Wasn't there a chinese guy that failed these three times, put his family in poverty due to the expense, realized he's the brother of Jesus and started a rebellion that killed 40 million people? History can be weird sometimes
Hong being influenced by American Christian missionaries is odd, but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs. Throughout Chinese history, the White Lotus society, with millenarian Buddhist beliefs, had challenged the Qing and the Yuan (the Ming founder was a member). The Yellow Turbans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame were Daoist esoterics. Manichaean rebels fought the Song. I think a lot of times it’s just that religious cultists had the necessary social structures in place to launch rebellions, and the cohesion to continue the fight as opposed to scattered peasant revolts. The history of Chinese dynastic shifts is replete with secret societies. The Taiping were noteworthy not only because they were Christian-influenced, but because it was an act of such an organization being created in real-time, out in the open.
The modern Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong makes sense from this perspective.
Revanchism, extreme nationalism and economic anxiety among other reasons what led to the rise of the ww1 veteran who happened to fail an art admission