Xi Jinping Is At War With God. President Trump Has Shown He Can Win Some Of The Battles.

Xi Jinping received a red-carpet welcome at the White House this week. Pastor John Cao is in Changsha with stage 4 cancer in his bones, and Xi’s regime won’t give him a passport.

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That contrast tells you most of what you need to know about the man across the table from President Trump.

Pastor Cao is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. His wife and two sons live in North Carolina. He has a grandson he has never held. He spent seven years in a Chinese prison for his ministry and finished that sentence in March 2024. He has been trapped in China ever since. He has applied for a passport five times, and Beijing has said no five times. No law is keeping him there. Cruelty is, and so is Beijing’s wish for leverage. Xi Jinping should release Pastor Cao now and let him come home to his family.

China’s regime has declared war on God, and that is its policy, not a figure of speech.

Under Xi, the Communist Party has pulled hundreds of crosses off churches. It has banned unlicensed preaching online, put clergy through loyalty tests and on a national registry, and ordered that the faith be “sinicized,” meaning rewritten to serve the Party. In October 2025, authorities began the largest crackdown on house churches in decades. They took Pastor Ezra Jin of Beijing’s Zion Church from his home in Guangxi and detained 27 more of the church’s pastors and members across the country. In Xi’an a few months earlier, police arrested Pastor Gao Quanfu of the Light of Zion Church, then his wife, Pang Yu. They were charged with “using superstition to undermine law enforcement.” Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church is still serving a nine-year sentence.

Why? The Party cannot tolerate any loyalty higher than loyalty to the Party. By some estimates, China now has more Christians than Communist Party members. Xi sees every one of them as a threat, and he’s right to worry. Faith is the only thing the Party cannot own.

President Trump deserves credit for getting Pastor Ezra Jin released. At the Beijing summit in May, he raised Pastor Jin’s case with Xi directly. It wasn’t on the formal agenda until he put it there. Less than two months later, Pastor Jin landed in Los Angeles and was back with his family. “A China without religious freedom is a China we cannot accept,” he told supporters on Capitol Hill after he was freed.

We saw this fight up close. In March, at CPAC in Grapevine, Texas, Pastor Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, stood before our audience and spoke for her father. She also spoke for every believer the Party has locked away. It was one of the most inspiring moments we have seen on the CPAC stage. By summer, her father was free. Presidents rarely see the difference their words make so plainly. This president did.

To be clear about what happened, Xi did not free Pastor Jin because he had a change of heart. He freed him because he wanted something: a smoother summit, a softer tone, more time on trade. Beijing trades in people. It releases one prisoner and keeps many more. Eight of Pastor Jin’s Zion Church colleagues are still behind bars: Pastors Gao Yingjia, Wang Lin, Yin Huibin, Lin Shucheng, Liu Zhenbin and Wang Cong, Elder Wang Zhong, and Wu Qiuyu.

That is why CPAC led a coalition in writing to the president this week. The coalition includes Grace Jin Drexel and more than a dozen other faith leaders. The letter asks the president to seek freedom for 50 people in China who are imprisoned or otherwise kept from living freely because of their faith. For each one, it asks for release in China, permission to come to America where appropriate, or safe passage to a third country. Pastor Cao comes first.

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The president has the relationship with Xi and the record on this issue to make change for religious prisoners in China. President Trump can convince Xi to take action and help those who are in prison simply for practicing their Christian faith.

Religious freedom is at the core of American values. It is intentionally the first freedom named in the Bill of Rights, and it is why so many came to this country in the first place. President Trump is making it a priority.

Xi brought smiles and trade promises. He talked about “strategic stability.” He did not talk about the pastors in his cells. That is his choice, and it should not be ours.

Americans remember who stood with the persecuted. President Ronald Reagan kept pressing Mikhail Gorbachev about Soviet dissidents and refuseniks, even in Moscow, while he negotiated with the Kremlin. He understood that a regime that jails people for praying cannot be trusted on anything else.

The list has 50 names. Start with a dying pastor who just wants to go home to America.

Gordon G. Chang is director of the CPAC Center for Defeating Communism, a CPAC board member, and author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America.”

Matt Schlapp is chairman of CPAC, former White House Political Director, and co-author of “The Desecrators: Defeating the Cancel Culture Mob and Reclaiming One Nation Under God.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.

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