Restrictive Right to Religious Freedom of Protestant House Churches in China

This article seeks to explore how the right to religious freedom of Protestant house churches has been restricted under the existing repressive legal framework from a socio-legal perspective given that China has established an instrumentalist legal system. The recent dissolution of a large number of Protestant house churches in China has been widely reported in the international press, which indicates a significant change of approach to Protestant house churches under the newly revised Regulation of Religious Affairs (RRA). The existing literature has focused on Protestant house churches largely from religious and sociological perspectives. Through analyzing the RRA, it was found that it has taken an integrated legalistic-political approach to Protestant house churches, which has been understudied in the scholarship.