Authorities link Bibles and porn in communist campaign

Chinese Communist Party authorities long have sought to suppress religious faith, from arrests and detentions of leaders to wholesale destruction of places of worship.

Now they're trying a mind game, linking Bibles to pornography with the apparent hope that society's general disgust with one will lead to rejection of the other.

Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China, reports that in a campaign "to eradicate pornography and illegal publications," the state is targeting religious venues and imposing more bans on publications.

Bitter Winter points out that controlling free speech and the printed word is one of the ways the Communist Party has suppressed religious belief.

Since March 2018, "online and retail sales of Bibles have been banned in China, and hymn books or other spiritual readings aren’t allowed in churches unless sanctioned and published by the government."

In August, posters promoting the campaign to "eradicate pornography and illegal publications" were put up in Fengzhuang Three-Self Church, a congregation of the government-controlled national church in Zhengzhou city in the central province of Henan.

"The government's campaign to 'eradicate pornography and illegal publications' has actually swept into churches. This is slanderous to God!" one of the church's workers told Bitter Winter.

"This isn't just slanderous, but is a trap laid by the devil to make people mistakenly believe that there is a severe problem with the church's ethos," another said.

Bitter Winter reported that earlier in the month, the Religious Affairs Bureau of Zhengzhou city's Erqi district "convened a meeting of the persons in charge of religious venues, demanding them to display information promoting the campaign against illegal publications in their places of worship."

In an open letter, the Chongyang county government in the province of Huebei warned that "dark and evil forces" and "pornography and illegal religious publications" are associated with religious belief.

Such "harmful information" is described as anything that would "weaken, distort, or negate the "party's leadership or China's socialist system."

Included are sermons, religious publications and Bibles.

"Many believers have reported that the Three-Self churches to which they belong have been subjected to sudden inspections by the government. All newspapers, hymnbooks, gospel leaflets, and especially Bibles that weren't published and printed by the state were confiscated and even burned," the report said.

A church in Shenyang city was fined $1,400 when South Korean Bibles were found.

Fox News reported Marco Respinti, the director-in-charge of the Italian-based Bitter Winter, said the Communist Party is using "very tricky, subtle cultural warfare" to combat the church in China.

"Sometimes the CCP says you're allowed to have religious materials in the state-controlled church, but then they stop people, so it's contradictory," Respinti said. "They are trying to control all of culture, and religion is a huge part of people's culture. So they're trying not only to stop people's public expression of religion but they are also trying to go into personal things -- beliefs -- they are trying to indoctrinate people through these banning of religious materials."