Last month, the Chinese government-controlled church held a seminar telling Protestant churches to preach to their congregations about China’s “victory” against Covid-19 and the “superiority of the Party’s leadership and and the socialist system.”

According to a report by Bitter Winter, the message to the official churches, as also known as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement Church of China, was clear: a pastor’s job is to “unite believers around the Party and the government, and continue to promote the Sinicization of Christianity.”

China weaponized the pandemic against the underground church, using it as an excuse to shutdown fellowships, monitor and restrict the movement of believers, and to isolate Christian leadership.

The directive was shared by Pastor Xu Xiaohong, who is the government appointed chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement Church and also a member of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPC). Members of the CPPC are reserved for members of the Communist Party. To be a member of the Communist Party in China, members have to swear an oath to atheism. So in essence, those appointing the leadership over the churches in China, dictating what can be taught and not taught in sermons, regulating the number of believers allowed to be baptized and the distribution of Bibles are atheists and do not believe in God!

This is one of the primary reasons why the overwhelming number of Bible-believing Christians refuse to register with a government church in China and are forced underground.

During the meeting, it was reported that there were additional requests to have more surveillance of churches catering to ethnic minorities to detect and repress any support of “separatism.” The China Religious Circles Peace Committee is also said to have mobilized a greater effort to work together with Chinese diplomacy and promote the official narrative about religious liberty in China throughout the world.

In an act stranger than fiction, the religious meeting called for more surveillance, including on the web, and more teaching of Karl Marx’s ideas about religious issues, who called religion the “opium of the masses,” and believed Christianity and Communism were incompatible.