{"id":1133689,"date":"2021-12-20T10:05:00","date_gmt":"2021-12-20T15:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1133689"},"modified":"2021-12-20T10:05:04","modified_gmt":"2021-12-20T15:05:04","slug":"chinas-just-intensified-their-war-on-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/chinas-just-intensified-their-war-on-christians\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s Just Intensified Their War On Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">14<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fchinas-just-intensified-their-war-on-christians%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1133689&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>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 \u201ccultivate core socialist values,\u201d punish pastors who evangelize or worship without the government\u2019s permission, and instruct the faithful to obey the Communist authorities in their own oppression.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cefforts \u2026 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.\u201d Religious \u201cbelievers should be guided to cultivate core socialist values and put them into practice,\u201d he said. \u201cXi also demanded efforts to rally vast religious believers around the [Communist] Party and gozvernment,\u201d the state-run Xinhua News Agency <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cn\/english\/2021-12\/04\/c_1310352026.htm\">reported<\/a>. In other words, teachers of any of China\u2019s five <a href=\"https:\/\/www.justice.gov\/eoir\/page\/file\/1068681\/download\">recognized<\/a> religions \u2014 Buddhism, Taosim, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam \u2014 must become apostles of Communism, preaching the pseudo-Gospel of obedience to the State.<\/p>\n<p>Xi wants to assure that churches know their place \u2014 or else. Religious belief must not \u201cinterfere with educational, judicial and administrative affairs as well as social life,\u201d he <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cn\/english\/2021-12\/05\/c_1310352966.htm\">said<\/a> 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hoover.org\/sites\/default\/files\/research\/docs\/clm52jb.pdf\">last meeting<\/a> in 2016. Unauthorized prayer or preaching threaten the atheistic regime.<\/p>\n<p>Worse yet, President Xi is calling on church \u201cleaders\u201d 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\u2019s approval. \u201cAll religious groups are required to strengthen their self-management,\u201d Xi added. Since President Xi changed party rules to effectively make himself <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/world-asia-china-43361276\">president for life<\/a>, churches know they face obedience or Xi\u2019s wrath for many, many years to come.<\/p>\n<p>But the CCP is not leaving the suppression of the Gospel to ecclesiastical leadership. To bring this about, Xi said, he will send \u201ccadres\u201d of Communist agents into churches who are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nCedOQJ0ZEA\">from the government, and they\u2019re here to help<\/a>. \u201c[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&nbsp;CCP\u2019s religious work theories and policies, and religious knowledge.\u201d A cadre leader must be&nbsp;\u201cfirm in ideology and politics, adhere to Marxist religious views \u2026 and strengthens the construction of the discipline of Marxist religious studies,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/bitterwinter.org\/china-ccp-national-conference-on-religion\/\">reported<\/a> Bitter Winter magazine, which reports on Christian persecution in China. That follows the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/asia.nikkei.com\/Politics\/Full-text-of-the-Chinese-Communist-Party-s-new-resolution-on-history\">resolution on history<\/a>, adopted just days before Xi\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailywire.com\/news\/chinas-xi-jinping-appears-to-mock-biden-with-name-during-meeting-after-biden-denials-over-relationship\">virtual meeting<\/a> with Joe Biden, which says that \u201creligions in China \u2026 provided active guidance for the adaptation of religions to socialist society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This month\u2019s meeting, which attracted few headlines in the U.S., signaled a new era of deeper persecution. The Communists\u2019 tone was so harsh that even propaganda media couldn\u2019t cover for them. \u201cChina tightens control of religion,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scmp.com\/news\/china\/politics\/article\/3158590\/china-tightens-control-religion-emphasis-national-security\">reported<\/a> the South China Morning Post, which The New York Times has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/03\/31\/world\/asia\/south-china-morning-post-hong-kong-alibaba.html\">said<\/a> is \u201cpioneering a new form of propaganda\u201d for Beijing. (Pot, meet the kettle.)<\/p>\n<p>Believers have had things bad enough under the 2016 guidance. \u201cReligious freedom conditions in China continue to deteriorate,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.uscirf.gov\/countries\/china\">according<\/a> to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe 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,\u201d reported USCIRF. \u201cIndependent 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201csinicisation of religion\u201d: Each faith must be interpreted according to Chinese Communist ideology, and every religion must <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ucanews.com\/news\/china-stresses-more-marxism-tightening-control-of-religion\/95322\">create<\/a> a \u201creligious theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/therightswriter.com\/2020\/12\/chinese-communist-gospel-teaches-that-jesus-killed-a-woman\/\">Jesus Christ killed a woman<\/a>. A textbook that teaches law and ethics in Chinese secondary schools twists the traditional Gospel story of the woman caught committing adultery. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=John%208%3A3-11&amp;version=KJV\">the Gospel<\/a>, Jesus says that only someone without sin should <a href=\"https:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Leviticus+20%3A10&amp;version=KJV\">cast the first stone<\/a> at her, then tells the woman to \u201cgo and sin no more.\u201d The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 \u201ccultivate core socialist values,\u201d punish pastors who evangelize or worship without the government\u2019s 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 \u201cefforts \u2026 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.\u201d Religious \u201cbelievers should be guided to cultivate core socialist values and put them into practice,\u201d he said. \u201cXi also demanded efforts to rally vast religious believers around the [Communist] Party and gozvernment,\u201d the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported. In other words, teachers of any of China\u2019s five recognized religions \u2014 Buddhism, Taosim, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam \u2014 must become apostles of Communism, preaching the pseudo-Gospel of obedience to the State.Xi wants to assure that churches know their place \u2014 or else. Religious belief must not \u201cinterfere with educational, judicial and administrative affairs as well as social life,\u201d 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 \u201cleaders\u201d 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\u2019s approval. \u201cAll religious groups are required to strengthen their self-management,\u201d Xi added. Since President Xi changed party rules to effectively make himself president for life, churches know they face obedience or Xi\u2019s 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 \u201ccadres\u201d of Communist agents into churches who are from the government, and they\u2019re here to help. \u201c[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\u00a0CCP\u2019s religious work theories and policies, and religious knowledge.