In the Second Cold War, Religious Americans Must Lead the Way

Last week, Bitter Winter published the first English translation of the Chinese Communist Party’s new “Administrative Measures for Religious clergy,” set to come into effect on May 1.

First among the measures is the establishment of a comprehensive national database to record and track the state-authorized clergy of the five authorized religions (Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism). Any dissenting member of the clergy not registered in this database will be in immediate violation of the law. As Nina Shea observes, in order to register in the first place, clergy will have to demonstrate that they “support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and support the socialist system.” Their loyalty to the CCP will then be periodically assessed in a manner similar to the country’s broader social-credit system.

These measures are further evidence of the CCP leadership’s eagerness to avoid the tactical mistakes made by the Soviet Union last century. The Chinese Communists aren’t trying to extirpate every last trace of theism, thereby inviting the undivided opposition of religious believers and institutions (as the Soviets did with regard to John Paul II’s Vatican). Instead, they’re attempting to enervate religious opposition to the regime by taming and co-opting domestic religious belief, turning it into another thoroughfare for the regime’s agenda of social control. For this reason, Chairman Xi has prioritized the “sinicization” of religion in China, all but mandating the prominent presence of his own likeness in every house of worship.

The tactical approach that the CCP has taken toward the Roman Catholic Church is particularly instructive of how party policy on religion differs from that of Communist regimes past (and even present if one considers the Kims in North Korea). Instead of trying to drive the Catholic Church out of China altogether, the CCP seeks to increase its own influence over the Vatican. (They’ve taken exactly the same approach toward many other things like American sports leagues, international institutions, and even capitalism itself.)

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On September 22, 2018, the CCP signed an agreement with the Vatican — the text of which is still secret — according to which the two parties agreed to “cooperate” in the selection of Chinese bishops. In practice, this has basically meant that the Chinese have presented their approved candidates to the pope, who then officially approves them, almost as a formality. The whole affair reflects very poorly on Pope Francis and the Vatican hierarchy. The hope was to allow Chinese Catholics worshipping underground to come out of hiding and live out their faith in public; but this “liberation” has been purchased at the price of ceding all control over Chinese Catholicism to a militantly atheist cabal of genocidal communists.

The naïveté of the Vatican in agreeing to such an arrangement has been exposed to the fullest extent by these new “administrative measures”: Article 16 says that bishops in China will be democratically elected through the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and…