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.
