In a speech given at the International Religious Freedom (IRF) summit in Washington, D.C., recently inaugurated U.S. Vice President JD Vance said that the new Trump administration would redouble its efforts to promote freedom of belief around the world.
Speaking at the the Feb. 5 event, Vance noted that during President Donald Trump’s first term (2017–2021), his administration focused on international religious freedom throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and in China, which is governed by the staunchly atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In Trump’s second term, the administration will be “intent on not just restoring but on expanding the achievements of the first four years,” Vance, who is a convert to Catholicism, said.
His speech ties into the Trump administration’s apparent return to a more direct China policy — pushing back against Beijing’s malign activities that harm the interests of the U.S. and its allies, as well as the Marxist-Leninist ideology of the CCP itself.
Communism denies the existence of divinity and spirit, seeing religion and faith as mere instruments of the ruling class to oppress the masses. In China, the CCP has persecuted believers of all religions for decades, killing millions in the process.
Putting Beijing on notice
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Vance praised the role of Marco Rubio — the former Florida U.S. senator of three terms who is now serving as U.S. Secretary of State — calling him “one of the great living champions of religious liberty across the globe.”
During his time as senator, Rubio backed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was later passed into law, to restrict goods made in China by Uyghur Muslims imprisoned and forced into slave labor.
Last year, he led the creation of the Falun Gong Protection Act, which concerned the popular traditional faith that was practiced by an estimated 100 million Chinese in the 1990s before the CCP came down upon it with a brutal nationwide persecution campaign starting in 1999.
The Act would have addressed the CCP’s alleged mass murder of imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners by organ harvesting, as well as other forms of persecution against the group — including an escalating campaign of transnational repression reportedly ordered by senior Chinese regime leaders to defame and eventually eradicate Falun Gong’s overseas efforts to counter the repression adherents face in their homeland.
- ‘Whoever governs China in the future must restore morality and faith’: Statements From the Tuidang Movement (December 2024)
- US State Department Vows Action Against Communist China’s Persecution of Falun Gong
Recent years have seen the Party step up its atheist indoctrination, intensifying persecution of religious faith and compelling the few CCP-controlled religious bodies it deems legal to revere communism and its leaders ahead of their own teachings.
Morever, the Party has taken elaborate measures to graft a “sinicized Marxism” onto all of Chinese history and culture, portraying the 5,000-year-old civilization as one that was naturally devoid of deep spiritual beliefs.
Vance’s statements that Trump will continue to promote religious freedom come as the Trump administration cuts back massively on federal aid programs, including to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), whose global staff the White House plans to reduce from over 10,000 to a few hundred. USAID boasts an annual budget of $50 billion.
While President Trump has told reporters that “some of the money” that goes to USAID “is well spent,” criticis of the independent U.S. government agency point to its intransparency, such as refusing to answer Congressional questions, as well as funding of irrelevant programs, or those that undermine, rather than advance, America’s foreign policy interests.
State Secretary Rubio is now in charge of USAID.
