China was, for all intents and purposes and for over 3,000 years, always rigorously secular.

This is well-illustrated by one of my favorite China stories ever. In the 16th century European missionaries, most of them Jesuits, started to go to China to attempt to convert the country to Christianity. The most impactful of these missionaries – by far – was Matteo Ricci, a historical figure unfortunately far too unknown but probably one of the most consequential men in history.

Ricci, a very smart man, told himself that it made zero sense for him to go to China dressed in his European catholic priest attire: if he did so, the Chinese would see him as nothing more than an exotic barbarian in a dress. So what did he decide to do? He dressed up as a Buddhist monk, telling himself that he’d sell Christianity as a foreign – and more correct – variant of Buddhism. He assumed that since Buddhism was an established religion in China, presenting Christianity as part of it would be a natural entry point.

Nice try, but it didn’t work. At all. Ricci stayed in China as a Buddhist monk for years but he made just about zero inroads. Why? Because, dressed like this, no-one in a position of power would give him the light of day. What Ricci failed to predict was that Buddhist monks – and all religious figures – had low social status in China: unlike in Ricci’s Europe of the time, religion was simply not a serious affair in China.

Ricci, immensely frustrated, eventually understood his mistake. He figured out that in China, the path to influence ran not through temples but through academies: the elites who held the keys to everything were all scholars and intellectuals. So Ricci transformed himself once more: he learned to read and write classical Chinese, mastered the Confucian canon, and repackaged himself not as a man of God but as a man of knowledge – someone who could trade in mathematics, mapmaking, and moral philosophy. He also changed the way he dressed: he abandoned the Buddhist disguise entirely and put on the robes of a Confucian scholar. It worked. Doors that had been shut for years finally began to open.

This is a story for another article but Ricci eventually became the first person to translate the Chinese classics in Latin which had an immense impact in Europe. In fact, an extremely strong case can be made that he, more than anyone else, was the man most responsible for the Enlightenment movement.

Ricci died in Beijing in 1610, but through his translations, the ideas he sent back home slowly became the intellectual foundation for questioning the role of religion in public life: “l’argument chinois” (“the Chinese argument”) became a major intellectual weapon wielded by Enlightenment thinkers, particularly Voltaire, Bayle, and the philosophers more broadly. The argument was essentially: “Look, here is a vast, ancient, sophisticated civilization that has maintained order, morality, and good governance for thousands of years – all without Christianity, without revelation, without the Church. This proves that religion is not necessary for a moral and well-functioning society.” And the source material for almost all of this was… the Jesuit translations, starting with Ricci’s work.

The irony is too perfect: Ricci went to China to convert it to Christianity. He failed to do that but ended up planting the seeds that would convert his own civilization to secularism.

Somewhat longish digression but very illustrative of the point: China’s secularism was so deeply embedded that it didn’t just repel Christianity – it radiated outward and reshaped our entire Western civilization. We became secular ourselves (at least that’s the case of most European countries) under China’s direct influence.

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Then, around 1046 BC, the Zhou overthrew the Shang and immediately faced an existential problem of legitimacy. The Shang had claimed to rule because Heaven had chosen them. If that were true, then the Zhou had just committed the ultimate act of sacrilege. How do you justify going against God’s will?

The answer came from one man: the Duke of Zhou, who can thus be credited as the – perhaps unwitting – inventor of secularism, and as such one of the most influential political thinkers in human history. He made pronouncements documented across China’s oldest texts – notably the Shujing (Book of Documents) and the Shijing (Book of Songs) – where he explained that Heaven’s mandate is not a birthright but a contract conditional on virtue (德, Dé). As the Shijing puts it: “Heaven’s mandate is not constant” (天命靡常, Tiānmìng mǐ cháng) and as the Shujing declares: “Heaven has no favorites; it assists only the virtuous” (皇天無親，惟德是輔, Huángtiān wú qīn, wéi dé shì fǔ).

It might not sound like much but this idea completely changed the whole equation: suddenly the legitimacy of power didn’t rest on God’s will but on man’s moral judgement, on whether the ruler had virtue and governed well. And if he didn’t, he would lose his legitimacy to govern “in the eyes of Heaven,” just like the Shang.

This wasn’t secularism per-se but the practical effect of this was the de-divinization of political authority: if Heaven’s mandate depends on virtue, and virtue is measured by whether the people are well-governed, then ultimately it’s the people who are the arbiter of whether a ruler is legitimate. The Shujing itself makes this explicit with that remarkable line: 天視自我民視，天聽自我民聽 (Tiān shì zìwǒ mín shì, tiān tīng zìwǒ mín tīng) – “Heaven sees as my people see; Heaven hears as my people hear.” Heaven’s judgment is the people’s judgment.

So the Duke of Zhou didn’t just de-divinize power – he effectively placed the source of political legitimacy in the hands of the governed. Not through elections or formal mechanisms, but through a governing philosophy that explicitly stated that the ruler’s job is to serve the people, and that his legitimacy depends entirely on whether he does so.

This isn’t an abstract principle – it imposed a very real, structural constraint on every Chinese ruler for the next three thousand years. It’s why Chinese political philosophy developed such an intense focus on the practical machinery of good governance: meritocratic administration, water management, infrastructure – all the things that keep people fed and safe. It was survival logic: serve the people or lose the mandate. And if the ruler failed, overthrowing him wasn’t sacrilege – it was the will of Heaven. This is why so many dynasties in China’s history were toppled by popular rebellions, and why those rebellions were seen as legitimate rather than sinful.

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The Chinese people themselves have a uniquely pragmatic approach to religion. It never held society together the way it did in most other civilizations. That role was fulfilled by a moral system of beliefs, with virtue (德, Dé) at its center. In most civilizations, the fundamental questions – what is right and wrong? how should we behave? what do we owe each other? – were answered by religion. In China, they were answered by moral philosophy. The Duke of Zhou made virtue the basis of political legitimacy and Confucius then universalized it into a complete ethical framework for all of society. The result was a civilization that had everything religion provided elsewhere – a moral code, social cohesion, a sense of meaning, a hierarchy of obligations – without any of the theological infrastructure. No official God, no official scripture, no official clergy. Just the idea that human beings can and should cultivate moral excellence through study, self-reflection, and practice, and that this alone is sufficient to hold a civilization together. Family, filial piety, respect for elders, reverence for education – these all flow from virtue, not from faith.

This is what makes China genuinely unique among civilizations: it replaced theology with ethics as its organizing principle.

Vir: Arnaud Bertrand