Everyday Religious Freedom in the Expansion of Chinese Christianity in Europe

This chapter introduces the notion of “everyday religious freedom” to understand the meanings and experiences of Chinese Christians practicing and seeking religious freedom both in China and the Chinese diaspora in Europe. Building on Nancy T. Ammerman’s work on everyday religion, I use ethnography to provide nuanced data on how religion is experienced by living human beings in their actual lives, outside of “normal” religious sites and normative situation. While it seems evident that a powerful party-state is coopting religion in China, I show how there is also a perverse co-option of the state by religion in the story of expanding diasporic Chinese Christianity in Europe. In carrying out religious mission, these socially and spatially mobile Chinese Christians benefit from a diasporic reconfiguration of church-state relations. The study thus aims to challenge the dominant dichotomized view of state and religion in religious freedom research and contribute to the understanding of multiple religious freedoms from a non-western perspective. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.