The test for the United States has always been how to balance the nation's longstanding commitment to religious freedom abroad with the realities of China's growing economic and political might. "I think it's a common perception in the region that U.S. influence has been on the decline in the last decade while Chinese influence has been increasing," Jeffrey Bader, senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council, told Foreign Affairs.

So far, religious freedom activists have been underwhelmed by the actions of the Obama administration on international religious freedom in general and China in particular.

The first sign of trouble came during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's February visit to China, when she appeared to diminish the importance of human rights in China when asked about the administration's approach. "We know what they are going to say, because I've had those kinds of conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders," Clinton told reporters. "We have to continue to press them. But our pressing them can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis."

Then in October, Obama declined to meet with the Dalai Lama when the exiled leader of Tibetan Buddhism visited Washington. Obama said he was postponing meeting until after the China trip to avoid angering Beijing, but others saw it as an ill-timed snub of a popular man of peace and a symbol of the struggle for religious freedom.

The president has also not named an Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, a post that carries great weight with religious freedom advocates and could bring shape and clarity to the administration's vague goals on this topic.

An editorial in the latest edition of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, sums up the concern, pointing to "worrisome signs suggest that religious freedom is not a high priority" for the administration. "The administration's signals have been at best mixed on the issue of religious freedom," Thomas Farr, director of the Office of International Religious Freedom under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, told the magazine. Farr is now a senior fellow at Georgetown's Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, where this month he gathered scholars and activists for a daylong seminar on the Obama record on religious freedom.

Others at the conference were more direct in their comments.

"I don't think we've got a clear voice, a clear picture coming out of Washington. That's a source of considerable worry for many. Will there be a robust defense of religious freedom?" Jean Bethke Elshtain, a philosopher at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who is known for her conservative views and support for the Iraq invasion, told me. "What we're looking for, and we haven't seen yet, is real clarity from the top of the administration. And so we are left reading the tea leaves."

While the Obama administration is facing huge challenges on many fronts, foreign and domestic, and is the target of regular criticism for not moving more quickly on a series of key appointments, there is good reason for making international religious freedom a higher priority.

One is that the criticisms aren't simply a case of the religious right taking a swipe at the man who replaced George W. Bush.

The consensus among activists and academics across the spectrum is that while Bush's heart was in the right place on promoting religious freedom, his execution left a lot to be desired, especially when it came to China. It was just over a year ago, in fact, that Bush traveled to China to give his seal of approval to the Olympics -- though his visit came just a few months after Beijing's brutal crackdown on Buddhist-led protesters in Tibet.

Ironically, there is widespread feeling that Bill Clinton was more effective at deploying religious freedom as an aspect of statecraft. "He knew how to make things happen on this," one rueful religious freedom campaigner, a conservative Christian, told me. Bill Clinton was also savvy about the domestic political benefits of doing so. A 2008 survey by the Christian advocacy group Open Doors USA showed that strong majorities of Christians in every region of the country believe combating religious persecution should be a foreign policy priority for the United States.

And it was Clinton who signed the International Religious Freedom Act, known as IRFA, into law in October 1998 with broad backing from a Republican-dominated Congress that three weeks earlier had opened an impeachment investigation against him in the House. IRFA remains the magna carta of American policy on promoting religious freedom overseas. But religious freedom itself largely remains an agenda item for Republicans and conservatives, a far cry from the days of Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, when Democrats were closely identified with religious freedom issues like Soviet Jewry.

Moreover, promoting religious freedom internationally has the potential to restore America's reputation as the world's champion of religious liberty and indeed all human rights -- a reputation which has suffered greatly in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially in Muslim nations where the United States is keen to promote religious freedom for persecuted Christians. Many believe promoting religious freedom should also be considered a weapon in defeating terrorism.

There has always been, and likely will always be, a sharp debate about what role religious freedom plays on the ground in other countries, and how to best promote it.

Some argue that religious freedom is a necessary precursor to the development of democracy and free markets, while others say capitalism leads to an expansion of human rights, including religious freedom. In the same vein, some argue that it is vital to engage countries, especially powerhouses like China that can do as they please, and to promote religious freedom through diplomacy and by opening markets and expanding cross-cultural ties that will inevitably lead to greater religious liberty. Others say denouncing religious persecution is the most effective and the most just way to go -- the "name-and-shame" approach that calls abusive governments on the carpet in order to pressure them into establishing religious freedoms.

That dichotomy is built into the infrastructure of American diplomacy. IRFA set up two basic components on this issue: One is the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom, led by the as yet unnamed ambassador-at-large. The second is the autonomous U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which is made up of nine commissioners appointed by the president and congressional leaders.

The two bodies often have competing agendas and styles. The State Department office tends to promote diplomatic engagement while USCIRF, being independent and comprised of activists and political appointees, tends to be much more outspoken and critical of other countries. The USCIRF commissioners -- the commission still has a majority of Bush appointees -- critiques the State Department and issues advisories to the president on what he should do, as the commission did ahead of Obama's China trip.

"The trip is an opportunity to dispel any notion that human rights and religious freedoms are not priorities, and to set the record straight on any of the Administration's prior statements on the place of human rights in our bilateral relationship with China," the commission wrote Obama in a memo signed by its chairman, Leonard Leo, a longtime Republican activist and official of the Federalist Society.

Obama will not be able to clarify all these issues during his stay in China, which will take up three days of the visit and includes stops in Beijing and Shanghai. But he can lay down a marker that would then be followed by concrete actions when he returns to the United States.

Such actions would include appointing an ambassador for religious freedom as well as making appointments of his own to USCIRF (the terms of the current Bush-era commissioners have expired, but there are legal uncertainties as to how many appointees the White House and Congress are allowed to name). That would begin to establish the framework of an Obama Doctrine on religious freedom, and provide momentum for a critical issue and a critical time

Administration officials say that Obama will raise issues of human rights to Chinese President Hu Jintao when they meet on Tuesday, the second day of the president's visit. Tibet is expected to be one of the issues he raises, though no explicit mention has been made as to how or whether Obama's pitch will include religious freedom. Officials say Obama could visit a church or religious site to make that point.

Of course Chinese leaders have listened to remonstrations before and then gone about their business.

During the time of the Olympics, newspapers featured stories of burgeoning house churches that indicated a relaxation of strictures by the Chinese.

But just this month one of the largest house churches in China, the Beijing Shouwang Church, which was showcased during last year's Olympics and hosted GOP congressman Frank Wolf at a service, was evicted from its longtime worship space and forced to hold services for some 500 worshipers in the snow in a nearby park -- though that too was closed down by authorities, according to human rights activists.

Other house churches are being shuttered, Catholic bishops and priests remain in prison, and on Nov. 3, Fan Yafeng, a well-respected professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and outspoken advocate for religious freedom, was fired ostensibly for "political reasons."

"It means the [Communist Party] cannot endure the mainstream views of Chinese society and the international community," Fan told The Age of Australia. "The Government has given up all political reforms. They only aim to protect their own interests."