Chinese officials and residents in a rural area of Jiangxi province have revealed a government plan to “melt the hard ice” in the hearts of Christians towards communism by denying them pivotal poverty relief packages if they do not replace images of Jesus in their households with photos of President Xi Jinping.

One official stated that the move was necessary because Christians are “ignorant” and need to be taught to worship the state, not God.

The move is the latest in a string of crackdowns against Christianity in the Xi era. Xi’s regime views Christianity, which has experienced a popularity boom in the past decade, as a challenge to the supremacy of the Communist Party’s growing cult of personality around Xi himself.

The South China Morning Post first picked up on the social media posting that revealed the program, noting that the post showed someone replacing their Christian images with Xi Jinping’s official headshot and praised local Communist Party officials for having transformed locals “from believing in religion to believing in the party.”

The social media post tracked efforts in the town of Huangjinbu, in southeastern Jiangxi province. It claimed that up to 600 residents had “voluntarily” replaced their images of Jesus, resulting in 453 new photos of Xi hanging on living room walls.

The Washington Post, which also reported on the post, noted that Communist Party officials in Yugan county in Jiangxi, where Huangjinbu is located, had noted with panic the rapid growth of the region’s Christian population an expressed “a sense of crisis” about it in a regional meeting in October. This new effort may have been a result of brainstorming to solve the problem of more people believing in Jesus than communism.

The South China Morning Post confirmed the efforts with Qi Yan, identified as “chairman of the Huangjinbu people’s congress.”

“Many rural people are ignorant. They think God is their savior. … After our cadres’ work, they’ll realise their mistakes and think: we should no longer rely on Jesus, but on the party for help,” Qi told the newspaper. Some, he added, became Christians due to “illness in the family,” which the communists argue can only be cured through “the Communist Party and General Secretary Xi.”

Qi claimed that the government has only forced individuals to place photos of Xi over their Christian images in “the center of their home,” not their bedrooms or other private areas.

A local resident, which the South China Morning Post identified as “Liu,” stated that many families were forced to remove their images because they would otherwise not receive their poverty relief packages, putting their lives in jeopardy.

Christian persecution has become a hallmark of Xi-era Chinese Communist Party (CPC) rule, both due to Xi’s efforts to amass power and Christian groups’ efforts to spread the word of the Gospels. The former have been more successful than those of Xi’s recent predecessors, and Xi himself became the most powerful (CPC) chairman in modern memory at the party’s congress in October, where the party enshrined his name in the constitution, alongside Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The Washington Post, in their piece on Huangjinbu, notes that some Chinese media have begun referring to Xi as “Great Leader,” a title previously reserved for Mao.

Xi prepared for his elevation at the party congress by severely limiting the mobility of Christian leaders, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). At the time, RFA reported that the party had “slapped a travel ban on a number of Christian believers” in southern China, preventing them from traveling to conferences in Hong Kong where they may speak openly about their persecution. Some, friends and family say, were arrested or simply went missing.

China only formally allows two Christian churches to practice: the Catholic Church and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, a state-controlled Protestant entity. All open Christian worship is heavily regulated and officials control who delivers sermons and what they say during services. Even in more autonomous regions like Hong Kong, the Communist government has exerted its control over Christian events. Hong Kong Christian activist Derek Lam, for example, noted in an August New York Times column that Beijing had begun hijacking Christian youth events to promote “One Belt, One Road,” a communist infrastructure project intended to grant China complete dominance of the Asian economy.

Most Christians in China are estimated not to belong to either of the legal churches, but to worship in underground “house” churches, which are illegal. Researchers have estimated the total Christian population in China to be around 100 million, compared to 85 million members of the CPC.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

The latest episode of The Simpsons compared counselor to President Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway to top Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Sunday’s episode saw Marge Simpson defeat “sexist” Mayor Quimby to become Springfield’s first female mayor. When Marge’s favorability begins to tank, a political advisor convenes a focus group and discovers “throwing” Homer Simpson “under the bus” is the key to boosting Marge’s popularity with voters.

