Christians face harassment and disruption in Beijing crackdown on religion, US government agency reports

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/44150479

In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.

The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.

  • @QuarterSwede@lemmy.worldEnglish
    24•3 months ago

    In the Torah and Old Testament this is exactly why God forbade having idols, those can be replaced. Changing pictures of Jesus and Mary is for the Catholic Churches since Protestants don’t use idols. Protestant and Catholic Churches are to remove crosses (“for safety reasons”). These churches will just replace those images with something else (maybe the Ichthus <>< or IHS/Chi-Rho ☧) to represent a meeting place, there are many Christians symbols to choose from, and new ones will be made as necessary.

    This has happened in the past in other areas and it never stops them. The message of an outside forgiver who is immortal and died so that they can be forgiven is too strong to quash. Of course the Chinese government takes issue with that. It takes power away from them. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Maybe Xi is coming to gripes with his own mortality as he ages and is trying to solidify his/his party’s rule?

    @FlyingSquid@lemmy.world what’s your take on this?

    • Flying SquidEnglish
      12•3 months ago

      Apart from being highly amused? I don’t think it will fully work. And it’s not even just the forgiver part. It’s the eternal afterlife in heaven part. Because if the choice is “obey Xi on Earth by no longer venerating Christ” or “spend an eternity in heaven,” and I believed in all this stuff, I’d sure pick heaven and just worship in secret.

      I will say that it does kind of stop people though… in the sense that eventually their beliefs get diluted into a sort of merging of belief systems. Judaism and Christianity themselves are examples of this, but more recent ones would be the various New World iindigenous groups that merge their Pre-Columbian religion with Christianity or Crypto-Jews in the Southwestern U.S., the result of Spanish Jews converting to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spanish lands.

      So maybe what will end up happening is a sort of new form of Chinese Christianity where Mao is venerated as a saint or a prophet, but Jesus will very unlikely be usurped from the top of the worship chain… but right now, they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.

      • @QuarterSwede@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7•3 months ago

        they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.

        Well said; this is what I was driving at. I don’t always align with your perspective but it’s always interesting. Thanks!

        • @Manmoth@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1•2 months ago

          Saints offer prayers to God. If you’ve ever asked someone to pray for you then you have done the same thing that the Orthodox do when they venerate an icon. No one is replacing God with Saints. Saints are only Saints because of Christs work in their life.

      • FlaxEnglish
        0•3 months ago

        Bit of a rubbish take. These pictures are appearing in the three-self protestant state churches or the government forcing the pictures in Catholic churches. Basically all they’re actually doing is pushing Christians underground.

        • Flying SquidEnglish
          5•3 months ago

          That’s literally what I was talking about when I was talking about the Indigenous Americans and Crypto-Jews… so how is it a “rubbish take?”

    • FlaxEnglish
      4•3 months ago

      Pictures of Jesus and Mary aren’t (supposed to be) idols

      • @RadicalEagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7•3 months ago

        Idol: an image or representation of a god used as an object of worship.

        I agree that they probably weren’t intended to be idols, but pictures of Jesus, Mary, the cross, etc are just objects of worship.

        Jesus’s message of universal love goes beyond the Christian religion, which feels like it only exists to promote itself instead of the values that Christ promoted.

        If Jesus were alive today I doubt he would care about the destruction of religious symbols. He’d probably say something like “Why are you concerned with a symbol when you have brothers and sisters who need help? If you really want to exalt God, go out and do His work.”

        Like, if people truly believe God is the alpha and omega do they really think they need to get offended on his behalf?

        Christianity has done a great job of putting God in a tiny box called “religion” and taking away all his power to the point where dinosaurs, evolution, and science are able to shake their faith.

        God/love/the universe is nonsense, and we get to spend our whole lives trying to figure that nonsense out.

        https://youtu.be/SzXn4PozUTo?si=h2-x0YJHqZzmuG7n

        • FlaxEnglish
          3•3 months ago

          I would agree that religious symbols should serve only as reminders. Although putting up a photograph of Xi Jingping replacing Jesus is still an insulting statement and we all know what it’s supposed to imply.

          But in terms of saving a family or a picture of Jesus in a fire, obviously the choice should be the family.

        • @ChiefSinner@lemm.eeEnglish
          2•3 months ago

          veneration doesn’t mean worship. there’s a huge difference. Idol worshippers believe the statues / picture / whatever is some kind of living god. Orthodox or catholics who venerate icons of Christ or the Theotokos (Mother of God) or other saints are not worshipping them. They are venerating / showing respect to the icon that is representing the saint who is alive in Christ or God.

        • @Manmoth@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1•2 months ago

          It’s funny hearing a Protestant make sweeping claims about what is or is not true Christianity.

  • @cheese_greater@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20•3 months ago

    Isn’t Jesus like the President of the Universe? I’m almost convinced that JTown outranks him.

    HEs before Xis and all that

    • @RadicalEagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5•3 months ago

      I’m pretty sure Jesus was opposed to the idea of nations, geopolitical boundaries, and political authority in general. So idk if he’d accept a title like “president”.

      • Rikudou_SageAEnglish
        2•3 months ago

        That’s the classic cliché of him being good for that role because he didn’t want it.

      • @Manmoth@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2•2 months ago

        "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Mk 12:17

  • andrew_bidlawEnglish
    2•3 months ago

    I wonder if that’s local churches trying to adapt to weird policies by lazily masking their beliefs.