The Varieties of Protestant House Churches: Beyond Authoritarian Legality

This Article examines the interactions between Protestant house churches and state actors within China’s socio-legal context, where the party-state increasingly uses legality to control religion. It develops a typology of Protestant house churches, categorizing them based on the various degrees of religious freedom practiced under illiberal politics. The study explores two primary dynamics: the potential for politically reciprocal collusion between law enforcement officials and house churches that operate outside the illiberal legal framework and the potential breakdown of such arrangements due to repressive measures aimed at dismantling the churches. These repressive measures are particularly likely during the party-state’s “strike hard” campaigns, which often implicitly target religious groups, or when the church’s high-profile public engagement challenges the ideological dominance of the party-state’s Marxist atheism. This Article may provide insight into similar situations in other authoritarian regimes that maintain a dominant religious ideology. © The Author 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society of Comparative Law.