Village Christian Social Memory And Identity - Wide Religious History And Life Of Faith,

This thesis aims at introducing the theory of social memory into the field of religions study, applies it on analyzing the history and belief of a typical rural church—Guangzong Church. From the macroscopic aspect, I will relate all their sufferings to the historic background in different eras and review it's changing of social position and image along with various historic movements. Through this, I try to find out their means of adjusting social memory to remold their identities and then remove the tension between the political structures and themselves. From the microcosmic aspect, through probing into their "social memory producing" activities, such as divine service, bible-reading, pray, sermon, hymn and so on, I will show you how churches cultivate believers' identities through remold their social memories. Further more, I would like to discuss the possibility of the existence of adhesive integration of identities and its situation.The paper consists of six parts. The Introduction tells the motivation of this study and briefly describes Guangzong Church, then sets up some questions that worth a study. In ChapterⅠ, the social memory theory is defined and previous studies are systematically introduced, including the total researching condition both in western and Chinese academic cycle. At one time, I show the advantages of my study both in theoretic and fieldwork methods. Then, the resources are briefly introduced. The ChapterⅡdescribes the detailed information of Guangzong church, including the location, culture and other information. After that, I draw a brief historical landscape for Guangzong church through describing the changing of the Christian population and the church's location and size in different times. Then, the particularity of Guangzong church as a house church is discussed, the historic and realistic causes are demonstrated too. In ChapterⅢ, through reviewing the history of the Christian churches, I try to find out the source of their historic memory. Firstly, introduce the missioning cases in the end of Qing dynasty in Guangzong, analyze the relationships between churches and government and local society. Then, study the alteration of those relationships during MinGuo, further more, bring forth their tribulations during the "Three-self Patriotic Movements" and the "Culture revolution", and according to this, analyze the intrinsic relationship between their social memories and identities. The Chapter IV analyses the multi-identities of Christians and studies the possibility for the adhesive integration of identities. Firstly, introduce the multi-identities phenomenon and the conflicts caused by it. Secondly, apply the memory analyzing method on the identity-reforming process of Christians to study the adhesive integration of identities. The last part summarizes the study and put forward that the systematic study of the history of Chinese Christianity is extremely important for forming Christians'identity rationally. And the coming forth of a great amount of Christians who bear adhesive identities is the key to solve the intension between churches and rural societies.To sum up, this thesis illustrates the correlation between Guangzong Church and local society during different times from a macrocosmic view, otherwise, on the foundation of plenty fieldwork, analyzes the forming process Christians'identity. Combining these two aspects, this thesis discusses the existence of adhesive identities.