The Chinese Communist Party has been trying to get into the soul business – not to save them but to claim them.
Pastor Ezra Jin should know. As founder and senior pastor of Zion Church, one of the largest unregistered Christian churches in Beijing, he was arrested along with more than 30 other religious leaders in October 2025 as part of an intensified crackdown on underground churches across China. He was released in July after nine months of detention following a direct appeal from President Donald Trump.
His offense? Practicing his Christian faith without the party’s approval.
“If you cannot secure even the ability to believe what you want to believe, you are no different from a slave,” Jin said in an interview in Dallas, during a visit in which he met with President George W. Bush. “This is why I think freedom of conscience – the freedom to believe what you want – is the foundation of all other freedoms.”
During their meeting, President Bush spoke about his concern for prisoners of conscience in China, including some he painted in his new book, The Call of Freedom: Pastor Wang Yi, Dr. Gulshan Abbas, Joshua Wong, and Jimmy Lai.
President Bush has long advocated for religious freedom and freedom in China in particular – where the CCP tries to control all aspects of religious activity. Authorities impose state control over organizational structure and personnel and require the maintenance of files on staff activities. They have also used digital surveillance.
“The main characteristic of a totalitarian regime is that it uses everything in its power to control everything it can,” Jin said. “It wants to control not only your body and your property, but also to use its political apparatus to change your soul.”
The party harassed Jin’s congregation as a vibrant unregistered church, pressuring landlords to evict it from rented spaces, cut off electricity and water in the middle of services, and staged police raids to round up worshippers at prayer, he said. A few years ago, the party demanded the church install two dozen facial recognition cameras to track attendance. When the church refused, the government shut Zion Church down completely.
Congregants began meeting in small cafes and parks, but even then they weren’t safe. The church moved online and leaders visited different locations, planting more than 100 churches across 40 Chinese cities between 2021 and 2025, Jin said. But the pressure on Chinese Christians kept increasing, culminating in the 2025 crackdown.
Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, the Kelly and David Pfeil Fellow at the Bush Institute and a specialist on democracy and human rights issues, noted that many countries around the world have authoritarian leaders, like those in China, who fear that people of faith will never come fully under their government control.
“(People of faith) believe in something bigger, and for a government that wants to control everything, that is a threat to its power,” she said. “That’s why religious freedom is so important to the fight for freedom everywhere – because it is innate to every person.”
Eight of Jin’s coworkers from his church are still in a Chinese prison, and he said that in some cases, the authorities have intensified their efforts against them. Multiple churches have been shuttered since Jin’s release. He called for Americans to advocate for his colleagues’ release and that of other prisoners of conscience, as they once did for him – because only the United States has enough power to influence China.
“The Western values that America currently leads are not just about economic and military success,” he said. “The Western order, with America at the forefront in our modern world, is first and foremost about valuing human rights, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state. A modern state needs to allow different peoples, ethnic groups, and religions to coexist and work together in society. An alternative system that rises and tears apart is bad not only for the people who live under it, but for the entire world order.”
Communities beyond the Christian one are also facing persecution in China – including Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists – and it’s important to advocate for all of these people of faith, he said.
“A person doesn’t only have physical needs – what you eat, how you sleep, who you associate with,” he said. “There’s also something deeper and more internal, something some would call sacred: a soul, or simply the ability to believe in something.”