\u201d A cadre leader must be\u00a0\u201cfirm in ideology and politics, adhere to Marxist religious views \u2026 and strengthens the construction of the discipline of Marxist religious studies,\u201d reported Bitter Winter magazine, which reports on Christian persecution in China. That follows the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s resolution on history, adopted just days before Xi\u2019s virtual meeting with Joe Biden, which says that \u201creligions in China \u2026 provided active guidance for the adaptation of religions to socialist society.\u201dThis month\u2019s meeting, which attracted few headlines in the U.S., signaled a new era of deeper persecution. The Communists\u2019 tone was so harsh that even propaganda media couldn\u2019t cover for them. \u201cChina tightens control of religion,\u201d reported the South China Morning Post, which The New York Times has said is \u201cpioneering a new form of propaganda\u201d for Beijing. (Pot, meet the kettle.)Believers have had things bad enough under the 2016 guidance. \u201cReligious freedom conditions in China continue to deteriorate,\u201d according to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).\u201cThe 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,\u201d reported USCIRF. \u201cIndependent 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.\u201dYet 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 \u201csinicisation of religion\u201d: Each faith must be interpreted according to Chinese Communist ideology, and every religion must create a \u201creligious theory of socialism with Chinese characteristics.\u201dThe 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 \u201cgo and sin no more.\u201d The Chinese textbook presents a twist ending:\u00a0\u201cWhen the crowd retreated, Jesus raised a stone and killed the woman, and said, \u2018I am also a sinner, but if the law can only be executed by a spotless person, then the law will die.\u2019\u201d The story \u2014 which the authorities apparently plagiarized from Orson Scott Card \u2014 teaches that citizens should obey government officials \u201cbecause, honest or corrupted, they represent the [Chinese Communist] Party, and the Party\u2019s law should never be questioned,\u201d explained\u00a0Bitter Winter\u00a0magazine.Unfortunately, the CCP\u2019s war on religion has extended beyond classrooms, reaching into churches, seminaries, and Christians\u2019 homes.In April 2020, one of the CCP\u2019s cadres ordered impoverished Christians to remove pictures of Jesus, or banners with scriptural quotations, from their living rooms or lose the state pension that keeps them alive. That follows a 2017 campaign to force Chinese Christians to replace crosses, images of Jesus, or Bible verses with pictures of President Xi Jinping. Christians also had the option of replacing an image of the Prince of Peace with a picture of the greatest mass murderer\u00a0in\u00a0history, former dictator Mao Tse-tung. In March 2017, a social media account reported that villagers in\u00a0Jiangxi province \u201cwillingly\u201d took down 624 faith-oriented images and put up 453 pictures of Xi. But villagers confirmed that government officials used force \u2014 including threatening the loss of government benefits \u2014 to effect the change.\u201cHelp turn those who believe in religions into believing in the Party\u201d pic.twitter.com\/dKXnmX1KK8\u2014 Yaqiu Wang \u738b\u4e9a\u79cb (@Yaqiu) November 13, 2017In June 2019, Communist officials ordered a state-sanctioned Protestant church in Henan province to replace the Ten Commandments with socialist propaganda. \u201cYou have to do whatever the Party tells you to do. If you contradict, your church will be shut down immediately,\u201d a CCP official reportedly told the congregation. One of the newly displayed quotations from Xi Jinping states that \u201ccore socialist values\u201d will \u201cimmerse various religions of China.\u201d Imagine having to replace the Ten Commandments with a statement that Communism will drown your faith.The previous November, officials with the United Front Work Department required another Protestant church to erase the first commandment of the Decalogue, which forbids having other gods. \u201cThis must be removed,\u201d one of the 30 members of the inspection team that showed up at the church said, pointing at the words etched in stone by God\u2019s finger.Those who do not comply with the government\u2019s tiniest edict face incarceration. On May 21, Communists arrested Roman Catholic Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Xinxiang, seven priests, and an undisclosed number of seminarians. Their crime? Using an abandoned factory as a makeshift seminary without the government\u2019s permission.The \u201cSinicization\u201d of Christianity is impossible, because socialism is incompatible with Christianity. Marxism and the Bible envision different kingdoms, led by different rulers, established in different spiritual spheres, and operating according to radically different morality. Christianity, which teaches the inherent dignity of every human life thanks to its creation in the image of God, can never reduce anyone to a mere cog within the wheels of the State. And no religion whose Golden Rule proscribes the love of every soul could embrace the hatred that lies at the heart of socialism.\u201cWithin the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot,\u201d said Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. \u201cTo achieve its diabolic ends, communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails a destruction of faith and nationhood.\u201dIn the Communist view, efforts to bastardize Christianity, to turn churches into exponents and theorists of socialism, and to get the church to quell all internal dissent and disobedience is only the first step to the compete eradication of Christianity, and every religion. The Left is right that Communism is in an all-or-nothing war with the Author of faith; it is wrong about how it will end. In the battles between now and that conflict\u2019s final consummation, we should take to heart the words of Solzhenitsyn to hold fast to truth, because \u201cone word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.\u201d We should do so all the more at Christmastime, when \u201cthe Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only-begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.\u201dThe views expressed in this piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.The Daily Wire is one of America\u2019s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a\u00a0member.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1133689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1133689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1133689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1133689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1133689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}