Hindu View of Christian Salvation

DR. DAVID FRAWLEY 
Hindu Post
March  27, 2016

Christian conversion is based upon the promise of forgiveness of all sins and everlasting salvation by belief in Jesus. It is important that Hindus and all others subject to conversion efforts understand the wrong ideas and wishful thinking behind these views.

Christianity is based upon a theology of sin and salvation. In the Christian view, one is born into sin owing to the original sin of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, as described in the Bible, who were tempted by the Devil and went against God’s will. We gain salvation through Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, whom God sent down to Earth to redeem us. Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins and the original sin of Adam and Eve, which his blood washed away.

Those who accept Jesus as their savior and become Christians are said to be immediately saved. Faith in Jesus is the basis of salvation, not any action of our own. According to Christian thought, nothing we can do apart from accepting Jesus can save us. Souls who fail to accept Jesus are condemned to damnation, however good or wise they may be. Each individual has only one life to make this decision to accept Jesus or not, which is then irreversible for all eternity.

After death, those who are saved go to heaven, where Jesus dwells. In Christianity, heaven is usually a physical world, which requires a physical body, such as promoted in the Christian belief in the Last Judgment and resurrection of the body, and the reason why Christians bury the dead. Those who are not saved are condemned to eternal damnation.

Such is a brief synopsis of historical Christian theology, which has slight variations among different Christian sects. There is no Christianity without Jesus and no salvation without faith in Jesus. This idea of sin and salvation by belief in Jesus and gaining a place in heaven is the basis of Christian conversion efforts, and of baptism to become a Christian.

Evangelical Christians, such as are coming to Bharat from the USA, take this theology literally, and still argue that the world is only six thousand years old as proclaimed in the Bible. Some modern Christians, perhaps embarrassed by the condemnation of the majority of the human race that remains non-Christian, try to explain it away as metaphorical. Yet to date the Catholic Church has not disavowed this theology of sin and salvation either.

Hindu View of Liberation

Hindu Dharma respects freedom of belief for all people, holding that there is ultimately One Truth and a unity of consciousness behind all existence. Hindu Dharma states that each individual should be free to follow whatever spiritual path he or she feels most drawn to, or even no path at all.

Yet this view of religious pluralism does not mean that Hindu Dharma regards all religious theologies as correct or equal. The Hindu view like that of science allows for the existence of a variety of theories but these theories must be proven by experience and cannot be regarded as correct merely because someone believes in them.

Hindu Dharma encourages us to inquire into our inner nature through examining our own minds and striving to come to a direct realization of truth, which it teaches through various dharmic philosophies and meditation practices.

Hindu sacred texts like the Upanishadsand Bhagavad Gita describe the supreme truth or Brahman as an infinite and eternal Being-Consciousness-Bliss (Sacchidananda) beyond all names and forms. This unlimited Being is the Self of all, Atman, dwelling within each creature.  The Supreme Reality dwells with you as you, not as your mere physical body but your core awareness, the inner witness behind all your thoughts and experiences.

In Hindu Dharma, the soul is an individualised power of consciousness and has many lives as it evolves in consciousness to realize its true nature of unity with the Supreme. The individual soul is bound by ignorance and karma, which is the cause of rebirth and suffering, a failure to recognize its true nature that causes attachment to the external world of appearances, birth and death.

The Hindu view is one of karma and rebirth, not sin and salvation and one life only. All souls will gain liberation eventually and return to their true nature of pure consciousness. The goal is not one of heaven but of Self-realization. It is not of a glorified physical world but a blissful awareness beyond body and mind.

Interfaith Discussions

We must be very clear about our concepts in interfaith discussions. There has been a superficial and uncritical approach that equates Christian salvation and Hindu liberation (Moksha), as well as equating religion as faith with the Sanskrit term dharma.

In Hindu Dharma there is no original sin attributed to our ancestors or to any Devil that we must atone for. There is only an ignorance and wrong actions that arise from it. This ignorance is removed by knowledge of truth and development of higher awareness, not by mere belief.

We as individuals are responsible for our condition in life that results from our own karma. There are certain actions that are inherently wrong, like harming others. These do not depend upon the commandment of any deity but on a violation of dharma and natural law.

