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The 71-page report, China: State Control of Religion, analyzes government documents. Although the government argues that control of religion is strictly in accord with law, there are five new elements in China's religious policy. One is a lessening of reliance on arrest and detention. Second is a more strict enforcement of registration requirements for all religious groups. Third, the criteria for identifying who qualifies as an authentic religious group worthy of registration has been narrowed, forcing many groups to be declared illegal. Fourth, new mass campaigns have been launched promoting "spiritual civilization" and nationalism as an antidote to religion. Fifth, there is an increased tendency to target those with foreign links.
The report was careful not to imply that actual incarcerations had declined but merely that there was "no evidence of widespread or systematic brutality". And though some officials have overstepped the mark, these incidents face increasing denunciation from the central government.
This is not a cause for rejoicing, however. The new cornerstone of religious policy is registration. The report says, "By registering, congregations agree to certain limitations on their independence, including control over selection of clergy, supervision of financial affairs, veto power over building programs and religious materials, and restrictions on activities such as education and social welfare projects." Recent laws have tightened these limitations even more. For example, a 1996 regulation mandates annual inspection of religious sites.
The Chinese government is criticized for claiming no one is prosecuted in China for religious belief, only for criminality--because to refuse to submit to the intrusive monitoring which registration involves is precisely what makes any group illegal.
Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the report is the evidence of the entire government bureaucracy working together in two geographic areas to eradicate unregistered activity--the central United Front Work Department, local police, the Religious Affairs Bureau, the Catholic Patriotic Association and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (China's official churches). In each area a careful plan to exterminate the Catholic and Protestant "underground" was laid out month by month. A Christian leader in Jiangsu province confided, "These tactics are not new, but there is a new sophistication of coordination since 1995." Compass Direct
It seemed rather harsh of Samuel Lamb, a Chinese house church leader, to call Xu Yongze, another house church leader, a "heretic", and wish that prison would "make him repent". If he had shown the slightest sympathy for a man now facing 10 years of what Lamb faced for 20 years (Xu Yongze was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison), I might not have felt so taken aback.
Perhaps Lamb's reaction meant more to me because I had a similar feeling a few days before while reading about the Church Fathers. Tertullian laid into Praxeous in the most uncharitable terms imaginable. Augustine called for the Donatist sect to be punished by military force. It seems that many of the great heroes of the faith burned with as fierce a hatred for those they perceived to be the enemies of God as they were inflamed with love for God.
Samuel Lamb had never heard of Tertullian and had never read Augustine. He said his attitude was quite biblical, and listed New Testament passages where the authors were equally tough on heretics: I Timothy 6:4, II Peter 2:22, Jude 11.
Many Western Christians have gone to China, intent on learning from men such as Lamb, only to find them negative and intolerant. This has caused many Western church leaders to reject the house churches as fundamentalist and build bridges instead to the more sophisticated Three-Self leaders (except they soon sound the same too).
In partial mitigation for Lamb and others like him, let me make the following points.
1. Inflexibility of attitude towards theological deviance is a common yet understandable characteristic of most persecuted churches. James Bradley, a church historian at Fuller Seminary, says "you will usually find a rigorous, penal attitude towards [church] discipline whenever people are suffering for their faith." Speaking of 16th-century Anabaptism and the 20th-century Russian and Chinese churches, he warns, "It is a persecuting environment which produces rigidity of thinking, because definitions and borders are absolutely essential. You need to know who is true and who is false because you trust your very life to those who are true." In the trench-like conditions of persecution, where betrayal and infiltration are rife, and false teaching is often deliberately sponsored by enemies of the faith, it is no wonder church leaders tend to draw the dividing line between true and false with a fierce black-and-white vigour.
2. The chinese house church leaders are jealous for their great revival. Says Lamb, "Over 30 years ago, a great revival swept Taiwan, but now there is little to show for it because the new disciples were not grounded in truth, and they slid quietly back into the old religion." Many house church leaders feel overwhelmed with the task of discipling so many new converts, and they are worried that peasants--among whom the growth of the church is fastest--are in it for the thrills and healings. Said a Henan leader, "The peasants care little for orthodoxy. They do not realize the connection between truth and power."
3. The older house church leaders have witnessed personally the chaos and divisiveness that Xu's Born Again movement has wrought. While Xu should be exonerated from the charge of heresy, his movement has split many churches. Evangelists from his movement blatantly target other house churches, splitting congregations and teaching that all other groups are false. They tend to target young teens as their primary evangelists, especially females, insisting they keep their vocation a secret from their own kin. A Western parallel is the reaction of conservative evangelical leaders to the charismatic movement, especially among those who saw their church memberships decimated.
Perhaps in this whole episode God is teaching us not to make an idol of the Chinese revival, but to realize afresh where great outpourings of the Holy Spirit always end up--in cracked clay jars! Alex Buchan, Asia Bureau Chief for Compas Direct
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