Modes of Belief in Chinese Folk Religion

Interviews with 66 residents of a Taiwanese village about their folk religion revealed that there is no simple division between believers and unbelievers, but rather that people's belief can be classified into four types, or modes: Intellectual belief, which tries to make sense out of reality; true belief, which accepts everything with total credulity; practical belief, which evaluates religious tenets on basis of evidence; and non-belief, which declares folk religion irrelevant. These findings bear on anthropological question of the new intellectualism, suggesting that both intellectualist position, which declares that people believe religious tenets literally, and anti-intellectualist position, which declares that religion is purely a metaphor for something else, are overly simple in that they do not consider individual variations.