Christianity has been waning in the West since the 19th century, giving way to a secular progressive leftist ideology. However, in the East, the trend is opposite. In the largely secular country of China, Christianity is surging as the fastest growing religion. But the left does not approve. According to Open Doors, 50 million Christians are persecuted in the communist empire, and it is getting worse. [perfectpullquote align=”right” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=”24″]…his legacy was the millions of corpses sacrificed on the altar of socialism…[/perfectpullquote]
The charity ranks China as the 27th worst country in the world to be a Christian, up 16 places in one year. Their Head of Advocacy, Zoe Smith, said: “The current climate is so severe that some older Chinese pastors have shared with Open Doors their worry that persecution in China will soon be comparable to that suffered under Chairman Mao.”
Political Correctness
When Chairman Mao Zedong died in 1976, his legacy was the millions of corpses sacrificed on the altar of socialism, many of which were Christian. It was Mao who invented the term “political correctness”, and it meant the same under his dictatorship as in America: Oppression of dissenting opinions.
His successor, Chairman Deng Xiaoping, reversed many of the disastrous progressive policies. Most people know that this involved a radical departure from socialism towards a market economy, but few are aware that it also involved greater freedom of speech and religion. Under his regime, Christianity was permitted to grow – and it did.
But today’s president, Xi Jinping, has partially returned to the policy of Mao, which means censorship even more severe than on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. The communists have always understood that the core defense of a Western-style liberty with individual rights has been Aristotelian Christianity. This religion will always be a threat to the left.
Rewriting History
In 2018, the Communist government therefore initiated a five-year plan to make Christianity more compatible with Chinese and socialist values, including rewriting the Bible. Stephen Mosher, author of Bully of Asia: Why China’s Dream is the New Threat to World Order, has told Life Site News that: “So far, it is (1) no longer possible to buy a copy of the Bible online [in China], (2) existing copies of the Bible are being confiscated whenever the authorities come across them, and (3) there are new versions of all sacred texts – Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, etc. – that reinforce Communist ideology in the making.”
If that sounds eerily familiar, it is because it is like the tactic the left uses in the West to undermine liberty. When they failed to win elections with their progressive ideas, they opted for the backdoor to power: Invading academia and rewriting history and science books to be more in alignment with communist ideology.
That is why so many young Americans today believe that the United States is an evil racist empire that invented slavery, while knowing nothing about the genocides, oppression, misery, and poverty that socialism has caused everywhere it has been tried.
A Major Difference
There is, however, one major difference between the Chinese communists and the progressives in America: In China, they fully control the levers of government. In the U.S., the far left only holds cultural hegemony, whereas the political power still is shared with the right and is tempered by the Constitution.
But China gives us a chilling vision of what could happen if progressives ever gain full control of the government in America. Fortunately, that is still far away. Nevertheless, conservatives and libertarians – and Christians of all political colors – should use their freedoms to invest in taking back the culture from the far left, while they are still free to do so.
