“The Chinese Communist Party is an evil regime. … They are running concentration camps in Northwestern China, and they are persecuting Christians throughout their region, and they have long forced abortions on women or sterilization on women,” – Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR)
ChristianPost.com reports that
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, poor Christian villagers in China have been ordered to renounce their faith and replace displays of Jesus with portraits of Chairman Mao and President Xi Jinping or risk losing their welfare benefits.
Religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter reports that in April, officials with China’s Communist Party visited believers’ homes in Linfen, a prefecture-level city in the northern province of Shanxi. While there, they ordered residents who receive social welfare payments from the government to replace crosses, religious symbols, and images in their homes with portraits of China’s communist leaders.
If Christians resisted the order, officials annulled their subsidies.
“All impoverished households in the town were told to display Mao Zedong images,” a local pastor told Bitter Winter. “The government is trying to eliminate our belief and wants to become God instead of Jesus.”
A member of a state-sponsored Three-Self church in one of the villages recounted how local officials tore down all religious images and a calendar with an image of Jesus in his home and posted a portrait of Mao Zedong instead.
“Impoverished religious households can’t receive money from the state for nothing — they must obey the Communist Party for the money they receive,” the believer quoted an official as stating.
In May, an official in the eastern province of Shandong stormed into the home of a local Christian. While inside the Christian’s home, the official posted portraits of Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping and reportedly said, “These are the greatest gods. If you want to worship somebody, they are the ones.”
In April, the government of Xinyu city in the southeastern province of Jiangxi canceled a disabled Christian’s minimum living subsidy and a monthly disability allowance of 100 RMB (about $14) because the believer continued to attend worship services despite government orders.
Similarly, in Jiangxi’s Poyang county, a Christian woman in her 80s was removed from the government’s aid list because she said “Thank God” after receiving her monthly 200 RMB (about $28) subsidy in mid-January.
Another elderly Christian woman from Henan’s Shangqiu city had her minimum living allowance canceled after government officials found a cross image posted on the door of her home.
“They tore it down immediately,” she said. “Afterward, both my minimum living allowance and poverty alleviation subsidy were canceled. I am being driven to a dead end. I have diabetes and need injections regularly.”
The Communist Party previously targeted images and photos of Jesus as part of its campaign to “transform believers in religion into believers in the party.”
In 2017, The South China Morning Post reported that CCP officials removed more than 600 Christian symbols from the living rooms of believers in Yugan county of Jiangxi province, and 453 hung portraits of the communist dictator.
SCMP, a newspaper that kowtows to the communist regime, claimed the move was part of a state-sponsored campaign to alleviate poverty in the region since some CCP members believe families’ faith is to blame for poverty.
“Many poor households have plunged into poverty because of illness in the family. Some resorted to believing in Jesus to cure their illnesses,” the head of the government campaign told SCMP. “But we tried to tell them that getting ill is a physical thing, and that the people who can really help them are the Communist Party and General Secretary Xi.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, rights groups, and the U.S. State Department have condemned China’s continued crackdown on religion and religious minorities.
In its 2020 Annual Report, USCIRF called upon the Trump administration to impose targeted sanctions on Chinese officials responsible for severe religious freedom violations. It noted that Chinese authorities not only removed crosses from churches across the nation but also banned youth age 18 and younger from participating in religious services.
In June, a Christian man was arrested and at least two women were injured in China’s Henan province after 200 communist officials stormed into Sunzhuang Church and demolished the structure using cranes and heavy-duty machinery.
On Open Doors USA’s World Watch List, China is ranked No. 23 on its list of countries known for persecuting Christians. The organization notes that all churches are perceived as a threat if they become too large, too political, or invite foreign guests.
Sound familiar?
It should.
As Antifa and Black Lives Matter continue to protest, riot, destroy property, and disrupt American life in major U.S. cities, Democrats and those on the Far Left of the political spectrum are still trying to equate the actions of these ungrateful little barbarians with the noble actions of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
That is a shining example of promoting a false equivalency.
Several leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were devout and serious Christians.
Dr. King studied the Bible and took God’s Holy Word very seriously. He saw the huge contradiction between God’s moral code and state-sponsored discrimination.
He believed that Americans would listen to him about civil rights because they shared a mutual faith in the God of Abraham, and His Son, Jesus Christ.
America in the 1960s was still a nation of believers who shared the same belief in morality and ethics.
Today, we are watching our popular culture being inundated by the tenets of radical secular humanism. Relative morality and situational ethics are both practiced and lauded by “the smartest people in the room”.
We are watching a generation which has been indoctrinated in our public schools to believe that they are their own god, and whatever they do, right or wrong, is just “me being me”.
So, if they deface or burn down a church, or, if “protesters” harass Christians going to or leaving church services, it is excused because Christians are “narrow-minded” and “not doing what is best for society”.
If America puts the far Left Democratic Party in charge of the Oval Office and House and both Houses of Congress this November, we will no longer be the Constitutional Republic that our Founders meant for us to be, where we can worship God “in spirit and in truth”.
Instead, just like Communist China, the State will be our god, whether we want it to be or not.
And, all the richness and fullness of our lives under the American Freedom which God bequeathed us would be transformed into a life spent in working and living for the good of a Marxist Government, just like those poor Chinese Christians in the above article.
The present actions of Antifa and BLM are just a portent of things to come, unless Christian Americans “put on the full armor of God” and reclaim America from the New Bolsheviks who seek to “radically change” it.
So, love God, pray, and stand up for what is right.
“Onward, Christian Soldiers,
Marching as to war.
With the cross of Jesus,
going on before.”
Until He Comes,
KJ
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