Teresa Zimmerman-Liu & Teresa Wright. Journal of Church & State. Volume 60, Issue 2. Spring 2018.
Religious beliefs are important in every society, and a study of them can enable scholars to better understand a society’s norms and structures. Many social conflicts in the world today include a religious component and arise when religions spread to new areas through globalization. Understanding how different societies deal with religious conflict and controversial religious groups, especially in the context of global cultural flows, can provide insights into the workings of governments and social systems coping with globalization. This article focuses on a religious group that has been situated in and has moved between two very different social and political systems: those in China and those in the United States.
The group is known by its members as the Local Churches but is called by its critics “the Shouters.” Despite its categorization as a cult in both the United States and China, as of 2011, church leaders reported approximately four thousand Local Churches throughout the world outside of China and another twelve hundred to fifteen hundred congregations within China’s borders. The Local Churches arose in China following the introduction of Western Protestant Christianity. Local Church founder—Watchman Nee—localized Western Protestant teachings to match the cultural context of China in the early twentieth century. In the 1960s, the group and its teachings flowed back to the West in its indigenized form, where it challenged mainstream American Protestant groups. In the late 1970s, the Local Churches reappeared in China during the post-Mao Era.
In both China and the United States, the group has been considered a cult. However, the process by which this designation was given and the consequences of this designation have been quite different. The differences derive from the distinct social and political systems found in China and the United States. In China, the Local Churches were categorized as a cult via a top-down process, wherein the central government played a key role in defining the group as aberrant by placing it on a list of “evil religious cults.” In the United States, the categorization of the Local Churches emanated from the bottom-up, as social groups worked to shape public opinion, influencing the way in which courts and legislative bodies regulated the group’s popular designation as a cult. Along with shedding light on the way that religious groups have been categorized in the United States and China, the case of the Local Churches provides insight into the relationship between globalization and religious development. The process by which the group was categorized as a cult in the United States and China was inextricably intertwined in the transnational movement of the group.
Data and Methods
This article analyzes a wealth of primary data related to the Local Churches from U.S. court documents and transcripts, official Chinese documents, and published statements by U.S. leaders of the anticult movement—a grassroots movement against new religions that began in the 1970s. The article also relies on previously unreported interviews with U.S. leaders of the Local Churches’ Living Stream Ministry (LSM) and with Gretchen Passantino Coburn, a leader in the U.S. anticult movement who has undertaken significant research on the group. The article is further informed by the co-author’s experience as a member of various Local Church congregations in the U.S. and Taiwan from 1978 to 2008 and her work as a translator for Local Church leader Witness Lee in his publication companies in Taipei and Anaheim, California, during the 1980s and 1990s and for church members who sought refuge in the United States from persecution in China during the early 2000s. In addition, the article consults existing scholarly examinations of the Local Churches.
Contested Definitions of “Religious Cult”
The West/United States
The processes by which the Local Churches have been categorized as a cult in China and the United States have been shaped by scholarly, popular, and governmental debates concerning the definition of a religious cult. In the West, as described by James T. Richardson, the term “cult” initially was employed in a nonpejorative, technical manner by sociologists engaged in the study of religion. They defined a cult as “a small informal group lacking a definite authority structure, somewhat spontaneous in its development …, somewhat mystical and individualistically oriented, and deriving its inspiration and ideology from outside the predominant religious culture.” Further developing this conceptualization, Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge differentiated religious groups into “churches, sects, and cults” and defined cults as religions that are completely new in a certain society: “Whether domestic or imported, the cult is something new vis-à-vis the other religious bodies of the society in question.” In the 1970s and 1980s, these earlier sociological definitions were displaced in the West by a popularized, pejorative definition of cults as “manipulative and authoritarian groups which allegedly employ mind control and pose a threat to mental health.” Western scholars found the popular allegations of “brainwashing” and mind control to be problematic; hence, academics have since eschewed using the term “cult,” instead referring to “new religious movements” (NRMs) and “minority religions.” J. Gordon Melton traces the development of the definition and study of NRMs, ultimately finding that they “are unacceptably different” from mainstream religious groups in any particular country and that they “are thus primarily defined not by any characteristic(s) that they share, but by the tension in their relationships with the other forms of religious life represented by the dominant churches, the ethnic religions, and the sects.”
