Chinese dictator Xi Jinping announced at the National Religious Affairs Meeting on December 4 that Christian churches must “cultivate core socialist values” and “put them into practice,” receive the state’s permission before sharing the Gospel, and obey the Chinese Communist Party at all times, The Daily Wire reported.
The statements from the CCP’s first religious affairs meeting in five years will apply to all faiths in China, but the CCP views Christianity as a specific threat because the Bible teaches that God and the moral law, not the government, has absolute authority.
Xi said that Christian pastors and priests, as well as other religious leaders, must try “to keep enhancing the recognition of the motherland, the Chinese nation, the Chinese culture, the CPC, and socialism with Chinese characteristics among religious personages and believers.”
China recognizes three religions in addition to Christian Roman Catholicism and Protestantism: Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam.
These faiths, Xi said, must all “rally vast religious believers” around the CCP and Chinese government.
Xi sees the Chinese state as deeply connected with the Chinese people’s religious practice.
“Religious groups stand as a bridge and a bond connecting the Party and the government with people from religious circles and the vast religious believers, Xinhua reported.
Xi instructed people of all religions to separate their beliefs from daily life so that they do not “interfere with educational, judicial and administrative affairs as well as social life.”
Neither should religion “impair the health of citizens, offend public order and good morals.”
Most Christians believe that they must incorporate their beliefs into education, law, and society, or else they are failing to embody their faith.
China offers “freedom of religious belief,” but this freedom should be “fully and faithfully implemented” within the context of Chinese national and political life, according to Xi.
