Religious Freedom and the Local Church: Contextualizing Vatican II discourses in ‘Confucian’ China and the ‘Protestant’ U.S.

At present, a global resurgence of ethno-religious nationalism requires re-assessment of Vatican II’s discourse on religious freedom and its reception in local churches. In the People’s Republic of China and the U.S., the rise of Han Confucian and white Christian nationalisms has puzzled many observers who long viewed the PRC and the U.S. as opposites — the former committed to values of atheism and secular modernity, vs. the latter committed to religious non-establishment and civic pluralism. For many intellectual historians, it has been alarming to see these traditions deployed in service of a new style of autocratic governance, where the Chinese and U.S. regimes under Xi Jinping and Donald Trump look more similar than different in their use of ethno-religious nationalism. If the conciliar declaration Dignitatis Humanae and pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes failed to anticipate this new style of autocratic rule, what was missing in the formulation or reception of Vatican II’s vision of religious freedom?

The fact is, Vatican II never issued its optimistic call for religious freedom into a vacuum. No doubt, it was easy for the Cold War Catholics to imagine a categorical opposition of ‘atheism’ and ‘religion,’ as if religious freedom were simply a matter of whether states did or did not afford space for various religious groups to believe and practice their convictions with dignity. But the reality has been far more complex, as the documents landed in environments that were already and still are populated with myriad religio-moral understandings of ‘freedom.’ It turns out that modern technocratic autocrats — especially if they have control of media platforms — may be simultaneously thoroughly secular yet readily blend ethno-religious identity politics into the strengthening of executive power. If Vatican II failed to provide a roadmap, it is because these documents did not anticipate the extent to which techno-autocratic states could encompass, cherry-pick, and instrumentalize religious discourses of identity and freedom.

To assess this disconnect between the Church's vision in the 1960s and the global realities of 2025, I offer a contextual-comparative analysis of Catholic religious freedom discourses in the Chinese and American churches' respective Confucian and Protestant milieus. Granted, it is simplistic to cast China as ‘Confucian’ or the U.S. as ‘Protestant’ — so I introduce these descriptors only as placeholders for complex intellectual and social histories that must be unpacked. It is the task of this presentation to show how China’s governance is infused with assumptions from a diverse array of rival Daoist, Legalist, Mohist, Confucian, and Communist religio-political philosophies, and how the U.S.’s treatment of religion juggles an array of Christian positions ranging from mere non-establishment and toleration of religion to thicker models of Christian democracy. If Xi and Trump have strengthened their executive power through Confucian and Christian nationalism, it was possible because their countries had little consensus about what their constitutional provisions for "religious freedom" meant.

I demonstrate that comparative-contextual analysis can help recover strands of Chinese ‘Confucian’ and American ‘Protestant’ thought that grant religious communities the sort of agency that Vatican II imagined — not just to avoid or serve executive state power but to inform state priorities and inspire society-wide investments in the common good. In sum, Catholic contextual theology can be a search for allies.

The presentation is organized in four parts:

First, I periodize the reception of Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes, noting how Vatican II was sandwiched by a variety of nationalisms both before and after.

Second, I turn to the Chinese Church, contextualizing its experience within Chinese religio-intellectual history. I trace how what emerged as the “Confucian” mode of governance incorporated attractive and coersive styles of state-religion relations. Early Confucian thought shared much with Daoist ideals of effecting change through natural (ziran), free (ziyou), and non-forced (wuwei) actions and non-actions; the ideal sage ruled through the attractive charismatic power of virtue (de). Yet Confucian political philosophy was also influenced by more utilitarian and pragmatist Mohist and Legalist thought, which stressed modifying the behavior of the populace through impartial care (jian ai) and coercive use of rewards and punishments. One enduring assumption in Chinese religio-political thought has been the responsibility of the government to concern itself with the spiritual and moral welfare of the people – though traditionally this meant not only regulating religious groups but holding he government accountable to the ideals of Heaven. Freedom in the Chinese context has never been the freedom to do whatever one wants but is the freedom that comes from acting within relationships that are not zero-sum but conducive to mutual flourishing.

Third, I turn to the American Church, contextualizing Catholic discourses within an array of Protestant views on freedom: Baptist insistence on separation of church and state, Reformed thought on ‘sphere sovereignties,’ and the Quaker emphasis on freedom of conscience. I survey the ecclesio-political thought of the newer New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a dominionist political movement that promotes Christian supremacy through a blend of rightist politics and purported prophecy. One enduring American assumption has been that religion-state relations are a matter of competitive interests, where different groups jockey defensively for latitude. Though this conflictual picture is easily coopted into ‘might-is-right’ logic, there are versions which affirm religious freedom as the freedom to collaborate with religious others and the state guided by spiritual convictions.

Finally, I conclude that the Catholic Church must put away any notion that Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes describe how things are; the Church's 1960s vision of religious freedom by no means carried the day, as evidenced by the rise of ethno-religious nationalisms globally today. Instead the local churches must undertake the more harrowing and constructive task of putting Vatican II ideals in comparative dialogue with old and new religious and ideological conceptions that animate their local context. For Catholics swept up in or uncertain of how to resist trends toward religious nationalism, it may be salutary to take a long comparative look at the diverse strains of thought surrounding their given local church, to see which are counter, consonant, complementary, corrupting, or correcting of their own faith.