Will China Become a Christian-Majority Nation? Regulation, Demand, and an Agent-Based Test of the Supply-Side Theory

<p>Whether China will become a Christian-majority nation in the twenty first century is among the most visible disputes in the social science of religion. Influential projections forecast sustained Protestant growth toward a majority by mid-century, resting on the supply-side premise that religious demand is high and roughly constant and that state regulation drives growth by pushing demand into underground churches. Survey evidence instead shows the Christian share plateauing at a few percent. This study adjudicates the theoretical claim rather than the data by formalizing the supply-side mechanisms as an agent-based model and asking whether they can generate the projected growth under the theory's own logic. The model is built for explanation, not prediction. It distinguishes the demand the projections require, a congregational demand for membership sustained by long-term investment, from the transactional religiosity that dominates Chinese religious life; it makes the distribution of that congregational demand explicit, and it grants Christianity every structural advantage. The mechanisms produce rapid growth only when the population is assumed receptive before any evangelism begins. And under the regulation China imposes, the Christian share plateaus in the single digits, rises at most to the low twenties under the most favorable variations, and never approaches a majority. The finding holds across extensive sensitivity, network, and denominational analyses, with the receptivity distribution alone accounting for 84 percent of the variance in outcomes; it breaks only when suppression is allowed to manufacture demand without limit, an assumption the theory does not license. We conclude that supply-side mechanisms sort and intensify congregational demand but cannot create it from transactional religiosity, and that demand governs the growth trajectory.</p>