Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [76]
Another thing that Gao Shengchan himself could do, however, was to write articles and circulate them to the various believers; this was actually a way of sending information to the government. His most important theme was “God is God and Caesar is Caesar.” He wrote that the Christian church did not seek secular political power; it was a force for social stability, and thus the secular government should not interfere with religion. His hope was that he could influence the government to change its usual policy and accept the idea that politics and religion were separate realms. He wanted to erect a firewall between the political regime and his religion, and that would be of great assistance to the development of religion at this point in time. He also wrote blogs under several names to support those Beijing scholars who advocated the desensitization of religion.
However, Gao Shengchan didn’t advocate putting extra pressure on the government during the desensitization process, and he was opposed to the demands of urban radical Christian intellectuals for official recognition of the home-church movement and for the legalization, open operation, and free publication of formerly underground churches. He believed that the government could not officially recognize the home churches; desensitization was their bottom line. After desensitization, the best thing would be for the government to act as though it were unaware of the underground churches, and for the Bureau of Religion to act as though it had never heard of any home churches outside of the Three-Self Patriotic denomination. The home churches should not do anything to embarrass the government. If they didn’t cause any trouble, everybody could save face and everybody could function well.
Gao Shengchan thought that later generations would probably look back and say that this was the purist age of Chinese Protestant Christianity. Because it operated outside the Three-Self Patriotic Church, Protestant Christianity still retained its underground character, and there were very few secular benefits to becoming a member of the church. So most of the new members joined the church with a pure heart; they were practicing faith for the sake of faith. If some church leaders or volunteer workers became corrupt, they were the exception and not the rule. People in China who were genuinely ambitious for fame, profits, or power joined the Communist Party, the so-called democratic parties, commercial-interest groups, organized-crime gangs, or the entertainment industry; comparatively few would choose the religious arena. Even if they did, they would join the government-recognized religious organizations or found a sect of their own; they would not be very likely to join a Protestant denomination. On the other hand, in a country like the United States, where Protestant Christianity was the mainstream religion, the churches could hardly avoid being associated with fame, profit, power, and interest groups. Gao Shengchan hoped that Chinese Christianity could continue to develop underground for a long time so that ambitious characters would not be interested in the home-church movement and Chinese Christians would be able to remain as pure-hearted as they were now.
The Church of the Grain Fallen on the Ground had quite a good reputation in Chinese Christian circles, and, since all its leaders had spent time in prison, many foreign Christians came to see them. Li Tiejun and the others were particularly happy to associate with foreigners, but Gao Shengchan was quite wary of this; he was afraid that the Communist Party would charge them with the crime of collaborating with foreign powers. From his exchanges with visitors from abroad, Gao Shengchan realized even more clearly that, although the Christian churches didn’t aspire to secular power, they could still be drawn into politics as in America, where the Evangelical Christians frequently worked on issues with the Republican Party and its