Christianity Lives on in China

After two decades of atheistic Communism, the faith and hope of the Christian community inside Red China is not dead. In spite of government-permitted purges against Christianity during the Cultural Revolution that resulted in the closing of all church buildings throughout China, the Christian witness still continues in the clandestine “home congregations” or “cell-structure” church groups.

These Christian “cells” are meeting in villages, towns, and cities all over China, and are particularly strong in Shanghai. Authoritative Christian sources out of China report that in one traditionally Christian area near a south-coast city, there are about 3,000 Christians in a population of over 30,000. Meeting together in small cell groups, these believers are able to support a Christian worker among them. This underground shepherd travels from group to group, leading Bible studies and encouraging and comforting the Christian flock.

Average attendance at these “home churches” is eight to ten. “It is very difficult in a Communist society to gather even eight or ten believers,” a Shanghai man said. In areas where the pressure against Christians is greatest—mainly large cities—numbers drop to three or four, and during times of special stress meetings may be discontinued. Shanghai at present is passing through a period of religious pressure when increasing restrictions and political factionalism make any type of home gathering dangerous. Latest reports indicate that women who attend Christian meetings in the general Shanghai area far outnumber the men.

There are no regular church services in China. Times and places for undercover meetings are arranged from one gathering to the next as conditions permit. These believers meet for the specific purpose of “fellowship.” As they encourage one another with exhortations from the Bible and pray together, their faith is nurtured and kept virile.

But it is in the younger generation that the Church has been hardest hit. There are relatively few young people among the small Christian groups who meet in secret behind closed doors. A recent escapee from the Mainland said, “Young people, twenty-five years of age and under, living in the People’s Republic of China, have no concept of God or religion.” When talking to Red Guards in Canton at the height of the Cultural Revolution, this correspondent was told, “Some old people over fifty still believe, but most of them have changed their minds. We young people are all atheists.” Asked how they accounted for a creation if there were no Creator, they said the principles contained in the “thoughts” of Chairman Mao were a distillation of the forces responsible for the original creation!

Not only Christians but also Buddhists and Muslims have suffered under the new, second-generation revolutionaries of China. African Muslims living in Peking reported to friends in transit that thousands of Muslims in Ninghsia had been killed during the Cultural Revolution over incidents involving a lot of fighting. However, because Christianity is regarded as a Western religion overtly linked with both the old discredited culture of China and present imperialist enemies of Chinese Communism, it has been subjected to the bitterest persecution of all religious groups on the China Mainland.

The violent purges that resulted in the present official liquidation of any kind of open church activity in Red China began during the late summer of 1966. Methods used to humble, discredit, and in many cases wipe out “reactionary religionists” were virulent and crude.

In Canton an elderly woman, discovered by Red Guards in possession of a Bible, was stripped, smeared with honey, and made to stand in the fierce sun for many hours. A young man was dragged through the streets with a rope about his neck; a heavy stone also tied to his neck pulled down his head to show the hair shaved in the shape of the despised cross. A Catholic seen wearing a crucifix was arrested by Shanghai Red Guards, tied to a cross, and tormented with hot irons.

A Shanghai businessman, now living in Hong Kong, told the tragic story of Communist persecution against the churches in his home city. Two of his relatives, a husband and wife, both keen Christians, were captured by Red Guards in one of the many terror sprees suffered by that city during the Cultural Revolution. Both were working and between them earned 200 yuen a month. Since 1951 they had managed to save 3,500 yuen, which was deposited in one of the state banks. They were graduates of the well-known St. John’s University in Shanghai and fluent in the English language.

Because of their faith, university education, ability to speak English and money in the bank, they were branded as “capitalists.” Driven to desperation by the constant criticisms, public humiliations, and ostracism by neighbors afraid of their “capitalist” connections, they finally committed suicide by taking poison.

“There were many suicides such as this, with people jumping from high buildings and taking poison. Not only Christians but people from all walks of life took their lives in the nationwide purge.”

Even the state-controlled Three-Self Church (self-supporting, propagating, and governing), countenanced mainly for its usefulness in preserving at least a superficial image of religious tolerance, was affected in the campaign to politically purify all institutions. Preachers in this quasi-religious organization were ruthlessly purged. Numbers of them had “big character” posters pasted to the doors and walls of their homes accusing them of revisionist and other “crimes.” Red Guards gathered neighbors and children to stand outside their houses and shout slogans for hours on end. Many broke down under the strain and took their lives.

But official lists published in Peking showing names of revisionists purged during the revolution carry no names of top men in the Three-Self church. It appears that top-echelon leadership remains intact, and this may well reveal Peking’s intention of permitting some form of Christianity to function again if internal pressures demand it.

“Before the Red Guards came,” a Christian from the Mainland said, “Three-Self churches were allowed to continue services every Sunday, although the preaching was mixed up.” This meant that Marxist-Leninist doctrine had to be included in the preaching. Services were controlled by the authorities and were under the close scrutiny of Communist cadres, who were present at every service. The “mixed up” preaching drove the majority of “pure doctrine” Christians away from the political church to form their own private home congregations.

During the pogrom special hatred seemed to be directed against the Bible. All churches had their Bibles confiscated or destroyed. In Swatow’s Sun Yat-sen Park, Red Guards staged a public burning of Bibles plundered from the city’s churches. So scarce have copies of the Scriptures become that where a copy is held it automatically becomes the focal point of cell-group life. When not in use it is placed in special hiding places, and during one purge period a Christian family wrapped its Bible in plastic and buried it.

