China’s persecution of Pastor Jin

As Donald J. Trump bestrides the globe like a colossus, delivering peace in the Israel-Gaza war after two years of brutal fighting, the Chinese Community Party (CCP) is not ready to join his parade to a well-deserved Nobel Prize. And as if to prove the point contemporaneously, this week the CCP arrested evangelical house church pastor Jin Mingri of Zion Church. Though any attack on religious liberty and human rights is a thumb in the eye of the United States, Pastor Jin’s arrest is doubly so because his wife and kids reside in the United States; he is a graduate of Fuller Seminary in California, and his three children are U.S. citizens.

Pastor Jin leads Zion, one of the most vibrant evangelical church networks in China. The Wall Street Journal reports that Zion has sites in 40 cities across the forbidden kingdom, while NPR says that the church network reaches as many as 10,000 people per week. The crackdown on Zion included not only the arrest of Pastor Jin, but as many as 30 other pastors and staff affiliated with Zion across the country.

As an outgrowth of the government’s Communist political philosophy, the Chinese state is officially atheist. The state only allows religious exercise through government-sponsored “patriotic associations,” which for all Protestants is the National Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Along with the Catholic, Buddhist, Taoist, and Islamic patriotic associations, the Three-Self Movement is overseen by the United Front Work Department of the Central Committee of the CCP. All of which is to say, while the United States Constitution has a clause prohibiting the establishment of a state religion, the Chinese have the opposite: an established non-religion of atheism combined with government oversight of any religious activity.

The relationship between the official state churches and the unofficial independent churches has always been tense, especially as the state uses the police to enforce its monopoly on religious gatherings. The Catholic Church in China has similarly been subject to numerous enforcement actions, especially over the delicate matter of whether the Vatican or the Chinese government selects and approves bishops.

At the close of 2024, a bishop recognized by the Vatican who is not a member of the Patriotic Catholic Association was arrested for saying Mass around the Christmas holiday. The Vatican and Chinese government cut a deal in 2018 that was supposed to resolve such conflicts, but the Hudson Institute’s Nina Shea documents at least ten bishops who have been targets of repression tactics since then.

Thankfully, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quick to respond to the arrest of Pastor Jin and his Zion Church confreres with a strong statement condemning the Chinese government’s “hostility towards Christians who reject Party interference in their faith and choose to worship at unregistered house churches.”

Secretary Rubio’s statement ended with a call for the CCP “to immediately release the detained church leaders and to allow all people of faith, including members of house churches, to engage in religious activities without fear of retribution.” Here’s hoping. The CCP has persecuted numerous other sects beyond just Catholic and Protestant Christians, including the Muslim Uyghurs, the Falun Gong, and the Tibetan Buddhists. The state simply will not tolerate any civil society outside its grasp, and the Vatican’s warm-fuzzy diplomatic approach has obviously failed.

The timing for the arrest of Pastor Jin is doubly suspect because President Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea this week. That meeting will likely focus heavily on trade; the United States and China are in a long-running spat over tariffs and other bad-faith business practices, like China’s lack of respect for American companies’ intellectual property. Pastor Jin’s arrest might be nothing more than a bargaining chip, a hostage to be quickly acquired and then released to much fanfare as a show of good faith, as though the U.S. leadership cannot see through such cheap tricks.

President Trump is not one to be easily taken by such fakery; I hope he drives a hard bargain for not only Pastor Jin’s release, but greater religious freedom for all Chinese.