No Salvation or Spiritual Realization by Proxy

In Hindu Dharma , there is no salvation or liberation by proxy. Neither Jesus nor any other figure can save you or realize the truth for you. In fact you do not need to be saved at all!

You only need to understand your true Self and the nature of existence, which are one, which takes you beyond all suffering born of attachment to body and mind. To transcend ignorance requires a sadhana or spiritual practice, defined in Hindu Shastras through dharmic living, ritual, mantra, Yoga and meditation.

One cannot go beyond karma and ignorance simply by believing in someone or by accepting someone as your savior. That is merely wishful thinking. Just as another person cannot eat food for you, or be educated in your place, you must do your own spiritual practices to purify body and mind in order to access the universal consciousness.

A heaven that requires a physical body is only an attachment to the earth and physical reality in disguise, not understanding our true spiritual nature. The soul does not need a body for its happiness. Its true nature is the pure light of awareness.

One may honor the compassion shown by Jesus, but Christian theology of sin and salvation is far from the truth. It does not reveal our true nature or explain our real purpose in life.

We must have a clear discernment of different theologies and their different goals. Only Self-knowledge brings about liberation. Christian theology, including that endorsed by the Vatican today, does not teach this and its goal of salvation is very different.

http://www.hindupost.in/society-culture/hindu-view-of-christian-salvation/

A Mischievious Thorn in the Side of Conservative Christianity

MARK OPPENHEIMER
The New York Times
JULY 10, 2015

NORTHAMPTON, Mass. — It is hard to know what to hope for when meeting a couple of Satanists. Horns? Sulfurous fumes? Faint strains of organ music? But when they sit down in an organic food cafe and order plates of fettuccini Alfredo, it’s hard to take them seriously as worshipers of the Dark Lord of the Underworld.

Nevertheless, the men who call themselves Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry — pseudonyms for the two co-founders of the Satanic Temple — have done more for the Satanic brand than anyone since Anton LaVey, the San Francisco carnival worker who wrote “The Satanic Bible” (Avon, 1969). With only a website, some legal savvy and a clever way with satire, the two Bostonians’ new, mostly virtual religion has become a sharp thorn in the brow of conservative Christianity.

Their religion, or anti-religion, has about 20 chapters and 20,000 Facebook followers, they say. With no full-time staff, the Satanic Temple has in three years achieved the kind of social media exposure usually reserved for pets in distress.

Last month, the Satanic Temple claimed victory after a court ordered that a monument to the Ten Commandments be removed from the Oklahoma Capitol grounds. Although the Satanic Temple was not a plaintiff in the lawsuit, they say their plan to place a statue of Baphomet, a goat-headed deity of occult legend, beside the monument, on freedom-of-religion grounds, may have forced the court’s hand.

In April, the Satanic Temple used a crowdsourcing campaign to raise $800 for a rural Missouri woman’s trip to St. Louis, to have an abortion. As legal restrictions have forced other clinics to close, the St. Louis clinic is the last abortion provider in the state.

And in 2013, the Satanic Temple achieved notoriety for its “pink mass,” enacted at the grave site of the mother of Fred Phelps, founder of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church. The ritual, involving same-sex couples kissing, was described on the Satanic Temple website as having turned Mr. Phelps’s mother “gay in the afterlife.”

Mr. Jarry, a 48-year-old filmmaker, musician and academic, agreed to speak on the condition that I not use his real name. He does not actually believe in Satan, he said. But long ago he imagined the potential effectiveness of a Satanic organization.

“The first conception was in response to George W. Bush’s creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,” said Mr. Jarry, who was raised by irreligious Jews. “I thought, ‘There should be some kind of counter.’ ” He hit on the idea of starting a faith-based organization that met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them. “Imagine if a Satanic organization applied for funds,” he remembered thinking. “It would sink the whole program.”

That idea percolated until 2012. At an event at Harvard, Mr. Jarry, who was taking graduate classes there, met the man who became “Mr. Greaves,” a man who, when not participating in Satanic Temple activism, is often called Douglas Mesner. He is now 39 years old and says he “does some odd jobs” for a living. Mr. Jarry and Mr. Mesner bonded over a shared distaste for organized religion and an inclination to fight back with mischief.

