John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, wants the many people who are persecuted for practicing their religion in China to know that they are in his thoughts this Christmas.
The Committee has issued this statement by Moolenaar: “As Americans celebrate Christmas this week, I pray that one day the people of China will be able to enjoy freedom of religion…. Right now, the Chinese Communist Party denies citizens the joy of Christmas, forces people of faith to either worship in secret or submit to the state, and jails many religious followers indefinitely. Those persecuted by the CCP today have been courageously steadfast in their faith and they are an inspiration for all those who stand against the Party’s brutal oppression. As Americans, we are blessed to live in a nation that values religious liberty, and in the competition between the United States and the CCP, our nation’s freedoms will be victorious.”
The Committee notes that according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Chinese Communist Party harasses “Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, [and members of] Falun Gong and other religions. Independent experts estimate that between 900,000 and 1.8 million Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and other Muslims have been detained in more than 1,300 concentration camps in Xinjiang.”
Seven years of Bitter Winter
Also this Christmas, Bitter Winter celebrates seven years of publication (“A Christmas Letter from Bitter Winter,” December 24, 2024).
When we started in 2018, we had in mind a magazine dealing with religious liberty issues in China only. It was a niche subject, and we did not expect to have a substantial number of readers. We had a strength, though, our contacts in China and the willingness of several dozens of citizen journalists to risk their liberty to send to us unique stories, pictures, and videos. Some of them indeed went to jail.
Our success went beyond our own expectations. We not only reached 100,000 unique visitors per month and more, but we also became the most quoted source on religious liberty in China in the yearly reports of the U.S. Department of State for several years in a row. We were also routinely quoted by British, Dutch, Italian, and other governmental reports as a believable and authoritative source on China. This is due not to our being smarter than somebody else, but to the bravery and resilience of our correspondents from inside China.
In 2020, Bitter Winter widened its scope to include reporting on the state of religious freedom in other countries as well, publishing “one article on China and one on other countries” every day. “We also decided to often include a Saturday feature article devoted to the visual arts and culture, always connected with religion and spirituality.”
To mark this seventh Christmas since its establishment, Bitter Winter features the Gauguin painting “Te Tamari no Atua” (“The Child of God,” shown above) because, in the view of Massimo Introvigne, editor-in-chief, and Marco Respinti, director-in-charge, it “calls for respect for different religions: Christianity, which some of Gauguin’s anticlerical friends treated with contempt, and Tahitian spirituality, which some missionaries repressed as ‘heathen’ and perhaps demonic.”
