"Ninu igbá naa ni" [All that he created exists in the calabash] Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Hearing: "China’s War on Religion: The Threat to Religious Freedom and Why it Matters to the United States"

 

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 I have been following the work of the  Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) for some time.  Essays HERE: CECC. CECC serves as an important venue for the dissemination of official positions of the United States on its relationship with China.  Its prior leaders includes current Secretary of State Rubio.  It is also an official space in which debates or positions that might be taken by the State, or what may serve as encouragement for private action, might be developed.   

CECC has a fairly comprehensive range of issues on which it focuses.  CECC issue areas include Access to Justice; Business and Human Rights; Civil Society; Criminal Justice; Developments in Hong Kong and Macau; Ethnic Minority Rights; Freedom of Expression; Freedom of Religion; Freedom of Residence and Movement; Human Rights Violations in the U.S. and Globally; Human Trafficking; Institutions of Democratic Governance; North Korean Refugees in China; Population Control; Public Health; Status of Women; The Environment and Climate Change; Tibet; Worker Rights; and Xinjiang.

Among the more important issues of interest to CECC has been a cluster of related issues and actions which are categorized as falling within the category "Freedom of Religion."One of the key points of divergence between liberal democratic, theocratic, and Marxist Leninist approaches to social organizaiton touches on the matter of religion.  

Theocratic systems, of course, center a specific religion and its grounding premises for social, economic, moral, and ritual ordering. It sees and understands the world from the perspective of religious beliefs, performances and the expectations that are drawn from it. Religion, and the specific one foregrounded, define and frame the reality within which it is possible to rationalize the world and order individual and collective human  life appropriately. The core beliefs of that religion must be vigorously protected from internal corruption and external threat. Apostasy merges with treason; difference is gauged by reference to the system of behavior and belief expectations built into the religious system; and sometimes that produces the theology (expressed through law and practice, as well as the resulting social custom), of toleration, but sometimes not. Theocracy is both ancient and modern.  It can be built on any number of structures and overseen by any sort of caste of earthly intermediaries. Before the establishment of monarchy Israeli Judaism favored judges and dispute settlement (Samuel 8:14-22); European Christianity merged its messianic transformative Judaism, with its predecessor's its Sanhedrin (now reconstituted as a magisterium) reconcieved within and through the structures and sensibilities of empire (Edict of Thessalonika) etc.). All are built on exogenous and divine authority the will of which is memorialized in some way, the power of which is reinforced through ritual practice, and the naturalization of which is embedded through structures of leadership and guidance the authority of which is directly connected to the divine source of truth/law/ritual etc.--that is, faith (consider Calvin, Institutes, Chp. 2, ¶ 6). This expresses itself by several means and in a variety of forms (See, e.g.,  Tao Te Ching, chp. 8; ). That connection and authority then permeates all human cognition and the consequential rationalization of the world around them and the evolution and operation of their own collectives, all of which is intimately connected to worship, in the old sense of making one worthy through performative reverence. 

