In their effort to “exert total control” over religion and to “sinicise” Catholic and Protestant Christianity, the authorities have “ordered the removal of crosses from churches [and] replaced images of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary with pictures of President Xi Jinping,” the report said.
The report concluded that “every facet of religious life for Buddhists, Catholics and Protestant Christians, Muslims, and Taoists” was facing pressure to incorporate CCP ideology, and religious elements considered contradictory to the state’s political agenda were being eradicated.
This worked out great for Lenin and Stalin who just skipped the middle step and outlawed the church, then put their statues everywhere
Dictators always do that.
And, not because they’re atheists as the butthurt Christians so often claim.
It’s all about centralized control and not allowing for divided loyalties or spaces for people to gather outside the party’s control.
More often dictators take control of the church and use it for propaganda.
The US has it figured out, give the churches that support you special privilege
And slaughtered a lot of clerical people in the wake. There is a monastry where more than 1000 monks have been murdered under Stalins influence in Mongolia.
Overall tens of thousands of clerical people must have been murdered under Stalin
The Chinese approach is far more effective I fear. The Soviet way worked only with mixed results and was more ideology driven than logical. In Poland, the Catholic Church became a huge factor in the opposition because of that. If religion is deeply rooted in society, controlling and steering religion makes for a powerful tool to control the masses while fighting it automatically makes it a strong opposition force.