Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) is infamous for his persecution of the Jews about 170 years before Christ. He ran a gruesome campaign to stamp out the Jewish religion and replace it with pagan Greek religion. He decreed that “they might forget the law, and change all the ordinances” (1 Maccabees 1:49).
Jewish mothers were forbidden to circumcise their children. Those that did were gruesomely killed along with their children. Rabbis that didn’t hand over Bibles for burning were murdered. Everyone was forced both to eat unclean foods and to perform sacrilegious ceremonies every month.
If this seems long ago and far away, it is not. Such things are happening in China right now. In April, 2016 President Xi Jinping ushered in religious persecution with a decree that religious groups “must adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
Buddhists are forbidden to follow the Dalai Lama. To force compliance, the CCP has set up “management committees” to control each monastery along with surveillance cameras and regular police inspections.
Monks and nuns must display portraits of CCP leaders, and are subjected to “patriotic re-education,” arrest, torture and expulsion from the monastery if insufficiently loyal.
Muslim Uyghurs are being interned in re-indoctrination camps--as many as one million according to a recent report from Human Rights Watch. Meanwhile, their children are either held in orphanages or given to non-Muslim families. They are promised release on the condition that they denounce their Muslim faith.
Chinese Communist Party officials are also billeting in Uyghur homes to keep a close watch on whether they observe the traditions of their faith. During Ramadan Muslims are expected to eat pork and perform other sacrileges to demonstrate loyalty to the CCP.
Christian persecution focuses mainly on unregistered churches. Long ago, the state-authorized churches have been coopted for government propaganda; and parents are forbidden to bring their own children to worship God.
For these reasons authentic Christians have gone underground. They to hear preachers loyal to God, not the CCP. These are the churches now in the crosshairs of Xi Jinping.
On Sunday September 9, Beijing’s largest house church was raided by 60 CCP officials who sealed the building and confiscated pastor Jin’s personal assets and all church items that they deemed to be “propaganda.” The Sunday before, churches in Henan province were raided. Worshippers were assaulted, and both Bibles and crosses were burned.
In response, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) released a statement: “These collective actions ... signal an alarming escalation in persecution of citizens in China under Xi Jinping. USCIRF condemns the Chinese government's ongoing brutal and systematic targeting of religious communities for their beliefs.”
These all echo the tactics of Antiochus Epiphanes. For the CCP, like the Soviet Communists, the Nazis, and every totalitarian state in history, it is not enough to control territory. Godless Materialism is threatened by any faith in an Authority transcending the state. For this reason, Materialists must control not only the body, but also the mind.
Bibles are burned. Piety is prevented. Communication is shut down. Vile acts and blasphemies are coerced. The goal is not to kill the people, but to kill their faith. It didn’t work for Antiochus. It won’t work for Xi. But in the mean-time untold numbers of people must suffer under these inhumane attempts to throttle conscience.
As terrible as this is for nearly half of the Chinese population that holds some transcendent faith, it is not only a Chinese problem. The Christian West, once the world’s exemplar of freedom, is beginning to see these barbaric ideas gain traction.
Just last week a group at Goldsmiths, University of London, calling itself “LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths” asserted that people who oppose their ideas should be sent to Soviet-style gulag camps for rehabilitation. These camps used starvation, cold, disease and execution to “rehabilitate” tens of millions of Soviet citizens. As many as 50 million died.
“LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths” wants forced indoctrination revived. When challenged, they doubled down, claiming that the gulags were a kind way “to correct and change the ways of ‘criminals.’” They assured us that nobody was locked away for life. The “longest sentence was 10 years” because if the indoctrination “couldn’t be done in ten years, it couldn’t be done at all.”
If you assume that they were reacting to Christian fundamentalists, you would be wrong. Rather, “LGBTQ+ Goldsmiths wanted “Radical Feminists” to be thrown into gulags. This is a sobering reminder that attacks on religious freedom exempt no one.
The USCIRF is standing with persecution-watch organizations to advocate for Muslim Uyghurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Chinese house churches. Their advocacy benefits not only the religious, but the secular as well.
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