In the face of this dearth of Scripture inside the China Mainland, Christian groups outside China, including the Bible societies, are engaging in special broadcasting to beam in the text of the Bible read at dictation speed. One organization, the Far East Broadcasting Company, from its powerful transmitter KSBU on Okinawa is able to broadcast the Bible right into Shanghai on the medium wavelength, and by shortwave radio to Canton and the south China area from Manila.

Today there are no church buildings open in China. Red Guards boasted to me that all religious buildings had been destroyed or converted to “proletarian” uses, and the “superstitious relics” inside them removed. In Peking the former Anglican cathedral is now a warehouse, and in Wuhan church buildings have been converted into a community center. One centrally situated church in Swatow is now a textile factory. The only recognizable church building in Canton today is the red-star-crowned, twin-spired Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart—boarded, empty, and plastered with Mao slogans.

Chinese Christians in Hong Kong discreetly remit funds to Mainland Christians; without this help many would find it difficult to exist in a society that discriminates against the Christian and his dependents. The families of many believers in prisons and forced-labor camps are largely supported by funds sent from Hong Kong. Because of this, recent warnings from the Mainland to go slow on outside cash remittances are interpreted to mean increasing hardship for thousands of Christians in Red China.

Authorities in China are now branding money from outside as “imperialist cash” and holding it in banks or paying it out only in small amounts over long periods. Regular recipients of such money are brought under suspicion and in some cases have been in “trouble” with the authorities.

But the extent of Christianity’s continuing influence in China must be measured against recent official pronouncements warning the nation to “combat” religion.

Last August in the first official statement on religion and church affairs to be made since the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Red China Communist theoretical magazine Red Flag said: “We must combat religion—that is the ABC of all materialism and therefore of Marxism.… Scientific Communism and religion are antagonistic. The struggle for the realization of the ideals of Communism in the whole world and ‘the building of the kingdom of Christ on earth’ are incompatible with each other like fire and water.”

While it generally castigates all religions, the article repeatedly aims its sharpest barbs at the Christian faith. Criticizing Russian attitudes toward what it calls “so-called Christian Communism,” the article hits out at Khrushchev, who “shạmelessly praised the Pope as a great man devoted to world peace,” and at “the Vatican, bulwark of the most reactionary religious forces in the world, and the Pope, the loyal defender of capitalism.”

Manifesting continuing bitterness toward China’s pre-Communist missionary era, the article says, “Still less will the Chinese people forget how the imperialists had used religion as an instrument for cultural aggression and later, military and political aggression against our country, turning her into a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country.”

This renewed outburst against Christianity is of utmost significance for the churches on the China Mainland. It must be viewed as an indication not only of Peking’s concern at the tenacity with which the people cling to “reactionary religion” but also of a more determined reimplementation of the stated Peking policy of “the eradication of all religion.”

On Getting What One Deserves

The extent to which Americans—including Christian Americans—indulge in the self-satisfying sport of complaint is truly appalling. A visitor to our community, or thousands like it, if all he had were ears, would suppose we were of all men most miserable, most destitute, most deprived.

A wise lay woman once remarked to me that Christians ought to be the last persons to use the word deserve. How quick we are to jump on the welfare recipient who we feel gets something he does not “deserve.” Have we considered what our “fair share” would be if we got what we deserved? In a world in which over half the people have an annual income under $200, what do you suppose we deserve? In a world largely without electricity, hospitals, televisions, modern highways, what do we deserve? In a world where perhaps half the people work all day to scratch out a meal we would throw away, what is our fair share?

“Millionaires and don’t know it,” someone has said. That is what we all are. Think of the difference between you and a man making $200,000 a year; well, that is the difference between you and most of the world, only you are the one making twenty or fifty or one hundred times as much money. Jesus said that each of us will be judged by the standard he applies to others. I think we’d better not point out too enthusiastically the failure of others to act responsibly with what they have, lest we be called into judgment on the same charge.

Spend a day visiting a prison, an orphanage, a nursing home, a cancer ward at the hospital, a psychiatric ward at a state mental hospital, a school for the blind, a center for the retarded—then see if you can mumble your complaint to God. Tell him how bad things are with you. Challenge his generosity. Ask for a replay on your life. Demand to have your fair share, what you deserve!

The Bible says that we are all stewards of the gifts God gives us. Are we ignorant of the gifts of life, health, wholeness, vast financial resources, education, comfortable homes, hospitals and schools, jobs? We have used these gifts almost exclusively for our own betterment; worse, we have not recognized what we are doing.

Jesus told a parable about a man who kept accumulating this world’s goods, so much that he filled his barns to capacity and was about to build more. Read Luke 12:16–20 for God’s opinion of that man. The Bible declares that “to whom much is given, much is required.” The gifts we have received from God and his creation are not only gifts but also opportunities and responsibilities.

Our future appears even brighter in material terms. For many, the twenty-hour work week is just around the corner. Even now the real necessities of life can be acquired in relatively few hours of labor a month. We have more and more leisure time, more and more money to spend on non-essentials. What do we do with our time and money and talents?

Count me out of the line waiting for what they deserve. I do not want my fair share in this life or in that to come. Next time I feel like complaining, I’ll take a walk on good legs, look with good eyes at the family God has given me, at my home, my food, my car, and then I think I’ll sing a verse of “Amazing Grace”: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.…” Then I’ll try to figure out why God gave me all these blessings. Was it just because he wanted me to have them, or did he have something in mind for me to do with them?—LYNN R. BUZZARD, Pacific Northwest representative, Christian Medical Society.

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