“I’ll be the Kellyanne Conway of this thing!” the political adviser tells her strategists and a room full of focus group participants.

“Kellyanne Conway!” one woman in a focus group says. “I like how she always looks like she just woke up.”

“I think it’s inspiring how now a woman can be Joseph Goebbels,” another woman in the focus group says, while the entire room mumbles in agreement.

Marge Simpson’s mayoral victory party, (FOX, 2017)

Focus group of Springfield residents. (FOX, 2017)

Paul Joseph Goebbels became Adolf Hitler’s minister for public enlightenment and propaganda in 1933. Goebbels spent the next 12 years, during WWII, forcing Jewish artists, filmmakers, musicians, and newspaper editors out of business, producing propaganda films, and showcasing a genocidal Hitler to the public in the most positive fashion possible.

The long-running FOX animated comedy has targeted Trump and his administration officials before. A clip released in April depicted former White House press secretary Sean Spicer hanging from a noose in the White House briefing room, while Conway looked on in horror vowing not to replace him.

In May, Seth MacFarlane’s long-running animated Fox comedy Family Guy used the show’s Emmy mailer to mock Conway’s red-white-and-blue inauguration outfit. In July, The Late Show host Stephen Colbert mocked Conway, calling the senior White House adviser “Satan’s trophy wife.”

Conway, who doesn’t typically shy away from hitting back at her critics, has not responded to the Simpsons episode.

Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson

In a new biography by Keith Koffler, Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon shares his reminiscences about Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, calling the tome one of his six most formative influences, and comparing America’s challenges to those to which our forebearers succumbed.

“I’m not a multiculturalist,” Bannon relates in Bannon: Always the Rebel, explaining:

America has “an underlying culture, that has been passed down from Jerusalem, to Athens, to Rome, to London. It’s the belief in self-reliance, it’s the belief in the self-determination of the individual. It’s freedom to be the traditional family. The culture that is our way of life. I think it’s absolutely vital and important. And we have an obligation to those that came before us as much as we have an obligation to the people in the future to pass that down.”

The Romans, Bannon gleans from Gibbon, “[Are] the people most like us. … They built this great empire and how it all slipped away over time.”

First published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, the Englishman Gibbon’s work is a landmark of historical scholarship, setting the pattern for modern history writing. The Roman Empire was the greatest power the Western world had ever known, and its long shadow still cast noticeably over Gibbon’s enlightenment Europe. His flowery narrative of three centuries of decadence and decline that followed the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius featured prominently in the schooling of ten generations of school children and university students across the English-speaking world. Like much of the classical Western Canon, it began to fall out of favor in the latter twentieth century.

Bannon, a devotee of the work, sees striking parallels in present-day America. Key to Gibbon’s depiction are the steady corrosion of the core virtues, and, while the term was still centuries from being coined, “social capital” of the Roman Empire by mass uncontrolled immigration, decadence among the elite, and the loss of cohesion around societal institutions with the rise of what Arnold Toynbee would describe – 140 years later – as the Empire’s “internal proletariat” of early Christianity.

“You can see that power of Roman virtue, these Roman virtues of manliness, and service to the state. And that’s why everybody in the world wanted a part of that,” Bannon told Koffler of the state of affairs in Rome at its peak.

That virtue, like the civic virtue of “melting pot”-era America, was enough to assimilate controlled immigration – the first waves of barbarians to the Roman citizenship 212 A.D.’s Edict of Caracalla granted them. But those barbarians came, in Gibbon’s view and Bannon’s, to overwhelm the capacity of the society to subsume them, like the unchecked mass of often-illegal third world immigration threatens to do to America today. And that “overrunning” of the Empire’s values at its frontiers was matched by the abandonment of them at its heart, among its elites.

As Koffler relates of his conversation with Bannon: