Sidebar: "The Opiate of the Masses"

[Note: This entry is dated 1-28-20 to create chapter sequence. Back to Chapter 2]

Before I proceed with Chapter 3, I should clarify something I've stressed with Enoch in our conversations:  I care about the Chinese people.

In 2014, while traveling broadly across China, I met hundreds of "strangers" in China who were very kind to me. My struggle is not with the people of China but the atheistic heart of Communism that has controlled that nation for seventy years.

I grew up during Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in China.  The mothers of American kids my age told their children to finish eating their meal because "People are starving in China." Sadly, that was very true, but during those same years, I incorrectly thought that all of the people in China were Communists, that they all treated Mao's little Red Book like the Bible while rejecting  everything to do with God. Some did but not all.

It is true that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has become the world's largest political party (with over 83 million members all of which are told to embrace atheism), but it is also true that that membership of the CCP represents only 13% of  China's population (1.4 billion). In other words, never in the history of the world have so many lived under so few in absolute power.

In the U.S. "balance of power" system, flawed as it may be, there are basically two clashing parties wrestling in countless stalemates affecting slow changes within a constitutionally-based government. We have a civilian controlled military and local de-centralized control of states, counties, municipalities, school districts, etc. Different branches of government can defy the very "throne" so to speak (and they often do). This is not trues in China where the CCP controls every aspect of life from womb to tomb. They make the laws and choose how to enforce them. They are the military, the intelligence, the local police, the hospitals, the landlords, the schools and universities. They control commerce, immigration, the public transportation, the airport security, etc. You are not "free to move about the country," as Southwest says. To move from province to province for any reason requires advanced authorization from the Party. (For instance, if two parents wanted their son to visit Hong Kong for reasons of their own, they would also have to state legitimate reasons that the authorities would approve.)

The Party even controls an institution it would prefer to exterminate: the church. To appease the weak adults who need the "opiate of the masses," they oversee the approved a framework for "church" (only about 2-3% attend approved churches). These churches abide by Party guidelines, which include facial recognition cameras facing the congregation to ensure that Party members and college students and children under 18 do not enter the services. The strategy of keeping young people out of church is an attempt to stop the generational contagion of faith.

There is only one place where the whole family of faith (young and old) can be involved in worship and study; one place where Chinese believers can share life as prescribed in the New Testament; that place is the unapproved "house church" (or "family church" as Enoch calls them). The following video describes the plight of such churches:

I'm sure readers here understand why I hold no ill will toward more than a billion people who for seven decades have endured the absolute control of such a system. Ideas have consequences, and nations built on the notion of expelling God and rejecting the principles of His Word fill the void with tragic social experiments. This has proven true of all nations, past and present, all over the earth for all time. God cannot be expelled from any place. That much is known, but what is ours to imagine is what life is like under a powerful system bent on trying to expelling Him.

I have seen such despair in China, but I have also seen light in the eyes of those whose hope is not in governments or godless leaders but in the Lord. Before we hastily judge the results of such a direct assault on Creator God, let's not forget that here in the U.S. there has been a similar attempt to keep God out of our schools; to shut the mouths of those who embrace His Word; to show feigned tolerance for people of faith. Here, too, we see similar condescension to let God be an "opiate of the masses" for those who need it. It sometimes feels as if our own leadership is saying, "Let's allow enough talk of God to maintain plausible deniability that we reject Him."  Or as Pastor Wilber Rees satirized nearly fifty years ago in his poem:

"$3.00 Worth of God."

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.
Not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep,
but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk
or a snooze in the sunshine...
I want ecstasy, not transformation.
I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth.
I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack.
I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

— Wilbur Rees

Rees's was describing the "feel good" minimization of God characteristic of America's post-Christian culture. His words are not all that different from the full quotation of Karl Marx from nearly a century ago: "The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.... Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."  Whether Christ followers are silenced by communism (3 million at a time) or capitalism (at $3 a pound), the end result is pretty much the same, and yet through the centuries of men trying to take God's place, the searching heart continues to cry out to Abba Father, the true and living God.  

As light-bearers, Christians are called to love those in the dark even as they love one another.  With that in mind, please know that the following chapter, while unflattering, is told with sympathy for all of the characters involved.

[On to Chapter 3]