Analysts and critics of Chinese nationalism have long noted nationalists’ commitment to various ‘truths’ of the nation ‒ its unity, its 5000-year history, its cultural superiority, for instance. Generations of scholars of ‘Chinese religion’, on the other hand, have argued that ‘truth’ is rarely relevant to Chinese religionists. Chinese religion cares not for declarative truths but rather for ritual efficacy, they have argued. Despite this difference in the way scholars of nationalism and religion in China have depicted the two phenomena, other scholars have argued that their modern histories are inseparable. Combing ethnographic description and textual analysis, this talk argues that the rise of ‘spiritual nationalism’ within so called Confucian Academies (shuyuan) in recent years is an attempt to bridge this gap between nationalism centred upon discursive claims to truth and religion centred upon ritual efficacy.

Gareth Breen is a Fellow in the Anthropology of China at the LSE, where he received his PhD in Social Anthropology. He has also taught Medical Anthropology as an Associate Lecturer at UCL. He has written about Christianity in China and Taiwan for Social Analysis, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Transcultural Psychiatry, and Gender, Place and Culture. His most recent research is with networks of spiritual nationalists in Northeast China. His forthcoming monograph, Sublime Sociality: An Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, won LSE Press’ First Book Award.