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President Trump’s relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping has yielded a significant victory for religious freedom this week, as Beijing released an imprisoned underground church pastor just two months after the president personally advocated for his freedom. In an era where American leadership is often mocked by the globalist class, this is what effective diplomacy looks like: direct, personal, and results-oriented.
Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, founder of Beijing’s Zion Church, was one of 18 church leaders arrested in what NBC News described as “China’s largest crackdowns on a single religious congregation in decades.” The communist regime had targeted Jin and his church for years, part of Beijing’s broader assault on religious freedom that has seen underground churches demolished, crosses torn down, and believers thrown into prison for the crime of worshipping outside state-controlled institutions. Jin’s case came to the forefront after President Trump, returning from a state visit to Beijing in May, told reporters he had discussed the pastor’s imprisonment with Xi directly.
“He said he’s gonna strongly consider the pastor,” Trump told reporters on his flight back, while also noting that the release of Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai would be much more difficult. That conversation happened in May. By July, Jin was on a plane to Los Angeles, arriving on Independence Day no less, to be reunited with his family. The timing is almost poetic: a pastor freed from communist persecution touching down in the land of the free on the anniversary of that freedom.
The pastor’s family didn’t hesitate to credit the Trump administration for their leadership in securing his release. “We hope this is a signal of a positive turn for people of faith in China and relations between our two nations,” the family said in a statement. Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, now a national security analyst with the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Commission, had fought tirelessly for her father’s freedom, including testifying before a congressional committee last November about the persecution her family faced.
This is what separates Trump’s foreign policy from the failed approaches of the past. Previous administrations talked about human rights while kowtowing to Beijing for trade deals. Trump talks to Xi directly, man to man, and gets results. Is every imprisoned believer in China going to be freed tomorrow? Of course not. Jimmy Lai remains behind bars, serving a 20-year sentence for the crime of publishing a pro-democracy newspaper. But one pastor is free today who wasn’t free yesterday, and that matters. It matters to his family, it matters to his congregation, and it matters as a signal to Beijing that the United States still cares about religious freedom, even if our own domestic elites have forgotten why it matters.
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