From Pressure to Resilience: An Analytic Framework for the Psychosocial Well-Being of Religious Minorities in Authoritarian Contexts.

Religious minorities living under authoritarian governance face unique psychosocial stressors, yet these stressors remain understudied in public health. Using unregistered Protestant churches in China as a case study, this analytic essay examines how state-sponsored marginalization shapes mental health. Integrating public health, sociology of religion, and political science, this article proposes the authoritarian pressure-resilience (APR) framework. The framework combines a socioecological perspective with theories of minority stress and disciplinary power to explain pathways from structural pressure to psychosocial outcomes. The APR framework identifies legal-political and ideological-cultural pressures as key stressors mediated through community adaptation. It offers a means of studying political repression as a social determinant of mental health and informing culturally safe interventions. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print August 20, 2026:e1-e9. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308623).