Article By Samuel Ben-Ur
The Chinese Communist Party is rewriting the Bible.
As part of Xi Jinping’s “Sinicization of Christianity” campaign, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plans to ensure Christianity in China is instilled with “core socialist values.” Pursuant to that effort, the CCP is currently working on its own translation of what it calls the “Chinese Christian Bible.” While it has yet to complete the project, the CCP has already given Christians a glimpse of what the world’s first communist Bible might look like.
In China, the Ten Commandments became nine, then six, then zero.
In 2018, mere months after Xi announced his “Five-Year Plan to Sinicize Christianity,” authorities forced a state-approved church in Henan Province to delete the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me.” The removal of arguably the single most important line of text not just for Christianity, but for all three Abrahamic faiths, is a strike against the very heart of religion.
Later that year, the government changed the curriculum of a Sunday school in Hong Kong, removing not just the first four Commandments, but all references to “the Lord.” The entire book of Genesis was also removed. In 2019, the CCP completed this progression and replaced the Ten Commandments wholesale with Xi Jinping quotes. Within the span of a year, “You shall have no god before me” became “Use Chinese Culture to permeate faith” and “follow the party.”
The CCP has also targeted John 8:3-11, among the most famous passages in the New Testament. In the original story, when the Pharisees bring Jesus a woman accused of adultery, he replies, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” He then forgives the woman.
A textbook published by China’s University of Electronic Science and Technology Press, a government-run school, changes the ending. After the Pharisees leave, Christ tells the woman “I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.” Jesus then personally stones her to death.
These stories reveal the true face of “Sinicization.” Xi seeks to transform the Gospel into banal communist diktats, where mercy is subsumed by oppressive lawfare and the Party is the only higher power.
The CCP is, of course, avowedly atheist, and essentially deifies former Chairman Mao Zedong, who banned all religion during his reign, from the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 to his death in 1976.
The CCP views Christians particularly with suspicion, due to perceived Western ties and the role of Christianity in the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, in which more than 20 million died.
Xi might similarly desire to ban Christianity, but Xi is not Mao and Xi’s China is not Mao’s China.
When Mao came to power, there were approximately four million Christians living in China. Since Mao’s death and China’s relative relaxation of religious restrictions, the Christian population has exploded. Xi presides over as many as 160 million Christians, though the exact number is opaque, as most worship in underground churches to avoid CCP oversight. If Christianity continues to grow at a steady rate, China may be the world’s largest Christian country by 2030.
Despite CCP propaganda glorifying Mao, the Party is not eager to repeat the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, which spanned from 1966 to 1976. That period brought societal turmoil and more than a million deaths. Coupled with the challenge of forcing disbelief on more than 100 million Christians, today’s CCP is likely unable and unwilling to enforce a zero-tolerance religious policy. Instead of suppressing Christianity, it has sought to adapt it to Chinese Communist ideology — developing Christianity into another propaganda mill for the CCP. Grasping Xi’s endgame is crucial to understanding the unique persecution Chinese Christians face.
Where other forms of Christian persecution are marked by bloodshed, such as in Nigeria, where Islamist terror groups routinely massacre Christians, China instead seeks to replace God with the Party. This is why, of all Christian teachings, the CCP first sought to remove the first of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
Incidents such as these are merely the surface of what Xi’s “Sinicization” program entails.
China has instituted a bevy of religious restrictions since 2020, including loyalty tests for clergy, requiring the inclusion of Xi Jinping’s thought in seminary curricula, and a total ban on minors participating in religious activity.
Surveillance technology now permeates churches across China, monitoring sermons and building a database of Chinese Christians. Resistance to the implementation of surveillance devices can lead to beatings or disappearances for Christians who wish to maintain a degree of independence from the CCP. Authorities have ripped down thousands of crosses and replaced them with portraits of Xi. Churches that refuse to join China’s state-sponsored religious bodies have been targeted with increasing frequency in large-scale raids in which police lock up hundreds of worshipers.
As the Trump administration increasingly seeks to combat the oppression of Christians worldwide, Washington should mandate that the State Department’s International Religious Freedom process explicitly catalog altered biblical texts, approving committees, state-run publishers, and responsible officials. Those findings should be used to drive rolling Global Magnitsky sanctions and visa bans against those involved in clergy loyalty tests, church raids, and scripture rewriting.
The U.S. is the only country in the world that can bring to bear sufficient pressure on China to slow or even stop its corruption of the Christian faith. Standing up to Beijing is essential to any policy of defending persecuted Christians.
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