At the very moment that Mao was becoming a god, his believers were dismantling China’s ancient infrastructure of faith. Karl Marx had considered religion an “illusory happiness” incompatible with the struggle for socialism, and the People’s Daily called upon the young to “Smash the Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Red Guards demolished temples and smashed sacred objects in a surge of violence that the scholars Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer describe as the “most thorough destruction of all forms of religious life in Chinese and, perhaps, human history.”
