China Bans Massive House Church after They Refused to Install Surveillance Cameras Inside the Church

China has banned the house church Zion, a 1500-member congregation, after they refused to install surveillance cameras in their church. China threatened to close down the church if they did not comply and have now come through on their threat.

According to Christianity Today, even though the church had been able to gather without registering for some time, the Chinese government claimed that the church was banned because without registering first, its gatherings were illegal.

The Chinese government also confiscated what it called “illegal promotional material” from the church, Reuters reports. It is unknown what the “illegal” material consisted of, but one guess is it was mostly Bibles and church literature. This happened despite the country’s constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to churches. Reportedly, Xi Jinping, who took office 8 years ago, began completely disregarding this right in China’s constitution and began shutting down churches left and right and persecuting religious minorities.

However, religious asylum seekers who founded The Epoch Times have long reported on the Chinese affronts to any religion that doesn’t worship the state and its leaders. The paper cited the Tiananmen Square massacre, where China famously slaughtered religious adherents to a different form of Buddhism from the official, government-sanctioned versions.

In recent…