Chinese Communist Party's threats to religious freedom focus of lawmakers' interfaith roundtable

By Kate Scanlon, OSV News

WASHINGTON (OSV News) -- Members of the bipartisan House select committee on China hosted an interfaith roundtable with religious leaders July 12 to discuss the Chinese Communist Party's threats to religious liberty in the country.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., chair of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, said that Chinese President Xi Jinping "has no problem with the First Commandment just so long as he and the CCP are playing the role of God."

China's constitution "states that citizens enjoy freedom of religious belief -- but of course, (in) the Xi definition of freedom, there's a much closer resemblance to what we would call oppression," Gallagher continued.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom's 2023 Annual Report found religious freedom "deteriorated" in China, and listed that country among those it recommended be designated by the U.S. government as a "country of particular concern" for its "systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations" of the right to freedom of religion or belief.

The State Department has called China's treatment of the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority, genocide. The communist government has likewise targeted adherents of Christian, Jewish, and Buddhist faith traditions.

Frederick Davie, the international religious freedom commission's vice chair, said that Xi has also demonstrated the prosecution of underground Catholics who remain loyal to the Vatican.

"Unfortunately, the Vatican-China agreement on bishop appointments has not brought improvement in religious freedom for the Catholics," Davie said.

In 2018, the Vatican and the government of China signed an agreement -- renewed in 2020 and again in 2022 -- outlining procedures for the election of Catholic bishops in China and their confirmation by the pope prior to their episcopal ordination or installation in a diocese. However, the agreement has been breached on more than one occasion, with CNS Rome reporting the Vatican learned April 4 through media reports China's authorities had installed the bishop of Haimen as the bishop of Shanghai without obtaining papal agreement.

Gallagher said that "Buddhists and Muslims in the far west are facing quite simply the attempted annihilation of their faith and in some cases, their population."

Pastor Pan Yongguang of the Mayflower Church, whose members were recently granted asylum in the U.S. after leaving China, said through an interpreter, "There is a real price to pay for being a true Christian in China."

"The CCP is staunchly atheistic and against all religious behaviors," he said. "There is no freedom of religion in China."

Members of that church arrived in Texas in April after they were granted asylum in the U.S. following their arrest in Thailand and possible deportation back to China. The Protestant community adopted the name "Mayflower" as a nod to their commitment to religious freedom, and to the 17th-century English Pilgrims who traveled from Europe to North America on a ship of the same name.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who hosted a press conference earlier in the day with Yongguang, said that Xi has even made alterations to the texts of Bibles "using Xi's principles, which are Marxist, Leninist, communist."

"That is outrageous," he said. "It's an affront to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the U.N. documents dealing with international religious freedom."

At the roundtable, Gallagher said those changes include revising a Gospel of John passage about Jesus Christ's discussion with a woman who committed adultery. The John 8 passage is a well-known demonstration of Jesus' insistence upon showing mercy to a person against a crowd prepared to exact the death penalty -- prescribed for adultery in Mosaic law -- in the name of justice. The crowd goes away as no one takes up Jesus' challenge that the one without sin should cast the first stone. Jesus, who is without sin, then tells the woman that he does not condemn her and to "go and from now on sin no more."

Xi's version, however, revises the passage to the outcome desired by the crowd in the original: Jesus himself stones the woman.

Gallagher said the communist regime also has replaced displays of the Ten Commandments at some local churches with Xi quotes.