Richard Spencer, in a post about Hong Kong making Confucius’s birthday a holiday (in which he says some nice things about The Useless Tree), raises a question about the revival in China of the thought of the Venerable Sage:

…Perhaps, now that President Hu Jintao is embracing Confucianism, he
is particularly keen for it not to be seen as a religion, which would
highlight the huge break with Communism, or at least Maoism, that this
rediscovered respect entails?

Certainly poor Mr Qi [Xiaofei, the deputy director of the State Administration of Religious Affairs] gets completely wound up in knots. To quote in full:

"A
systematic religion is more complex than being just created by people.
The five main religions in the mainland recognised by the state
administration have a very long history. They didn’t just happen
overnight and have always been there. We respect Confucian philosophy,
but we have no plans to make any changes yet."

He said
Confucianism had never taken the path of a systematic religion except
in ancient China. "We should let things take their own course."

Hard
to know where to start analysing that one. Perhaps with "We should let
things take their own course," which I would suggest is hardly the
guiding principle of governance in China.

More significantly, Mr
Qi apparently wants us to believe that protestantism is legal in China
"because it has always been there"; whereas Confucianism – something
which I would have thought most people would have connected to China
rather consistently over the millennia – might, if properly assessed,
be found to be something that was "just created by people" or even just
to have "happened overnight". Um?

     Um, indeed.  It strikes me as ironic that a Communist Party official would suggest that religion is something more than a belief system "created by people."  Is he positing a divine source?  Maybe Hegel is taking the place of Marx in the Party’s ideological pantheon…

      I have written about  the religiosity of Confucianism, or the lack thereof, before.  The more I think about it, however, the more I tend toward the view that says it is not a religion.  The main thing that separates Confucianism from China’s "officially recognized" religions is the absence of a transcendent universal spiritualism.  Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. all invoke a god or gods with a supernatural existence and powers.  These external spirits (though an element of them may be in-dwelling in believers) attract the veneration of large groups of people, groups larger than, say, a clan or lineage.

     Confucius rather famously avoided talk about spirits and gods.  Ancestors, and their spirits, were (are?) venerated but these icons relate only to the relatively narrow social grouping of the lineage.  While I should be respectful of your elders, I am not expected to ritually venerate them they way I should my elders.  There’s just not a lot of supernaturalism in Confucianism (although there is certainly a lot to be found in the local religious traditions, often Daoist, that merge with Confucian ideas).  It is quite common to see it described as "this worldly," and I think there is a certain truth in that.

     Now, Spencer mentions the Confucian temple near where he lives in Beijing.  It is true that religious-like practices – such as investing the figure of Confucius with god-like significance – have emerged over the centuries.  Much of this, however, is linked to the state ideology: public veneration of Confucius was meant as a model for how families were supposed to pay obeisance to their ancestors and to respect the virtuous political authorities who were so conspicuous in their doing the right thing.  The purpose was not personal salvation in a heavenly afterlife.  Rather, it was a means of disciplining and channeling behavior in the here and now.  Rather like the behavioral strictures of Catholicism without the promise of eternal life (what a bummer!). 

     So, Spencer is right to point out the ideological contradiction of a Communist Party-inspired revival of Confucianism.  But maybe Mr. Qi is also right when he says that Confucianism is not a religion.