Why the Chinese Communist Party Fears Faith More Than Nuclear Weapons

Why the Chinese Communist Party Fears Faith More Than Nuclear Weapons

Sam Brownback, one of America's most experienced religious freedom diplomats, has made a striking claim: the Chinese Communist Party fears faith more than it fears aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons. That is not rhetorical flourish. It is a policy conclusion drawn from decades of observation—from the architecture of state surveillance in Xinjiang, the systematic dismantling of Tibetan Buddhist institutions, the detention of underground Catholic priests, and the industrial suppression of Falun Gong practitioners.[^1] When a government of that scale organizes so much institutional energy around eliminating religious identity, the implicit message is that religious identity does something the state cannot replicate or neutralize by ordinary means.

The Person the State Cannot Fully Control

The Catholic understanding of the person holds that human beings are not reducible to their social function, economic output, or compliance with external authority. Personhood carries an interior dimension—a relational orientation toward truth and transcendence—that precedes and exceeds whatever political structure surrounds it.[^2] Authoritarian states consistently confirm one testable prediction of this framework: interior formation produces resilience that coercive systems find genuinely threatening.

Brownback's account documents what this looks like in practice. Christians in China have continued to organize, worship, and transmit their faith across generations despite legal prohibition.[^1] Uyghur Muslims have maintained cultural and religious identity under conditions of mass internment that outside observers have compared to cultural genocide.[^3] Tibetan Buddhists have preserved contemplative practice under sustained assault from a state that has asserted legal authority over the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama.[^4] These are not small acts of passive endurance. They represent post-traumatic growth operating at a civilizational scale.

Faith as Infrastructure of the Self

The question worth sitting with is not simply why these communities survive, but how. Religious practice builds something in the person that functions like load-bearing architecture—something that bears weight quietly, invisibly, until the moment it is tested. When the state attempts to remove it, two things become clear: the structure becomes vulnerable, and the very act of trying to dismantle it reveals that something real was there all along, doing essential work.

When Brownback describes Christians tortured for refusing to renounce their faith, or Uyghur families separated to break cultural transmission, or Tibetan monks subjected to re-education programs designed to sever their interior life from institutional religion, he is describing attempts to dismantle the infrastructure of selfhood.[^1] The fact that these attempts frequently fail is data, not just inspiration.

Frankl's observations from the Nazi concentration camps pointed in the same direction: those who survived longest were often those who retained access to a framework of meaning that extended beyond the immediate conditions of suffering.[^5] The communities Brownback documents offer a contemporary, large-scale replication of that finding.

Silence as Complicity

Brownback's central moral argument is that our silence fuels the persecution. The claim is not simply that Western governments should adopt stronger diplomatic postures. The deeper claim is that silence, when one has relevant knowledge and capacity to act, is itself a form of participation in the harm.[^1]

In Catholic moral theology this is the distinction between sins of commission and sins of omission, and the tradition has never regarded the second as trivially less serious.[^6] Beyond theology, moral psychology has documented that repeated disengagement from one's stated values produces fragmentation of identity, erosion of self-trust, and a moral numbing that compromises wellbeing broadly.[^7] Silence about religious persecution is not just a political choice. It is a choice with interior consequences.

What Resilience Actually Requires

Positive psychology has recognized the limits of frameworks focused on individual cognitive or behavioral strategies.[^8] The communities Brownback describes did not survive primarily through personal stress management techniques. They survived through belonging, through transmitted narrative, through shared practice that connected the individual to something larger and older than any single life.

What protects persecuted Christians in China is not merely that they have friends. It is that they participate in a story, a sacramental life, a set of practices, and a community of meaning that frames their suffering not as meaningless affliction but as something that can be witnessed, carried, and eventually redeemed.[^1] Efforts to treat the cognitive, relational, and spiritual dimensions of that as separable tend to miss what is actually doing the protective work.[^8]

The Broader Picture

Brownback served as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom from 2018 to 2021, working directly on cases involving Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners.[^9] The data points are stark. Estimates of Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang internment camps range from one to three million.[^3] Independent tribunals have documented reports of forced organ harvesting targeting Falun Gong practitioners.[^10] Underground Catholic communities operate under legal threat throughout China.[^11] These constitute one of the largest organized suppressions of religious life in the contemporary world.

A Forward Orientation

The story Brownback tells is ultimately not a story of defeat. It is a story of what happens when a regime with enormous coercive capacity confronts something it cannot simply overpower—because the thing it is trying to destroy lives inside persons, inside relationships, inside practice, inside identity formation that resists reduction to function or compliance.

That a nuclear-armed state with the largest surveillance apparatus in human history considers religious faith its most dangerous opponent is a remarkable testimony to what faith is.[^1] Communities that hold together under conditions designed to fracture them are not anomalies. They are evidence, offered at great cost, that the human being oriented toward truth, love, and transcendence is not fully comprehensible by any framework that reduces personhood to survival alone.

References

[^1]: Brownback, S., & Rogers, M. (2024). To try men's souls: The global assault on religious freedom and why it matters. Hachette Books.

[^2]: Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. (2004). Compendium of the social doctrine of the church. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/romancuria/pontificalcouncils/justpeace/documents/rcpcjustpeacedoc20060526compendio-dott-socen.html

[^3]: Zenz, A. (2019). Thoroughly reforming them towards a healthy heart attitude: China's political re-education campaign in Xinjiang. Central Asian Survey, 38(1), 102–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/02634937.2018.1507997

[^4]: Human Rights Watch. (2020). "Eradicating ideological viruses": China's campaign of repression against Xinjiang's Muslims. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/09/09/eradicating-ideological-viruses/chinas-campaign-repression-against-xinjiangs

[^5]: Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press.

[^6]: Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.). (1997). §1868–1869. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM

[^7]: Aquino, A., & Becker, T. E. (2005). I/O psychology and organizational behavior: Considering the value of applied extension of organizational research. In B. M. Staw & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), Research in organizational behavior (Vol. 27, pp. 351–379). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-3085(06)27009-2

[^8]: Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5

[^9]: U.S. Department of State. (2021). Office of International Religious Freedom: Ambassador-at-Large Sam Brownback. U.S. Department of State. https://2017-2021.state.gov/biographies/sam-brownback/index.html

[^10]: China Tribunal. (2019). Independent tribunal into forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China: Final judgment. China Tribunal. https://chinatribunal.com/final-judgement-report/

[^11]: U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. (2023). Annual report 2023: China. USCIRF. https://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/2023-05/China.pdf