Book review
God is red: The secret story of how Christianity survived and flourished in Communist China
Reviewed by Walter Taylor, Special to The Layman, February 6, 2012
Liao Yiwu, God is red: The secret story of how Christianity survived and flourished in Communist China (New York: Harper One, 2011), 231 pages. $25.99.
While the title of Liao Yiwu’s God Is Red has a provocative sound to it, the subtitle of his recent book on Christianity in China provides a description of what he has written. It is a moving, riveting account of the survival and growth of Christianity in China despite the hostile persecution of the church by the Communist government. Taken from the transcripts of interviews with Christians who lived through the Communist takeover of the nation in the 1950s as well as the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, Yiwu allows Chinese Christians the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words. What makes this all the more interesting is that Yiwu himself is not a Christian. While he is a dissident now living in the West, Yiwu is not a believer. But his experience as a dissident makes it possible for Yiwu to show great respect for the individual Christians who tell their stories through his book.
Among the many striking things Yiwu reveals about church life in China is the great love and respect that Chinese Christians continue to show for the missionaries who brought the Gospel to them. Even though the Communist government executed or expelled all Western missionaries 60 years ago and for more than a generation has painted the missionaries as Western imperialists, Chinese Christians continue to remember them with gratitude.
In the 1980s when the Communist government began to lift restrictions on religious expression, both government officials and the outside world were shocked at the sheer number of Christians who began to fill the churches. Yiwu reports on both the officially recognized “Three Self” churches as well as the “illegal” house churches, revealing that while in some of the cities the lines between them are more drawn, in the countryside and smaller cities many worshipers attend both.
Yiwu interviews both Protestants and Roman Catholics, the young and the old, the educated and the uneducated. He takes the reader from an old dilapidated missionary cemetery in the countryside to the busy streets of Beijing. He reveals government officials who participate in Christian worship as well as those who view Christians with suspicion. He travels with an itinerant Christian doctor providing medical care for remote villages. Yiwu introduces us to an elderly nun still committed to regaining all the land her Catholic parish lost to the government. He shows us a gentle Christian man who can forgive his tormenters. But most significantly, Yiwu proves the dictum of the ancient church father Tertullian : “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” God Is Red is both an informative and an inspiring read.