At the time, Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, was pushing a bill to allow voluntary prayer at public school functions. After the bill passed, the two traveled to Florida to make their feelings known.

“So we created this mock rally in support of Rick Scott,” Mr. Jarry recalled, “where we were coming out to say how happy we were because now our Satanic children could pray to Satan in school.”

Mr. Mesner stood behind Mr. Scott on the steps of the state Capitol, holding a banner proclaiming, “Hail Satan! Hail Rick Scott!”

At the time, the name associated with the Satanic Temple’s email account was “Lucien Greaves.” When it became clear that the news media would want to interview someone from the organization, Mr. Mesner adopted Lucien Greaves as his pseudonym. In 2013, Vice magazine outed Mr. Greaves as Mr. Mesner, and since that time he has answered to both names — although in fact, “Douglas Mesner” is also a pseudonym, one he has used for many years. He, too, asked that his legal name not be published, to prevent threats to his family.

Mr. Mesner insists that his attraction to the Satanic label is not just opportunistic. Although he, like Mr. Jarry, is an “atheistic Satanist,” meaning that he no more believes in a literal Satan than he does in a literal God, he finds special meaning in Satanism, which represents to him the solidarity of outsiders, those judged and excluded by the mainstream.

As a child in the 1980s, Mr. Mesner noticed how suspected Satanists were accused of inciting child abuse and how Satanic music was considered a culprit in juvenile delinquency.

“And as a kid, in the midst of that, you are playing Dungeons & Dragons, listening to certain music, and you wonder, ‘What is Satanism?’ ” Mr. Mesner said. “And you find it to be this syncretism, this amalgam, and it’s something you can’t walk away from. It’s not arbitrary to us. It’s a way of celebrating an outsider status, to look where other people won’t, to look for the obscure, the bizarre, the anomalies. To see the beauty in the ugliness.”

The Satanic Temple’s founders do not believe in tax exemptions for religious organizations, so have not asked for one; they also refuse to say what the Satanic Temple’s budget is. The organization has seven fundamental tenets, which the founders say are a work in progress, subject to change.

“It could be eight tomorrow, it could be six,” Mr. Jarry said. The tenets include humanistic statements like “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s will alone” and “Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.”

Satanic Temple plans include the ultimate in strait-laced, law-abiding activism: lawsuits. It is looking into using the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to oppose abortion waiting periods, claiming that it violates Satanic doctors’ belief in the sanctity of good science.

And they are looking for plaintiffs, willing to identify as Satanists, who will file suit against public schools’ use of in-school isolation and deprivation of bathroom access. Such punishments “are physical or psychological abuse,” Mr. Mesner said, “which violates the Satanic Temple principle of sovereignty of body and mind.”

The two Satanists are also trying to figure out what to do with their statue of Baphomet, by the sculptor Mark Porter, since they no longer plan to place it on the grounds of the Oklahoma Capitol. It was to be unveiled on July 25 at a theater in Detroit, but under pressure from Christian activists, the theater has withdrawn its permission. Which is the kind of oppression that Mr. Mesner has come to expect will be visited on his kind.

“We’ve been talking a lot of comedy,” Mr. Mesner said, “but I genuinely feel this is every bit a religion — this cultural identity, this narrative that contextualizes your life, your works, your goals. And you have these deeply held beliefs, that if they are violated, it compromises your very self.”

mark.e.oppenheimer@gmail .com; Twitter: @markopp1

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: A Mischievous Thorn in the Side of Conservative Christianity .

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/a-mischievious-thorn-in-the-side-of-conservative-christianity.html?_r=0

Give Me That Old-Time Religion

From ISIS to the Christian right, three new books explore the modern urge to go back to an original, uncorrupted version of faith.

