Following what appeared to be a glimmer of hope for the release of imprisoned Chinese Pastor Ezra Jin, communist dictator Xi Jinping’s regime expanded its crackdown on Christians over the weekend, raiding a prominent evangelical house church during Sunday worship and detaining dozens of believers.

According to a report from ChinaAid, between 60 and 70 “police officers, SWAT personnel, Domestic Security Protection Unit officers, religious affairs officials, and local government representatives” stormed a hotel conference room in Jiangyou City where the Early Rain Covenant Church (ERCC) was holding a worship service on June 14, shutting it down and detaining 33 worshippers, including two church elders. The ERCC is a house church (unregistered with the government) that has been an ongoing target of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since at least 2018. Wang Yi, ERCC’s founding pastor, was arrested in 2019 over purported charges of “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business operations” and sentenced to nine years in prison.

The 33 congregants were detained for over eight hours, with several pressured into signing “guarantee letters” in order to be released, “though officials allegedly refused to disclose the document’s contents unless individuals first agreed to sign it.” Others were allowed to leave only after being forced to hand over personal information. Elders Wu Wuqing and Yan Hong “were sentenced to 15 and 14 days [of] administrative detention respectively.”

Beijing’s latest operation marks a notable expansion of its crackdown against Christian churches, even after what appeared to be a possible softening in the case of Zion Church founder and head pastor Ezra Jin, who was imprisoned in October along with 16 other Zion pastors and members. Last month, following a summit between President Trump and Xi, the U.S. president told reporters that the Chinese dictator had told him that he was giving “serious consideration” to Jin’s case.

But the hopeful news appeared to be short-lived. Three weeks after Trump’s comment, reports surfaced that Jin’s lawyer, Guisheng Li, had been barred from seeing the embattled pastor, who now “effectively has no contact with the outside world.” Li initially had been able to meet with Jin at least three times, but then the pastor’s case “escalated from the local level to the city level in China.” Li remarked in a video posted on X that “The relevant department of the court did not handle the case according to law.”

Experts like Gordon Chang, who serves as a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, say that the communist regime’s latest crackdown is part of a broad operation to dismantle religious practice in the country.

“China’s regime, especially since 2016 with its campaign to ‘Sinicize’ religion, has intensified its assault on faith,” he told The Washington Stand. “The Communist Party, in reality, is not trying to make religion ‘Chinese’ but trying to eradicate it altogether.”

Chang continued, “The increasing isolation of imprisoned Pastor Ezra Jin and the raid on the Early Rain Covenant Church could have been triggered by something in particular, but it does not really matter. After all, these repressive actions are part of a multi-decade campaign to enforce atheism.”

He further observed that “President Trump deserves credit for raising the confinement of Jin and Jimmy Lai with Xi Jinping. Yes, Xi can make an individual pastor or parishioner suffer, but he is fighting a losing battle with Protestants. There could be 100 million Protestants in China, with about four-fifths of them outside the official Protestant church. In truth, nobody this side of Heaven knows the number of Protestants in China because they are persecuted and therefore many of them hide from the authorities.”

“People in China yearn for faith, and the beneficiaries of this deep yearning are the Protestant congregations, especially the ones that gather in homes out of the sight of officials,” Chang added. “God always wins these battles. Xi should read the Old Testament to see what happens to those who fight Him.”