U.S. Senator Katie Britt (R-Montgomery) and U.S. Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Haleyville) both pressed President Donald Trump to put China’s jailed Christians in front of Xi Jinping ahead of Thursday’s meeting in Washington.
Aderholt met this summer with a pastor the Chinese Communist Party had locked up for more than 250 days for what Aderholt called preaching the Gospel. Pastor Ezra Jin is free and back with his family in the United States.
Eight of his Zion Church colleagues are still in Chinese custody.
Britt led a bipartisan letter with U.S. Senators Ted Budd of North Carolina and Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, asking Trump to raise those eight by name — Gao Yingjia, Wang Lin, Yin Huibin, Wang Zhong, Wang Cong, Liu Zhenbin, Lin Shucheng and Wu Qiuyu — along with Pastor Gao Quanfu, his wife Pang Yu and Pastor Tang Bingyi of Light of Zion Church.
China should “unconditionally release all unjustly detained political prisoners imprisoned for exercising their right to freedom of religious belief, and ensure that detainees who have not yet been released are treated humanely,” the senators wrote.
“The United States must stand and speak up for people of faith everywhere in the world and I call for their immediate release,” Aderholt said in a statement this week, calling Trump’s Thursday meeting with Xi “a critical opportunity to address the Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of people of faith.”
Britt advocated for Jin’s release in March and backed a successful push to free 13 Christians persecuted by Nicaragua’s regime. “Those who dedicate their lives to preaching the Gospel and advancing God’s Kingdom should be celebrated, not persecuted,” she said then.
Jin founded Zion Church in Beijing outside China’s state-controlled religious system. It had roughly 1,500 members when authorities shut its sanctuary in 2018, U.S. Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey, co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said at a Sept. 22 hearing. The church kept meeting, spread to nearly 100 sites in 40 cities, and in October 2025 authorities raided it and detained 18 people, Jin among them.
The eight still held face “fraud” and “illegal business operations” charges tied to church offerings and ministry work.
They are in prison for doing what Alabamians do every Sunday without asking anyone’s permission: picking a church, inviting a neighbor and opening a Bible.
The Associated Press reported China freed Jin in early July, weeks after Trump raised his case with Xi in Beijing in May. Even Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin credited Trump for the pastor’s freedom on Sept. 22.
Aderholt, chairman of the House Values Action Team, has pressed Nicaragua to free jailed pastors and condemned attacks on Christians in Nigeria. His appeal also named Uyghur doctor Gulshan Abbas, Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai and Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, calling their detention “an offense against freedom and international human rights.”
Religious liberty rests on a principle bigger than one congregation or one faith: government does not own a person’s conscience.
Families of the eight report malnutrition, extreme temperatures, inadequate medical care and mistreatment, and the lawyers defending them have faced pressure, Smith said.
Jin, testifying through his daughter at the same hearing, said reuniting with his family “and watching the fireworks together on America’s 250th Independence Day felt like a dream.”
“Even as I rejoice and enjoy such freedom and joy with my family, I cannot stop thinking and worrying about my eight fellow church leaders who remain in prison,” he said.
Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.
