In present-day China, journalist Ian Johnson spends years living alongside an underground Protestant church in Chengdu, a Buddhist pilgrimage family in Beijing, and Daoist priests in rural Shanxi. Structured around the lunar calendar's festivals, this work of narrative nonfiction traces a nationwide spiritual revival decades after Mao, and the uneasy space religion occupies under Communist Party rule.
A government can switch from attacking religion to promoting it, relabelling once-banned practices as cultural heritage and treating them as a source of stability. That support comes with rules: groups that play along get room to grow, while anything unapproved is cracked down on.
Where the state controls almost every independent group, religious congregations may be the only place left where people gather freely and organise around shared values. That makes faith a quiet foundation for a wider search for justice and decency, one the authorities cannot fully organise.
Once people no longer worry about housing and food, many turn to the eternal questions: why are we here, and what is life for? A society growing richer can therefore see a surge of religion rather than its decline, as people look for answers money cannot give.
The balance between believers and the ruling party is unstable because both sides want more than the deal gives. As the number of believers grows, the faithful may want more than limited freedom, and the state may want more say over people's inner lives.
After a century of attacks on religious life, faith comes back as a return to old rituals, seasons and roots, not as something wholly new. A country once held together by ritual is again filled with temples, pilgrims and fortune-tellers, so revival reconnects people to an older way of life.