Stalinism and the Radicalisation of Wu Yaozong’s American Liberal Christianity in Republican China

No man has seen God (1943) was the masterpiece of the Chinese Protestant theologian Wu Yaozong (1893–1979). This article retraces Wu’s leftward intellectual turn in the preceding years, which culminated in the book’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and Communism. Originally a follower of American liberal Christianity, Wu embraced Stalinism after the mid-1930s. His case testifies to an alternative afterlife of American liberal Christianity, the Socialist character of which had become moribund in America, but found new vitality in China through Wu’s Stalinist reappropriation. Today, Wu’s development of the American liberal tradition lives on in different Chinese Christian communities worldwide.