“Almighty God,” They Call Her

When I was writing biweekly columns for the Korea Times, I occasionally had to scramble for topics. In November 2019, however, I had one handed to me. I received an e-mail from a lady of Chinese descent living in Seoul. She told me that she and the group to which she belonged had suffered religious persecution, and would I consider doing a story about them? I refused to make any promises, but I agreed to meet her and two others at a local coffee shop the following weekend.

At the appointed time, three nice-looking people—two women and a man—came in. Their names have been forgotten, so I will call them Jennifer, Catherine (sender of the e-mail) and Steve. We settled at a table in the corner of this shop and talked for an hour. They had been in Korea for about a year, having fled their homeland due to repression by the Communist Party of China.

I knew that one of the main tenets in Mao Zedong’s ideology was atheism, and that Christianity is still frowned upon as “foreign.” No less important was that Mao, that shameless ego-tripper, liked the focus to be on him, not Jesus Christ. Catherine and her two friends identified as Christians, but they belonged to a very strange offshoot known as Eastern Lightning (Matthew 24:27: “For as the lightning comes from the east and shines to the west, so also shall the coming of the Son of Man be”). Christianity, a faith to which I adhere, began to splinter long before the Protestant Reformation, so I was willing to listen. What follows is a blending of their words and research I did later.

In 1991, an 18-year-old woman named Yang Xiangbin started visiting house churches—distinct from those authorized and controlled by the Chinese government—and saying she had received revelations from the Holy Spirit. Some people, especially wives of migrant workers, found it all convincing. If nothing else, they derived a measure of emotional catharsis. Along came Zhao Weishan, a man with a history of joining new Christian sects. He supported Yang and was soon describing her as more than a prophet. Indeed, she was the second coming of Jesus! Her writings were collected and published as The Word Appears in the Flesh, which to me seems scarcely different from Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon. There are follow-up holy books, such as Judgment Begins with the House of God, Essential Words from Almighty God and God Has Come. Smith did the same (Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, etc.).

This cult (a term Catherine, Jennifer and Steve strongly refuted) grew, drawing attention from the Chinese media and government. As with Falun Gong, the government finds it threatening and has sought to undermine it or worse. There are so many accusations between the group and the government that I cannot begin to disentangle them. It is said that the Church of Almighty God staged a mass kidnapping in 2002. Their doomsday prediction for 2012, which obviously did not come true, may have caused riots. And a lady named Wu Shuoyan was murdered in a McDonald’s restaurant in Zhaoyuan in 2014 by six people claiming to be CAG proselytizers (two, a man and his daughter, were convicted and executed). The flip side: The Chinese government is alleged to have arrested, imprisoned and tortured thousands of Eastern Lightning followers. Many have emigrated, as had the three I met in the coffee shop.

Sincere and soft-spoken, they answered my questions well and sought to convey their views in a manner that I could grasp. The two ladies in particular spoke English well. In one instance, Steve begged my pardon and spoke to them in rapid-fire Chinese. They wanted to state their religious beliefs and how they had been treated badly at home, as well as in Korea. A sympathetic article in the Korea Times would be most welcome. But the more we talked, the less inclined I was to write it.

My cultural bias must have been obvious, as I kept coming back to Yang. She moved with Zhao (to whom she is said to be married and have a child) to New York’s Chinatown in 2000. She is really the second coming, is she? What does this god-person do there? Does she ride the subway around Manhattan, feed the pigeons in Central Park and keep up with the Knicks during basketball season? Perhaps Yang visits the Guggenheim Art Museum in her spare time. My attitude was not that snarky, but they surely perceived that I took a dim view of the whole thing. They could not bring themselves to say Yang’s name, calling her instead “Almighty God.” Furthermore, she now goes by male pronouns.

The four of us met in that same coffee shop a week later. They told me more of what they believed and why. I was not afraid to state my own views, which conflicted with theirs in ways big and small. I did not doubt that Catherine, Jennifer, Steve and other Eastern Lightning devotees had suffered in China. (As for that murder in the Mickey D’s—who knows?) Not only that, I respected them for holding tightly to what they believed. In the end, however, I had to tell them that I could not write a column on this issue because doing so would serve to validate their claims. While they did not say it, some of their co-religionists would accuse me of being in the thrall of Satan.

They understood, but they asked for one thing. Jennifer implored me not to write anything critical about the Church of Almighty God. Her request seemed reasonable, and I agreed. But two years have passed, and the statute of limitations on that promise has expired.

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