Liberal democratic systems, after centuries of warfare and violence--often brutal--that in the end failed to extirpate heresy, corruption, apostasy and rival religious lebenswelt (also bent on privileged domination as the generative premises around which reality and social relations must be ordered), produced both exhaustion and compromise. That exhaustion and compromise created a complicated affair--one the one hand it encouraged the sort of minority cleansing, indeed refined it, in ways that the resulting ordered world now believes is naughty and wrong, but from which they profited in terms of stability through segregation, relocaton,  and sometimes extermination (e.g., the wars of the Protestant Reformation, the constant passive aggressive instrumentalization of Jews, and like theocratic states (to this day), the "infidelization" of the other). But from out of that blood offering to the various gods served by them, including, later, the gods of reason and scientism, emerged a stability grounded in the de-naturing of the religious aspects of communal life  (de-sacralization) and the template for what--after a series of more bloodshed, violence and inter-religious social segregation--produced two more or less workable premises . The first was grounded on the formal de-prioritization of religion in for formal performances of political and economic life. Certainly the forms of state religion were maintained, but, with sometimes more and sometimes less performative theatrics and ritual, an ecology of religious communities was recognized, tolerated, and then, more or less equalized in their relation to the state. In the process, the ethics, morals, and values of religion (sometimes from the dominant religion, sometimes in the form of a cocktail of related beliefs, sensibilities and expectation) were transposed from out of the sacred and into the political (though of course also reflecting the religious views to whicvh connection could be made). And the second was grounded in market ideologies, or at least its mechanics. Religions, like other objects, could be understood as commodities (in this case of tastes, beliefs, values, and performances) in competition with other similar commodities (including non-religion) in markets for adherents. That implied two significant changes from theocratic systems. One touched on the increasing protection of entry and exit from religious communities; that is people could consume, embrace, or reject any form of religious community proffered for their review and "purchase." Apostasy might remain a religious concept but the State and its power would not be used to police it, nor would the State tolerate private measures to enforce or coerce continued belonging to one religious community or another. The other more tightly regulated State preference for one or another of religious systems "in the market" for belief.  

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 Marxist-Leninist systems appear, in various degrees that change over time and appear differently from one local context to another, to combine portions of both theocratic and liberal democratic approaches. Sometimes religion is suppressed entirely; sometimes it is tolerated but adherence results in certain political. economic, and/or social burdens. And sometimes the Marxist-Leninist vanguard is more or less indifferent, at least to the extent that whatever it is that is going on in and as a religious community does not interfere with the or challenge the leadership, aims, policies, and expectations of the political vanguard organized as and operating within the leading Communist Party. Yet this creates a problem. If the fundamental ordering principle of a Marxist Leninist State is the conception of the nation as a collective organized as and around a vanguard (Communist Party), and if its leadership and guidance must necessarily extent to all aspects of economic, social, cultural, and political life, then the issue of the recognition, but less the tolerance of religious communities autonomous of that leadership and subject to its guidance becomes, to some greater or lesser degree, problematic. One solution, drawing ironically on a similar (though temporary) resolution in medieval Europe, was to ensure that religious communities might be tolerated, but they must be subject to regulation by the State. That regulation might be substantially intrusive including the power to review and approve the selection of ministers of the faith (e.g., China-Vatican Agreement), and of the preaching, sermonizing, and theological development of those religious communities where these might be deemed to threaten the political order, that is the core premises and expectations of collective organizaiton, under a Marxist-Leninist political-economic model. At the limit, a Marxist-Leninist system that finds itself threatened can suppress religious communities that cannot otherwise be "digested" within the larger framework within which collective life is to be organized.  Where religious communities resist or seek to exist beyond the reach of the political-economic model, the response of the state will be as harsh, and perhaps as ruthless, as that expected from similar threats to theocratic systems. These then acquire "Chinese characteristics" that go back to the founding premises of the Empire now made relevant within a Marxist-Leninist structural and normative context. 

 

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It is in this context that one can see how the fundamental approaches of liberal democratic (American version) and Marxist-Leninist) Chinese system on matters of religion might not be both incompatible, but also serve as a point of division into which intervention and political responses are almost inevitable. The issue becomes more complicated still, where actions present fundamental incompatibilities with both theocratic and liberal-democratic systems, and where the suppression (from an outsider perspective) or system protection/solidarity mechanisms (from an insider perspective)  becomes violent and coercive. (displacements, confinement, re-education, etc.). It is with that in mind that one might more usefully approach the now long standing  and quite substantial gap between the core values of theocratic, liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninist states not just appear, but also appear to make responses inevitable. That is, to some extent, because the "effects" of one system in matters of religion can be deeply felt in others (e.g., Falun Gong), and is intensified where religious difference is tied to ethnic division and perhaps to some extent, identity) (e.g., Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang). 

