Here’s a trivia question I bet you’ll get wrong: Which nation is projected to have the world’s largest Christian population by 2030?
Nigeria or Brazil would be good guesses, as would the United States, the current number one.
But it’s none other than officially atheist China. The Good News is spreading rapidly in China, and it’s making the communist regime very nervous.
So nervous, in fact, that since becoming president in 2012, Xi Jinping has embarked on an increasingly brutal campaign to exert control over religious life in China.
While official figures are imprecise, experts believe there are about 60 million Christians in China, with roughly one-third attending state-sanctioned or registered churches and two-thirds worshiping in unregistered or underground “house” churches. But the relationship between church and state in China is more like a spectrum, as many churches are neither banned nor authorized.
The anodyne state-sanctioned churches operate with the approval of the state and are subject to its control, including being subject to surveillance camera monitoring. Pastors are forbidden from criticizing the government, for instance, and sermons cannot deviate from approved topics.
Then there are the house churches, which have increasingly been targets of state persecution. Last Christmas saw the most severe crackdown on Christianity in China in more than a decade. Several churches were closed and approximately 100 Chinese Christians were arrested in Chengdu after government authorities declared their church to be “an illegal organization.”
The police closed a school and a seminary, arrested a pastor, and confiscated Bibles. Other efforts to stamp out Christianity in China include banning online sales of the Bible. Many church elders have gone into hiding. Now Chinese authorities are going from town to town, demanding that Christian icons be replaced with pictures of Chairman Mao Zedong and Xi.
The ruling Communist party has even embarked on a five-year plan to make Christianity more Chinese, promote socialism, and to incorporate Buddhist and Confucian teachings into Christian scripture. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., has accused China of “taking a hammer and sickle to the cross.”
Christians in China have long had to elude authorities. When churches were closed, many opened and began attending secret House churches. Some pastors used encrypted chat apps to communicate with each other about government surveillance and share information about police harassment.
It’s not just Christianity, however. For years Beijing has effectively been at war with the Uighur Muslims who live in the western part of the country. An estimated 1 million Uighurs have been imprisoned in “re-education” camps and subjected to prolonged physical and psychological abuse.
As a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, I’ve heard horrifying stories of what the Chinese government is doing to the Christians they imprison.
For decades, China tried to control the population by limiting couples to one child. Those who became pregnant with a second child were often fined or forced to have abortions.
Because of a cultural preference for boys, Chinese parents would often abort baby girls. The result is that today there are some 100 million Chinese men who can’t find wives.
But now men Chinese men are being told that if they join the Communist Party, they can go to the internment camps to pick out a Christian woman as a wife.
This is the perverse result of a government that tries to control the most basic human rights of its citizens, the freedom of religion and the freedom to assemble.
Beijing is not dumb. It knows that the greatest threat to its grip on power is a compelling competing message that exposes the empty promises of communism. Christianity preaches peace, and the basic dignity and worth of all human beings, while communism seeks total control and prizes obedience to the state that leaves no room for God.
Christianity also offers a way for the millions of Chinese who have moved into the middle class to resist the consumerist culture that has overtaken the country.
Religious freedom is increasingly under threat here in America, from attacks on Christian businesses to the rise of anti-Semitism on our college campuses and the halls of Congress.
But hearing the horror stories from across the globe puts it into perspective. We live in a country whose founders felt that the right to freedom of religion was so central to American democracy that they enshrined it in the First Amendment to the Constitution. And I thank God for that.
Gary Bauer is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of American Values and chairman of Campaign for Working Families. He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
