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gerate the importance of culture, using it as a façade for poli cies grounded in interest. But there are some real and impor tant differences between Chinese and Western (particularly American) worldviews that are worth exploring. They begin with God. In the 2007 Pew survey, when asked whether one must believe in God to be moral, a comfortable majority of Americans (57 percent) said yes. In Japan and China, however, much larger majorities said no—in China, a whopping 72 per cent! This is a striking and unusual divergence from the norm, even in Asia. The point is not that either country is immoral— in fact all hard evidence suggests quite the opposite—but rather that in neither country do people believe in God. This might shock many in the West, but for scholars of the subject, it is a well-known reality. East Asians do not believe that the world has a Creator who laid down a set of abstract moral laws that must be followed. That is an Abrahamic, or Semitic, conception of God shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but quite alien to Chinese civilization. People sometimes describe China's religion as Confucianism. But Joseph Needham, an eminent scholar of Confucianism, notes that if you think of religion "as the theology of a transcendent creator-deity," Confucianism is simply not a religion.
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Confu
cius was a teacher, not a prophet or holy man in any sense. His writings, or the fragments of them that survive, are strikingly nonreligious. He explicitly warns against thinking about the divine, instead setting out rules for acquiring knowledge, behaving ethically, maintaining social stability, and creating a well-ordered civilization. His work has more in common with the writings of Enlightenment philosophers than with reli gious tracts. In fact, during the Enlightenment, Confucius was hot. The