The pejorative definition of a religious cult arose from the grassroots anticult movement in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the American counterculture movement ushered in a plethora of new religious movements, including the Local Churches, the Unification Church (“Moonies”), Hare Krishna, The Way, The Children of God, Scientology, and The Alamo Foundation. The worried parents of the youths who joined these movements formed self-help groups, beginning the anticult movement. At first, participants in this movement disseminated information to the media and lobbied governments in efforts to restrict the new religions. Shortly thereafter, evangelical Bible expositors joined the anticult movement and wrote books for lay believers, explaining the beliefs of these new religious groups and contrasting them with mainstream, Western evangelical theology. As the movement developed, notions of brainwashing and mind control became increasingly prominent. When the medical and psychiatric professions began treatment of cult members, participation in NRMs came to be seen in psycho-pathological terms, and the cult concept was medicalized. This development allowed anticult “deprogrammers” to circumvent the civil liberties of NRM members by kidnapping them and subjecting them to rigorous “de-brainwashing” regimens. Although the aggressive deprogramming tactics of the 1970s and 1980s have decreased since the early 1990s, American media outlets have continued to cast NRMs in a negative light, characterizing them as “cults linked … to violence, actual or potential.” Hence, in the United States, the notion of a religious cult continues to hold the negative connotations that it acquired during the 1970s and 1980s.
American grassroots activities revolving around cults eventually worked their way into the U.S. court system. During the early days of the anticult movement in America, NRMs were generally protected in the courts by the First Amendment. In the 1970s and 1980s, most court rulings “were favorable to supporting ‘marginal’ religions.” But as the term “cult” became medicalized, the courts frequently upheld actions taken by anticult “deprogrammers,” as membership in the NRMs came to be considered involuntary and due to mind control practiced by the groups’ leaders. The 1990 decision by the California federal court in United States v. Fishman was a loss for Margaret Singer, a leading expert witness on behalf of brainwashing theories in cult cases, and the brainwashing proponents. This precedent affected other courts; brainwashing ceased to be an issue in cult court cases, and courts began to dismiss cases on the grounds that they could not adjudicate matters of religious belief. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Employment Division of Oregon further changed the understanding and application of the Free Exercise Clause of the U.S. Constitution with respect to religion. In the majority opinion of Smith, Justice Antonin Scalia asserted that religious beliefs do not excuse an individual from compliance with a valid state law. John Wybraniec and Roger Finke note that this means that a state is no longer “required to have a ‘compelling interest’ before denying religious freedoms.” Since that time, case studies show that minority religions in the United States increasingly have been subject to legislative regulation.
Overall, the conceptualization of cults in the U.S. has been a bottom-up process. The process began with the development of new social and religious groups, which spawned the growth of opposing groups. These different groups interacted with one another in a variety of ways—directly and personally, through media outlets, and through the judicial and legislative systems. And, various parts of the complicated American government—most significantly, state legislatures, the national Congress, and the Supreme Court—have both reflected these social conflicts and tried to adjudicate and regulate them. It has been a messy and confusing process, but the impetus and pressure for political involvement has emanated from society rather than the government.
China
The Chinese word for cult is xiejiao. It can also be translated as “heterodoxy” and is a term that was used in the imperial era by the Chinese government to proscribe religions that “[conflicted] with the interests of the state and with what had been regarded as essential, namely, social ethics and certain accompanying rituals.” David A. Palmer describes the term’s use throughout Chinese history, showing how it was part of discourse against heterodox religious sects opposing the state as early as the Eastern Han (25-220 CE). Palmer then traces the use of the term up through the Republican Era and to the present day. Xiejiao was not used during the Mao Era but was revived in the 1990s when it was used to translate the English word “cult” and to refer to groups “denounced as heretical by the official Christian associations.”
