Persecution of Christians in China “has become the worst since the end of the Cultural Revolution” under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s leadership, Pastor Bob Fu said Friday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

Noting that Xi “already revoked the constitutional limit of his terms” in March by revoking term limits altogether, Fu said that “religious freedom and human rights in general [have] become the worst since the end of the Cultural Revolution” in the 1970s.

“Really, President Xi — or Emperor Xi — has launched wars against the church, against the crosses, against really the children of Sunday schools,” Fu said. “Now we have seen really in the past few months after this new regulation on religious affairs took effect, we have seen a tremendous increase in more persecution.”

Fu also said, “The leaders in different villages are searching home by home for every Christian family to confiscate their Bibles, [and] any Christian signs, including a cross on the wall, would be confiscated.”

In addition, every church pulpit is now asked to install facial recognition cameras so that the pastors’ sermons can be monitored and recorded, and every attendant at the church or mass can be recorded. Estimates of the number of professing Christians in China range from 100 million to 200 million.

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Host Laura Ingraham noted that Chinese Christian advocates say President Xi “has a particular animosity against Christianity” because in “the government, the regime, Communism is the religion in China, and you must not deviate from that.”

Ingraham said that this issue “frankly never gets enough coverage as we talk about our relationship with China, and these businessmen going over there and making all this money in China or sending factories over to China.”

“In my mind, it’s no different from how the Soviet Union treated Christians back in the 1970s, ’60s and into the 1980s, except it’s probably worse in many ways,” Ingraham said.

Fu, the founder and president of China Aid, a nonprofit Christian human rights organization, told Ingraham that she was “exactly right” in her assessment of China’s persecution of Christians and the squelching of religious freedom.

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Authorities also recently banned online sales of Bibles, and “Now, this week, we just learned … that the government has started to shut down the Catholic churches,” Fu said.

“They want this to be complete loyalty to the regime. And this is where Pope Francis has made a critical mistake in working with the Chinese government and allowing the Chinese government to have a say on who gets to be bishop and who doesn’t get to be a bishop,” Ingraham said.

“So now it’s just the Communist bishops. And these Communist fake Catholic bishops end up becoming the official Catholic bishops in China. That’s another problem. And then they’re just going to report everybody who comes to the services.”

Fu agreed, saying, “It’s just so sad … signing this deal allowing the Communist Party to have the nomination power of all the Catholic bishops in China. That is really, I think, nothing but a betrayal of, especially, many persecuted believers in China.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.