admin
When a respected voice like former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback stands before the Hudson Institute and tells Americans that Beijing is carrying out a calculated assault on faith, we should stop scrolling and listen. Brownback’s new book, China’s War on Faith, debuted May 12 and lays out a chilling, coordinated campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to crush religion at home and project that repression abroad. This is not abstract academic debate — it is an existential moral fight between freedom and an ideology that seeks to replace God with the state.
Brownback didn’t mince words: the CCP is “at war” with religious belief, and survivors onstage described a brutality that should shame every freedom-loving American. He and co-author Michael Arkush document what they call three genocides against Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Falun Gong practitioners alongside a systematic campaign to neuter Christianity and other faiths. If you still believe engaging economically with an increasingly authoritarian China will somehow make it more liberal, Brownback’s eyewitness accounts and interviews make that complacency impossible.
Let’s be blunt about one of the clearest examples: the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang has already been characterized by U.S. officials as genocide, with internment, forced labor, sterilization, and cultural erasure documented by governments and investigators. We owe the victims the dignity of calling this what it is and the duty to act in ways that punish perpetrators and protect the vulnerable. America cannot wave away these crimes in the name of trade or geopolitical convenience while millions suffer under Beijing’s boot.
The persecution isn’t limited to one group. Independent investigations and government reports have raised alarming evidence that Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience have been subject to medical testing and, in some cases, forced organ harvesting — horrors that read like nightmares yet are backed by painstaking inquiries. These are not fringe accusations; they have been examined by tribunals and cited in official country notes and human-rights briefings. If the international community refuses to name and punish such barbarity, who will stop the next atrocity?
Christians in China face a steady squeeze: churches are monitored, clergy are harassed, and the state attempts to co-opt or crush independent congregations, yet testimony shows the underground Church is not dying — it’s growing in courage and numbers. Survivors and pastors who spoke at the launch describe raids, disappearances, and an effort to turn worship into propaganda under the United Front, even as believers risk everything to worship in secret. That resilience should inspire every American who remembers that faith and freedom go hand in hand — and that our foreign policy must reflect those values.
This moment demands a reckoning: Washington should stop treating religious repression as a secondary issue and fill the ambassador-at-large post for international religious freedom immediately, impose targeted consequences on those responsible, and work with allies to choke off the CCP’s impunity. Conservatives who care about liberty and people of faith must lead the charge, not wring hands and hope markets fix consciences. If we love freedom and the God-given dignity of every human soul, we will stand loudly and unambiguously with the persecuted — and we will make clear that America will not be silent while tyrants wage war on faith.
