Religious persecution is ‘a warning sign that freedom itself is under siege,’ says the former ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom.
WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a “war on God” in its repression of faith, and appeasing such persecution will only invite greater aggression to the world, former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told a packed congressional hearing on Feb. 4.
Brownback, testifying at the House Subcommittee on Africa, cast religious freedom as a “stabilizing force” to ensure lasting peace and threats against it as a “major global security issue.”
“Religious persecution is not an isolated human rights concern,” Brownback said. “It is a warning sign that freedom itself is under siege, and when regimes crush faith, they are rehearsing the suppression of every other liberty that follows.”
Communist China, he said, is leading an “alliance of communist, authoritarian, totalitarian regimes” that “literally stop at nothing to control people of faith.”
“They see people of faith as a threat,” he said. “The people of faith are the ones that will be first attacked and the last ones left standing.”
The scale of the issue can be seen in the dollars spent, he said.
“Communist China will spend billions of dollars this year alone to suppress every faith that exists in that country,” he told the lawmakers there. “They‘ll suppress the Uyghur Muslims, they’ll suppress the Tibetan Buddhists. They’ll suppress the Christians, and they save their greatest anger and bile for the Falun Gong, a domestically grown group.”
The Falun Gong spiritual discipline and meditation practice features slow-moving exercises and teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. After its introduction in 1992, the practice spread rapidly, and by the late 1990s, official estimates had put the number of those practicing it at around 70 million. In 1999, the CCP turned on Falun Gong, launching a brutal persecution that continues today, including subjecting those who refuse to renounce their belief to torture in black jails and labor camps, and even forced organ harvesting.
By Eva Fu