That the the arena in which CECC has been vigorously projecting its views and values in the marketplace for public opinion and social/`political action for some time.  While the practices of theocratic states appears to be less worrisome to the Americans and American values for some reason (except perhaps when one speaks to Jewish values in multi-religious in Israel), the practices of Marxist-Leninist States in that respect tend to trigger the American political (and religious) classes to a far greater and more immediate effect. Thus the organization and formatting of the CECC hearing, , held 20 November 2025.

 The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has intensified its drive for absolute control over religion, insisting that believers subordinate conscience and conviction to the Party and to General Secretary Xi Jinping. This is not incidental to the PRC’s domestic agenda or international influence; it is a core feature of Party rule, reflected in sweeping regulations on religion and detentions, surveillance, and harassment targeting believers and groups operating outside official bounds. The hearing will spotlight escalating repression targeting all of China’s diverse religious communities and examine why the CCP’s assault on freedom of religion matters for the United States. (CECC Press Release/Concept Note) 

At the same time, each approach suggests both the objectification of religion, as such, and the commodification of belief, with respect to which the state may either intervene or leave to faith markets . All of this, of course, is a function of the cognitive cages within which it is possible to understand, value, resist, or advance, particular ways of knowing, seeing, being, and interacting. In Ifa,  a story is related in Òfúnmeiji of the time that Ifa was cast for Odù (an aspect of Olódùmarè ( a name which, it has been said, reflects "O ní odù mà rè" "the owner of the source of creation that does not become empty," (Encyclopaedia of African Religions, ), compare 道 (dào)) when he was going to create all the different characters in the world:

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 He was advised to sacrifice four pillars and one big calabash [(葫芦/葫蘆)] having a lid and a chain. He heeded the advice and sacrificed. He was assured that no one would question his authority. Therefore he should pitch the four pillars on the ground together, place the calabash on them, and use the chain to tie the pillars to his hands. He obeyed and performed the sacrifice as instructed. The day that Odù created all the characters  in the world has since been called Odùduà (Odù that created all things that exist, Oòdua, Olódúmarè). He created all that existed in the calabash. We (human beings) are all living inside the calabash [Ninu igbá naa ni, ni Oun da gbogbo; Uwa si, ninu igbá naa ni gbongbo (eda-alaayé) wa wa yio]. (Òfúnméjì, Afolabi Epega and Philip Neimark, The Sacred Ifa Oracle (Athelia Henrietta Press, 1994).

 The calabash represents the cognitive cages within which we create ourselves and in that creation    can order ourselves to our own creation. It is at once object, a way of providing a framework for signifying that object, and the basis for which interpretation of the world within our calabash may be understood and applied. It is both faith, and the object of faith; it is belief, and the certainty that belief, guided by those who are adept in the ways of the ordering of the calabash, provides both good and its measure. Those are the calabashes ( Igbá-Odù (Odù-logboje), the calabash in which existence is contained) within which the great actors and systems that are the object of the CECC hearings appear to find themselves (and the rest of us with them)--in those vessels filled with belief in the infinity of that which is contained within it. And there the great tragedies, and sometimes beauty--of the calabash, certainly, but within, that becomes a more complicated and infinitely tragic matter. 

The tragedy, of course, is understood only from within the calabash. Within that calabash, Chris Smith, CECC Co-Chair , could quite correctly speak this way: 

We say that religious freedom is a universal right, because it is guaranteed by a sovereign God who created human beings in His own Image and Likeness and imbued them with inalienable dignity and worth, whether they were born in Washington or Wuhan. It is thus not a “Western” construct but a universal one. Yet the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, leader of the world’s largest atheistic state, would force his own people to think otherwise.  (Opening Statement Chris Smith).

Co-Chair Dan Sullivan described the impossible--a view of the calabash that cannot exist in the space space as his. 

