China’s Just Intensified Their War On Christians

As people in the West gear up to celebrate Christmas, the people of China are bracing themselves for the Chinese Communist Party to follow through on its stated plan to intensify its war against the Christian faith. President Xi Jinping has announced that Chinese Christian churches must “cultivate core socialist values,” punish pastors who evangelize or worship without the government’s permission, and instruct the faithful to obey the Communist authorities in their own oppression.

President Xi Jinping and other Communist officials laid down the law at the National Religious Affairs Meeting on December 4, the first national-level meeting about religion in five years. President Xi told religious leaders they must make deliberate “efforts … to keep enhancing the recognition of the motherland, the Chinese nation, the Chinese culture, the CPC [Chinese Communist Party] and socialism with Chinese characteristics among religious personages and believers.” Religious “believers should be guided to cultivate core socialist values and put them into practice,” he said. “Xi also demanded efforts to rally vast religious believers around the [Communist] Party and gozvernment,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. In other words, teachers of any of China’s five recognized religions — Buddhism, Taosim, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam — must become apostles of Communism, preaching the pseudo-Gospel of obedience to the State.

Xi wants to assure that churches know their place — or else. Religious belief must not “interfere with educational, judicial and administrative affairs as well as social life,” he said on December 4. This is especially true of clergy who teach on social media and the internet, something that has terrified the CCP since the last meeting in 2016. Unauthorized prayer or preaching threaten the atheistic regime.

Worse yet, President Xi is calling on church “leaders” to do his bidding for him. To help secure his power, President Xi is instructing churches to crack down on clergy who proclaim the Gospel or worship with fellow believers without the party’s approval. “All religious groups are required to strengthen their self-management,” Xi added. Since President Xi changed party rules to effectively make himself president for life, churches know they face obedience or Xi’s wrath for many, many years to come.

But the CCP is not leaving the suppression of the Gospel to ecclesiastical leadership. To bring this about, Xi said, he will send “cadres” of Communist agents into churches who are from the government, and they’re here to help. “[I]t is necessary to cultivate a team of party and government cadres who are proficient in Marxist religious views, familiar with religious work, and good at working with religious believers, and let them study Marxist religious views, the CCP’s religious work theories and policies, and religious knowledge.” A cadre leader must be “firm in ideology and politics, adhere to Marxist religious views … and strengthens the construction of the discipline of Marxist religious studies,” reported Bitter Winter magazine, which reports on Christian persecution in China. That follows the Chinese Communist Party’s resolution on history, adopted just days before Xi’s virtual meeting with Joe Biden, which says that “religions in China … provided active guidance for the adaptation of religions to socialist society.”

This month’s meeting, which attracted few headlines in the U.S., signaled a new era of deeper persecution. The Communists’ tone was so harsh that even propaganda media couldn’t cover for them. “China tightens control of religion,” reported the South China Morning Post, which The New York Times has said is “pioneering a new form of propaganda” for Beijing. (Pot, meet the kettle.)

Believers have had things bad enough under the 2016 guidance. “Religious freedom conditions in China continue to deteriorate,” according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

“The communist Chinese government has created a high-tech surveillance state, utilizing facial recognition and artificial intelligence to monitor and harass Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Falon Gong and other religions,” reported USCIRF. “Independent experts estimate that between 900,000 and 1.8 million Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Muslims have been detained in more than 1,300 concentration camps in Xinjiang.”

Yet the Chinese Communists do not merely persecute believers but insist on changing the substance of the faith itself. The meeting demands that church leaders proceed with what President Xi calls the “sinicisation of religion”: Each faith must be interpreted according to Chinese Communist ideology, and every religion must create a “religious theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

The meeting signals that this process of adulterating the faith, which is already apace, will ramp up in the years to come. For example, a Chinese textbook claims that Jesus Christ killed a woman. A textbook that teaches law and ethics in Chinese secondary schools twists the traditional Gospel story of the woman caught committing adultery. In the Gospel, Jesus says that only someone without sin should cast the first stone at her, then tells the woman to “go and sin no more.” The

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