PCUSA downplays plight of Chinese Christians

Leaders of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in a repetition of previous policies, are heralding the "official voice" of Communist China’s government-recognized church while treating lightly the plight of Chinese Christians who are suffering severe persecution.

 By John H. Adams

 Today’s alignment is strikingly similar to how the denomination joined hands through the National Council of Churches (NCC) and World Council of Churches (WCC) with the "official voice" of Christians in the former Soviet bloc. (See related story, p. 19.) That relationship became a national embarrassment after The Readers’ Digest, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and other news organizations disclosed WCC-KGB connections.

Before the break-up of the Soviet Union, Presbyterian Church (USA) leaders junketed hand-in-hand with the WCC and NCC on visits to the Soviet Union. Invariably, those who took the tours brought back stories of a thriving Soviet church under a "benevolent" communist leadership.

Their view was decisively rebutted by subsequent developments, when, with the ouster of the Communist dictatorship and sudden dismantling of the USSR, Soviet persecution of Christians came to light.

PCUSA allied with CCC

Today, the PCUSA is so strongly allied with the "official" China Christian Council [CCC] that it has accepted, almost without question, the CCC leadership’s denial that Christians in China are being persecuted. Thus, when Bishop K.H. Ting, honorary chairman of the CCC, insisted that there is no government-orchestrated persecution in China, Eva Simpson, editor of Presbyterians Today, observed, "Because the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) works in partnership with the China Christian Council, we need to respect the wisdom of its leaders."

Yet it was another CCC leader, Han Wenzao, Ting’s recent successor, who openly supported arrest and imprisonment of Xu Pongze, a pastor known as "the Billy Graham of China." Westerners call him Peter Xu. The details of Xu’s case are sketchy, for not even his family was allowed to attend his trial in September.

Wenzao accused Xu of criminal activities, heresy and leading a religious cult. (Officially, a cult in China is any church that does not register with the state and does not agree to the state’s restrictions on worship, preaching and theology.)

According to Justin Long, managing editor of Eternity’s Edge, the Internet arm of Frontier Mission, "This case is pivotal because Peter Xu is the leader of one of the largest house church movements in China, commonly known as the Full Scope Church or the Born Again Movement.’

Long says the assault on Xu by the CCC’s Wenzao was the "equivalent of arresting an evangelist of the stature of Billy Graham and attempting to make him out to be a David Koresh-type figure."

China, despite some new freedoms, is no haven for Christianity. It is illegal for a Communist Party member to be a Christian. Churches must register with the government. They cannot evangelize or baptize people under the age of 18. They are not permitted to criticize the government. They must restrict their relationship with foreign Christians (for instance, Catholics are prohibited from contacting the Vatican).

According to Xu’s son, "friends of my father arranged for him to go to Beijing to meet Billy Graham, who was visiting China for the first time. On the day before the appointment with Graham, my father disappeared. When overseas friends inquired of the Chinese government about this, the Chinese government replied: ‘We do not have such a person in this country.’"

Xu was jailed from 1988-91 without specific charges.

Official Presbyterian version

Meanwhile, "The Church in China" was the theme of the November issue of Presbyterians Today. The eight-page spread included stories by Editor Stimson and warm photos of church gatherings, Bible publishing and a winsome and smiling boy in the street in front of a Chinese church. No mention was made of Xu. "Reports of persecuted Christians may be true,"Presbyterians Today said, "but they don’t tell the full story of the church."

The PCUSA view of persecution in China is even more naive than that of the U.S. Department of State under President Clinton. In July, after months of vacillation on the issues of persecution, and in response to escalating pressure from Con gress, the department issued a strong criticism of China’s repression and persecution of Christians.

Commenting on the State Department report, Nina Shea of the human-rights group Freedom House told The New York Times that it "underscores a serious human rights issue that has been overlooked." Anti-Christian persecution "is massive and vastly unreported. But few Christian Americans even know about it."

"There’s a bias among some of our political elites, that if you are willing to die for the Bible, you’re a fanatic, but if you die in front of a tank, you’re a hero," she said. "The great lesson absorbed by the tyrants of the world from the collapse of the Soviet empire is that it was the churches that contributed to the democratization and collapse of the empire."

Snubbing evangelical prayer date

The PCUSA’s ambivalent attitude toward Christian persecution in China received impetus from the 209th General Assembly in Syracuse.

As reported by the Presbyterian News Service, "In a resolution crafted to relate to persons of all faiths, the 209th GA called Presbyterians to corporate and individual prayer for those who suffer persecution for the practice of their faith…."

But the proposed resolution was pointedly amended so that the official Presbyterian day of prayer would not coincide with the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, an international initiative begun in 1996 by the World Evangelical Fellowship. The WEF, which has a decidedly different view of Christian persecution in China, had invited the PCUSA to participate in the Sept. 28 international prayer effort.

In a self-admitted boycott of the evangelicals, the Presbyterian resolution declared January 4 as the prayer date and named the occasion: "An Annual Day of Prayer for Those Who are Persecuted for their Faith."

Susan Ryan, a member of the staff of the Worldwide Ministries Division, told the GA commissioners, "We did this so as not to link ourselves to an image of a Christian America that goes overseas with an imperialistic bent."

Albert Pennybacker, the NCC’s public policy chief, said mainline churches did not support the evangelicals’ prayer date because "there is a political agenda hidden under the prayer day for that."

Contrasting orthodoxies

Alan Wisdom, of Presbyterians for Democracy and Religious Freedom, which is especially concerned about the persecution of Christians, says a key failing of liberal Christians is their inability or unwillingness to understand the theological threat that evangelicals pose to leadership in countries that have an anti-Christian bias.

Peter Xu believed in and preached emphatically the second coming of Christ, a foundational doctrine of orthodox Christianity. But, as Wisdom points out, second-coming theology is a strong rebuttal of Communist orthodoxy, which proclaims that the state is a continuing economic and social improvement program, one that needs no divine intervention.

Wisdom also says it is naïve to expect the "official" CCC voice to stray far from the Communist Party agenda. Its duty is to maneuver damaging reports about persecution away from the Communist Party and to promote the Christian movement as an ally of the Communist leadership.

In 1993, The Readers’ Digest published an investigative report titled "The Gospel According to Marx." The report strongly criticized the World Council of Churches, of which the PCUSA is a leading financial supporter, and its alliance with Soviet agents, including members of the KGB. The article included evidence that the KGB influenced WCC policies, even securing a seat for one of its agents, Alexei Sergeyevich Buevsky, on the council’s powerful Central Committee.

Describing the WCC as a "caricature of the ecumenical movement" and "little more than a radical political phenomenon," The Readers’ Digest said Buevsky helped draft key documents and strongly influenced the WCC Central Committee toward its consistently anti-Western, pro-Soviet stance throughout the cold war years.

Most damning in the report was that the WCC failed to condemn the Soviet Union’s persecution of its own people, including religious leaders who openly proclaimed their faith in the face of an official atheistic regime. Presbyterians who remember that history, while observing the PCUSA’s uncritical support for the Chinese government’s officially sanctioned church are wondering if this is a case of "déjà vu all over again."

Our denomination’s cozy relationship with the CCC, which ignores or downplays the plight of persecuted evangelicals, is indeed a repetition of past mistakes.