Today’s message is straightforward: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a systematic campaign to bend every faith in China to Party rule. CCP authorities aim for the complete subordination of religious belief to state ideology—re-engineering doctrine, leadership, education, architecture, and even online worship. The CCP is not content to police behavior; it wants to control the conscience and intrude on the most powerful and personal relationship there is—the one with God. * * * To the CCP, faith is not just a challenge, it is an existential threat to its grip on power—and why it must be controlled or destroyed. * * * That is why this hearing matters—not just for one community, one country, or one faith, but for the defense of human dignity and conscience everywhere. The CCP wants believers in China to feel isolated and forgotten. Our responsibility is to show them—and to show Beijing—that they are neither. (Opening Statement Dan Sullivan)

Both of these opening statements of the co-chairs are correct and both statements also reflect, inverted, the very sentiments that drive Chinese policy grounded in their own sense of the form and scope of universal rights, and the location, nature and character of the universal sovereign divinity in whose eternal text they have invested in and drawn their faith.  Both China and the U.S. are equally committed to their faith--in their own systems and in the core premises from out of which the relationship of faith to political communities is understood as natural and inevitable. Both are committed to the ordering of religion within the premises of quite different state ideologies with respect to which it is intended that all members of their respective polities believe. To both polities it is faith that is an existential threat to their orders--but not faith in religion, rather faith in a political ideology inconsistent and threatening to their own--and that is why each believes that the other must be controlled or destroyed. To paraphrase Co-Chair Smith, that is why the hearing matters--to project universal values throughout the calabash that the U.S. and China share at the moment. 

The Opening Statements and Witness Testimony, along with the Hearing "Concept Note", and the Opening Statements of the CECC Co-Chairs follow below. All may be accessed HERE. along with links to the video recording of the Hearing.

  

 

China’s War on Religion: The Threat to Religious Freedom and Why it Matters to the United States

Thursday, November 20, 2025 - 9:30am - Thursday, November 20, 2025 - 11:30am

106 Dirksen Senate Office Building

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has intensified its drive for absolute control over religion, insisting that believers subordinate conscience and conviction to the Party and to General Secretary Xi Jinping. This is not incidental to the PRC’s domestic agenda or international influence; it is a core feature of Party rule, reflected in sweeping regulations on religion and detentions, surveillance, and harassment targeting believers and groups operating outside official bounds. The hearing will spotlight escalating repression targeting all of China’s diverse religious communities and examine why the CCP’s assault on freedom of religion matters for the United States.

The hearing will focus on: (1) CCP policies and tactics for coercive control of religion and their impact on individuals and communities; (2) Transnational repression used to censor and punish diaspora religious communities and individual believers abroad; (3) the nexus between religious freedom and national security, and the strategic importance of religious freedom diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific; and (4) policy recommendations for a robust U.S. response.

The hearing will be livestreamed via the CECC’s YouTube Channel. 

 

Opening Statements

Senator Dan Sullivan, Chair

[Statement]

Representative Christopher Smith, Co-Chair

[Statement]

Witnesses

Ambassador Sam Brownback: Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom (2018-2021), Governor of Kansas (2011-2018), U.S. Senator (1996-2011)

[Testimony]

Ismail “Ma Ju” Juma: Hui Muslim human rights advocate 

[Testimony]

Bhuchung Tsering: Leader, International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) Research and Monitoring Unit

[Testimony]

Bob Fu: Founder and President, ChinaAid

[Testimony]

Grace Jin Drexel: Daughter of Pastor Ezra Jin

[Testimony]

China’s War on Religion: The Threat to Religious Freedom
and Why It Matters to the United States
Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ)
CECC Chair
November 20, 2025
By co-chair Chris Smith
As prepared for delivery

