This article is Part 2 of a seven-part series adapted from a lecture delivered at Harvard Law School on May 1, 2025, at the Program on Biblical Law and Christian Legal Studies. Reproduced with permission from Dr. Ruth Okediji, faculty director.
In Part 1, we proposed four guiding questions and four intersecting axes—China, the West, the church, and ideas—to cultivate a watchful posture toward the 2040s. In this installment, I begin where any conversation about “China and Christianity” must begin—with traditional China’s worldview and how the Christian faith first appeared within it.
The World Behind the Encounter: Four Strands of Traditional China
I start with an old civilization and its layered worldview. At the center stood Confucianism—not merely moral philosophy but the grammar of statecraft, social order, and education. Daoism and folk religion shaped daily piety, rituals of protection, and pursuits of longevity or harmony with the natural order. Buddhism, entering after the second century AD, offered monastic discipline, metaphysics of suffering, and popular devotional life. Alongside these, the empire regularly confronted heterodox movements—subversive sects that promised salvation or rebellion; many were banned.
This was not a “religious marketplace” but an imperial ecology. Orthodoxy and heterodoxy were matters of public order. The state supervised the rites, educated the elite, and classified teachings it deemed dangerous. Within this ecology, Christianity, when it appeared in later centuries, did not arrive as a neutral idea. It came as a foreign faith that did not obviously fit the existing categories.
“Heterodox” or Tolerated? How Policy Framed Perception
According to this imperial logic, the first instinct was to treat unfamiliar teachings as heterodox. Over time that instinct was complicated by geopolitics. By the mid-19th century—after the Opium War and the unequal treaties of 1842 and the years following—Western powers secured toleration for Christian activities through treaty provisions and extraterritorial arrangements. Toleration, however, did not mean sympathy. A foreign religion that now enjoyed foreign protection reinforced the sense that Christianity was not indigenous to China’s ancient complex of philosophies and cultic life.
The result was a durable perception: Christianity might be tolerated in practice, even useful in certain schools or hospitals, yet it remained foreign to the civilizational core as traditionally imagined.
Is Christianity a Western Religion?
What do we mean by “Christianity,” and why is it so commonly labeled Western? Some of this is historical memory. The public face of Christianity in modern China has often been European and American missionaries since the early 1600s and, especially, the 19th century. Add to this the accumulated legacy of late antiquity and medieval Christendom, the Renaissance and Reformation, and the intertwined histories of Europe and North America. From a global vantage point, Christianity is perceived as Western.
Yet the faith did not begin in the West. It arose in West Asia, in a Jewish context, and spread across the Mediterranean world before Europe was Christianized. Today, Christianity is a global movement with many centers. Still, perceptions matter. In China—as in many places—Christianity’s association with the West has shaped the questions people ask and the suspicions they nurture.
Early Encounters Through a Clockmaker’s Hands
Consider one early moment of cultural encounter. Around 1600, Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, entered China. Courtiers and scholars, fascinated by clocks and maps, often received him as a clockmaker rather than as a theologian. The technology opened doors; the faith was rarely understood. This misrecognition is instructive. It shows how new ideas are filtered through existing desires—for tools, status, or knowledge—long before they are evaluated as truth claims. It also hints at a pattern: Christianity could be welcomed for its usefulness (science, education, medicine) even as its claims about God and redemption were set aside.
The Christian Tradition, Briefly Sketched
If Christianity is more than a Western import, what is it? One way to answer is to glance down the long hallway of Christian thought and life: the early church, the Fathers, Augustine and Aquinas: then Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and the evangelical awakenings. Each moment speaks to questions of God, humanity, sin, grace, justice, and hope. I mention this not to rehearse a curriculum but to underline a point: Christianity arrived in China with a thick tradition—texts, practices, and arguments forged across continents and centuries. Misunderstanding was therefore likely on both sides. The Chinese court saw clocks; missionaries brought catechisms; each side read the other through familiar lenses.
From “Foreign” to the Texture of Daily Life
Traditional China’s framework thus produced a paradox that still echoes. On the one hand, Christianity was foreign—a heterodox teaching, later a treaty-protected religion associated with Western power. On the other hand, it gradually became part of the texture of daily life for communities who believed: worshipping in chapels, translating and copying Scriptures, running schools and hospitals, practicing charity, and forming household and congregational networks.
That double perception—foreign yet lived, tolerated yet suspect—helps explain much of what follows in modern times: the oscillation between curiosity and resistance, between public usefulness and ideological suspicion, between room to breathe and moments of constraint.
Why This Matters for the Path Ahead
Beginning with traditional categories clarifies debates that still recur. When critics dismiss Christianity as “Western,” they echo a civilizational framing grounded in earlier imperial habits of classification. When people welcome Christian institutions for education or medicine but avoid Christian confession, they repeat an old utilitarian embrace of the useful while sidestepping the theological.
For those who believe, the invitation is twofold. First, to understand the cultural memory we are walking into—how words like orthodoxy and heterodoxy, foreign and indigenous, still carry weight. Second, to bear witness in ways that are both faithful to the Christian tradition and attentive to Chinese moral imagination, language, and social life.
That is where we will go next. If this installment sets the worldview and policy backdrop, the following piece turns to the late-Qing and Republican era—a season of crisis and importation in which Chinese intellectuals reevaluated everything from Confucian classics to modern science, and Christianity found itself praised, critiqued, or made a scapegoat in turn.
Next in the series (Part 3): Crisis and Critique (1862–1927)—two Anti-Christian Movements, May Fourth imports, Chen Duxiu’s turn to Marxism, and the Levenson/Cohen thesis.