ALEX STRICK VAN LINSCHOTEN

PACIFIC STANDARD 

JUL 7, 2015

BUILDING GOD'S KINGDOM: INSIDE THE WORLD OF CHRISTIAN RECONSTRUCTION
Julie J. Ingersoll
Oxford University Press

ISLAMIC POLITICAL THOUGHT: AN INTRODUCTION
Gerhard Bowering
Princeton University Press

MISQUOTING MUHAMMAD: THE CHALLENGE AND CHOICES OF INTERPRETING THE PROPHET'S LEGACY
Jonathan A.C. Brown
Oneworld Publications

They have a long-term vision for social change. Some of them believe that adulterers, homosexuals, and blasphemers should be stoned to death. They reject liberal ideas and seek a return to religious fundamentals. Secular governments, they feel, should be replaced with theocracy; legal systems should be replaced with religious law; the education of all children should be guided by the precepts of faith. God, they proclaim, is the only authority.

ISIS ideologues? Taliban clerics? No, these are the Christian Reconstructionists, adherents of an American religious movement whose ideas, thanks to the efforts of the Chalcedon Foundation, have for decades slowly been gaining traction among a portion of the Christian religious right in the United States.

All too often today, whenever the subject of “religious fundamentalism” comes up, Americans are quick to think of conservative Muslims overseas. But, as Julie Ingersoll makes clear in Building God’s Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction, they would do well to broaden their outlook to include other brands of extreme views—especially those that have arisen much closer to home. Ingersoll takes the Christian Reconstructionists as a case in point, in part because she knows them well (she was once married to a Reconstructionist and co-founded a private Christian school) and in part because she feels they have exerted a surprisingly powerful effect on American political discourse.

Reconstructionism’s founder, Rousas John Rushdoony, was born in the United States to a family that had just fed the Armenian genocide—a trauma that inspired Rushdoony to want to re-build society from the ground up, according to fundamental Christian principles. With secular politics and morality having failed humanity so spectacularly, it was time to run the world again the way God wanted it to be run. He laid out his program in a monumental 1,879-page work entitledThe Institutes of Biblical Law.

Rushdoony and his followers began their efforts with a focus on the grass roots. They eschewed direct political engagement and took a longer-term view of their enterprise. In a savvy tactic used the world over by religious movements interested in effecting social change, the group has devoted much of its time and energy to the family unit and education. Reconstructionists were instrumental in fighting the early battles of what became the homeschooling movement, for example, and Rushdoony himself actively took part in the legal challenges that first allowed the movement to spread in the United States.

In terms of sheer numbers, the Reconstructionism is not a major factor on the American religious scene; it’s not a denomination and has very little active presence in actual churches. But in Building God’s Kingdom, Ingersoll makes the case that core Reconstructionist ideas have exerted an outsized influence on political, cultural, and legal life in the U.S., through their leadership presence at the forefront of key issues. Homeschooling is one obvious example, but Ingersoll cites others: the work of the Tea Party activist David Barton, who has championed the idea of America as a fundamentally Christian nation; the creationist movement, the revival of whose literal interpretation of scripture owes much to Rushdoony; and the development of “biblical” arguments against government welfare and taxation. Ingersoll even discerns Reconstructionist roots in some of the particularities of the language used by the American religious right. When their affiliates refer to public schools as “government schools,” or argue that they are “Marxist-socialist,” for example, Ingersoll contends that they are echoing phrases used by Rushdoony. Ingersoll also detects Reconstructionist influences on the secessionist Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the Republican senator Rand Paul.

Studying the Reconstructionists can help us understand the motivations and tactics of religious groups trying to return to an “authentic” experience—among them the West’s current obsessions, ISIS and the Taliban. But trying to make sense of the Islamic State or the Taliban without a thorough understanding of the political traditions from which they derive is foolhardy. Hence the importance of Islamic Political Thought: An Introduction, a new collection of essays edited by Gerhard Bowering, which presents a nuanced guide to the many approaches to political life that have evolved during Islam’s almost 1,500-year history. In many ways, this amounts to an entire history of ideas, full of foreign terms and unfamiliar characters, that most Westerners simply aren’t taught. Trying to absorb it can be overwhelming, and the editors of this volume haven’t helped matters by ordering it alphabetically rather than thematically. But their efforts do have one very important merit: They make abundantly clear that Muslims themselves have long grappled with questions about the relationship of religion and politics.

