Tag: Mao

Xi Jinping’s CCP is rewriting the Bible

by Samuel Ben-Ur, Op-ed contributor – May 13, 2026

Christian Post

The Chinese Communist Party is rewriting the Bible. 

As part of Xi Jinping’s “Sinicization of Christianity” campaign, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plans to ensure Christianity in China is instilled with “core socialist values.” Pursuant to that effort, the CCP is currently working on its own translation of what it calls the “Chinese Christian Bible.” While it has yet to complete the project, the CCP has already given Christians a glimpse of what the world’s first communist Bible might look like. 

In China, the Ten Commandments became nine, then six, then zero. 

In 2018, mere months after Xi announced his “Five-Year Plan to Sinicize Christianity,” authorities forced a state-approved church in Henan Province to delete the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” The removal of arguably the single most important line of text not just for Christianity, but for all three Abrahamic faiths, is a strike against the very heart of religion. 

Later that year, the government changed the curriculum of a Sunday school in Hong Kong, removing not just the first four Commandments, but all references to “the Lord.” The entire book of Genesis was also removed. In 2019, the CCP completed this progression and replaced the Ten Commandments wholesale with Xi Jinping quotes. Within the span of a year, “You shall have no god before me” became “Use Chinese Culture to permeate faith” and “follow the party.”

The CCP has also targeted John 8:3-11, among the most famous passages in the New Testament. In the original story, when the Pharisees bring Jesus a woman accused of adultery, he replies, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” He then forgives the woman.

A textbook published by China’s University of Electronic Science and Technology Press, a government-run school, changes the ending. After the Pharisees leave, Christ tells the woman “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.” Jesus then personally stones her to death.

These stories reveal the true face of “Sinicization.” Xi seeks to transform the Gospel into banal communist diktats, where mercy is subsumed by oppressive lawfare and the Party is the only higher power.

The CCP is, of course, avowedly atheist, and essentially deifies former Chairman Mao Zedong, who banned all religion during his reign, from the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 to his death in 1976. 

The CCP views Christians particularly with suspicion, due to perceived Western ties and the role of Christianity in the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, in which more than 20 million died.

Xi might similarly desire to ban Christianity, but Xi is not Mao and Xi’s China is not Mao’s China. 

When Mao came to power, there were approximately four million Christians living in China. Since Mao’s death and China’s relative relaxation of religious restrictions, the Christian population has exploded. Xi presides over as many as 160 million Christians, though the exact number is opaque, as most worship in underground churches to avoid CCP oversight. If Christianity continues to grow at a steady rate, China may be the world’s largest Christian country by 2030.

Despite CCP propaganda glorifying Mao, the Party is not eager to repeat the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which spanned from 1966 to 1976. That period brought societal turmoil and more than a million deaths. Coupled with the challenge of forcing disbelief on more than 100 million Christians, today’s CCP is likely unable and unwilling to enforce a zero-tolerance religious policy. Instead of suppressing Christianity, it has sought to adapt it to Chinese Communist ideology — developing Christianity into another propaganda mill for the CCP. Grasping Xi’s endgame is crucial to understanding the unique persecution Chinese Christians face. 

Where other forms of Christian persecution are marked by bloodshed, such as in Nigeria, where Islamist terror groups routinely massacre Christians, China instead seeks to replace God with the Party. This is why, of all Christian teachings, the CCP first sought to remove the first of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” 

Incidents such as these are merely the surface of what Xi’s “Sinicization” program entails. 

China has instituted a bevy of religious restrictions since 2020, including loyalty tests for clergy, requiring the inclusion of Xi Jinping’s thought in seminary curricula, and a total ban on minors participating in religious activity. 

Surveillance technology now permeates churches across China, monitoring sermons and building a database of Chinese Christians. Resistance to the implementation of surveillance devices can lead to beatings or disappearances for Christians who wish to maintain a degree of independence from the CCP. Authorities have ripped down thousands of crosses and replaced them with portraits of Xi. Churches that refuse to join China’s state-sponsored religious bodies have been targeted with increasing frequency in large-scale raids in which police lock up hundreds of worshipers. 

As the Trump administration increasingly seeks to combat the oppression of Christians worldwide, Washington should mandate that the State Department’s International Religious Freedom process explicitly catalog altered biblical texts, approving committees, state-run publishers, and responsible officials. Those findings should be used to drive rolling Global Magnitsky sanctions and visa bans against those involved in clergy loyalty tests, church raids, and scripture rewriting. 

The U.S. is the only country in the world that can bring to bear sufficient pressure on China to slow or even stop its corruption of the Christian faith. Standing up to Beijing is essential to any policy of defending persecuted Christians.

Originally published at Providence. 

Samuel Ben-Ur is a research analyst focusing on Christian persecution at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Blessed Old Man – A True Tale of God’s Provision

In one village in southeastern Fujian near the Guangdong border, Chinese believers told a remarkable story of God’s provision and power. An elderly brother had believed in the Lord for many years when the Communists took control of the area in 1949. The Blessed Old Man, as other believers affectionately dubbed him, came from an impoverished family and had never learned to read or write properly. Despite these simple impediments, after he received the Lord Jesus he proved to be a powerful evangelist, leading hundreds of people to faith in Christ throughout the district.

