(End of the American Dream)—For more than a billion people living in China, freedom of religion does not exist. So those that do wish to worship as they please must do it in secret, and if they are discovered the consequences can be extremely severe.
This week, China is in the news because it is suddenly engaged in a massive trade war with the United States. But most of the time, people living in the western world don’t pay much attention to what is really going on inside China, and so very few actually know about the absolutely horrifying things that are being done to Christians by the communist Chinese government.
If you are a Christian that does not live in China, I would recommend avoiding the country for the foreseeable future, because practicing your faith in China could get you arrested. New regulations that just went into effect totally ban foreigners “from preaching, sharing their faith, or establishing religious organizations without official government approval”…
New regulations released this week by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) impose severe restrictions on missionary activity in the country, according to Chinese state media and representatives of the Chinese Communist Party.
The regulations, which take effect May 1, prohibit foreigners from preaching, sharing their faith, or establishing religious organizations without official government approval.
Justifying these regulations, Chinese state media claimed that the newly revised rules promote national security—a common justification for CCP persecution of religion—and help to protect “normal religious activities,” referring to activities run under strict government oversight as part of state-run religious institutions.
This is just the latest attempt to crack down on “unauthorized” religious activity in China.
The Chinese government openly admits that it “intensified efforts to dismantle cult organizations in 2024”…
Earlier this year, the Chinese government issued a report boasting about the increased persecution of independent religious groups in 2024.
“China’s public security authorities intensified efforts to dismantle cult organizations in 2024,” reported the Global Times, a state-run media outlet. “They have worked to curb the growth and spread of cult organizations, mitigating potential threats to national political security and maintaining social stability.”
To the Chinese, any religious organization that is not controlled by the government is considered to be a “cult”.
If you consider yourself to be a Christian in China, you are only legally permitted to attend certain types of state-controlled churches…
The protestant Three Self Church and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association are prominent examples of these state-run institutions. They work to promote CCP propaganda and the personality cult surrounding country President Xi Jinping through songs, sermons, and community events.
Independent house churches, which operate outside the state-sponsored system, are often raided, and their members are arrested on charges of working against the interests of the state.
It has been estimated that there are more than 100 million Christians in China, and independent house churches are extremely popular. But when a house church is discovered, the leaders are often arrested and taken to secret interrogation facilities…
Authorities in China are detaining Christians in secretive, mobile “transformation” facilities to make them renounce their faith, RFA has learned.
A member of a Christian “house church” in the southwestern province of Sichuan who asked to be identified by a pseudonym Li Yuese said he was held in a facility run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s United Front Work Department, working in tandem with the state security police, for 10 months after a raid on his church in 2018.
“It was a mobile facility, that could just set up in some basement somewhere,” Li said. “It was staffed by people from several different government departments.”
Li claims that he was beaten, abused and tortured in a very small windowless room for almost 10 months…
Li said he was held in a windowless room for nearly 10 months, during which time he was beaten, verbally abused and “mentally tortured” by staff, eventually resorting to self-harm by throwing himself against a wall.
His account is chillingly similar to those of former inmates of “transformation” camps in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Ultimately, Li is one of the fortunate ones.
Many Christians that are grabbed by authorities are never seen again.
Chinese officials are hoping to eventually make religion of as little importance as possible in China.
One of the ways that they hope to achieve this is by banning all children from participating in religious activities…
Children under 18 are constitutionally prohibited from having any formal religious affiliation in China. There is also a ban on religious education, including Sunday schools, religious summer camps and other forms of youth religious groups. Schools focus on promoting non-religion and atheism, and many children join CCP-affiliated youth groups, where they must pledge commitment to atheism.
Do you understand what this means?
Every child in China is prohibited by law from setting foot in a church.
That is evil on a level that I don’t even have the words to describe.
We need to understand who we are dealing with.
As they continue to grow in power, the Chinese would love to start imposing their “values” on the entire globe.
Meanwhile, persecution of Christians continues to intensify in areas of the world that are heavily Islamic.
In fact, in some cases it can literally be a death sentence for a Muslim to become a Christian…
A mother of six children was stabbed to death by her Muslim husband in Uganda after she attended her first church service, sources said.
Nasiimu Mirembe, whose children range in age from 3 to 18, had put her faith in Christ on March 21 after hearing the Gospel from a friend in eastern Uganda’s Busembatya town council. She was 41.
She and her friend were on their way to a church service on March 23 when a Muslim neighbor, Awudu Mbulalina, greeted them 218 yards (200 meters) from the worship site and continued on, said the friend, whose name is being withheld for security reasons.
This sort of thing happens all the time in Islamic nations, but we hardly ever hear about it.
Of course things are becoming a lot more uncomfortable for Christians in many western nations as well.
For example, Christians in New South Wales, Australia can now be hit with fines of up to $100,000 simply for praying for a gay or lesbian friend…
Christians in Sydney and throughout the rest of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, could now face five years in prison and fines of up to $100,000 for offering counseling to or praying for “LGBTQA” individuals, even if they say their same-sex attraction or gender confusion is unwanted.
On April 4, legislation known as the Conversion Practices Ban Act 2024 became law, raising alarm among Christians who by merely explaining the Good News of Jesus’ power to heal, the immutable definition of marriage, or timeless truths about the complementarity of man and woman, risk being punished as criminals in NSW.
As such, this is a major step toward criminalizing Christianity and the fullness of the Gospel message in “the land down under.”
Jesus warned us that those that decide to follow Him will be hated.
And we are certainly witnessing that all over the world right now.
But the persecution that is coming in the years ahead will be even worse.
Is that something you are ready to face?
Jesus gave everything for you. Are you prepared to give everything for Him?
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.