The Inescapability of the Sacred

Two months ago, the Trump-Xi Beijing Summit was paraded across the internet as a bastion of hope for the future of Chinese relations with the West. Many foreign policy analysts have, as usual, mistaken ceremony for substance. 

The American state visit to China — the first since 2017 — produced honour guards, Boeing aircraft orders, and an invitation for Xi to visit the White House in September. On trade progress was made on everything from soybeans, to rare-earth metals. On Taiwan, Iran, technology, and the broader structure of the US-China relationship, there was no progress at all. Most analysts think the summit stabilised US-China affairs. But they ignore the reality that the issues that were and were not resolved represent a broader pattern, not mere coincidence. 

The summit failed on Taiwan, Iran, and technology because they are structurally different problems to that of trade. 

Why, when Trump and Xi can negotiate on materials with relative ease, do Taiwan and the values underpinning the international order sit beyond the reach of any conceivable compromise? The standard answer — that these are simply harder problems, involving more fundamental interests — is true, but insufficient. It doesn’t explain the quality of the impasse: the way both sides speak about these questions with a fervour wholly isolated from rational calculations. Xi doesn’t insist that Taiwan reunification is strategically important. He insists it’s “the unwavering historical mission of the Communist Party of China”. Taiwanese independence is not merely an incompatible preference, but as cosmologically “irreconcilable as fire and water” — his words, not mine.

Standard analyses of the US-China relationship, then, get something fundamentally wrong. Western analysts look at Xi Jinping through the lens of a rational authoritarian — a leader maximising power within a competitive state system, making strategic calculations about leverage, timing and interest. 

Beijing looks at Western liberalism and sees something similar: a thin ideological cover for American hegemony — preferences disguised as principles.

Both readings contain truth. But both miss the defining structures of one another’s existence; each side experiences its own commitments not as interests, but as inviolable — things set apart and forbidden, defended with a zeal that is structurally religious even when both parties would strenuously deny it. 

To understand that mutual misreading, it helps to recall Durkheim’s observation about religion: the sacred is not about God or the supernatural. It is a structural category — things “set apart and forbidden” from negotiation, protected by prohibitions, defended against contamination with an intensity that exceeds what self-interest alone would foster. When violated, the response is not strategic, but something closer to desecration. ‘Secular’ life, it turns out, is full of those sacred commitments. Constitutional rights in a liberal democracy. Empirical truth to the scientist. Territorial integrity to the nationalist. 

Once we understand the sacred as a structural category rather than a religious one, we can see it operating everywhere — including in the two most consequential political systems whose relationship is, as last month's summit demonstrated, concurrently warm in ceremony and frozen in substance.

Let’s start with the West. Western liberal values — human dignity, universal rights, democratic self-determination, the rule of law — have a genealogy their defenders rarely acknowledge. Human dignity derives from the Christian doctrine of imago dei; democratic equality from the Pauline universalism of the New Testament; individual conscience and freedom of belief from the Protestant Reformation; the rule of law from the natural law tradition. 

The rules-based international order, then, is not the discovery of universal human reason. It is the crystallisation of a particular theological inheritance, presented to the world in a mask of universalism. Modern secular societies believe they've transcended religion, but they've actually just relocated the sacred. They’ve replaced explicit theological frameworks with supposedly objective secular values that function identically to religious systems. This isn't a failure of secularisation. It is proof that human societies cannot escape ‘the sacred’ as a structural necessity. 

Afghanistan made this undeniable. Twenty years of intervention was premised on the claim that Western liberal values were universal; that what constituted legitimate political life was self-evident and globally applicable. Two weeks after the withdrawal, though, the institutions built to embody those values dissolved entirely. And the standard explanations — institutional failure, corruption, insufficient capacity-building — all took for granted what the withdrawal exposed: that the project had assumed its values were universal when they were, in fact, particular. The Afghan political and social context that refused those values was not irrationally rejecting the universal. It was declining to accept the sacred commitments of a specific civilisation.

