With the Chinese Christians: worshipers in a dark place.(The World II)

Beijing

I MEET Qiu Yue and her friend Yang Jie at an average-looking restaurant. Qiu has chosen the place precisely because it is unremarkable. Our meeting must have a low profile: Qiu and Yang's safety would be jeopardized if the authorities knew they were having lunch with a Western journalist. In fact, Qiu fears that her security has already been compromised. She suspects that her phone has been tapped, and knows that her e-mails, like those of everyone else in China, are screened by software that searches for terms deemed politically sensitive. We have therefore taken precautions: Our phone conversations have been short and vague, and in our e-mails we have made a habit of writing "C" instead Christian, "B" instead of Bible. Probably we have avoided detection. But one cannot be sure.

Qiu and Yang (which are pseudonyms) belong to "house churches" here in the capital. A house church is a Protestant Christian assembly that is illegal, having refused to register with the Chinese government and join the Three Self Patriotic Movement, the Communist party's umbrella Protestant organization. A similar division exists within Chinese Catholicism: The Patriotic Catholic Association, which is controlled by the Party, does not recognize the authority of the Pope, while an illegal Catholic church remains loyal to the Vatican and operates underground.

Those unacquainted with contemporary China are often surprised to learn that the Communist party sanctions a kind of Christianity. But this is not surprising when one realizes that many of the Party's propaganda efforts involve the presentation of a simulacrum of genuine freedom. Religion is a case in point. Although the Party remains dogmatically atheist, it permits worship in state-approved churches such as the Three Self Patriotic Movement. But because China's Communists remain hostile to anything that posits a source of authority higher than the political, they carefully control what is taught in these official churches to ensure that the realm of the divine is firmly subjugated to the authority of the Party.

This subjugation manifests itself as a tendency to strip from Christianity its claims to transcendence. "The Three Self Church has never preached Christ's Second Coming," says Qiu. "They don't think that Mary was a virgin. They think Christ had an earthly father." The only kind of Christianity to receive official blessing is thus sundered from many of Christianity's essential doctrines and reduced to a collection of moral precepts.

The Three Self Church also uses religious instruction as an opportunity for political indoctrination. As an example of this, Qiu adduces the Three Self Church's teachings about Lei Feng, a Chinese peasant-turned-national-hero who was lionized by Mao for his supposed acts of selflessness and political service (acts which, incidentally, many Western historians now believe never happened). The Three Self Church teaches that Lei Feng, in virtue of his service to the country, will go to heaven. The political message of such a teaching cannot be overlooked: Lei Feng is one of the Party's best-known symbols.

"Lei Feng's works focus more on serving the government than on serving Christ," says Qiu. That is an understatement, and Qiu--perhaps because she is accustomed to having to be careful--tends toward moderation in her criticisms of the Chinese government. She even makes a point of telling me that her church prays for Hu Jintao and the Party leadership. But she leaves no doubt that official Chinese Christendom "combines religion and politics," and that she finds this unacceptable: "We want our faith just to be our faith." Some 80 million Chinese Christians feel likewise--and, like Qiu and Yang, have gone underground.