Contemporary Chinese anticult activities have followed a very different trajectory from those in the United States, where grassroots conflicts between social groups influenced the courts and opened the door for governmental regulation of cults; in China, the government has taken a top-down approach stemming from its desire to maintain political and social control. As with all other aspects of governance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the ultimate authority is the Communist Chinese Party’s (CCP’s) top leadership. More detailed policy formation and enforcement responsibility lie with the CCP’s United Front Work Department. Simultaneously, within the party-state’s parallel “government” or “state” structure, the State Council’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) is charged with regulatory initiatives and supervision. Both the CCP’s United Front Department and the state’s SARA have offices down to the county, municipal, and district levels. Along with these entities, local Public Security Bureaus have broad responsibility to enforce regulations regarding religion.
China’s Constitution (last revised in 1982) affirms the citizenry’s freedom of religious belief but protects only “normal” (as defined by PRC government and CCP organs) religious activities. Moreover, whereas the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution expressly states that the U.S. Congress “shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” Article 36 of the 1982 PRC Constitution allows the government to regulate religious activities that “disrupt public order.” Similarly, the CCP’s Central Committee’s “Document 19” (issued in 1982) grants legal existence to five religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism)—but only under government-affiliated “patriotic” associations. For Protestants, this association is the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (Zhongguo jidujiao sanzi aiguo yundong weiyuan hui, or sanzi jiaohui; hereafter, TSPM). In order to register with the state, a religious group must submit a preliminary application, a document of approval from the TSPM, records of assets and proof of the right to its meeting place, a membership list, and a constitution. In addition, the group must agree to the “three fixes” (san ding): a fixed meeting place, leader, and area of coverage.
If a Protestant religious group does not register with TSPM, its legal status is unclear. Some unregistered groups have been branded cults (xiejiao) and thus are viewed as illegal. Many other unregistered groups have not been given such a designation and exist in a sort of limbo, neither clearly legal nor clearly illegal. The cult label is the most severe form of censure for unofficial religious groups and can entail stiff penalties; typically religious groups classified by the government as a cult are forcibly disbanded and their leaders jailed.
However, the rationale for inclusion on the PRC’s cult list is not clearly defined. In 2000, at a Beijing symposium on cults, local authorities were told that they should not examine the beliefs of any religious organization but should instead focus on whether the group is “harmful to society.” Further, according to a 1997 interpretation by the People’s Supreme Court, Article 300 of the PRC Criminal Code allows Chinese authorities to “delegitimize any belief system that they deem to be superstitious or a so-called evil religious organization [also translated as an ‘evil religious cult’].”
Despite the fundamental difference in constitutional stipulations and general governmental attitudes toward the regulation of religion in the United States and China, there has been some overlap between anticult activities in the two countries. China’s political leaders have taken many ideas from the American anticult movement in their campaigns against unsanctioned religious groups. Indeed, the Chinese government solicited and received assistance from Western anticultists in formulating its definitions and social controls for cults, especially the Falun Gong. For example, in 2000, the Chinese government sent representatives to attend an anticult conference in Seattle. After this conference and other meetings with Western anticultists, Chinese officials selected certain anticult ideologies to be used as the basis for Chinese government policies and pronouncements with regard to groups designated as religious cults. American popular definitions of cults were written into Chinese criminal code, and lower-level cadres were trained in their implementation. Further, Chinese political authorities have called upon American anticult scholars and activists to articulate the Chinese government’s case for the designation of particular religious groups as cults.
Case Study: The Local Churches
As noted earlier, since the Local Churches have been labeled a cult in both the United States and China, the group serves as an excellent vehicle for comparing and contrasting the processes by which the social systems of each country interact with controversial religious groups. Further, as indicated above, the Local Churches provide an illuminating illustration of the global transmission and transformation of religion. A closer examination of the history of the Local Churches uncovers the details of its globalization, as well as the different categorization processes that occurred in the United States and China.
Church History
The Local Church movement began in Fuzhou, China, in the early 1920s; its primary founder was the indigenous Chinese preacher and Bible expositor Watchman Nee (Ni Tosheng, 1905-1997), a native of Shandong Province, joined Nee’s group in Shanghai in the early 1930s. He became Nee’s close associate and an editor in Nee’s publication ministry. Nee and Lee were third-generation Christians in Western mission churches in China. Both spent time as members of Plymouth Brethren Assemblies prior to striking out on their own. Nee, Lee, and early members of the Local Churches expressed dissatisfaction with mission Christianity and sought to find a way to be Christian apart from Western cultural influences. The early Local Churches utilized a strategy generally used by minority sects of a religion—namely, returning to a fundamentalist understanding of the religion’s sacred text. The Local Churches further sought to emphasize the elements of scriptural and historical Christianity that would most appeal to their audience of Republican-era (1911-49) Chinese people.
