This Christmas has a thought for those who do not have the right to celebrate it. The organization Open Doors estimates that 309 million Christians on their list of the 50 most guilty nations are currently facing “very high” to “extreme” levels of persecution.

The reason varies from country to country. In Afghanistan and Libya, for example, it’s Islamic coercion. In Eritrea and Myanmar, authoritarian nationalism. In North Korea, China and Vietnam, by contrast, the culprit is the one-party communist state.

It’s not all bad news. In Sudan, according to Open Doors, things have improved after the overthrow of the Islamic regime of Omar Al-Bahir by the military. A caretaker government “announced the end of the death penalty for apostasy” and subsequently suppressed “Islam as the state religion”. From now on, converts to Christianity no longer have to fear the death penalty for having left Islam, although they are still “attacked or discriminated against if their faith is discovered”.

A growing concern is that despotic regimes around the world are increasingly using surveillance technology to monitor their own citizens. This often happens under the pretext of providing “protection” and “security” to the population. Improved surveillance capability is one reason the People’s Republic of China reinstated Open Doors’ Top 20 People to Watch list this year for the first time in a decade. The other reason is that Xi Jinping reversed a certain leniency towards Christians that had been in place since the end of the Cultural Revolution after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. This new hard line against Christianity is justified in terms of a broader policy involving the “sinization of all religions”.

Christianity has never had it easy in the People’s Republic since its founding in 1949. Protestant denominations have all been co-opted by the state-sanctioned Three-Autonomies Movement while new Catholic bishops have been appointed by Beijing , rejecting the primacy of the Roman pontiff. Protestant and Catholic clergy who rejected these changes were forced to accept menial jobs or worse. Anyone who joined the “underground” Christian movement in the 1950s and early 1960s risked a long stay in a re-education camp and possible execution.

Conditions for Christians only turned from bad to worse during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). They were invariably included in the catalog of “monsters and demons” to be “swept away”. It is difficult to know the extent of Christian persecution during this period. The records and archives of this political convulsion are largely destroyed or otherwise unavailable. What we do know, however, is that Christianity has come back stronger than ever despite – or, ostensibly, because of – Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Today, some 100 million people – just under seven percent of the population – are practicing Christians.

One of the many paradoxes of Christianity is its propensity to prosper rather than decline under the threat of tyrants. The Emperor of Rome Diocletian initiated the so-called Great Persecution in 303 and yet, some twenty years later, Constantine promoted Christianity to the status of a privileged religion in the empire. Western historians, since the Enlightenment, have quibbled about the role played by the “cult of martyrs” in preparing Constantine’s decision, but their denials are mostly irrelevant. It was the previous three hundred years of discrimination and harassment – in combination with the twenty years of the so-called Great Persecution – that sparked what David Bentley Hart, in Atheist illusions, described as the “Christian revolution of the fourth century”.

Xi Jinping, both paranoid and belligerent, seems little interested in the lessons of history. The torment of Christians began in 2017 in rural villages when the party suddenly demanded that portraits of President Xi replace images of Jesus Christ in local churches. Then they came for the mega-churches – the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, the Zion Church in Beijing, and the Rongguili Church in Guangzhou. Some churches were not only closed but literally destroyed.

In 2019, famous Early Rain Covenant pastor Wang Yi was sentenced to nine years in prison – after already spending a year in detention – for “illegal business operations” and “inciting the subversion of state power. “. Of course, any action possible under the sun is potentially illegal and subversive in a one-party state without an independent judiciary or even the appearance of a free press.

Analysts Olivia Enos and Hannah So, reporting for the Heritage Foundation earlier this year, revealed the existence of new “transformation facilities” designed to brainwash unauthorized church members. One of these victims in Sichuan, pseudonym Li Yuese, testified to the horror of ten months spent in a “windowless and ventilated room” subjected to all kinds of physical and mental violence to make him renounce his faith. Christian: “After you’ve been there a week, death begins to look better than staying there.”

Ultimately, there can be no compromise with the Communists, as Polish Catholics discovered in Soviet times. Either you leave them or they leave you. Thus, the provisional agreement signed between the Vatican and the PRC in 2018 and renewed in 2020 succeeded, as Benedict Rogers writes, only “to strengthen the regime’s control over the church in China, to suppress dissent and buy the Pope’s silence “. Even now, Pope Francis maintains that “difficult dialogue is better than no dialogue at all.” Tell that to dissident priests in China, banned from preaching and some now in prison, who knew from the start that any China-Vatican deal was not worth the paper it was written on. Perhaps the Christians of China, tested by all kinds of financial, psychological and physical threats imaginable, are much more savvy of the tricks of communism than their Western counterparts – and much more spiritually harsh on top of that.

Pastor Wang Yi’s message Declaration of Faithful Disobedience, published in 2018 after his arrest, gives an idea of ​​what Xi Jinping is opposed to attacking Christians who are in the world but not of the world: “If God decides to use the persecution of this communist regime against the ‘church to help more Chinese people to despair of their future, to lead them through a desert of spiritual disillusionment and through it to make them know Jesus… so I am happily willing to submit to God’s plans ”.

Xi Jinping’s thought, even with a hundred more processing facilities in operation, cannot hope to compete with the power of this message.