Since the 1970s, Cantonese Protestant theologies have presumed, I hope to show in this chapter, a separation between the church and a world they presume to be secular. To scholars in Chinese Christianities, this division will sound entirely unsurprising. Lian Xi and Christie Chow have traced the emergence of this distinction among Chinese Christian revivalists during the Republican Era in the early twentieth century. Tim Tseng has observed its “transpacific transpositions” to American urban centres such as New York and San Francisco after the Chinese Communist Revolution. The field has already spoken, as it were, and not only in China, but all over what has come to be known as the Pacific Rim.
But there is a story to how Chinese Protestant revivalism spread across Pacific Rim civil societies. In terms of the Pacific Rim’s dream coordinates, most of the Cantonese Protestants I spoke to could narrate themselves in the secular terms of students moving to North America for school, highly skilled workers who settled in the Bay Area, semi-retirees who sought a slower pace of life in Vancouver, and entrepreneurs who kept a foot in Hong Kong for business opportunities. But the Cantonese Protestant church communities that they established offer a concurrent transpacific narrative. In this story, what spread throughout the Pacific Rim from the 1950s to the 1970s was the theological account of the church regarding the “secular” as a presence that compromises the purity of Cantonese Protestant church congregations to practice their faith without being dependent on political institutions outside the church. The prevalence of this theology among Cantonese Protestants in Pacific Rim civil societies, I intend moreover to demonstrate, was hard won. Strict separation from the secular was not the norm when they arrived on the scene, and their arrival resulted in political contests in which their theological vision became dominant from the 1970s onward.
I first set the stage with the Chinese revivalists in Republican China moving to Hong Kong and initiating a revivalist “student movement” that led to young Cantonese Protestants framing mainline Protestant denominational bureaucracies in Hong Kong as secular and breaking from them in the 1950s. I move to these students’ subsequent collisions in the 1960s and 1970s with the Asian American Movement in San Francisco and Chinese Canadian community politics in Vancouver, both of which they regarded as blocs of theologically compromised Chinese Christian church communities. The final part of this chapter focuses on developments in Hong Kong since the late 1970s, in which this strict separation of the church and the world enabled the emergence of a theology of civil society from among Cantonese Protestant communities, which has arguably been carried over into the present in the democracy movements that have animated transpacific interest in the Hong Kong protests.
Denominational secularities: the “student movement” and Hong Kong Protestantism
When I was conducting field work in Hong Kong, a story that my participants narrated to me concerned what some called the “St. Paul’s Seven.” As a composite of their hagiographic tale goes, seven classmates were suspended by St. Paul’s School in the early 1960s because they began an evangelical Bible study and proselytized fellow students. While St Paul’s itself was an Anglican school, my participants suggested that the denominational establishment wanted complete control of theological activities at the school instead of recognizing the power of the Holy Spirit in their midst. The story of the suspension, at least from the perspective of my interviewees, is therefore the tale of a church institution that had become so compromised by its secular power that it could not recognize the movements of God.
I recount the story of the St Paul’s Seven because it invites reflection on a new understanding of the church’s relation to the secular that was emerging in 1950s and early 1960s Hong Kong. One research participant who told me this story was the longtime general secretary of the Hong Kong evangelical organization Breakthrough Youth Ministries, Philemon Choi. He said that he had actually met one of the St Paul’s Seven and that he in fact had been led to Christian faith through this young revivalist’s influence. In fact, the St Paul’s Seven were part of a much larger movement that had an inter-school evangelistic rally organized by the Inter-School Christian Fellowship (ISCF). ISCF in turn was the secondary school node of a networked set of institutions such as the Fellowship of Evangelical Studies (FES) and the Hong Kong University Christian Association (HKUCA).
Taken together, these fellowships composed what was described to me as a “student movement.” One of the movement leaders from that time invited me to lunch and described a revival that “broke out,” she said, in 1951 at a Baptist youth camp on the island of Cheung Chau. The new Hong Kong revivalism, she continued, emphasized pietistic practices that differentiated Christian life from a kind of secular worldliness as a matter of “purity.” What that meant, she said, was that she “would not even pass in front of a cinema,” though she had “no qualm about TV.” This seeming contradiction in practice, she added, had to do with the students’ normative belief in what in some evangelical quarters is known as the “Rapture,” a sudden event in which practicing Christians would suddenly disappear from the earth in preparation for God’s judgment of the earth at the end of the world. A cinema, the students speculated, was a house of vice, an impure space. If they were in such a place, perhaps they would not be “raptured.” A television set, by contrast, can be anywhere.
The Cheung Chau revivals generated, my respondent said, a set of gatherings calling themselves “Gospel churches.” They were spin-off congregations from the Baptist Convention, which she said had attempted to suppress the student movement just like the St Paul’s Seven had been suspended by an Anglican school. The reason for the repression, she added, was that the denominations were “suspicious of young people and spread rumours that they were communists.” What the students threatened, she suggested, was the temporal power of denominational institutions, which in turn were said to be compromising the faith. Indeed, a popular term that emerged from the time about the charities that these institutional apparatuses offered to refugees in Hong Kong fleeing the war-torn mainland was “rice Christians,” people who claimed to have converted to Christianity but only for the material benefits it conferred on them. From the perspective of the students, the revivals seemed to threaten the denominations’ material power by calling them on their spiritual bluff. For the revivalists the denominations were in fact secular institutions, even though they were Protestant Christian in name.
(excerpted from chapter 2)