Nee’s blueprint for Christian practice called for a loose network of independent congregations each overseen by a council of elders, similar to the organization of the Plymouth Brethren Assemblies. Nee further insisted that each city or town have only one church with one eldership; hence, the name Local Churches. There were no formal clergy. A group of extra-local coworkers moved from church to church preaching upon the invitation of a locality’s elders. The coworkers had no control over local groups except through the power of their teaching; there was no central headquarters, and the coworkers did not receive fixed monetary compensation from any particular local church, churches, or central organization. Most of the elders were employed in regular professions and were volunteers in the church service. This mode of organization effectively removed Nee’s group from the influence of foreign missions. Thus, it appealed to Chinese of the early twentieth century, who associated missions with imperialism.
Because there were no official clergy, all members of the congregation were encouraged to spend much of their free time engaged in church service. Nee drew upon the scriptural teachings and practices of the Pietists and Christian mystics, emphasizing Christian prayer and practice in all matters of the believers’ daily lives. Nee’s emphasis on daily practice by all the believers made his version of Christianity attractive to average Chinese people because traditional Chinese religions were not institutionalized but were diffused in daily life and required active participation by believers. This emphasis on spirituality in the midst of the believers’ mundane life further differentiated the Local Church’s practice of Christianity from mainstream Western Christian practices.
Nee’s emphasis on the entire network of Local Churches as the manifestation of the church universal created a strong sense of community, an important factor to people with a traditional Chinese worldview, which emphasizes relationship and community over isolated individuals. In this aspect, Nee’s fundamentalism differed greatly from American fundamentalism, which places much more emphasis on individual believers, individual pastors, and individual congregations. Nee and Lee also emphasized studying Scripture in a nuanced way, with much attention to context and with a view to the writings of major theologians from all of Christian history. They did not agree with the systematic, rationalized, reductionist theology that according to Weber lies at the heart of Western capitalist society. As will be described in detail, these cultural differences contributed to later misunderstandings with mainstream evangelical American Christians when Witness Lee brought the Local Churches to the United States in the 1960s.
Nee contextualized Christianity to his time and place. In so doing, he inspired his followers and created a vibrant, enthusiastic Chinese Christian community. Indeed, Nee’s movement can be considered an example of the “complex interaction between the global and the local” that has occurred repeatedly throughout the history of globalization. His Local Churches show similarities to modern indigenous Pentecostal churches in South America and to African Christian congregations. These forms of Christianity represent a “glocalization” of the Christian religion in social contexts very different from Europe and the United States. Furthermore, all of these forms of “indigenous” Christianity have come into conflict with mainstream Western Christian groups.
The Local Church movement grew in China under the leadership of both Nee and Lee until the Communist Revolution and the establishment of the PRC in 1949. At that time, Lee was sent to Taiwan to continue ministry work there. Nee remained in Shanghai, working among Local Church congregations in what was now the PRC.
Watchman Nee and the Local Churches in Mao-era (1949-76) China first attempted to cooperate with the Communist government, as long as they were free to worship apart from government controls. But in 1952, Nee was arrested, and in 1956, he was “accused as a counter-revolutionary and charged with a series of crimes against the state. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison and died in a labor camp in 1972.” With Nee gone from church leadership, the Chinese government moved to take control of the Local Churches. However, a number of congregations survived underground through the end of the Mao Era.
Witness Lee continued as the heir to Nee’s ministry work in Taiwan throughout the 1950s. The basic components of Lee’s Local Church teaching and practice were the same as those under Nee in mainland China, but Lee refined the vision and practice over time. In 1962, Lee immigrated to the United States and began to speak widely, preaching his and Nee’s version of Christianity in heavily accented English, which was often difficult for average Americans to understand. Nonetheless, in the late 1960s, the Local Church movement began to take off in the United States, especially in California.
