The dissertation examines the rapid growth of Chinese Protestant numbers from fewer than a million members in 1949 to more than 40 million Chinese today. I analyze the Chinese Communist Party regime's top-down efforts to contain Protestantism within churches under the Three Self Protestant Movement (TSPM) mass organization and the societal resistance by Protestants worshiping in unregistered churches outside Party-state control.

Substantively, I argue that to understand Protestant practice today, it is necessary to grasp the Party-state's continued attempt to control Protestantism since the 1950s. Further, the Cultural Revolution represented a turning point because the breakdown in regime hegemony led to a form of Protestantism practiced in private spaces, led by ordinary believers, and shaped by counter-hegemonic values. In the reform era state regulation has replaced coercion as the CCP's primary strategy, but the Party-state still seeks to contain religious growth inside TSPM churches and by reshaping Protestant collective identities and doctrines through state nationalism. These efforts have largely failed as many Protestants worship in unregistered churches and a substantial portion worship in a gray zone between TSPM churches and unregistered churches.

Analytically, I draw on social movement theory to develop the concept "religious leadership capital" as a way to analyze how leaders mobilize followers by reference to shared narratives that embed believers' actions in a context beyond the here-and-now of secular reality. I also extend work on social-movement collective-identity construction to suggest one way to conceptualize how differing state and societal priorities alter the relative importance of religion and nationalism in Protestant religious identities.

Chinese Protestants in unregistered churches today have rejected Party-state hegemony to operate in private spaces, where they have fashioned counter-hegemonic identities that provide alternative values, offer new organizational skills, and build transnational networks. By challenging dominant cultural values in organizations outside state control, Chinese Protestantism may be considered an emerging, religiously-based social movement motivated to achieve long term cultural goals.