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Originally Posted by Astromancer
Actually, not so much. From a fairly early period (there's debate as to when) China elites have prefered to encourage agnosticism amoung the elites. Read what Confucius actually says on religion. He isn't interested in banning or denying it, he just suggests it's a waste of time and energy. China has a great deal of passionately religious people yes, but the elites tend to quietly leave it alone. Those amoung the elites who were deeply religious tended to keep their faith private. Remeber that in Chinese literature, the devout are generally dupes and the priests are generally crooks.
China ran itself with a nonreligious elite. You could make the case that between 1780 and 1980 the USA followed a similar policy of keeping religion out of the halls of power even when the president was deeply religious. |
Buddhism and Taoism were both important in politics during long chunks of Chinese history, though, and Confucianism was assimilated into the larger religious-ideological system. Ancestor worship, which is older than any of those things, is still practised to a considerable extent even today.
I'd argue that what you see in China is not a lack of importance of religion in state affairs, but simple a different way of loooking at these things, and a different set of religions/ideologies.