The Making of a Cult in the United States
In the 1970s, when American evangelical Christians encountered Local Churches under the ministry of Witness Lee, many were put off by the unfamiliar doctrinal terminology used by Lee and by the strong Chinese influence that was evident even in Western congregations. As Local Church members proselytized on American campuses, they came into conflict with mainstream evangelical groups, such as Inter-Varsity. During the mid- to late 1970s, two research organizations affiliated with the anticult movement—the Christian Research Institute (CRI) of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Spiritual Counterfeit Project (SCP) of Berkeley, California—researched and published “highly critical evaluations” of the Local Churches. These reports did not call the Local Churches a cult but were cited in later publications that did.
Although Witness Lee and CRI founder Walter Martin met in 1977 and felt they had found common ground with which to foster understanding between the two groups, most of the CRI research staff did not trust Lee and felt that Martin had been deceived. Other members of the Local Churches lacked the forbearance of their leader, and both sides continued arguing and skirmishing. The conflict between the Local Churches and the anticult movement worsened after the publication of two books on cults: The Mind Benders, by Jack Sparks, and The God-Men, by the SCP staff. Jack Sparks had been associated with the forerunner to the SCP, and his book was based on the same SCP research as The God-Men. The Mind Benders was a book on cults, and one of its chapters described the Local Churches as an Eastern cult that brainwashed and abused its members. The God-Men was entirely devoted to describing the errors of Witness Lee’s theology and church practices. In 1981, an updated version of The Mind Benders placed a chapter on Jim Jones and the People’s Temple directly after the chapter on the Local Churches.
Immediately thereafter, the Local Churches took to the courts to clear their name. They filed a lawsuit, which ended with a 1983 settlement agreement. In accordance with the settlement agreement, Thomas Nelson Publishers (the well-known American Christian publisher that put out The Mind Benders) retracted the book and published a retraction in eighteen American newspapers.
In 1979, Neil Duddy and the SCP wrote a much-revised German edition of The God-Men that, in 1981, was published in English by Inter-Varsity Press. The book contained allegations of brainwashing, financial irregularities, “moral pygmyism,” and total control by church leaders over the believers’ lives. The Local Churches took the matter to court. Judge Leon Seyranian of the Superior Court of Alameda County, California, heard testimony from five expert witnesses, who were all renowned scholars of religion in America. All testified that the Local Churches were a nonconventional yet orthodox Christian group and that they found no evidence of mind control or detrimental effects of membership to Local Church believers. Moreover, the pretrial depositions of the people involved with writing and publishing the second edition of The God-Men showed that they had either “willingly and knowingly falsified the truth” or “exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth” when writing the book. Therefore, Judge Seyranian ruled in favor of Witness Lee and the Local Churches, awarding them a combined total of $11,900,000 in damages. They were unable to collect in full because SCP had declared bankruptcy the day before the trial in anticipation that it would lose.
This judgment did little to ameliorate the views of the anticult movement with respect to the Local Churches. Elliot Miller of CRI reports that the conflict between the Local Churches and the anticult movement “remained at a low boil” for many years after the 1985 trial. John Gordon Melton, one of the experts who had testified at the trial, sent an open letter to the American evangelical community encouraging them to reevaluate their condemnation of Witness Lee and the Local Churches in light of the libelous accusations in The God-Men. His exhortations went largely unheeded. Living Stream Ministry leaders estimate that there have been roughly three hundred republications of The God-Men’s assessment of the Local Churches.
The Local Churches sued their detractors for a third time in 2001. In 1999, Harvest House published the Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions by John Ankerberg and John Weldon, which included a chapter on the Local Churches, and which again connected the Local Churches by association and inference with brainwashing and mind control. The Living Stream Ministry and sixty Local Church congregations sued Harvest House in 2001 in the 80th Judicial District of Harris County in Houston, Texas, but the court ruled in favor of Harvest House in 2006, stating that the courts have “no business ruling on a ‘religious’ dispute.”
