ABSTRACT
During a small workshop on Chinese Christianity, two American scholars present findings on when and how the Chinese state ‘intrudes’ into society by ‘harassing’ house churches, and how Christians are ‘scared’, suffering from severe trauma to the extent that, even after being evacuated to California with the help of underground asylums, they are still afraid of praying in public. However, when the Chinese state is mentioned, the scholars do not seem interested in explaining why the state regulates house-churches so strongly. Instead, they repeat for a dozen times the word ‘harassment’. This lexical shortage suggests a conceptual one in regard to describing the empirical data of state—religion relations in contemporary China, a topic dominated by a set of terms laid out by the universal-in-disguise standard of religious freedom based on individualism and state—church separation. This standard also implies that religious freedom will prevail once the state is removed, and that religious adherents should be left alone, free to choose among religions in the way similar to customers in a shopping-mall where the state is nothing but a negligible security guard, as suggested by the term ‘religious marketplace’ (Yang F. 2010a). With these assumptions, religious pluralism is premised by religious organizations being free from state ‘harassment’.
