Religion: Communist Domesticity

Christians in Communist China have suffered under an attack as clever as any Iron Curtain persecution and far more systematic than most of the others. Speaking for the Protestants, the Rev. Wallace C. Merwin, onetime Presbyterian missionary in China and now working for the National Council of Churches' Division of Foreign Missions, last week appraised the Communist attack and Christianity's chances for survival.

"The Chinese Communists," he wrote in The Christian Century, "recognize that persecution is not the most effective way to deal with the church." Their method: domestication. "The church, in other words, is permitted to exist only as it is...

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