书城外语ChristianityinChina
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第19章 ChristianityFacingtheChoiceofNewChina(1)

In 1949, with the continuous victories of the People"s LiberationArmy, the founding of a new China was becoming anoverwhelming trend. Quite a lot of Christians were consideringthe question: what should Chinese churches do in the future?

For a long time, the foreign missionaries in China, especiallyAmerican missionaries, had taken it as one of their major tasksto oppose communism, and had missed no opportunity to makeanti-communist speeches, in an attempt to train Chinese churchesinto forces opposing the communist Party of China (CPC)。

Influenced by the foreign missionaries, the Christian churches,schools and publications were full of pro-American and anticommunistideology and comments, which deeply affected manyChristians. After the victory of the War of Resistance againstJapanese Aggression, Chiang Kai-shek broke his own words andprovoked civil war. Considering American interests and for someideological reasons, American missionaries took the churchesas a tool to carry out their anti-communist propaganda and incitedthe sentiments of anti-communism and anti-Sovietism amongChinese Christians. In December 1942, when the 13th annualmeeting of the National Christian Council of China was held,some missionaries were specially invited to make such anticommunistspeeches as "Christianity and communism‘, "theChurches and the New Epoch‘, etc. They proposed to fight againstthe dissemination of the communist ideology with the "PushingAhead Movement‘。 John Leighton Stuart, the U.S. ambassadorto China at that time, repeatedly instructed the missionaries toattach great importance to the construction of churches in ruralChina and to compete with CPC in winning the loyalty of thepeasantry. The time from 1947 to 1949 was the period that theChinese communist revolution achieved a series of decisivevictories, but the anti-communist trend in the churches became more rampant. The book Atomic Bomb and the End of the Worldpublished by the Seventh Day Adventists described thecommunist parties‘ capture of regimes as the end of the world.

And 110,000 copies of its first edition were printed whichexercised a rather large influence. With the liberation of variousplaces in north China, the foreign missionaries and some Chineseclergy ran to the south one after another and made speeches tothe churches there. They said they had witnessed the CPC killingpeople and committing all kinds of crimes, and spread rumorsthat the CPC persecuted religious people in an attempt to provokeChristian anti-communist sentiments. The college magazine of Nanjing Jinling Concord Theological College carried a story thata priest in Shandong Province was nailed dead on the Cross.

However, soon after the whole country was liberated, this priestwhose name was mentioned in the magazine came to Nanjinghimself, which naturally scotched that rumor. Some clergymeneven used the prophesies of Bible to attack the CPC by innuendo,saying that the half-iron, half-clay feet of the giant described inthe book of Daniel was the union of workers and farmers, whichwould be broken down in the future; and that the locust and thered horse in the book of Revelations were bombers and thecommunist party, and one third of the people on the earth wouldbe killed by them. These inflammatory remarks stirred up oneupsurge after another in the Chinese churches. Before the KMTregime fled to Taiwan and the foreign missionaries ran awayfrom the Chinese mainland, the latter planned a series ofemergency measures. These included: launching a "Saving theSoul Movement‘; training Chinese clergymen to replace theforeign missionaries and seeking opportunities to carry outdisruptive activities under complicated circumstances; tointegrate the churches into families to disseminate disruptiveactivities, etc. They attempted to deprave Christian churches totools of the American and KMT reactionary forces. Therefore,after the founding of the People"s Republic of China, manyChristians did not trust the communist regime and felt there wasno future under it.