Hatching a plan to give Christianity a black eye and to show the supremacy of Marxism, the government decided to make an example of the old preacher by giving him the best house in the village and a generous supply of food. They also appointed him chairman of the village’s Communist committee, thinking that when he abandoned his religion they would display him as a shining example of the goodness of Communism and the futility of Christianity.

The Blessed Old Man, however, belonged to Jesus Christ. Instead of being seduced by the Communists,

…he used the large house he had been provided to hold house church meetings and distributed the food he was given to those believers in need. After some time, the government saw that their plan was badly backfiring, so they issued an ultimatum  to the “chairman”. He had to choose between his faith and the new lifestyle and status he had been afforded by the authorities. Although he knew that he would return to a life of extreme poverty and hardship, the old brother did not hesitate for a moment.  “ I choose Jesus!” he boldly declared.

The enraged officials threw him out of the house. He had nowhere to go, but another believer provided him with a small room on the side of a shack. China at the time was suffering terribly from Mao’s disastrous economic experiments, and millions of people were starving to death. Although the old man now had somewhere to stay, there was no food available to eat. All the meager crops were taken by the government, and the other Christians were too poor to help him.

For some days the old man wasted away in his tiny room, with no food passing his lips. He grew weak and ill and knew that his life would soon be snuffed out. Then one morning he awoke to find a hole in the bottom of the wall. He didn’t know what had caused it and repaired the damage. A few hours later he found another hole and started to wonder if these strange occurrences were from the Lord. While he was still pondering it, a large rat came through the hole with some food in its mouth. After entering the room, the rat dropped the food on the floor and then left. A short time later it returned and did the same again. A small collection of nuts and vegetables lay on the dirt floor!

Each morning the rat paid a visit to the elderly brother. In response to his commitment, God had saved the old man from starvation by instructing a rat to feed him! The miraculous provisions continued for several months. On some days the rat brought more food than usual. Those were the days when the old man was expecting a visitor!

Excerpt from Fujian – The Blessed Province – The China Chronicles, Paul Hattaway, Asia Harvest (Langham Global Library), p. 245-246

God says “I will not, I will not cease to uphold or sustain thee; I will not, I will not, I will not forsake someone in a state of defeat or helplessness in the midst of hostile circumstances.” (Expanded Greek Translation of Hebrew 13:5 by Dr. Kenneth Wuest.)

Be encouraged Saints… regardless of your circumstances. God sees you, is in you, and has not forsaken you.

Love,

Carl

Is the Pope Right About the Human Heart Being ‘Fundamentally Good’?

Is the Pope Catholic? This humorous rhetorical device has long been used to answer a question with an emphatic “yes!” But after comments made by Pope Francis during a recent 60 Minutes interview, a lot of people are now asking the question for real.

“We are all fundamentally good,” Pope Francis told Norah O’Donnell during their exchange. “Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.”

A snippet of the interview captioned with the pontiff’s controversial claim went viral on X earlier this month, though additional context was later added by users to indicate a slight mistranslation by 60 Minutes. The community note explained: “Pope Francis said ‘somos un poco pícaros y pecadores’, meaning literally ‘we are a little bit rogue and sinners,’ speaking to some sinfulness within each of us. This is not the same as saying ‘there are some rogues and sinners’.”

So, are all humans “fundamentally good”? Is the heart itself good? Are we just a “little bit” rogue and sinful?

Not according to the prophet Jeremiah, who said: “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Or King Solomon, who mourned, “The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live” (Ecclesiastes 9:3).

Or Jesus, who explained that “it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly” (Mark 7:21–22).

Or the apostle Paul, who quoted the Psalms to emphasize his point: “As it is written: ‘There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one’ ” (Romans 3:10–12).

[Scripture teaches that], all humans have inherited a sin nature as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God in the Garden of Eden. As a result, we are born with a propensity towards sin, are estranged from God, and are in desperate need of salvation.

As early as the fifth century…a British monk called Pelagius denied original sin. He taught that the fall of Adam did not cause all humanity to inherit a sin nature, and he stressed that humans were fundamentally free to live good lives without the intervention of divine grace.

But a secular argument can also be made that the Pope erred on the fundamental nature of humanity. We need look no further than the collectivist political projects of last century—communism especially.

The belief that humans are inherently good allowed men like Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to put forth—and put into action—their ideas that a harmonious society could be achieved if only the right social conditions were created. But eliminating existing class structures did just the opposite, creating a vacuum that was quickly filled by tyranny, oppression, and mass atrocities.

Ironically, the old systems these leaders did away with, while not perfect, had been honed over the centuries to take into account the fallenness of man. Still today, the safest and most prosperous nations on earth are those that properly account for deep human fallibility through their provision of robust checks and balances.

Thus, while the idea of original sin might sound jarring today, it remains one of the most important political insights in history. Its logic is counterintuitive. When humans assume we are fundamentally good, we end up unleashing the most unspeakable evil. But when we are humble enough to admit our fallenness and sin, prudence urges us to create the social conditions fit for human flourishing.

After all, the Christian gospel message is not that we are good, but that despite our sin, Jesus Christ is good, and that he has come to save us.

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/05/pope-human-heart-fundamentally-good/

Source: Berean Call