The first issue to contend with is the fact that the Qur’an itself offers few details about what sort of political system Muslims should adopt. Instead, over time, scholars and theologians engaged in a vast collective effort to establish the history of the religion and to define its political principles—much of which is now found in the sunna and hadith—and the precedents established by the initial four rulers of the new polity. The early religious community was forced to adapt to the challenges of ruling over vast swathes of territory, and in doing so they inevitably absorbed ideas and practices from those they conquered and studied. Plato and Aristotle’s idea of a rational philosopher-king as ruler was an important influence, this volume shows, as was the Persian culture of bureaucracy, which allowed the growing Islamic empire to administer its territory.

As the centuries wore on, the burgeoning enterprise of Qur’anic interpretation and Islamic political theorizing generated an entire class of Islamic scholars, who, in turn, set about consolidating their position as the arbiters of religious authority and political power. They did this in part by engaging in increasingly abstract debates that alienated lay believers—and, as routinely happens in all religious traditions, those believers began calling for a return to an “original,” uncorrupted version of the faith, especially in the 20th century. At the same time, literacy rates and communication techniques improved, enabling fundamentalists to spread their message with unprecedented power and speed—which is how the Islamic State and the Taliban today have managed to lay claim, however misguidedly, to “authentic” Islamic imperatives.

But what is “authentic” in Islamic history and interpretation? That’s the subject of Jonathan A.C. Brown’s Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy. Brown expounds on several key moments of debate in Islamic history to illustrate a flexibility and variety of interpretation that is almost always forgotten, ignored, or denied in Western discourse about Islam. Brown can be overly loquacious, but still, Misquoting Muhammad is a book I wish I had the money to buy for all my friends and colleagues, because he presents readers with a guide to Islamic thought that portrays it not as a fixed entity but as a complex product of utterly human machinations.

Consider the case of what is sometimes referred to as the “wife-beating verse” in the Qur’an (4:34). The text seems to support the idea of men beating their wives in the event of disobedience, yet Brown shows how Muslim scholars and followers have often rejected that apparent meaning in favor of one in which affection and mercy are the norm. Where there’s a will, there’s always a way around literalism.

The examples Brown cites in Misquoting Muhammad are instructive: They’re a reminder of the ultimate importance of context. As the anthropologist and scholar of religions Talal Asad has noted, it’s in studying the gradations of belief and interpretation—and the attempts to deny those gradations—that we can begin to understand a religion. Ultimately, Brown teaches a simple, if vital, lesson: Authenticity is elusive in religion, and those who claim it tend not to be searching for the truth but grasping for power.

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/give-me-that-old-time-religion

Why Is China Nationalizing Christianity?

The Diplomat
Zachary Keck
August 12, 2014

Last week China announced it was nationalizing Christianity. What are the motives behind this?

China will redouble its efforts to nationalize Christianity, a senior Chinese official announced on last Thursday.

“The construction of Chinese Christian theology should adapt to China’s national condition and integrate with Chinese culture,” Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, said at a Shanghai forum on the “Sinicization of Christianity,” according to Chinese state media.

Gu Mengfei, deputy secretary-general of the the Three-Self Patriotic Movement — a state-sanctioned umbrella organization for Protestant churches — elaborated on the initiative. “This will encourage more believers to make contributions to the country’s harmonious social progress, cultural prosperity and economic development,” Gu said.

It’s not clear from the report exactly what changes the government plans to make to its policy on Christianity. A crackdown of some sort on Christianity is almost certain, however. The Chinese government already places a number of restrictions on religion. All churches, for example, are required to register with the government. They operate under close government scrutiny, with all legal Protestant churches belonging to the state-sanctioned umbrella organizations, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council, and the Catholic churches belonging to the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.

Through these organizations, both Protestant and Catholic churches in China are already required to practice Christianity with Chinese characteristics, to some degree. For example, Catholics are not allowed to recognize the authority of the Vatican. Meanwhile, as the name implies, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement — which long predates the establishment of the People’s Republic of China — has Chinese nationalism at its core. The Three-Selfs are the three principles of self-support (financial independence from foreigners), self-leadership/governance and self-propagation (indigenous missionary work).

Nonetheless, the officials’ comments last week indicate that the Chinese Communist Party intends to further tighten its grip over Christianity. There are a number of possible targets and motivations for the crackdown.

