Washington, Feb 6 (IANS) A joint House Foreign Affairs hearing on defending religious freedom delivered a stark warning that authoritarian regimes and extremist violence are accelerating a worldwide crackdown on faith communities, while US policy tools and enforcement mechanisms lag behind the scale of the crisis.

At a hearing titled “Defending Religious Freedom Around the World,” Congressman Christopher Smith said religious liberty — often described as “America’s first freedom” — is deteriorating globally, with “billions of human beings” living under severe restrictions that can lead to “incarceration torture, and execution.”

Citing the Open Doors 2025 World Watch List, Smith said, “More than 380 million Christians suffer high levels of persecution and discrimination for their faith,” adding that “antisemitism is exploding, not just in the Middle East but throughout Western democracies, including in the United States.”

Smith said “brutal dictatorships like China, Russia, Nicaragua, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba” are seeking to suppress faith communities, arguing that such regimes are “terrified of letting their people speak out and to practice their faith.”

Former US ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Sam Brownback told lawmakers that an emerging alliance of authoritarian states now views faith as “the greatest internal threat to their dictatorial control.”

“This alliance of communist authoritarian totalitarian regimes will literally stop at nothing to control people of faith,” Brownback said, urging Congress to see religious freedom not as a peripheral human rights concern but as a strategic security issue.

“If we will look at religious freedom not as some sort of a side humanitarian issue,” he said, “but would see it as a major global security issue… this represents the best tool I believe that we have to go at these regimes.”

Brownback alleged that China is at the center of this repression, saying Beijing has invested “billions of dollars in creating the most sophisticated surveillance technology mankind has ever known by far” and has shared it with other authoritarian governments to help them control religious communities.

A central moment of the hearing came from Grace Jin Drexel, daughter of detained Chinese pastor Ezra Jin, who described what she called the largest crackdown on an independent Christian congregation in China since the Cultural Revolution.

“On October 10, 2025, my father Pastor Ezra Jin was arrested by the Chinese authorities along with 27 other pastors and church leaders from Zion Church,” she said. “Eighteen remain imprisoned today.”

Drexel said many church leaders were detained “in front of their young children” and urged lawmakers to demand the immediate and unconditional release of all detainees.

She said the crackdown is part of a broader campaign under President Xi Jinping to bring all religious life under state control, including forcing churches to install surveillance equipment, removing religious symbols, and replacing them with portraits of Communist Party leaders.

“Sinicization in practice means facial recognition cameras, monitoring who is worshiping, and the government selecting church leaders and dictating theology,” she said.

Drexel also described what she called transnational repression linked to her advocacy, including threats, surveillance, and harassment targeting her family in the United States.

Former US Commission on International Religious Freedom chairman Stephen Schneck warned that the global crisis is closely tied to the retreat of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism, saying religious freedom has increasingly been “subordinated to transactional foregn policy.”

Schneck warned that cuts to foreign assistance programs have weakened support for civil society and religious freedom defenders, undermining US credibility abroad.

–IANS

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