The Chinese Communist Party finds “intolerable” the idea that the highest authority in a church should be God, Grace Jin Drexel, daughter of imprisoned Pastor Ezra Jin, told Breitbart News in an interview on Monday.
Jin Drexel has been advocating for the release of her father and 17 others associated with the Zion Church of China since the government enacted a sprawling nationwide crackdown in October. Zion Church, an “unregistered” Christian congregation that introduced the widespread use of virtual services to unite believers, has grown to become one of the largest Christian churches in the country despite the Communist Party using multiple repressive waves to try to exterminate it.
Jin Drexel is participating in the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Summit this week in Washington, DC, which showcases the suffering of victims of religious persecution from a variety of faiths around the world and facilitates the proposal of solutions to expand the free exercise of faith. She explained in remarks to Breitbart News that her father, who founded the Zion Church in 2007, and other members of the church are merely seeking the ability to function as a normal Christian community would in the free world and are now facing significant criminal punishment for doing so.
“My dad’s position [is], he’s saying, ‘We’re not political at all. What we want is to say that my church, this church, belongs to God,’” Jin Drexel explained. “And the sacred decisions of the church belong to God and those are what we’re asking for. And that in itself is what is so intolerable in China.”
“They’re only asking to have the ability to worship freely and not under the control of the Chinese government or the Party. That’s all they’re asking for,” she emphasized.
China, potentially home to as many as 160 million Christians, is one of the world’s most dangerous places to practice the faith. The atheist Communist Party only allows the existence of five legal religions: Protestant Christianity under the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” a Chinese “Catholic Church” unaffiliated with the Vatican, Party-controlled Islam, Party-controlled Buddhism, and largely unaffiliated Taoism. The Chinese “Christian” churches are vehicles of the Communist Party, used for propaganda praising dictator Xi Jinping and forbidding true preaching of the Gospel. It is illegal for children to practice any religion. According to the Christian humanitarian organization Open Doors, the Communist Party expanded its totalitarian control of religion in 2018 with laws targeting discussion of faith online – critical to the repression of the Zion Church.
“They are being charged with a relatively new crime called the ‘illegal use of information online’ and that is because my father’s church – originally we started in Beijing and it was like a part of this urban church movement that was more open but it was still unregistered or not under the government control,” Jin Drexel explained. “But, in 2018, the church was shut down by the government and they forced us to have this online/offline model where my father and the church leaders would do a lot of the services on Zoom and also had different congregations meet in smaller groups together.”
That “hybrid smaller model,” she noted, allowed Zion to “become one of the biggest churches across all of China” during the Wuhan coronavirus era as “no one else had this model at the time.”
“So because of that they are charging Zion Church with the online services,” she noted. “But it’s really because of Zion’s influence and the fact that they tried to shut down Zion but, instead of disappearing, we grew.”
Jin Drexel predicted that the Communist Party would soon charge those arrested with more crimes “because, technically speaking, this crime that they are being charged with, the maximum sentence is three years.”
“If I were in the Chinese government position, I wouldn’t be going around 11 different cities capturing close to 30 leaders and creating a whole task force to just get people for three years,” she suggested. “So we suspect that this is just the beginning.”
Jin Drexel described as a “miracle,” fueled by support from the United States and other international actors, that the Chinese government has allowed the imprisoned any legal team at all and that her family knows where her father is being imprisoned.
That aside, however, she described the circumstances the Christians are facing in Communist Party custody as harrowing.
“They’re sleeping on the floor, there’s no bed, they might have a mat or so that they can lay on,” she explained. “They don’t have enough blankets or even warm clothes and we know that, especially in the male cells, there’s not even window panels in their room so the elements like wind or water and just rain can all come in, and so it’s extremely cold and damp.”
The Christians, contrary to Chinese law, cannot communicate with family members in any way, including letters, and relatives have been denied the ability to hand over necessary medications to be given to the prisoners.
Pastor Ezra Jin, his daughter explained, suffers from type 2 diabetes and requires specific medication to maintain his health, which the Communist Party refuses to allow relatives to bring to the detention center housing him.
“We don’t know how his health is doing,” she said. “He is also under tremendous stress and they’re doing lots of interrogations, sometimes way into the night.”
Jin Drexel called for the “unconditional” release of her father and the Christians arrested with him, emphasizing that they are simply exercising basic rights. She also explained why the Zion Church chose to operate independently despite the risk.
“What kind of sermons you preach, what kind of music you sing, what kind of small groups you lead, how many people get baptized – those are all determined not by the church, not by the congregation, not by the Holy Spirit,” she noted. “Those things are determined by the Party, who is not Christian, who is not religious, whose leadership has a very different calculation than the church congregation. And that’s the only way that they are saying is allowed religion in China.”
“I feel this tremendous privilege to speak out as an American and that carries so much,” she concluded. “China, if it sees itself as being able to do these violations on universal values – especially values that Americans and the free world think is one of the most important values to have, the freedom of religion – and it gets away with it … China will continue to go on violating this freedom of religion and will continue going on being a bully on the international stage.”
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