In the early 1980s, the primary obstacle in the way of religious studies was
the general, absolutely negative attitude towards religion which derived from
one-sided and dogmatic interpretations of the famous remark by Karl Marx,
‘Religion is the opium of the people’. Marx had an unarguably authoritative
position in China. Encouraged by Deng Xiaoping’s call for ‘wholly and fully’
understanding Marxism, some leading scholars, mainly from Nanjing and
Shanghai or in the Protestant Church, such as Zheng Jian-ye and Zhao Fu-san,
proposed that the remark could be understood neither as the leitmotif of Marx’s
idea of religion nor as an absolutely negative judgment. Regarding religion only
as ‘opium’ or an illegal drug would lead to dismissing believers as ‘opium eaters’
or drug addicts and to judging religious leaders as drug dealers. That would
justify the repression of all religions that had occurred during the past twenty
years. But other remarks in the same essay and elsewhere showed that Marx
had sympathy for religious people. Furthermore, the metaphor of ‘opium’ had
something more than just a negative sense, as many churchmen had used the
same metaphor before Marx in Europe, where people knew opium as an
effective painkiller. This meaning contrasted with that familiar to Chinese
people, for whom opium was only a notorious illegal drug and a reminder of
the disgrace of the Anglo-Chinese ‘Opium War’ (1839–1842).
Other leading scholars, mainly from the Institute of World Religions, such
as Lu Da-ji and Ren Ji-yu, held that the idea of religion as opium could be
seen as a cornerstone of Marxist theories of religion. Indeed, opium is an
effective painkiller, but it is so just because it has some anaesthetic or narcotic
function. Such a function gave religion a reactionary role in relation to
oppressed people in the class struggle. Of course, this function also had a
positive character when people needed it in a pain-making society. In any case,
spiritual opium was different from material opium and was not to be destroyed
like the latter. According to these scholars, the extreme ‘leftist’ attitude of the
past toward religion had complex causes and was not to be understood only
as the result of Marx’s remark.
The North–South ‘Opium War’, as many people called it, had a very positive
influence on religious studies in the mid 1980s. Although the two sides
emphasized different aspects in their understanding of Marx’s remark, they
agreed in opposing the ‘extreme leftist’ interpretation and in advocating every
side’s right to hold its opinion and to argue on an equal footing. After the
debate, more and more scholars threw away the dogmatic interpretation of
the Marxist theory of religion, took a more open attitude towards religions,
and maintained wider horizons in their research.
From the mid 1980s on, partly as the result of the open attitude and partly
as the outcome of the influence of the ‘studies of cultures’ current in Chinese
intellectual circles, a relatively new idea appeared and spread swiftly in religious
studies, the idea of ‘religion as culture’. It was given precise expression in such
propositions as the following: ‘Religion is a universal social and cultural
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
CONTINENTAL EAST ASIA
165
