American City on a Chinese Hill: American Fundamentalism in Contemporary Chinese Christianity

Abstract

A generation of Chinese house church pastors, such as Yu Jie and Wang Yi, have often been designated as leading public theologians who combined political liberalism with theological Calvinism in their pursuit of China’s democratization. Their recent authoritarian teachings and their endorsement of Donald Trump, however, have called that designation into serious question. This dissertation studies the historical reason why they underwent such a change of mind. The answer, in short, is that they were influenced by the kind of political theology proposed by a branch of American Christian fundamentalism. This movement had remained consistently critical of key features of American liberty and democracy. Yet in the context of the Cold War missions and China’s reopening in the 1980s, resourceful American missionaries repackaged this theology as a missing link in China’s democratization and liberalization. Its underlying moral dualism and authoritarianism, meanwhile, resonated with house church pastors who sustained profound trauma from the June 4th Tiananmen repression, yet who nevertheless wished to secure a public foothold for their faith and their churches. The result was a curious mixture of Chinese house church Christianity with American fundamentalist Calvinism, indeed an American city on a Chinese hill.