It’s time to fundamentally rethink America’s approach to the Chinese Communist Party: Sam Brownback.

By Probe International

In an interview with Jan Jekielek of American Thought Leaders, Sam Brownback, the former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom, lays it on the line: the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) war on faith is part of its zero-sum civilizational contest with the West.

Western-derived liberalism institutionalizes limits on state power and views faith—spirituality and religious freedom—as the right of each individual: the state does not command the soul. Whereas the CCP, says Brownback, is driven by a worldview that treats independent religious faith as a direct ideological and organizational threat to its monopoly on power, and frames this threat as intertwined with Western influence—making suppression of faith a frontline in its broader contest with Western civilization’s core ideas. 

“We’re created equal in the eyes of God,” says Brownback. “In their system, the masters are better than the people.” There is no higher power or individual dignity granted by God superior to the Party, in other words.

Discussing his new book, China’s War on Faith, which profiles the CCP’s systematic persecution of religious believers and the remarkable resilience of faith under extreme pressure, Brownback highlights three ongoing campaigns waged by the CCP that amount to “genocides.” These include the brutal repression of primarily Muslim Uyghurs; the slaughter of Tibetan Buddhist monks and leaders, as well as the CCP’s attempt to control the selection of the next Dalai Lama in order to eradicate Tibetan Buddhism; and the near-destruction of Falun Gong, which once numbered more than 90 million practitioners in China.

The CCP’s explicit goal, argues Brownback, is to wipe out these groups and their cultures. If the CCP’s campaign of forced organ harvesting and other “diabolical” methods were described as atrocities from the 15th century, they would seem medieval and yet they are happening today, he states.

Brownback’s assessment is urgent and direct: the CCP is an “evil regime” that has killed more of its own people than any other in “the history of mankind,” yet has long been treated as a normal country, he says. The two systems—totalitarian control under the CCP and Western/Judeo-Christian civilization—are fundamentally opposed and inevitably on a collision course. In Brownback’s estimation, this dynamic, combined with the CCP’s advanced digital surveillance and its establishment of a “digital police state,” positions the CCP as the most formidable adversary the West has ever encountered. These tools of control are more powerful than those wielded by any previous dictator and have now been exported to at least 80 countries.

He urges moving beyond pleading or shaming the CCP on human rights to adopting a position of strength, in the same way Ronald Reagan harnessed moral clarity to confront the Soviet Union over its treatment of Jewish refuseniks. Calling on America to stand on its principles of religious freedom—enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that China itself signed—Brownback urges the current administration to side unequivocally with people of faith. His recommendations include inviting persecuted believers to the White House to tell their stories globally and rally world religious leaders. He imagined the Pope standing in Taiwan to declare “Be not afraid,” as John Paul II did in Poland.

Ultimately, Brownback believes China will lose its war on faith, no matter the carnage, because the CCP’s top-down system “sucks the soul out of people.” Systems claiming total authority over man eventually collide with reality’s feedback.