Making Religion, Making the State : The Politics of Religion in Modern China

This volume combines the perspective of religion as a constructed category of modernity with the analytic focus and empirical grounding of institutional social science to develop a new approach to the study of state and religion in modern and contemporary China. Making Religion, Making the State combines cutting-edge perspectives on religion with rich empirical data to offer a challenging new argument about the politics of religion in modern China. The volume goes beyond extant portrayals of the opposition of state and religion to emphasize their mutual constitution. It examines how the modern category of "religion" is enacted and implemented in specific locales and contexts by a variety of actors from the late nineteenth century until the present. With chapters written by experts on Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Daoism, Islam, and more, this volume will appeal across the social sciences and humanities to those interested in politics, religion, and modernity in China. This text combines cutting-edge perspectives on religion with rich empirical data to offer a challenging argument about the politics of religion in modern China. The volume goes beyond extant portrayals of the opposition of state and religion to emphasize their mutual constitution