Professor warns against allying with official church in China
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 3, 2000
Some Western Christian groups have “injudiciously” allied themselves with the government-sanctioned “patriotic” church in China, while the much larger underground Christian church continues to be persecuted by the Chinese government, says an American scholar who recently lectured in China.
Allen D. Hertze’s views – “What I Learned in China”- are published in the May edition of First Things, a journal that focuses on religion in the public square. Hertze’s article is posted on the First Things web site.
Recently, leaders of the Presybyterian Church (USA) embraced the government-sanctioned Chinese church and negotiated an agreement for cooperation. They were assured by leaders of the China Christian Council that there was little persecution of Christians in China and that the “official” church enjoyed great freedom.
But Hertze, like Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, presents an entirely different picture. A professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, Hertze was in China recently to lecture on civic life and religion.
He describes exchanges with Chinese students that “had an Orwellian quality, especially those with party apparatchiks and the less sophisticated students. To explain U.S. concern about the religious situation in China, I would sometimes show photographs of house church Christians arrested by the government.
“A common response was, so why don’t they register? What’s the big deal? Well, I responded, the Religious Affairs Bureau is headed by an atheist, and the officially sanctioned seminaries and ministers are not free to preach the pure gospel. But why do they want to worship in their houses anyway-isn’t it more pious in a church? They worship in houses, I replied, because the government won’t let them worship in unregistered church buildings. Well, they must have been engaged in illegal activities, that’s why they were arrested. Yes, I would say, but their only illegal activity was refusing to register. They still broke the law.”