In 1807, the first Protestant pastor arrived in China. Robert Morrison was employed as a translator for the British East India Company—the very same company that cultivated opium in Bengal and sold it to millions of Chinese. By day he translated commercial contracts; by night, the Bible. The same empire that sold the drug also sold salvation for the soul.
One of his first converts was Liang Fa, a humble printer from Canton, who, in 1832, wrote a popular pamphlet—a mixture of biblical passages, sermons, and apocalyptic prophecies about the punishment of idolaters. Three years later, a 22-year-old man named Hong Xiuquan received that pamphlet on a street in Canton, where he had gone to take the imperial examinations. In China at that time, passing those exams was the only path for a peasant’s son to become a government official. From 1827 to 1843, Hong failed them four times.
He fell ill and raved for days. He dreamed that he was taken to heaven, that an old man with a golden beard handed him a sword, and that a younger man helped him slay demons. One day he read Liang Fa’s pamphlet and understood: the old man was God; the young man, Jesus Christ; and he, Hong Xiuquan, was Jesus’ younger brother, sent to rid China of demons. In the mountains, he founded the Society of God-Worshippers and managed to win over poor miners, landless peasants, and others in desperate straits.
While Hong was having divine visions, Emperor Daoguang faced a more earthly problem: millions of addicts due to the British’s illegal opium trade. In 1839, China confiscated and destroyed 1,000 metric tons of opium in Canton. London responded with a bombardment, launching the First Opium War in defense of what its propagandists called the free market.
In 1842, China was forced to sign a treaty ceding Hong Kong to England and obligating it to open five ports. A year later, the Chinese government was forced to readmit Protestant preachers.
I do not know if Marx alluded to this story when he wrote in 1844, “Religion is the opium of the people.” In any case, the Second Opium War began in 1856 and confirmed that, along with opium, Protestant missionaries were also legalized by force. From then on, they were able to travel and preach throughout the country under consular protection. For the Chinese, Christianity was not a faith but a clause of surrender.
By then, Hong had already proclaimed the Celestial Kingdom of Great Peace, and in 1853, his armies captured Nanjing—300 kilometers from Shanghai—massacred the Manchu population, and renamed it the Celestial Capital. Once in power, Hong banned opium, alcohol, and prostitution. The Heavenly King, meanwhile, lived in his palace surrounded by dozens of concubines. Purity, as is often the case, was for others.
In 1856, the prophet discovered that his lieutenant, Yang Xiuqing, was speaking with God the Father, so Hong ordered him executed and shut himself away in his palace to write commentaries on the Bible.
The West supported the Christian rebels, but when they failed to guarantee trade privileges, London and Paris chose the emperor they had previously humiliated. In 1860, British and French troops looted and set fire to the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. Two years later, American and British officers Ward and Gordon commanded the defeated Beijing Army against the Christian rebels. The civil war lasted for years and left nearly 30 million dead—more than all the military casualties of World War I.
The Qing Dynasty won the war but did not survive the victory. Nor did the resentment toward the missionaries disappear. It erupted in 1899 with the Boxer Rebellion, during which thousands of Chinese Christians and more than two hundred foreign missionaries were killed. In retaliation, eight powers occupied Beijing in 1900 and imposed on China a reparations payment of 450 million silver taels—one for every inhabitant of the country. The world’s greatest economic power for centuries was reduced to ashes.
When Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic in 1949, there were tens of thousands of foreign missionaries in China. By 1952, almost all had been expelled, some accused of espionage. The remaining churches were forced to sever all ties with the outside world. A total ban was imposed in 1966 with the Cultural Revolution. The churches reopened in 1979, under Deng Xiaoping, subject to strict state control.
A century and a half after Hong Xiuquan, the Chinese state continues to view a religion with foreign allegiances as the seed of treason. The communists did not invent this view; they learned it from history.
In Latin America, the problem was that the dominant religion had ceased to be an unconditional supporter of the ruling power. After the Second Vatican Council, a segment of the Catholic Church began to speak of Liberation Theology’s “option for the poor.” In 1969, the Rockefeller Report commissioned by President Nixon warned that the Latin American Catholic Church was becoming a force for change—even revolutionary change. In 1980, the Santa Fe Document, drafted by advisors to candidate Ronald Reagan, was more direct: it recommended that Washington crush Liberation Theology.
The CIA had experience in the religious sphere. In 1975, during the Senate Church Committee hearings, its director, William Colby, acknowledged that the agency had used missionaries as collaborators. In 1976, following the Senate scandal, the new CIA director, George H. Bush, announced that the agency would stop paying missionaries to preach in poor countries. In Cry of the People (1980), journalist Penny Lernoux documented the Bolivian dictatorship’s so-called “Banzer Plan”—supported by the CIA—to monitor and discredit progressive priests. The same was true in Peru. Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, and Brazil accused the U.S. missionary organization “Summer Institute of Linguistics,” dedicated to translating the Bible into indigenous languages, of being intelligence operatives. They were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
In 1982, a new coup d’état in Guatemala brought General Efraín Ríos Montt to power; he was a pastor at the Church of the Word, founded by the California-based mission Gospel Outreach. Ríos Montt delivered sermons on television every Sunday while his army massacred Mayan villages. Thousands of deaths later, Ronald Reagan visited him in Honduras and declared that the general was the victim of unjust accusations. TV pastor Pat Robertson repeated the same claim in 2013, when Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide. Ten days later, the Constitutional Court overturned the sentence.
In 1970, Protestants in Latin America made up four percent of the population. In 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, they accounted for 19 percent. Today, in many countries, they form electoral blocs capable of deciding elections.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the very Jesus whom Hong proclaimed to be his younger brother continues to warn: “Beware of false prophets, who come dressed as sheep but are wolves.” And he continues to be ignored by his flock of fanatics—“hypocrites who love to pray standing in the synagogues and on street corners, so that everyone can see them…”
Jorge Majfud, October 2026.
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