In early July 2026, Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri was released by Chinese authorities after being detained since October 2025. Pastor Jin is the founder of Beijing’s Zion Church, one of China’s most well known house churches. When he was taken into custody last year, the formal charge issued against him was “illegal use of information networks.”
That phrase deserves a moment’s pause. Pastor Jin was not arrested for preaching heresy, organizing a political movement, or inciting violence. He was arrested for conducting worship online. Zion Church had moved its services to Zoom after authorities forcibly shut down its Beijing premises in 2018. What the congregation understood as faithfully continuing their life together, the Chinese state classified as a criminal act—and the law provided the precise instrument to do so.
This is the reality that a growing body of religious regulation in China has made possible. For those outside China who pray for, support, or seek to understand the church there, this legal dimension deserves careful attention. The pressures facing Chinese Christians are often reported in terms of dramatic events—demolished churches, arrested pastors, confiscated Bibles. These are real and serious. But alongside these visible crackdowns, something more systematic is happening: the law is being used to redefine what Christianity is allowed to be.
Why Legal Language Matters
Laws might seem like background noise compared to lived experience. But in China, law plays a distinctive role. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) encodes something in a regulation, it signals a deliberate, long-term political intention—not a passing campaign. Legal changes in China tell us what the Party intends to achieve over time, because the law functions as an instrument of governance rather than a check on it.
This is a crucial distinction. In most democratic contexts, “rule of law” means an independent legal system that protects citizens from state overreach. In China, the equivalent concept (fazhi, 法治) can equally be read as “rule by law”—law as a tool the Party uses to govern, not a framework that governs the Party.The CCP leads legislation. Its authority is not constrained by law but expressed through it. When Beijing passes regulations on religious affairs, it is not setting limits on what the state may do to religion. It is defining what religion is permitted to be.
Three Legal Patterns Worth Understanding
Since 2019, the Chinese government has introduced several major regulatory measures governing religious life—covering religious groups, Islamic pilgrimage, clergy, religious schools, and internet religious services. Three patterns within these measures are especially significant for understanding Christianity in China.
Churches are being restructured to resemble Party branches.
The 2019 Administrative Measures for Religious Groups require religious organizations to adopt governance structures that closely mirror those of the CCP itself: elected chairs, fixed terms of office, defined reporting lines, and internal “reward and punishment mechanisms.” Religious groups must also regularly organize events to disseminate Party policies and CCP decisions among their members. What sounds administrative in description has significant consequences in practice: a church’s internal life—who leads it, how decisions are made, what is communicated to members—is increasingly shaped not by theological conviction or congregational discernment, but by state organizational logic.
Clergy are being placed under a surveillance-style file system.
The 2021 Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy require authorities to establish and maintain personal dossiers on every registered religious worker, recording not only their credentials but also awards, punishments, and instances of misconduct. This file follows the pastor throughout their career and is used to assess their “trustworthiness.” In 2024, China expanded this system by rolling out a publicly accessible online database of registered clergy. The logic is identical to China’s broader social credit mechanisms: behavior is monitored, recorded, and used to determine who may continue working. A pastor who preaches something officials deem politically incompatible risks not just reprimand but the permanent revocation of their credentials—and the criteria for what counts as a violation are deliberately left vague, maximizing the deterrent effect.
Christian expression online has been systematically closed down.
This is where the case of Pastor Jin becomes most illuminating. Zion Church’s move to online worship after 2018 was not an accident or a technicality—it was a congregation finding a way to keep meeting. But the legal ground was shifting under them. The 2021 Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services already prohibited unauthorized online religious education and broadcasting. Then in September 2025—just weeks before Jin’s arrest—authorities issued a sweeping new Code of Conduct for Religious Clergy on the Internet, banning clergy from livestreaming services, posting sermons on short video platforms, hosting WeChat prayer groups, conducting online religious education with children, or raising funds digitally for any religious purpose. Even AI-generated religious content is prohibited. The timing was not coincidental. Jin’s arrest came one month after these rules took effect. The law was written; then it was enforced.
What “Dereligionization” Means in Practice
Each of these regulatory patterns might be read individually as an administrative inconvenience or a security measure. But the cumulative logic reveals something more fundamental. What these regulations accomplish together is not simply the control of religion—it is the transformation of religion into something else.
The word I want to suggest for this process is dereligionization. It is distinct from two terms already familiar to ChinaSource readers. Persecution targets believers — it is coercive, often violent, and creates martyrs. Sinicization (中国化, Zhongguohua) concerns the cultural form of religion—adapting Christianity to Chinese cultural expression. Dereligionization goes deeper than either. It targets the content of faith: what a church teaches, how it is organized, who can lead it, and what its ultimate authority is.
Consider what the regulations require when taken together. A registered pastor must affirm CCP leadership and socialist values as part of their clerical qualification. Their church’s doctrinal interpretations must be “healthy, civilized, and modern” as defined by the state. Religious schools must dedicate course content to “Xi Jinping Thought,” patriotism, and Chinese culture. A church’s organizational structure must mirror the Party’s. The pastor cannot preach online without a state license. And if they step out of line, their file is updated, and their credentials are at risk.
What remains of Christianity in this framework is something that looks religious from the outside—buildings, services, clergy titles—but has been systematically emptied of its claim to transcendent authority. The church no longer answers primarily to God or to Scripture; structurally and legally, it answers to the Party. The state does not need to ban Christianity outright. It simply needs to ensure that everything Christianity does, teaches, and organizes passes through Party approval—and the law provides the mechanism for exactly that.
This is what makes the charge against Pastor Jin so telling. He was not accused of violence, fraud, or hate speech. He was accused of using the internet without authorization for religious purposes. In the eyes of Chinese law, holding a Zoom church service is now equivalent to “illegal use of information networks.” The act of worship itself has been reclassified as a criminal act—not because of what was said, but because it happened outside state-controlled channels. That is dereligionization in practice.
Why This Matters for Those Outside China
For Christians outside China who care about the church there, understanding this legal dimension changes how we interpret what we hear. A pastor who avoids registration, a congregation meeting in a home, a church refusing to install government cameras—these are not simply acts of political defiance. They are often acts of theological faithfulness: a refusal to allow the legal restructuring of the church to also restructure its faith.
Understanding the law also helps us read official Chinese language more carefully. When state media presents religious regulations as protecting “orderly religious practice” or ensuring religion “adapts to socialist society,” the language sounds reasonable. But it carries a specific legal meaning—one that is not about protecting religion but about subordinating it. The word most frequently used in Chinese religious regulations for the state’s role is guide (导, dǎo). In English, guiding sounds pastoral. In this legal context, it means political direction, enforced by credentialing systems, databases, and criminal charges.
Pastor Ezra Jin was detained for over eight months with his health deteriorating. His congregation, which once gathered openly in Beijing and then quietly on Zoom, is scattered. The law that put him there did not appear overnight. It was built article by article, measure by measure, over several years—each step individually bureaucratic, collectively transformative. Those who want to walk alongside the church in China need to understand not only the suffering it produces, but the architecture that produces it.
The cage is not always made of bars. Sometimes it is made of articles, clauses, and databases—and it has been built very carefully.
