why the French blonde beauty wanted him to convert to Christianity.
In fact, Christianity was nothing new in China. It had existed in China during the Tang Dynasty , and it seemed to be called Nestorianism at the time (he learned about it from an ancient artifact, the "Nestorian Church in China Monument," which he saw on TV). It became more prevalent in the mid-Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty, and even spread to the upper echelons of the literati. Famous scholars like Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao, and Yang Tingyun (even Emperor Chongzhen believed in it for a while) were all famous Chinese Christians, which shows how great its influence was.
After the First Opium War, foreign missionaries in China became open and legal. After the Second Opium War, foreign missionaries were granted the right to buy land and houses in mainland China and build churches for missionary work. As a result, the activities of various Christian denominations became active, which also caused many incidents. The reason is still the conflict between Christianity and Chinese culture, especially when Western civilization has shown its superiority and China has been relatively backward, this conflict has become more intense.
If it was just a conflict of faith, the problem would not be big. In the eyes of traditional Chinese literati, Christianity was nothing more than "heresy" and could be ignored. Sun Gang also knew that Chinese civilization was very inclusive and could enable more than 50 ethnic groups to live in peace for a long time (Tang Degang also said in "Seventy Years of the Late Qing Dynasty" that China has historically been a nation without religion. The people worship and believe in whatever they want, and gods, Buddhas and Taoism coexist. More Jesuses and Gods are not too many, but if you want to listen to and believe in all of them, it is impossible.), and in terms of faith, it is "the unity of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism", and no one thinks there is anything wrong with it (Sun Gang has been reading books on Qidian for so many years, and in many books on time travel and fairy tales, it can even be said that N religions are united, and he still enjoys reading them), but in fact, things are not as simple as he thought.
时间到了十九世纪下半叶，传教活动已经有些变味儿了，失去了本来的面目，当时的欧洲列强在中国的传教活动并不是出于对中国的同情，而是传教事业和西方文化渗透的需要。欧洲列强对中国的资源和市场很感兴趣，而这帮传教士的“雄心”更大，他们志在改变中国人的生活方式，并企图用基督教义来取代中国的传统儒家文化。
Unlike the ancient Mesoamerican civilizations that were also destroyed by the spread of Christianity, Chinese civilization has survived thousands of years and still has strong vitality. Traditional Confucian culture has long since penetrated into the lives of the large Chinese population. Western missionaries simply cannot achieve their goals. In order to attract as many Chinese as possible to convert to Christianity, they inevitably lower the "assessment standards" for Chinese believers, but this is where trouble arises.
Except for a very small number of people who had believed in Catholicism since the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, a large number of those who were attracted to join the church did not do so out of faith, but because of the hardship of life and the attempt to obtain material assistance, so they believed in religion and were baptized. For example, some people later said: "Many poor people joined the church. They did not really believe in religion, but had no way out in life and were forced by poverty and hunger . They joined the church just to eat the steamed buns provided by the church, or to use the church's two taels of money"; some local officials also testified that "Catholics were poorly clothed, had no food to eat every other night, and had to store beds and stoves under one clerk. They were so poor." It was not a big problem for poor people to join the church (it could even be said that it alleviated China's social crisis to some extent). The problem was that some lawless people joined the church in order to seek protection. There were two situations for such people. One was that they joined the church to seek shelter because they participated in anti-Qing organizations such as the White Lotus Sect and were hunted by the government. Some even had entire families or entire villages devoted themselves to the church. Another situation is that some people are originally some street rogues, hooligans and thugs. Once these people join the church, they can do anything. If they break the law, they can escape punishment by joining the church, and if they complain, they can get revenge by joining the church. After joining the church, they can not only resist the government and avoid corvée, but also do whatever they want to bully the people in the village. Although their number is small, they are extremely evil. If there are one or two such people in the church, of course, it will not have a good reputation. For example, the American Presbyterian Church developed 113 new believers in Shandong in 1886, but 128 people were expelled from the church in the same year, which is very telling.
As the role played by this group of people was extremely bad (similar to the "traitors" of later generations), and the two sides did not understand each other well, misunderstandings and conflicts between the people and the church continued to escalate, and thus evolved into a series of "religious incidents". As Western missionaries were protected by foreign forces in China, the intervention of foreign consuls inevitably complicated the incident. The "Tianjin Incident" of 1870 was a typical example of the problem of people-religion relations during this period.
