Inside The Church of Almighty God: The Most Persecuted Religious Movement in China

Branded as "the new Falun Gong" by local authorities, The Church of Almighty God is the most persecuted religious movement in China today. Thousands of police officers are deployed full time to identify and arrest its members. Hundreds of thousands of its devotees are in jail. Authorities claim, perhaps hyperbolically, that it has some four million members and accuse the group of serious crimes. Yet, the movement continues to grow.

In this ground-breaking study, Massimo Introvigne offers an inside look at this once-elusive movement, sharing interviews with hundreds of members and the Chinese police officers who hunt them down. The story of The Church of Almighty God is one of rapid growth, dramatic persecution, and the struggle of believers to seek asylum in countries around the world. In his telling of the story, Introvigne reconstructs the Church's idiosyncratic theology, centered in the belief that Jesus Christ has returned in our time in the shape of a Chinese woman, worshipped as Almighty God, to eradicate the sinful nature of humans, and that we have entered the third and final time period in the history of humanity: the Age of Kingdom. A major book from one of the world's leading scholars of new religious movements, Inside The Church of Almighty God is a critical addition to the scholarship of Chinese religion.

Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist, is the managing director of CESNUR, the Center for Studies on New Religions, in Torino, Italy, and the author of some 70 books in the fields of new religious movements and religious pluralism. In 2011, he served as the Representative of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for combating racism, xenophobia, and intolerance and discrimination against Christians and members of other religions. From 2012 to 2015 he was the chairperson of the Italian Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.