cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/44150479
In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.
The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.
Apart from being highly amused? I don’t think it will fully work. And it’s not even just the forgiver part. It’s the eternal afterlife in heaven part. Because if the choice is “obey Xi on Earth by no longer venerating Christ” or “spend an eternity in heaven,” and I believed in all this stuff, I’d sure pick heaven and just worship in secret.
I will say that it does kind of stop people though… in the sense that eventually their beliefs get diluted into a sort of merging of belief systems. Judaism and Christianity themselves are examples of this, but more recent ones would be the various New World iindigenous groups that merge their Pre-Columbian religion with Christianity or Crypto-Jews in the Southwestern U.S., the result of Spanish Jews converting to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spanish lands.
So maybe what will end up happening is a sort of new form of Chinese Christianity where Mao is venerated as a saint or a prophet, but Jesus will very unlikely be usurped from the top of the worship chain… but right now, they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.
Well said; this is what I was driving at. I don’t always align with your perspective but it’s always interesting. Thanks!
Thanks for asking!
Saints offer prayers to God. If you’ve ever asked someone to pray for you then you have done the same thing that the Orthodox do when they venerate an icon. No one is replacing God with Saints. Saints are only Saints because of Christs work in their life.
Bit of a rubbish take. These pictures are appearing in the three-self protestant state churches or the government forcing the pictures in Catholic churches. Basically all they’re actually doing is pushing Christians underground.
That’s literally what I was talking about when I was talking about the Indigenous Americans and Crypto-Jews… so how is it a “rubbish take?”