Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih’s line is less a pious defense than a strategic correction aimed at Western categories. The tell is the phrase “entirely wrong”: he isn’t gently nuancing a stereotype, he’s calling out a conceptual failure. Early 20th-century commentary often treated “religion” as a checklist item - creed, church, clergy, exclusive belief - then declared China deficient for not matching a Protestant-inflected template. Hu, a leading voice of the May Fourth era, turns that judgment back on the judge: if your definition can’t register what people actually do, it’s your definition that’s parochial.

The subtext is also domestic. Hu is writing in a moment when Chinese intellectuals were diagnosing tradition as both treasure and trap, trying to modernize without surrendering cultural legitimacy. To insist the Chinese are religious is to insist that moral life, ritual practice, ancestral veneration, temple economies, festivals, and everyday cosmology are not mere “superstition” or empty custom. They are social technologies for meaning and cohesion, even when they don’t announce themselves as theology.

There’s a sly modernist confidence here. Hu doesn’t need to prove any doctrine; he’s defending lived experience as evidence. By refusing the binary of “religious” versus “rational,” he anticipates a now-common scholarly move: treating religion as practice and ethics, not only belief. The sentence works because it exposes how quickly cultural description becomes cultural ranking - and how easily “not religious” becomes a polite way of saying “not like us.”