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

This presentation offers a comparative-contextual analysis of the Catholic Church's Vatican II discourses on 'religious freedom' in the People's Republic of China and the United States. The local Chinese Catholic and American Catholic churches have not received Vatican II's teachings in a vacuum but inevitably must situate the optimistic vision of Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes along alongside diverse existing local traditions which may or may not be complementary. In particular, the 21st century rise of Han Confucian and white Christian ethno-religious nationalisms in China and the U.S. make it especially urgent that contextual theologians engage in comparative dialogue with the internally quite diverse Confucian/Chinese and Protestant/American religio-moral discourses of their context, which may variously serve or resist the trends towards ethno-religious nationalism and autocratic rule.