Anti-Christian Movement

The Anti-Christian Movement (非基督教运动) was an intellectual and political anti-religious movement in China in the 1920s.^[1] The movement was born out of the anti-imperialistic and anti-Western sentiments that were heightened in the May Fourth Movement and strengthened by the strong desire for national unity in the 1920s. Under strong nationalistic feelings, Christianity was viewed by some as the vehicle and product of foreign imperialism, and that Western-operated churches and mission works were a way to shape the development of China for the benefit of Western imperialists. The movement aimed to challenge the presence of Christianity as a means to build a Chinese nation without foreign interferences.^[2]

The Anti-Christian Movement was also a result of ideological development in China. The May Fourth Movement brought in modern Western ideologies as possible ideological framework for the modernization of China, and some of them were critical of religions, such as Marxism, rationalism, and socialism. These skeptical views against religion had entered into the intellectual debate for Chinese modernization, which led to the thinking that the Christian faith was a superstition and it was imposed upon the Chinese people by Western imperialists.^[3]

The various movements were also inspired by modernizing attitudes deriving from both nationalist and socialist ideologies, as well as feeding on older anti-Christian sentiment that was in large part due to repeated invasions of China by Western countries.^[1][4][5] The Chinese nationalists had also sought unity in their country as well as a transformation in the way that their society operated, which seemed to heavily rely upon Western thought and/or ideals.^[3] They brought forth age-old criticisms about the Western religion and accused the Christian missionaries of actively participating in it as a way of eliminating the native culture of China like other foreign imperialists.^[3]