Friends, today I would like to discuss a question with you all: why is the CCP so afraid of religious freedom?
On the surface, it tears down crosses, closes churches, arrests pastors, and censors sermons. But if we stop at these phenomena alone, we have not yet seen the essence of the problem. The essence lies in a clash of worldviews.
Religion tells people: the universe is not an accidental accumulation of matter, and human life is not merely a matter of eating, drinking, and pleasure before finally returning to dust. Human beings have souls, consciences, and dignity. Above the universe there is a truth that power cannot change, and in the human world there are eternal standards of good and evil, right and wrong. Rulers can make mistakes, regimes can lie, and every person will in the end face the judgment of God.
And the atheist materialism promoted by the CCP seeks precisely to deny all of this. It says: there is no God, no soul, no afterlife, and no truth that transcends matter. The world consists only of matter, and human beings are merely combinations of matter. Since there is no God, whoever holds power may define truth; whoever controls material resources may control people's thoughts and destinies.
To drive this body of lies deep into people's hearts, it starts with children: it indoctrinates atheism in schools, calls faith superstition, and calls reverence for God backwardness. It does not merely forbid people to believe in God; it also seeks to occupy people's hearts, so that from childhood they know only matter and know only obedience, and do not know that their lives have a higher source and a higher destination.
This is exactly where atheism is most useful to the CCP. If people do not believe in God, they will fix their eyes only on the material interests right in front of them; out of fear for their jobs and their survival, they will compromise, and they will no longer ask where the universe came from, what life is ultimately for, or who it is that decides good and evil. When a person forgets that he has a soul, forgets that life comes from the Creator, he more readily accepts the absolute rule of one political party, takes the Party as the highest authority, and takes lies as reality.
So the CCP goes a step further still: it seeks to remake religion itself. It requires churches to obey the Party above God, hangs the Party's flags inside churches, writes the Party's slogans into sermons, and turns faith into a tool of rule. This is not respect for religion; it is an attempt to make the Party take God's place, so that what people worship is not the Creator but the regime itself.
Therefore, the CCP suppresses religion not because religion has done anything wrong, but because true faith inevitably makes people understand: the Party is not God, the regime is not truth, matter is not the whole of the universe, and brute power cannot dictate a person's conscience.
What it fears is precisely the truth of the universe and of life unfolding before the people. For once people believe in the existence of God, believe that truth stands above power, and believe that human dignity comes from God rather than from the government's largesse, materialist rule will be shaken. People will revere truth rather than brute power; they will refuse orders to do evil; they will stand upright as human beings, rather than kneeling to beg for survival.
Therefore, in fighting for religious freedom today, we are fighting not only for the right to gather and to pray, but also for people's right to know the truth, for the right of the conscience not to be remade by a political party, and for the right of every child to know that they are not merely matter, but a living being with a soul.
The CCP can tear down crosses, close churches, and arrest pastors, but it cannot lock up the truth, nor can it extinguish people's faith in God and their longing for the truth.
The truth will ultimately be revealed, and lies will ultimately go bankrupt.