Because they had concerns about the quality of research found in Ankerberg and Weldon’s 1999 publication, CRI researchers decided to revisit their investigation on the Local Churches. In 2009, Elliot Miller of the CRI and Gretchen Passantino Coburn of Answers in Action, two of the researchers from CRI and SCP who had done the original 1970s research on the Local Churches, published the results of new research, retracting their previous conclusion that the Local Churches were an “aberrant” form of Christianity and affirming their new conclusion that the churches are orthodox but different. Passantino Coburn gave five reasons for their earlier erroneous conclusions: (1) they had automatically assumed that their issues with “problematic [Local Church] teaching … stemmed from heresy or confusion on their part rather than misunderstanding on our part” (here Passantino notes that Lee’s Eastern heritage meant his writings “did not reflect the rational, didactic, Aristotelian exposition familiar to us, causing us to suspect theological error rather than mere cultural difference”); (2) the material studied in the 1970s was deficient in depth and breadth; (3) Nee and Lee’s theological approach was different from the systematic theology of Western evangelical Protestantism; (4) SCP isolated the teachings of the Local Churches from their historical and cultural roots, failing to understand the cultural context of early twentieth-century China where the group began; and (5) both the SCP researchers and Local Church members in the 1970s were “immature, inexperienced, and sometimes insensitive.” Similarly, Elliott Miller asserts that “the [Local Church’s] distinctively Chinese approach to the universal truths of Christianity has contributed significantly to their being misunderstood and mislabeled as a cult in the West.” Thus, it appears that the Local Churches were labeled a cult largely because they were too Chinese for mainstream evangelical Protestants in 1970s America.
Despite the testimony of religious scholars and the retractions and revised conclusions from the original researchers condemning the group, many American evangelicals have remained unconvinced. Harvest House has not retracted its entry in the Encyclopedia of Cults and New Religions, and Apologetics Index has criticized Passantino Coburn and CRI for their retraction of the cult label. However, other evangelical bodies, such as Christianity Today and Fuller Seminary, are no longer antagonistic toward the Local Churches. Living Stream Ministry leaders state that those earlier, disparaging publications have influenced public opinion in a way that has been impossible to revise, despite successful lawsuits and public statements by former detractors recanting their prior criticisms of the group. LSM leaders liken the effect of these earlier criticisms to “opening a feather pillow in the wind;” even if one succeeds in mending the tear in the pillow, the feathers can never be retrieved and stuffed back in.
Overall, the case of Witness Lee and the Local Churches demonstrates the bottom-up nature of religious categorization in the United States. The initial designation of the Local Churches as a cult did not involve the government or legal system, but rather occurred at the societal level, as groups that felt threatened by the spread of the Local Churches took action to “protect” themselves and other “vulnerable” individuals from the group’s influence. Opponents of the Local Churches published materials that described the group as a pernicious cult. When the Local Churches sued these publishers, the U.S. legal system became involved in the process. In two cases the Local Churches prevailed, but in a third case the court refused to intervene in the dispute, which effectively meant that the Local Churches lost in their bid to fully clear their name. Meanwhile, some of the key researchers of the anticult movement publicly recanted their earlier criticisms. In addition, some evangelical groups that previously considered the Local Churches to be a cult have ceased to hold this view. However, other evangelical groups, publishers, and leaders have maintained their assertion that the group is indeed a dangerous cult. Thus, it is a contradictory and convoluted situation. No legal or governmental entity has officially categorized the group as a cult, and two courts have ruled that it is libelous to publicly call it such. At the societal level, some key individuals and groups have recanted their earlier designation of the group as a cult, whereas other powerful individuals and groups have continued to describe the group as a cult and to work to prevent its expansion.
