Christ's Brother goes to China

In Brief

Take one part post-Opium-wars China, one part peasant dissent, and one part messianic nutcase, and you get the Taiping Rebellion -- more testament to the fact that guys who claim divinity seem to raise armies with remarkable ease. In this case, unfortunately, our hero Hong only claimed he was Jesus's kid brother. That left some other fellows to one-up him by, you guessed it, becoming God and Jesus. Things only got more difficult.

Party On

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As it had for millenia, success in nineteenth century China lay in a cushy civil service job, obtainable only through a series of tests of horrifying difficulty. Most men with ambition took and failed at least one in their life. Hong Xiuquan was one such social climber: he took the exams in 1827, 1836, 1837, and 1843, all to no avail. Hong was so upset with his third failure in 1837 that he fell ill for several days and had a strange, beatific vision.[1] In it elderly women washed the filth off his body, wizened men replaced his dirty internal organs with brand spanking new ones, and he met grandiose-looking people claiming to be his relatives.

Hong discarded the episode as a case of the pink elephants and, in 1843, he re-took and re-flunked the exam. After his fourth and final failure he wandered home and happened upon a Chinese translation of the Bible. It immediately became clear to Hong that the grandiose relatives in his dream were none other than the Judeo-Christian God and Jesus Christ, making Hong Christ's younger brother. Hong seized this new divine identity, unofficially baptized himself, and scurried about evangelizing. Before long, he needed more than the verses contained in his text to continue his work. In Dragon by the Tail, John Paton Davies Jr. details the proceedings for us:

In search of further guidance, Hong spent two months with an American Baptist missionary, the Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts, receiving scriptural instruction. Leaving before he was ready for baptism -- on which score the Reverend Mr. Roberts was quite right -- Hong returned to his native place near Canton. There he and his followers, now calling themselves God Worshipers, made themselves socially unacceptable by smashing idols and Hong lost his position as schoolmaster.[2]

In Resistance, Chaos and Control in China, Robert P. Weller gives a little more detail:

[Hong's movement] typically destroyed popular temples and desecrated the god images, often by tearing off their beards... While Hong may well have seen this as a bold blow at the heart of popular idolatry and superstition, god destruction was in fact always a perfectly plausible option within popular religious practice.

At the time, deities were plentiful and the existence of a few extra ones didn't cause any commotion. The god-worshiper relationship in China was a reciprocal one: if your particular god didn't bother to respond to your prayers, you had no obligation to continue worshiping him. Hence, all sorts of acts that might appear heretical to the outsider were quite acceptable. "Impotent deities might be broken to bits, burnt, or set floating down the river by angry crowds."[3]

Hong had a couple of favorite targets and managed to swell his own ranks by hitting them. At the local King Gan temple, Hong ordered his followers to "dig out the eyes of the demon, cut off its beard, trample its hat, tear its embroidered dragon gown to shreds, turn its body upside down, and cut off its arms."[4] While Hong no doubt felt such denouncement of false deities furthered Christianity, Gan's followers shrugged and picked up the pieces. They did not, as Hong hoped, abandon King Gan; they simply acknowledged the brute force of Hong's own god and continued in their own pagan worship.

No matter. Hong and his followers paraded from region to region, breaking things and looting freely, until they happened upon a man in the rural principalities who had established himself as quite the divine healer. This man, Yang Xiuquan, danced about and muttered gobbledygook, creating an air of feasibility with a high "coefficient of weirdness" (i.e. the stranger and more incomprehensible a message is, the more likely it's really divine).[5] Through his apparent efficacy as a miracle-worker, Yang had acquired a satisfied clientele himself, and no doubt viewed Hong as a threat to his autonomy. Not content to just be an adept healer, Yang proclaimed himself to be a medium for God. This was not just any God, but the Judeo-Christian God who was supposed to be Christ's, and therefore Hong's, father. Before long (fall 1848) another medium, Xiao Chaogui, showed up, and claimed to channel for Jesus. Alongside these theological giants, Hong's role as Jesus's brother was starting to look like small potatoes. Yang/God and Xiao/Jesus would often demand that Hong defer to their higher status when possessed by their respective spirits. This must have been unsettling to Hong who, we imagine, thought he had the market cornered on divinity when he first decided he was Christ's brother.

Jesus called any prophesies from individuals in the sect other than God, Hong, or himself "lies", and took appropriate steps to contain them: He beat such false mediums (up to a thousand strokes, leading to fatalities) or threated them with death if their spectral voices returned. Twice in 1851 rival groups did attempt to plant such false prophets into the God Worshipers, only to be rebuffed by God or Jesus (Jesus sentenced one group to death, but allowed them to appeal to God). Jesus beat adulterers and made other such social intercessions. The God Worshipers ballooned in size, slaughtered and pillaged where they went while claiming to be seeking "the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace". By burning the city of Hankow and capturing Nanking, the movement had grown a full fledged revolution, dubbed the Taiping Rebellion (T'ai P'ing meaning "Heavenly Kingdom") and had nearly overrun Peking. Once firmly settled in Nanking, our friend Hong began to distribute land equally among all his citizens and grant women rights equal to those of men. He began to slide into a regal torpor, replete with an armada of sixty-eight wives and three hundred manservants. Hong was only accessible via a group of ten or eleven subkings, and to ensure his power, assassinated God in 1856. Hong's former tutor, the Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts, visited him in 1861, and concluded that "I believe he is crazy... a wicked despot."[6]

This vacuum of leadership left the Taiping army picking its toes, and before long it was raiding local farms loyal to the Manchu throne. The Manchu armies, assisted by the American-led and ludicrously-named Ever Victorious Army, challenged them. With such a pompous attitude, we would be delighted if the Ever Victorious Army was soundly trounced. Sadly, such is not the case, and Hong put himself to the sword in 1865. Lest we get too carried away in amusement, the whole affair had shaken the social fabric of China to the core and ended over twenty million lives.

Further Reading

For further reading on this fantastic tale, we recommend picking up a more recent history and biography of Hong and his movement, God's Chinese Son. For those interested in other such millenial prophets, check out the False Christs of the Middle Ages. Finally, an essay inspired by Heaven's Gate entitled The Apocalypse Kit discusses these sorts of eschatological movements throughout history. Good stuff.

Footnotes

1. Weller notes Anthony Wallace's 1956 article "Revitalization Movements" in American Anthropologist (58: 264-281), wherein Wallace provides "a description of the experience of leaders of revitalization movements, who almost always begin from a vivid vision where a supernatural being blames problems on a violation of rules and promises slavation as part of an illness after a great disappointment."
2. Davies, 79. Boardman takes an entire chapter to explain exactly what part of the Christian doctrine this marauding gang of thugs chose not to subscribe to. He regularly invokes their omission of the Golden Rule in said chapter.
3. Weller, 61
4. Weller 63
5. Weller, p. 69. Weller makes reference here to Coral Gardens and Their Magic, by Bronislaw Malinowski, who appears to have first championed the idea of a weirdness coefficient. The casual observer will note with keen interest the fantastic success reaped by those sects willing to invoke a high quotient
6. Davies, 80

Bibliography

1. John Paton Davies Jr.. Dragon by the Tail. W.W. Norton & Co, 1972.
2. Robert P. Weller. Resistance, Chaos and Control in China. University of Washington Press, 1994.
3. Eugene Powers Boardman. Christian Influence Upon the Ideology of the Taiping Rebellion. Octagon Books, 1972.

 
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