By David K. Trimble

Last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that “the United States condemns the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) recent detention of dozens of leaders of the unregistered house Zion Church in China…” He further called on the CCP “to immediately release the detained church leaders and to allow all people of faith, including members of house churches, to engage in religious activities without fear of retribution.” The time is now for all of us as people of faith and defenders of religious freedom to rise with one voice to hold Xi JinPing and the CCP accountable.  

These arrests are only the latest episode in the CCP’s long history of widespread hostility toward religion. As RFI’s founder and president emeritus Tom Farr observed a few years ago: 

China’s totalitarian, atheist regime targets [Uighur Muslims with torturous ‘reeducation camps’] and any other religion that posits an authority greater than the party or the state. The Chinese communist regime employs violence to transform Tibetan Buddhism into an arm of the state. It destroys churches whose believers resist the state. It attacks Christian public witness by the process of ‘sinicization.’

China remains on a trajectory of unrelenting religious persecution, to such a degree that we can rightly view its tyrannical path over the last decade as a second “Cultural Revolution.” China’s spate of arrests of nearly 30 pastors and staff in at least 6 cities beginning last Thursday is a continuation of the CCP’s years-long campaign to “sinicize” underground churches that refuse to corrupt their faith in compliance with the state’s totalitarian rule. The main target was Zion Church, a network of underground house churches with nearly 5,000 members. Among those apprehended was Zion’s senior pastor Jin “Ezra” Mingri.

Only a couple of years ago, we at RFI partnered with Bob Fu and ChinaAid to seek U.S. government intervention on behalf of another group of besieged Chinese Christians, who came to be known as the “Mayflower Church.” This congregation of more than 60 Christians were facing torture, exile to work camps, imprisonment, and even death when they fled the CCP’s reach and eventually landed safely in Texas on Good Friday of 2023.  

China recognizes two “church” bodies: “Catholic Patriotic Association” and the Protestant “Three Self Movement.” Zion Church has no affiliation with either and is therefore “unregistered,” which makes its mere existence an offense to the state. Not that Chinese people of faith could rely on their country’s laws concerning religion even if they did robustly protect religious freedom, but China’s laws offer no such guarantee. According to the U.S. State Department: 

The government recognizes five official religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Only religious groups belonging to one of the five state-sanctioned ‘patriotic religious associations’ representing these religions are permitted to register with the government and are officially permitted to hold worship services. Regulations require clergy to pledge allegiance to the CCP and socialism and to ‘resist illegal religious activities and religious extremist ideology, and resist infiltration by foreign forces using religion.’ [emphasis added]

Even in terms of safeguarding “freedom of worship” – which is far narrower than the American conception of “free exercise of religion” that we defend at RFI – China’s laws fail.

Beyond its defective legal framework, China is proving yet again in its actions that it will not tolerate faithful Christians living among its population. Moreover, it remains undeterred in perpetrating grave human rights violations against Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. And its persistent repression of Tibetan Buddhists and other religious minorities add yet further evidence of the CCP’s hostility toward religion. The state’s persecution of these groups continues unabated. This must stop.

But what can and should the United States do, especially given the enormity of China’s economic and military power and the range of U.S. interests implicated by that power? The challenge of disentangling China’s religious freedom violations from other pressing issues that demand U.S. attention and action is extraordinarily difficult. One key to the puzzle is to find ways to enable religious freedom diplomacy to bolster other legitimate U.S. interests. As I argued recently, U.S. foreign policy must not allow economic considerations to compromise humanitarian concerns – including the protection of religious freedom. Instead, U.S. leaders should look for creative and complementary ways to advance both. 

In addition to redesignating China as a Country to Particular Concern (CPC), the United States should continue to integrate into its China engagement strategy the diplomatic tools that a CPC designation makes available. Though partially leveraged in America’s past relations with Beijing, far more could be done to put CPC designation to use vis-a-vis China and other countries on the list. Other means of pressuring China should also be explored, to include harnessing U.S. economic power, as former Vice President Mike Pence argued a few weeks ago. Pence called for using trade and visa policies to induce religious freedom violators like China, Nigeria, and India to change course. 

More than a quarter of a century after passage of the landmark International Religious Freedom of Act (1998), we must admit that the global landscape of religious persecution has not only failed to improve, it has actually worsened. In fact, we are in the midst of a global crisis of religious freedom. Now is a time for creativity and conviction, for the United States and key allies like the UK. We at RFI are eager to work with our civil society partners to equip leaders at the State Department and beyond who take the present scourge of persecution seriously and are willing to act. For this reason, Senate-approval of Congressman Mark Walker to serve as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom cannot come soon enough. 

Members of Zion Church currently facing interrogation and continued confinement, and countless others like them around the world, deserve nothing less than decisive action now from all who defend religious freedom.

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David K. Trimble is President of the Religious Freedom Institute.