And China is operating under exactly the same structure. Read Xi Jinping’s 2012 “Chinese Dream” address, and his 2021 centenary speech alongside one another. What emerges is not a political programme, but an eschatology. The structure — fall, suffering, promised restoration — is not historical grievance politics of the normal kind. It is a sacred wound whose every subsequent development derives its meaning and import from the arc of restoration it inaugurates. The Chinese Communist Party, on this account, is not merely a governing institution, but the vessel of national destiny. It is not a reversible political strategy, but “an irreversible historical process”. And those sacred destinies do not comply with negotiation. 

“Resolving the Taiwan issue and achieving the complete reunification of the motherland”, Xi said at the centenary, “is the unwavering historical mission of the Communist Party of China”. Reunification completes the trajectory from humiliation to redemption. It heals the sacred wound. To compromise on it would not merely be a geopolitical concession, but a betrayal of the entire meaning-making system that gives the CCP its legitimacy, and Xi’s governance its purpose. 

That is why Xi does not negotiate on Taiwan. It is not stubbornness. It is the obligation of a sacred commitment. 

And it is not merely rhetorical. Domestically, every Chinese citizen is required to study Xi Jinping Thought through a mandatory state app with participation tracked, scored, and reported to employers and universities. What is being monitored is not behaviour, but internalisation: not whether a ritual is performed, but whether the ritual has taken cognitive hold. 

That apparatus of ideological formation is not incidentally religious in structure. It is the logic of a civilisation that has always understood — since at least Confucius and Xunzi –that the purpose of ritual is not outward compliance, but the gradual reshaping of the interior life. The sacred order maintains itself not through force alone, nor because it embodies objective truth, but because it slowly manufactures the kind of person for whom the sacred order feels natural. The mandatory study app is that logic applied at national scale.

The West doesn’t have a state app, but it does have universities, newspapers, and professional cultures that track the boundaries of acceptable belief — and respond to violations with serious social costs. The underlying logic remains that of a sacred order maintaining itself through the slow production of those who experience its commitments as self-evident. 

The mutual misreading — where Beijing and Washington wrongfully treat one another as rational actors pursuing rational interests — is consequential.

The West interprets China’s position as a maximalist opening bid: strategically extreme, waiting to be walked back by the right combination of incentives and pressure. China interprets the West’s commitment to Taiwanese democratic self-determination as a thin ideological cover for containing Chinese power — a preference that will yield when the costs of maintaining it become sufficiently high. 

Both, though, are wrong about one another in exactly the same way. Both parties are encountering sacred commitments — held with the inviolability of religious doctrines — and insisting on reading them as rational interests that can be redirected. When China doesn’t conform to Western arguments about sovereignty norms, the West terms it as irrationality. When the West doesn’t conform to Chinese arguments about historical destiny and civilisational integrity, China terms it hypocrisy.

And the pattern extends beyond Taiwan. 

China’s challenge to the Western rules-based world order is not — as Western analysts tend to frame it — merely a revisionist power seeking advantage within an existing system. China’s insistence that “no one country or model has a mandate to control the discourse of human rights” is a counter-sacred assertion. China is not disputing specific terms of international law. It is contesting the claim that any particular civilisation’s sacred commitments have the right to govern the world at all. 

Beijing, in fact, reads Western universalism exactly as I think it should be read: as a particular sacred order sincerely held to be universal. But Beijing also has its own supposedly universal sacred structure — a “community with a shared future for mankind” — to counter that of the West. 

None of this is an argument for relativism, though. Structural symmetry is not moral equivalence. The genealogy of a value does not determine its validity. What it does determine, though, is how honestly that value can be defended.

And honesty, it turns out, is not a weaker diplomatic position than false universalism. It is perhaps a stronger one. The claim that liberal values are universal — self-evident to all rational minds, discoverable by reason alone — has been tried. It built the rules-based order on foundations it could not acknowledge, insisted on its values' self-evidence to civilisations that declined to share them, and generated precisely the backlash it failed to anticipate. An honest liberal order — one that says these are our values, we believe in them, and we think the world goes better with them, without insisting the cosmos has certified their truth — is more persuasive than one that treats the other side's refusal as a failure of rationality. It is also, not incidentally, more honest.

