Forty new churches open every week, not counting underground house churches (2). “By any standard, the recent growth of Christianity in China has been meteoric” (113). Today they number around 100 million (115). When Christianity was legalized again in 1980, the 4 million Christians who went into hiding had multiplied to 10 million. The oft quoted maxim held true under Chairman Mao as it did under Stalin, “Religion is like a nail, the harder you hit it, the deeper it goes”. Under the threat of Mao Zedong’s Red Guard, whose slogans included, “Beating down foreign religion” and “Beating down Jesus following”, Christianity went underground but not into hibernation. This is the story of faith’s resilience under an aggressive, government-lead policy of persecution that resulted in the death of many million people. This is the story of its rise.Īlthough the whole is pervaded by Rodney Stark’s sociological rigor, this book is in no way reducible to dispassionate science or mere technical research. In 1966, Christianity in China went underground, but not into hibernation. A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China, by Rodney Stark, is a short book that combines a sweeping history of missions to China with recent, reliable statistics on its effects and implications.
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