Protestant Christianity Revives In China

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Churches across China began reopening in September 1979, when Deng Xiaoping's new policy of relative religious tolerance ended the outright suppression of the Cultural Revolution. The first Protestant church to reopen did so in Shanghai that same month, and within a year a national Protestant conference already counted more than two million Protestants nationwide, a striking figure for a community that had worshipped underground or not at all for over a decade.

Growth continued strongly through the decades that followed, roughly ten percent annually by scholarly estimate, carried along two parallel paths: government registered Three Self churches operating openly within state oversight, and unregistered house churches meeting outside it. The house church movement took root first and most strongly in rural areas, then spread into China's cities as rural believers migrated for work and, later, as urban professionals joined its ranks in growing numbers.

What this changed for Christianity's spread was the reappearance, within a single generation, of one of the world's largest national Protestant populations from a starting point of near total suppression. The two paths China's Protestants took back into the open, one registered and public, one unregistered and improvised, both trace back to the same reopened Shanghai church of September 1979.