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As Xi Jinping demands “unyielding Marxist atheism”, history tells a different story: Christianity has deep, ancient roots in China—long predating Communism and resisting state-controlled “sinicisation”.

President Xi Jinping has made it clear to members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that they must be “unyielding Marxist atheists.”

Although this has not stopped 18 per cent of CCP members from regularly burning incense to Buddha or other deities, the five officially approved religions, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism, are all tightly controlled.

Xi has also implemented a policy of “sinicisation” – religion with CCP characteristics, so to speak. In some regions, churches have even been ordered to replace religious imagery, like images of Christ, with portraits of President Xi or CCP slogans.

But Christianity in China is far, far older than Communism, which is essentially clapped-out, second-rate 19th-century German philosophy. And it was “sinicised” hundreds of years ago.

The Luminous Religion of the Tang

Few people in China or Western countries know that Nestorian missionaries from what today is Iran arrived in China to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the year 635, in the Tang dynasty. The monks were welcomed in the Tang capital and encouraged to translate their sacred books from their liturgical language, Syriac.

(The Nestorians split with the Catholic Church after the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, over the nature of Christ.)

The most famous of the Christian relics of this wave of Christianity is the Stele of Xi’an. This is a limestone block about three metres high. inscribed with a brief account of Christian doctrines, including the Trinity and the Incarnation, and a history of the first 150 years of Christianity in China written in 1900 Chinese characters. At its top is a cross. The stele described Christianity as jingjiao or “the Luminous Religion.”

Unfortunately, a persecution which began in 845 weakened the Nestorian church, and with the collapse of the Tang dynasty, Christianity disappeared.  

But it rose again under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, although there were few faithful who were Han Chinese. Several dioceses existed in the 13th and 14th centuries before it, too, faded with the collapse of the Yuan dynasty in 1368.

Faith Beyond Political Control

This sketch of the shadowy presence of Christianity in China leaves out how the missionaries engaged with traditional Chinese culture. A recent scholarly book, “Science, Religion(s), and Spirit(s) in China”, examines the famous stele and other documents to understand how the Nestorian missionaries explained the Holy Spirit to their contemporaries. The author, theologian and physicist Jacob Chengwei Feng, was an atheist in his native China but became a Christian when doing postgraduate studies in the United States.  

“One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is its reconstruction of Jingjiao’s mission strategy,” writes Massimo Introvigne, in a book review in the online magazine Bitter Winter. 

“These monks did not depend on imperial favour or political patronage. They relied instead on science, craftsmanship, and dialogue. Their training in the Schools of Edessa and Nisibis equipped them with knowledge in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy—skills that earned them respect at the Tang court and among Daoist scholars.  

“Their mission unfolded through monastic witness, scientific expertise, courtly service, and interfaith dialogue, a form of cultural integration that was intellectually grounded and spiritually confident.”

As Introvigne points out, the followers of the “Luminous Religion” did not allow their beliefs to be controlled by the government of the day – as Xi is mandating today. Instead, they engaged in a fruitful dialogue in which their catechesis became both truly Christian and authentically Chinese. Introvigne observes that this shows that “Christianity has already taken Chinese form – without coercion and without losing its identity,” observes Introvigne.

Christianity is already well established in modern China. Government figures from 2018 put the number of Catholics at 6 million and of officially approved Protestant churches at 38 million. However, many belong to underground churches, and the real number of Christians may be as high as 160 million. If Christianity continues to grow, China could have more Christians than the US by 2030 – although, admittedly, all surveys of religion in China contain abundant helpings of guesswork.  

What is clear is that Christianity is not just a Western cultural import, like Coca-Cola or the iPhone. It has deep roots in China’s history and is in little need of President Xi’s soul-destroying “sinicisation”.

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Republished with thanks to The Catholic Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.