Chinese authorities this week carried out a sweeping roundup of pastors and leaders tied to Zion Church, one of the country’s largest underground Christian networks, detaining roughly 30 people including the church’s founder, Jin Mingri. What we’re watching is not routine law enforcement — it’s a coordinated purge of unregistered religious life that amounts to the most serious clampdown on Christians in China since 2018.
The arrests were justified by Beijing with a familiar, Orwellian charge: “illegal use of information networks,” a pretext to criminalize online worship and independent religious teaching. Families say Jin needs medication for diabetes and that lawyers have been denied access, a reminder that the regime treats human beings like political liabilities rather than citizens with rights.
Washington — finally speaking in a united voice — has publicly condemned the detentions, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding the immediate release of the pastors and calling attention to the broader pattern of religious repression under Xi’s Sinicization campaign. The diplomatic sting of these arrests comes at a fraught moment in U.S.-China relations, and it should force policymakers to reconsider the price of normalizing ties with a regime that slaps handcuffs on pastors for preaching to their own people.
This latest raid is not an isolated episode but the next chapter in a long-running campaign to stamp out churches that refuse Party control — Zion Church’s Beijing sanctuary was already shut down in 2018, and its members went online and underground to keep the faith alive. American conservatives who care about religious liberty know the pattern: where totalitarian regimes fear truth, they crush it with law and force; where liberty grows, tyrants resort to arrests and show trials.
Eyewitness accounts and church spokesmen describe violent, targeted arrests — even a case where a female pastor was reportedly separated from her newborn — tactics meant to terrorize congregations into silence. This isn’t governance; it’s intimidation dressed up as legality, and it demands an unapologetic American response on behalf of persecuted believers.
Patriotic Americans should be clear-eyed: the CCP’s assault on Christianity is proof that economic interdependence cannot paper over moral rot. Congress and the administration must immediately move beyond empty condemnations — impose targeted sanctions, institute visa bans on the officials responsible, and make human-rights conditions nonnegotiable in any trade or tech agreements with Beijing. If we value freedom, we must leverage every tool to protect those who are being jailed for praying.
This moment calls for prayer, sure, but also for pressure. Ordinary Americans — especially churchgoing conservatives — should rally to support the Zion Church families, demand congressional hearings, and insist that our leaders treat religious freedom as a core national-security priority. The United States was built on the idea that faith cannot be dictated by the state; if we abandon that principle abroad, we betray it at home.