First, Christianity in general, and Protestantism in particular, has exploded in China in recent years. As The Diplomat has previously noted, China is already estimated to have 58 million Protestants and some believe it will be home to the largest Christian population by 2030. Roughly one half of China’s current Protestants are estimated to belong to underground, illegal churches.

The officials who spoke at the Shanghai forum indicated that this rapid growth was the rationale behind the crackdown. For example, Gao Feng, the president of the China Christian Council, told the audience: “Over the past years, China’s Protestantism has become one of the fastest growing universal churches.” Wang himself noted: “Over the past decades, the Protestant churches in China have developed very quickly with the implementation of the country’s religious policy. In the future, we will continue to boost the development of Christianity in China.”

The growth of religion in China is to be expected given the government’s relaxation of restrictions on it (compared to the Mao era) and the profound socio-economic changes China has undergone since the reform and opening up period began. However, its growth also gives it the potential to act as a unifying force for political opposition to the CCP’s authority. Crucially, Christianity could potentially cut across regional divides in China.

The rapid growth in religion is particularly troubling for the CCP given that its own abandonment of Marxism has created an ideological vacuum. In its place, the CCP has increasingly turned to Chinese nationalism as the ideational complement to economic growth and prosperity. The “Sinicization of Christianity” would be consistent with its drive to push Chinese nationalism.

On the other hand, the campaign could be merely an attempt to crack down on the large network of underground churches in China. As noted above, roughly one half of China’s Protestants are believed to attend these churches. These operate outside CCP control and are therefore of particular concern for the Party. Sinicization could simply mean trying to force underground Christians into the state-sanctioned organizations that already put a Chinese bent on Christianity.

In a related campaign, much attention in China has recently been given to “evil cults,” which are essentially fringe religious groups. The impetus for this was a video that went viral in May in which a woman was beaten to death outside a McDonald’s by a group of individuals who belonged to “Almighty God,” one of the “evil cults.” According to China’s state media, members of the Almighty God cult have been rounded up by the thousands all across China. The Chinese government also published a list of 14 “evil cults” and pledged a crackdown on fringe religious groups in the country.

The Chinese government’s concern about the cults is not entirely unwarranted. Besides their potential for low-level terrorist attacks, fringe religious cults have at times mounted serious challenges to Chinese authorities. The the initial leader of the Taiping Rebellion, for example, was a cult leader claiming to be Jesus Christ’s brother.

It’s worth noting, though, that in discussing the evil cults, China’s state media has at times conflated them with the country’s broader network of underground churches. For instance, the Global Times has warned that “underground churches and evil cults are spreading like mushrooms… the problem is very urgent.”

Finally, it’s quite possible that the drive to nationalize Christianity is aimed at cracking down on foreign religious influences in the country. There is a long, long history of Christian missionaries operating in China. Often times, these organizations did much good in China by building schools and providing social services. However, they have also been the source of immense anger at times from the Chinese public and/or the government. Most notably, the Boxer Rebellion was an anti-Christian and anti-Western mass uprising, which the Qing dynasty sought to exploit to gin up public support. On the other hand, the CCP took the initiative in viciously rooting out all foreign missionaries in China during the decade after the Chinese Civil War ended. It has continued to occasionally accuse underground churches of working on behalf of foreign agents like the United States.

The fact that the Chinese leaders this week discussed the importance of nationalizing the Christian faith suggests that anti-foreign sentiment is part of the motivation behind the campaign. Moreover, as Shannon noted on China Power, recent weeks have seen a number of arrests of foreign Christians running non-governmental organizations near the North Korean border. Reuters even spoke of a “wider sweep of Christian-run NGOs and businesses along the Chinese side of the border with North Korea.”

A potential crackdown on foreign Christians in China would not be occurring in a vacuum. The CCP appears to have launched one of its periodic anti-foreigner campaigns, with a number of multinationals and foreign businesses being targeted and investigated in recent weeks. In this sense, the calls to nationalize Christianity in China may just be one part of a broader campaign aimed at reducing foreign influence in China.

It’s worth noting  that these explanations for the nationalize Christianity campaign are not mutually exclusive, and more than one of them is very possibly at work.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/why-is-china-nationalizing-christianity/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+the-diplomat+(The+Diplomat+RSS)