ABSTRACT
Two very different yet related phenomena in China’s transition from a dynastic regime to a modern nation will help us better understand how the modern Chinese nation impacted on and was in turn impacted by religion. The first case is about how a rising consciousness of the nation and its impending peril allowed some grassroots literati in the early twentieth century to assign added religious significance to a traditional, primarily literati-oriented practice thus justifying, reformulating and accentuating certain religious practices (hence ‘the nation in religion’). The second case is about how the nation provided the sociopolitical frame for religion while the nation itself was constituted by the ‘religion sphere’ (zongjiaojie 宗教界) (hence ‘religion in the nation’).
