For Wang, the book “represented a scriptural authority and emanated a sacred aura”. During the Cultural Revolution study sessions were an unavoidable part of everyday life for people in China. Involving “ritualistic confessions of one’s errant thoughts and nightly diary-writing aimed at self-criticism”, these sessions, he writes, “may be seen as a form of text-based indoctrination that resembles religious hermeneutics and catechism” – a “quasi-religious practice of canonical texts”.
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The instinct to take a text as authoritative and sacred, put it at the center of living, and then to study it, confess one's falling short of it, and even journaling about it, a popular evangelical habit in America by the way, all of it in a decidedly secular, atheistic, and political historical context evinces something telling about human nature, not about the divine. Human beings have a proclivity for ideology and fanaticism which can be exploited through the cult of personality. You may think Maoism is over in comparison to Christianity, but Gray recognizes that it has a Nachleben, and it is no coincidence that that afterlife is mostly in the West.
