I’m having a religious experience

I went to church yesterday.  Now, that might not sound like a big deal to you, but when you’re living in a Communist country, going to church is a big deal.  First of all, you can’t run a Google search for the local neighborhood church.  Internet searches for churches are blocked by the Great Firewall.  Instead, I emailed my pastor back in California and asked him to look up a church for me.  (Muchas gracias, Pastor!)  This is what he sent me:

If you look way on the bottom, it gives the address of the Shanghai SDA Church as well as the Jian SDA Church, and then it mentions that the Jian Church had been evicted by the government.  Great.  This article was from February 2009, so I was worried about the status of the Shanghai SDA Church in Pudong.  Regardless, I decided to give it a try and go to church on Sabbath.

The Shanghai SDA Church is located across the street from People’s Park.  The Shanghai Church rents the Moore Catholic Church on Saturdays to hold worship.  Next to the Moore Catholic Church is a ginormous, 7-story shopping mall.  It is HUGE.  Thus, the entire block where the church is located is crowded, crowded, crowded.

I walked into Moore Catholic Church and I first noticed that there are tour groups everywhere.  Being the first Catholic church to be built in Shanghai in the late 1800s, many foreigners come visit this landmark.  With so many people milling around, I couldn’t tell if there was actually church service going on.  Luckily, after finding an usher who spoke English, I learned that church service was going on.  I walked inside the sanctuary and it was SO LOUD!!  The pastor was preaching in Chinese via microphone, as the English translator was simultaneously translating via microphone, AND the tour guides were also giving tours via microphone.  It was really hard to hear anything.

After the service, I spoke to a few of the members, and they were all really nice and friendly.  They mentioned that they had not yet been evicted by the government from the church building, mostly because of the World Expo currently being held in Shanghai.  With so many foreigners everywhere in the country, the Chinese government has been lenient on the Shanghai church and has allowed the church to openly worship without any fear of persecution.  However, once the Expo is over in October, the church members fear that they will also be evicted and may need to return to holding worship service in secret.

It is so easy to take life in the US for granted.  I know that I certainly did.  Even now, I know that as an American citizen, I have more protections here in China than any Chinese person does.  I can honestly rely on my nationality to protect my civil liberties anywhere in the world.

One of the things that I noticed here is how all the locals repeatedly say how great China is and how great the Chinese government is.  They look down on us Americans because we openly criticize our government and our government leaders.  Just because someone tells you over and over again that their country is great does not make the country great.  This is a concept foreign to many Chinese.*  They truly believe that America must be awful because so many Americans talk about how awful the American government is.  What many people fail to see is that we are privileged to have a government that allows us to have civil liberties, which includes the right to openly criticize our government.

There are so many talk show hosts and other individuals in the American press who spew out such ugly things about American politics.  Ironically, Fox News is not banned by the Great Firewall. Darn.  So many of these people are extreme simply because they can be extreme.  Or they do it because they are just really obnoxious (Ahem, Glenn Beck and crazy Tea Party-ers).  To those who criticize the current American government as socialist or communist, come live in China or Syria or Cuba.  Until you actually live in such a country, you cannot say such things.

While I’m not a proponent of curbing First Amendment speech rights, perhaps we should be a little more thoughtful in how we present ourselves to the rest of the world.  Perhaps, we should compliment our country as much as we criticize our country.  Maybe not, but it’s just a thought.

*By Chinese, I am referring to local Chinese citizens, not simply those of Chinese descent.