A good Communist Party education starts from kindergarten, and it should necessarily include atheism. At the beginning of March, Christian parents from the Longwan District of Wenzhou, Zhejiang, sent to several human rights media pledges they are required to sign to have their children, aged 3 to 6, continue to attend kindergarten.
The documents look genuine, and similar texts have been circulated previously in China.
The document is called a “Kindergarten Family Commitment Not to Believe in Religion” and should be signed by the parents, who should indicate the name of the children.
In the mandatory statement, they promise to educate their children to socialism and atheism.
In another crackdown on religious freedom, local authorities in an eastern Chinese city ordered parents of kindergarteners to sign the pledge that affirms they are not religious.
Guardians of children at schools in Wenzhou, a city in the Zhejiang province, were asked to sign a “pledge form of commitment for family not to hold a religious belief,” according to the human rights group China Aid.
The pledge states that the parents affirm they “do not hold a religious belief, do not participate in any religious activities, and do not propagate and disseminate religion in any locations.” It also makes them affirm “exemplary observance of the [Chinese Communist] Party discipline and the country’s laws and regulations [and to] never join any Falun Gong and other cult organizations.”
Falun Gong, a religious movement founded in China in the 1990s, is openly critical of the Chinese Communist Party.
The parents promise to lead “civilized families” who “do not believe in religion, do not participate in any religious activities, do not teach religion to children.” Parents commit that they and their children will stay away from “Falun Gong of any other xie jiao,” avoid ‘feudal superstition,” and teach kindergarten children faith in science, socialism, and the Chinese Communist Party.
Campaigns for atheism may become more or less visible, but never subsided in China. Xi Jinping himself has repeatedly insisted that scientific atheism is an essential feature of Marxism, and popular culture is mobilized to inculcate this idea. The total prohibition of any religious education for Chinese children is part of these campaigns, and kindergartens are just another agency expected to enforce it.
One preschool teacher anonymously said the local authorities had never gone this far before, ChinaAid reported.
“In the past, the higher-level education department made it compulsory for kindergartens not to be superstitious and not to participate in cult organizations but did not mandate kindergarten children’s families not to believe in religion or participate in any religious activities,” the teacher said.
Pray for the believers of China and their families.
Intentional Faith 