Why China is terrified of Christianity
by Benedict Rogers, UnHerd:
From destroying churches to jailing priests, the Communist Party is bent on eliminating religion.
Religious freedom in China is facing the most severe crackdown since the Cultural Revolution — and most people don’t even realise. Yes, in the past year, the plight of the predominantly Muslim Uighurs has drawn increasing attention. At least a million, perhaps as many as three million, have been incarcerated in prison camps, where they face systematic torture, rape, slave labour and forced sterilisation. Likewise, the continued persecution of Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual discipline in the Buddhist tradition, has inspired worldwide condemnation.
But far less known is the brutal, and intensifying, repression of China’s Christians. For while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has always repressed religion in general, Christianity has always been its biggest target. This is partly a result of the Party’s promotion of atheism, as well its nervousness towards any gathering of people that it does not control. But it is also rooted in its fear that Christianity represents a “foreign” threat to its way of life, albeit one that the CCP hasn’t quite worked out how to deal with.
Under Mao Zedong, the Party attempted to eliminate Christianity altogether, though it succeeded only in driving the church underground. Indeed, as Deng Xiaoping started to open up the economy in the 1980s, the regime realised that the Church could not be eradicated so sought to control it instead; re-establishing state-approved church institutions for Catholics and Protestants that had been shut during the Cultural Revolution, while continuing to persecute underground congregations.
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