Thank you, Senator Sullivan, and good morning everyone
I’m very glad the CECC is holding this hearing, and to be working with you on this critical and
indeed urgent issue that is so close to my heart.
I say urgent because, as we speak, the Chinese Communist Party, directed by General
Secretary Xi Jinping, is engaged in one of the most extensive crackdowns on a Protestant
Christian house church in 40 years. I also say urgent because, as I look around in this room, I see
friends of many faiths with loved ones languishing in Chinese prisons. Their plight
is pressing and we must act and pray with urgency.
At its core, religious freedom is about the right of conscience—what George Washington
called “that little spark of celestial fire”—which is the inviolable domain in the heart of every
human being. I am proud to say that this is the 14th hearing I have chaired or
cochaired dedicated to religious freedom in China.
We say that religious freedom is a universal right, because it is guaranteed by a
sovereign God who created human beings in His own Image and Likeness and imbued them with
inalienable dignity and worth, whether they were born in Washington or Wuhan. It is thus not a
“Western” construct but a universal one.
Yet the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, leader of the world’s largest
atheistic state, would force his own people to think otherwise. He would have the Chinese people
believe that religious freedom is not for them, that religion itself is not for them, because he,
and the Party he leads, are terrified of religious faith. They fear any moral or spiritual authority
outside the control of the Party; and they punish worship of anyone but Xi Jinping.
Instead, the Chinese Communist Party wants total control over heart, mind, and spirit of
each citizen of China. In one particularly ludicrous yet equally insidious example, in September,
the Cyberspace Administration of China launched a two-month “Clear and Bright” campaign
that polices pessimism and “negative emotions,” among other thought crimes. This is
totalitarianism, pure and simple, and totalitarian governments cannot abide freedom of religion
or belief.
And yet—neither can they extinguish it.
In Tibet, as Communist authorities seek to stamp out any mention or memory of his
Holiness the Dalai Lama, blanketing religious sites with surveillance and security forces in the
lead up to his 90th birthday, a young singer performed a song celebrating the spiritual leader, and
Tibetans inside and outside Tibet shared and re-shared it on social media.
When authorities shut down Zion Church in Beijing, then one of the city’s largest, Pastor
Ezra Jin took the church nationwide by moving online, reaching more people than it ever could
have before. (We are also proud to have as one of our witnesses, Pastor Jin’s daughter, Grace,
who used to work for the CECC.)
In Fujian province, authorities confined underground Catholic bishop Guo Xijin to his
residence, so he joyfully celebrated the 40thanniversary of his priestly ordination by
serving communion to pilgrims through the bars of the chained gate outside his home.
After removing domes and minarets from thousands of mosques in China to excise foreign
elements, authorities likely believed they could dismantle two of the remaining mosques targeted
for demolition with impunity, yet whole communities of Hui Muslims in Yunnan province took
to the streets in protest.
And these are only a few examples out of the many we at the Commission have
documented, to say nothing of the countless acts of quiet faith and steadfast devotion known only
to individual believers and their God. I encourage you to read the statements we will be posting
on the web page for this hearing, which will feature expert testimony and inspiring personal
narratives from Uyghurs, Catholics, Falun Gong practitioners, and others.
Today, we will hear directly from brave men and women whose families and faith
communities have suffered in China for their dogged belief that they, too, are entitled to freedom
of religion, and that an illegitimate and atheistic regime cannot bind the conscience of its
citizens.
In many cases, authorities have pursued these believers in an authority above the CCP beyond
China’s borders, attempting to silence their advocacy.
Thus we are especially grateful for their voices here today.
Among those voices is that of Grace Jin Drexel, the daughter of Pastor Ezra Jin—and a former
CECC researcher. I heard Grace address the CPAC Christian persecution summit, and I
was deeply moved by her advocacy for her father. I know we are all eager to hear how we can
support Pastor Ezra and all those detained in the crackdown on the Zion Church network.
But we are not only here to lament or to cry out for the “least of these” who suffer
persecution and injustice, or to call out evil rulers and bad actors. We speak up for Falun Gong
practitioners, for Uyghur Muslims, for Tibetan Buddhists, and for underground
Catholics because it is right, but also because robust religious freedom diplomacy is critical for
U.S. national security, as Ambassador Brownback and I wrote in our recent op-ed for the
Washington Times, “Why China’s War on Religion Matters to the U.S.” And Ambassador, I
know this is the topic of the book you have coming out soon, and I really look forward to reading
it.
Studies show that religious freedom is strongly correlated with flourishing societies
and nations—it is a security stabilizer, making countries and regions safer. It is associated with
economic growth and trustworthy institutions, ensuring fairer markets for American and
international business.
This unalienable freedom is fundamental to peace and prosperity—for China and for the
United States—and deserves our strong and unwavering support.
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses
Thank you

