When most Americans think about foreign threats, they picture military confrontation: warships, missiles, cyberattacks on power grids. What they rarely picture is a professor in an American university receiving research funding from a government that persecutes Christians. Or a social media algorithm steering millions of young Americans away from faith and toward nihilism. Or a community group quietly building political influence in a congressional district.

The Chinese Communist Party does not need to fire a single shot to reshape America. It is doing so right now, through education, finance, media, and politics. And most Americans have no idea it is happening.

The CCP’s Strategy Is Not a Secret

The FBI has called the CCP’s influence operations the most significant counterintelligence threat the United States faces. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has documented a systematic campaign that includes:

  • Confucius Institutes on American university campuses, which operated under CCP direction to monitor Chinese students, suppress academic freedom, and shape curriculum. Congress moved to defund them, but many reopened under new names, with the same funders and the same mission.
  • TikTok’s algorithm, which internal research has shown serves different content to American users than to Chinese users, actively suppressing content about Tiananmen Square, Uyghur persecution, and Taiwan while amplifying content that erodes social cohesion.
  • “United Front” organizations, which the CCP uses to build political influence among diaspora communities, local governments, and advocacy groups.
  • Research theft and economic espionage, estimated to cost the American economy $225 to $600 billion annually in stolen intellectual property.

The House Committee’s own investigation concluded: “Federal agencies have succumbed to CCP influence and failed to combat China’s dangerous tactics.”

Why Christian Business Owners Should Pay Attention

The CCP is officially atheist. The Chinese government actively persecutes Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and Falun Gong practitioners. Church buildings are demolished. Pastors are arrested. Bibles are censored. Cross-shaped buildings are retrofitted to remove religious symbolism.

A government that treats faith as an enemy of the state is not a neutral business partner. It is an ideological adversary.

When the CCP funds American universities that produce your future employees and shape cultural narratives, it is not doing so out of goodwill. It is investing in a long-term influence campaign designed to make America more like China: secular, collectivist, and dependent on state power.

When CCP-connected entities gain ownership stakes in American farmland (now approximately 380,000 acres, concentrated near military installations), media companies, and technology firms, they are not making ordinary business investments. They are acquiring leverage.

Three specific pressure points for Christian business owners:

1. Supply chain dependency. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how deeply American businesses depend on Chinese manufacturing for everything from pharmaceuticals to electronics. That dependency gives the CCP real economic leverage over American policy, and over American businesses that cannot easily find alternative suppliers.

2. Financial system penetration. CCP-linked entities have invested heavily in American private equity, hedge funds, and technology startups. Some of those investments flow into funds that American businesses use for capital. Understanding your capital sources matters.

3. Cultural narrative shaping. The ideological environment in which your business operates, the assumptions your employees bring to work, the values your customers hold, is partly shaped by CCP-funded content and influence operations designed to weaken faith, family, and national identity.

The Biblical Framework: Nations and Stewardship

Scripture is not naive about the ambitions of powerful nations. The Old Testament is filled with accounts of foreign powers using trade, intermarriage, and cultural influence to draw Israel away from its covenant identity. The strategy is ancient. Only the tools are new.

Proverbs 22:3 says, “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.”

For the Christian business owner, prudence means understanding the geopolitical environment you operate in, not with paranoia, but with clear eyes. It means asking questions about your supply chains, your capital sources, and the cultural influences shaping your workforce.

Jeremiah 29:7 instructs God’s people to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city” where they find themselves. That is an active posture, not a passive one. It means engaging, building, advocating, and refusing to let the culture drift by default toward outcomes no one voted for.

What You Can Do Right Now

Audit your supply chain. Know where your critical inputs come from. If you are heavily dependent on Chinese manufacturing, begin developing alternative sources now, before a crisis forces the decision under duress.

Stay informed on policy. The legislative response to CCP influence is ongoing. Bills restricting Chinese ownership of American farmland and critical infrastructure, tightening scrutiny of foreign investment in media and technology, and defunding CCP-linked academic programs have all advanced in Congress. Business owners who stay informed can participate in the policy conversation.

Support organizations that are sounding the alarm. The Heritage Foundation, the Committee on the Present Danger: China, and the FBI’s Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program all produce resources for businesses navigating this environment. The Christian Employers Alliance (CEA) advocates specifically for Christian business owners at the federal and state policy levels, including on issues of foreign influence, national security, and economic sovereignty.

Connect with a community of like-minded business owners. Foreign influence campaigns work best when Americans are isolated and uninformed. Community, shared conviction, and clear information are the most effective countermeasures.

America was built on the conviction that a nation under God could govern itself through the consent of the free. That model requires citizens who are actually free: free from economic dependency, free from ideological manipulation, and free to govern themselves according to their own values and faith.

The CCP’s influence campaign is a threat to all three. Christian business owners who understand that, and act on it, are doing more than protecting their businesses. They are defending the foundation.

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