Toward the end of their summit in Beijing this past May, President Donald Trump and Chairman Xi Jinping fielded questions on matters ranging from trade to tech to Taiwan while seated in plush chairs on a gold-and-white embroidered carpet.

At the same time, hundreds of Christians in the United States focused their attention not on the two world leaders in those chairs, but on two other individuals not present: Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of the large underground Zion Church in China, and Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uyghur economist and professor.

Both men have faced the consequences of standing for their distinct faiths under the grip of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Pastor Jin, a Christian, was detained in October 2025 as part of a nationwide crackdown on unregistered “house churches.” Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur Muslim, has been serving a life imprisonment since 2014 after peacefully advocating for his community.

Tohti’s case is emblematic of the growing repression toward ethnic minorities in China. Specifically, Uyghurs, a Turkic people in western China and predominantly Muslim, are an ethnoreligious group that the first Trump administration identified as suffering a genocide.

Indeed, Pastor Jin and Ilham Tohti’s absence in May reminded us of those who are usually missing from these types of rooms on world stages: the persecuted. And across China, which operates as an atheist state and views organized religion as a threat, religious persecution remains severe, with Christians and Uyghurs both highly targeted by authorities in the form of detainments, torture, and disappearances.

“Two empty chairs”

Believers must remember the persecuted in China and remain obedient in our call to prayer and advocacy for those who are suffering.

Converting this calling into an opportunity for action, a small campaign was created: “Two Empty Chairs.”

“Two Empty Chairs” shared the stories of Pastor Jin and Ilham Tohti and asked for prayer and support in a public letter. Nearly 300 people from across 12 states signed that letter to President Trump asking that he raise concerns about religious persecution in China and request the release of these two men. In the case of Pastor Ezra Jin, it worked.

U.S. officials confirmed that President Trump raised Pastor Jin’s case at some point during his meetings with Xi, and in early July, Pastor Jin was released and later reunited with his family in the United States.

A testament to the Baptist distinctive of religious freedom for all, and an initiative of the Everett Center for Global Religious Freedom at Dallas Baptist University, the Two Empty Chairs campaign demonstrated the kind of hope in which individuals are free to hear the gospel and respond without fear of governmental harm.

In this way, “two empty chairs” was and remains symbolic of much more: the numerous prisoners of conscience —pastors, scholars, ordinary people—who are being silenced through detainment, imprisonment, or heavy state surveillance and threats to their lives or the lives of their families for their beliefs. The campaign itself encouraged Christians to pray that those suffering for their convictions in China would not be forgotten, and reflects our own conviction based on Christ’s command to love our neighbor in Luke 10.

The work isn’t done

Of course, religious freedom for all reflects the imago Dei: that all human beings are created with inherent dignity and worth because of their Creator. We thank God that President Trump raised Pastor Jin’s case during the Summit and that, as a result, he was eventually freed.

But we must continue to pray for the release of Ilham Tohti, as well as the thousands of others who remain jailed. We also pray that our political leaders would be reminded of their role to safeguard human dignity as a reflection of our values in foreign policy.

Looking ahead, the next Trump-Xi summit is set to take place in late September, this time in DC. While the attention at that meeting is largely on tariffs, Taiwan, and diplomatic wins, believers around the country will once more leverage it to advocate for the persecuted and to call for the President to again raise Ilham Tohti’s case, and others. Because, in the end, the fanfare around these summits will always come and go and eventually fade. Our prayers, however (“golden bowls full of incense before God” (Rev. 5:8)) will not, and the plight of the persecuted in China will not. Two empty chairs. . . ten empty chairs. . . millions of empty chairs remain in our world. And the church, well, we cannot afford to look away (Galatians 6:2).

Writer’s note: Dallas Baptist University will be hosting Pastor Ezra Jin as a speaker at the Everett Center’s 3^rd annual Global Religious Freedom Gathering, taking place September 28-29.

 

 

Denison Forum