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.
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