China’s prosperity inspires rising spirituality

China's prosperity inspires rising spirituality is an interesting Christian Science Monitor article about religion in China.

As China becomes more wealthy and worldly, it's also experiencing a growing interest in spirituality. Chinese are emerging with "more time and freedom to think," says Yuan Ci, a monk who works with the Buddhist Association of China in Beijing. In doing so, they are helping to revive China's venerable religions, like Buddhism.

I found this comment particularly interesting:

China's market economy, Yang Fenggang, a sociologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., wrote in an academic paper, is "accompanied by widespread moral corruption, which prompts many individuals to seek a theodicy, or a religious worldview, to put the seemingly chaotic universe into order."

The implication is that the market economy caused the moral corruption. More likely is that most people had to behave "morally" in a totalitarian society. The government had the monopoly on immoral behavior. Now the monopoly is cracking. "Compulsory virtue" is weakening but internalized virtue is also weak.