In Protestant churches in China last Christmas, robed choir members again raised their voices in song, but this time their music was not traditional carols and hymns of praise to God. It was “My Motherland and I” and other anthems of homage to the Chinese Communist Party. In the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA) churches, the Virgin Mary’s pictures are being replaced with portraits of President Xi Jinping, while half of China’s 98 dioceses remain without a bishop nearly two years after the signing of the Sino–Vatican provisional agreement. Subjected to a myriad of new rules, pastors and priests in both denominations are being forced to base their homilies on Xi’s sayings, now part of the CCP constitution. The underground churches, which have existed in a gray zone for two decades, neither legal nor banned as “evil cults” — a classification of over a dozen illegal religions, such as Falun Gong and “Eastern Lightning,” a.k.a. the Church of Almighty God — are being shut by the thousands. In a world distracted by pandemic, China’s Communist government is aggressively consolidating dominance over its tens of millions of Christians. This should trouble all China observers, whether Christian or not. These churches have constituted the largest nationwide movement with a culture and belief system distinct from that of the Chinese state. Courageous doctors, lawyers, scientists, and journalists dissent, but they can do so only individually or in small groups outside any national institutional support. Since the 1980s, the church — Protestants and Catholics, open and underground — had survived with more ideological independence than any other civil-society organization in China. Christians have long been persecuted and restricted, but the current comprehensive push to meld churches with the CCP, under penalty of eradication, threatens to be devastating to the faith. It signals the advance of totalitarianism, just as China is rising as a world power.
The Persecution of Christians Part 15
