Church of the Highest Supreme

rdf:langString Church of the Highest Supreme

rdf:langString The Church of the Highest Supreme (太上会 Tàishànghuì; or "Most Supreme", "Most High"; also known as 太上门 Tàishàngmén, the "Gate of the Highest Supreme") is a Chinese folk religious sect of northern China. The origins of the sect are obscure, although Thomas David Dubois traces it to the theological tradition of the networks of Hongyangism (弘阳教), another northern folk religious sect which has been officially registered under the auspices of the Chinese Taoist Association since the 1990s. Extensive fieldwork by Dubois in the late 1990s and early 2000s has produced documentation about the Church of the Highest Supreme as the most influential folk religious sect in rural counties of Hebei, followed by the Church of the Heaven and the Earth. These two religions "energetically revived" in rural Hebei since the late 1970s, with the tacit approval of the local government, after pressures from campaigns against some sects in the 1950s and the cessation of any public religious activity in the years of the Cultural Revolution. The Church of the Highest Supreme and the other sects of north China provide ceremonies for public and private religious life of local populations, and their ritual specialists are portrayed as moral exemplars and earnest sources of knowledge about the sacred.