China has experienced a surge in Protestantism since the days of Mao, but the government insists that worshipers stay within the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” a state-sponsored protestant organization. This has led many who do not want to register with the state — and give the government control over their religious practices — to turn to unofficial or underground congregations, known as “house churches” because they often meet in people’s homes. The house churches often are made up of people seeking nothing more than quiet places to practice their faith, but at times house church leaders have collided with the state. Mr. Lin was active in the house church movement at the time of his arrest in 2006.
Born in Taiwan, Mr. Lin studied chemical engineering and came to the United States while working for a Taiwan chemical company. He settled in southern California and started his own firm supplying latex gloves for hospitals. According to Alice Lin, his daughter, he had been “anti-religious” but experienced a sudden conversion in the 1990s. “He became really on fire for God,” she recalled. Mr. Lin belonged to the Evangelical Formosan Church of Orange County in Garden Grove, Calif. He was ordained as a lay pastor and was very engaged in grass-roots activity.
He traveled to China frequently. “He had a passion and a belief that China was going to have more Christians than anywhere in the world,” Ms. Lin told us. “There was this hunger, and he had a vision that China was going to become the largest churched nation. At some point it was not going to be hidden and suppressed, that God was going to redeem the leaders of China. He had a vision of building a Christian training center in Beijing.”
Mr. Lin drew inspiration from the legacy of Watchman Nee, a founder of the house church movement in China. Mr. Lin was working to establish the training center in Beijing when Chinese authorities first questioned him in 2006 and barred him from leaving China. He was detained on Aug. 17, 2007, and subsequently charged with fraud. (Chinese authorities commonly use fraud charges, sometimes related to their collection of offerings, to punish leaders of the house church movement.) According to the Dui Hua Foundation, which seeks to win better conditions and release of Chinese religious and political prisoners through dialogue, Mr. Lin pleaded not guilty but was convicted and sentenced in December 2009 to life imprisonment. He appealed, but the sentence was upheld in 2010.
In 2012, the sentence was commuted to 19 years and six months, and further reductions were made since, according to the Dui Hua Foundation. His current prison sentence expires in 2029.
Mr. Lin, now 68 years old, should not spend another day locked up. From prison, he can call his family only twice a month for five minutes each time. He has been deemed a religious prisoner of conscience by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and has been designated as wrongfully detained by the U.S. State Department under the Levinson Act.
Mr. Lin is hardly alone — China holds thousands of political and religious prisoners. It denies basic freedoms of speech, belief and assembly to its people. Mr. Blinken will undoubtedly have a busy agenda when he visits Beijing, but should pause and make time to appeal to China’s leaders to free Mr. Lin. The secretary should have no hesitation telling China’s leaders that Mr. Lin was not engaging in fraud in his effort to worship God outside close state control.
Beliefs and convictions are universal human rights, not a reward to be bestowed or withheld by the Chinese Communist Party and its overweening state.
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