China’s War on Religion: The Threat to Religious Freedom
and Why It Matters to the United States
Senator Dan Sullivan (R-AK)
CECC Chair
November 20, 2025
As prepared for delivery

Good morning. The Commission will come to order. Thank you to our witnesses and to all who
are following this hearing online.
Today’s message is straightforward: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a systematic
campaign to bend every faith in China to Party rule. CCP authorities aim for the complete
subordination of religious belief to state ideology—re-engineering doctrine, leadership,
education, architecture, and even online worship.
The CCP is not content to police behavior; it wants to control the conscience and intrude on the
most powerful and personal relationship there is—the one with God.
We have documented imprisonment, torture, and worse for such simple acts as owning a prayer
book, growing a beard, or gathering for worship.
There are currently 1,647 documented religion prisoner cases in the CECC’s Political Prisoner
Database. Though that number may be ten times higher when we consider all those detained in
the Uyghur region.
At least a dozen bishops and priests from my own Catholic Church are detained.
Make no mistake, freedom of religion is under assault worldwide—witness what is happening in
Nigeria. But nowhere is the scale of the threat greater than in China. There are an estimated 500
hundred million in China whose faith traditions face some form of restrictions or control.
And, the CCP’s grip on religion does not end at its borders. Through transnational repression, it
harasses exiled believers, infiltrates religious communities, and intimidates diaspora groups to
remain silent.
Some of our witnesses have personal experience with intimidation or transnational repression
right here in America.
Since Xi Jinping came to power, he has pushed an aggressive agenda to roll back what little
space for independent religion once existed and to assert CCP dominance over all aspects of
religious life.
Christian pastors are prosecuted for fraud for accepting charity. Uyghur Muslims are punished
for reading the Koran at home. Tibetan Buddhists are targeted for honoring the Dalai Lama;
Falun Gong practitioners are tortured for peaceful meditation the Party cannot control.
Across China, the Party has closed churches, imprisoned pastors and priests, and ordered the
removal of Islamic and Tibetan Buddhist symbols from buildings
We are here today because the right to believe according to one’s own conscience is not a
privilege government may grant or withhold. It is a universal human right, central to human
dignity and human flourishing.
We know now that religious freedom is a critical element in societies that are stable and
prosperous. Our own history, from the earliest colonies to the First Amendment, reflects a simple
truth: societies are freer, fairer, and more stable when people are free to worship, to practice their
faith, and to live, speak, and act according to their beliefs.
The CCP fears the power of faith because it is a source of values and moral authority it cannot
control. That is why it demands that crosses come down and portraits of Xi Jinping go up. It is
why a Catholic priest must preach Party slogans alongside sacred texts.
It is why so many religious leaders and religious believers are jailed.
To the CCP, faith is not just a challenge, it is an existential threat to its grip on power—and why
it must be controlled or destroyed.
The title of this hearing asks why does religious freedom in China matter to the United States.
We certainly want to hear our witnesses answer this question.
But let me offer one reason why this hearing matters by reading part of a statement bydetained
pastor Wang Yi, who met with President George W. Bush in the Oval Office in 2006. The
National Endowment for Democracy just awarded Wang Yi one of its highest prizes.
In one of his last statements before being detained, Pastor Yi said: “…the rulers of this country
are waging a war…in the [Uyghur region], in Tibet, in Shanghai, in Beijing…and the rulers who
are waging this war have chosen for themselves an enemy that can never be imprisoned, an
enemy that can never be destroyed, an enemy that can never be controlled or subdued, namely,
the soul of human beings.”
Pastor Wang Yi may now be in prison—but he, and millions of others like him, are not subdued.
That is why this hearing matters—not just for one community, one country, or one faith, but for
the defense of human dignity and conscience everywhere. The CCP wants believers in China to
feel isolated and forgotten. Our responsibility is to show them—and to show Beijing—that they
are neither.