The choice, then, is not between objective universal truth and the abyss. It is between a disguise that generates damage and an acknowledgement that our values are real without being ultimate. They are constructed and contingent, but worth defending on their own terms. Values held this way are held with the honesty that could enable geopolitical analysis to cease its perpetual bewilderment at the refusal of its interlocutors to behave rationally.

For foreign policy, the implications are more modest than they might appear. This is not a case for a new international order premised on civilisational relativism. It is a case for theological literacy in statecraft: the capacity to recognise a sacred commitment when one encounters it; including when it is held by oneself.

It means accepting that some disagreements are structurally irresolvable — not because the parties lack goodwill or intelligence, but because they are defending the inviolable, and the inviolable does not respond to negotiation. 

It means ending the category error of treating Xi’s position on Taiwan as a maximalist bid and Western liberal norms as universal principles whose rejection by Beijing is a strategic pose. 

It is to understand that summits might keep producing warmth, but that the pressure points will keep returning for as long as both sides mistake their sacred commitments for rational conclusions.

And the evidence that this matters beyond the analytical level is already visible in the Global South. China's diplomatic success across Africa and Latin America is not primarily a function of Belt and Road infrastructure investment, though that of course helps. It is a function of what China does not do: it does not insist that its sacred commitments are the conditions of partnership. 

Western aid and engagement arrive at developing nations with governance requirements, human rights benchmarks, democratic standards — the sacred order of liberal universalism exported as neutral development policy. China offers the same development without the theology. That many developing nations are choosing China over the West is not, as Washington tends to assume, evidence of authoritarian sympathy or institutional corruption. It is the rational preference of states that would rather not adopt another civilisation's inviolables as the price of a road.

In practice, a Western policymaker who understands this stops asking how to make the liberal order more persuasive to those who experience it as an imposition, and starts asking how we can offer partnerships that do not require the other party to adopt Western sacred commitments as the condition of engagement. That is a more modest foreign policy than the one Washington has been attempting. It is also, unlike DC’s current approach, one that might actually work.

Xi’s “fire and water” analogy was, then, more accurate than he knew. Not just about Taiwan, but about the nature of the US-China relationship itself. 

Sacred orders do not negotiate their foundations. They — just as the Christian cannot negotiate the resurrection, nor the Muslim the oneness of God — cannot refute the principles on which their existence depends. What they can do, though, is to stop mistaking intransigence for irrationality. 

That is what theological literacy in statecraft makes possible: not compromise on the inviolable – those beliefs will hold, on both sides, as a condition of human nature — but a different quality of encounter. 

A Western diplomat who understands that Xi’s position on Taiwan derives from a sacred narrative of national restoration – a century of international humiliation, an arc of destiny that cannot be interrupted without civilisational betrayal — can engage with Beijing far more authentically. 

And a Chinese diplomat who understands that Western human rights commitments are not just cynical covers for Western hegemony, but experienced as inviolable — set apart, forbidden, defended with a fervour of identity that has nothing to do with self-interest — can stop expecting concessions that will never come. 

The commitments will remain. But the nature of the encounter could shift from mere relationship management to something more authentic. 

Theological literacy, then, would not dissolve the differences between Washington and Beijing, make Taiwan negotiable, or China’s sacred narrative of national restoration any less total. 

What it would change is the foreign policy focus. Instead of asking how to convince the other side that your principles are universal — a project that has failed, visibly, and expensively, time and time again — it would ask how two civilisations with starkly different sacred orders can build a relationship that requires neither to betray what it holds sacred. That is a harder question. But, perhaps for the first time, it is an honest one. And honest questions, unlike dishonest ones, occasionally get answered with lasting consequences.