The Making of a Cult in the PRC
In contrast to the grassroots origin of the American anticult movement, the process by which the Local Churches were categorized as a cult in China was top-down and began in the political system. At the societal level, there has been no anticult movement in China, although there have been some religious leaders who have denounced the Local Churches and have participated in the government’s efforts to describe the group as a cult. Interestingly, the Chinese government utilized the anti-Local Churches writings of American anticult movement leaders in its rationale for categorizing the group as a cult. However, unlike in the United States, in China the group’s designation as a cult does not seem to have made regular people believe that the group actually is a dangerous cult. Although the government’s castigation of the group may cause some Chinese citizens to shy away from the group out of fear of political reprisals, the group has in recent years grown and expanded in many areas within the PRC. As noted herein, the Local Churches flourished in the period preceding China’s Communist Revolution. During the Mao Era, the Local Churches were forced to go underground as they realized that cooperating with TSPM officials would not give them freedom of religion. Joseph Tse-hei Lee reports that the Local Churches expanded at first by forming coalitions with other churches, whose missionary leaders had been forced out of China. The government launched a campaign against the group in the late 1950s, but the members still managed to practice their faith secretly using various strategies. According to Xi Lian, during the late 1960s the Local Churches had twenty thousand active believers in the area surrounding the city of Fuzhou, Fujian Province, on the southeast coast of China.
In the post-Mao Era, the Local Churches publicly reappeared and expanded, only to be categorized as an “evil religious cult” within a few years. Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the ascension of pragmatist Deng Xiaoping to leadership in 1978, China’s ruling CCP endorsed social and political loosening—including greater openness to the West. Under this freer political environment, members of Local Church congregations outside China traveled to the mainland to seek out congregations that had gone underground during the Mao Era. According to Xi Lian, “the bagfuls of Bibles and Shouters’ tracts (as well as occasional stacks of cash) that Li Changshou’s (aka Witness Lee’s) messengers brought … represented spiritual, and material, fortunes to those underground church leaders who linked up with the overseas brethren.”
Academics, church leaders, and CCP documents all agree that by 1983 the Chinese government was alarmed at the rapid growth and influence of the Local Churches throughout China. According to LSM leaders, the government’s decision to take action against the group was sparked by events in Dongyang County, Zhejiang Province, in early 1982. Around that time, TSPM leaders sent two representatives to Dongyang to set up a local chapter. However, Dongyang’s Christians did not welcome their arrival. Shortly thereafter, the TSPM representatives incited local cadres to violently break up various Christian meetings in the county. A similar chain of events occurred in Yiwu County, also in Zhejiang Province.
According to LSM leaders, after negative reports spread to Hong Kong, TSPM leaders shifted the blame to the Local Churches. In 1983, the CCP’s United Front Department sent a representative to Shanghai to meet with local TSPM leaders. They enlisted two former Local Church members, who had in 1956 joined the TSPM and who opposed Witness Lee, to write a critical account of the Local Churches. The Chinese government also contacted individuals in America and Hong Kong who were friendly to the TSPM to help with the project. The finished document drew heavily on the accounts of the Local Churches found in The God-Men and The Mind Benders. Based on this critical report, the CCP branded the Local Churches/Shouters as a cult. Indeed, the Local Churches head the list of “seven cults identified in the documents issued by General Office of the Central Committee of CCP and by the General Office of the State.” That CCP document states that by “1983 this sect has already spread to 360 counties, cities in 20 provinces and autonomous regions, with up to 200,000 deceived believers.” This document is the first to use the appellation “The Shouters.”
Subsequently, in the summer of 1983 the Local Churches were targeted in the first anticult campaign of the post-Mao Era. Contemporaneous accounts of this crackdown on the Local Churches show its top-down origins and political overtones. The July 21, 1983, edition of the Fuzhou Evening Newspaper reports on the crackdown in an article entitled “Our City Punishes Lawbreakers from ‘Shouters’ Reactionary Organization.” The slogan above the article states, “Fighting against Counter-Revolutionaries under the Cloak of Religion.” The article reports the July 14, 1983, arrest of Local Church leaders who “use religion as their cover and zealously attack the Communist Party and the People’s Government, opposing the socialistic system.” The anonymous testimony of another church leader in Fuqing City, Fujian Province, reports that on July 14, 1983, nineteen people from his Local Church were arrested in this “strike-hard” campaign. Many people were sentenced to death in this particular campaign; the anonymous author was “only sentenced to ten years in prison.” After 1983, Chinese Local Churches experienced cycles of tightening and loosening government repression, as did most Protestant house church groups in China, but the cult label meant that they were targeted more often and with harsher punishments.
The cult designation has had a different impact in China than it has in the United States. Although parts of the legal system in the United States have tried to clear the group’s name, and some individuals and groups within American society have recanted their earlier castigation of the group, most Americans who are familiar with the group still view it as a cult. In China, in contrast, the pinnacle of the political system has persisted in its labeling of the group as a cult, but at lower levels of the political system, officials have had a more mixed attitude and, in some areas, have tolerated or even accepted the group’s activities. Significant numbers of citizens have joined the group—despite its official designation as a cult.
Indeed, LSM leaders report that since 2005, they have traveled to mainland China roughly twice a year to meet with local officials in charge of dealing with the “Shouters.” They state that there is great local variation in the government’s treatment of the group. In general, they note that in larger coastal cities, and also in Beijing, Local Church groups are flourishing, holding regular meetings with as many as two hundred congregants. In inland areas as well, LSM leaders state that Local Church membership is very large. However, in inland areas gatherings are much smaller, with only a few dozen congregants at most. The difference in local treatment, according to LSM leaders, hinges on the relationships among local political authorities, local TSPM leaders, and local Local Church leaders. LSM leaders also report that official attitudes toward the group tend to shift over time. On their most recent trip to Shanghai (in October 2013), for example, the local official with whom they typically meet told them that he was too busy to see them because he was working to crack down on another “evil religious cult”—the Almighty God church. Further, since 2000, every five years there has been a wholesale leadership change across all levels of government, such that Local Church leaders have had to establish relationships with new political officials, who may or may not have the same attitude toward the group as did their predecessors.
In their efforts to clear the Local Churches’ name, LSM leaders reported first meeting with leaders of the TSPM, but after concluding that the TSPM has no real power, they began meeting with leaders of the Chinese political system’s higher bodies for controlling religions—the United Front Department and the SARA. LSM leaders state that most high-placed government officials agree that the cult label has no basis in fact, but the Chinese officials in question do not have the power to remove the group from China’s cult list. In 2009, the LSM leaders thought they had successfully negotiated to remove the group’s cult label, but in 2010, there was a change in SARA leadership and they had to begin all over again. At present, church leaders believe that to clear the group’s name, they will have to find a backer on the Central Committee of the CCP to persuade the other committee members to remove the group from the list. Until such time, in China, the group will be subject to the vicissitudes of CCP policy, and its members will live under constant threat of arrest and imprisonment. However, at the grassroots level, Local Church congregations may be expected to continue to flourish in many areas of China.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the case of Witness Lee and the Local Churches provides a window into the contrasts between the United States and the PRC as they deal with NRMs that develop and spread through globalization. The group’s experience in the United States confirms that there grassroots opinion is paramount in the process by which a religious group is labeled a cult. Although Local Church congregations in the United States do not face arrest and imprisonment, the label of cult frequently scares off people from joining the group. Despite court rulings and public statements by academics and former detractors declaring that the group is both benign and decidedly not a cult, Local Church members are often viewed askance by their nonmember friends and relatives. Moreover, there is little that the group can do to change grassroots opinion; the cult label appears to be very sticky in the minds of the American public. Nevertheless, the group meets freely and openly, owns a large publishing company, runs a leadership training center, and its members freely practice their faith.
In contrast, the cult classification of the Local Churches in China originated at the highest echelons of the government. The Local Churches top the list of cults named by the Central Committee of the CCP. This classification appears to be mainly political, and it most likely stems from CCP fears that the group is resistant to government control and has many connections to congregations and resources outside China. Grassroots Chinese citizens, in contrast, seem to be quite receptive to the Local Churches, as is evidenced by the large number of members in China, even in the face of possible imprisonment and government sanctions. In fact, if the Central Committee of the CCP were to remove the group from its cult list, the residue of the cult label likely would wash away in the minds of Chinese citizens. To the disappointment of the Local Churches, the CCP is unlikely to change its mind any time soon, and therefore, its members in China will continue to live under constant threat of repression for their faith.
For the foreseeable future, the Local Churches will continue to bear the cult label both in China and the United States. In the United States, this is due to grassroots efforts on the part of those who view the group as a dangerous threat and who have succeeded in popularizing this conception. In China, in contrast, the Local Churches’ continued castigation results from the CCP’s fear of losing control over society through the expansion of a group that is popular domestically and has access to foreign resources.