At a congressional hearing on Feb. 4, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback testified on the global state of religious freedom. He asserted that China continues to aid authoritarian and communist nations worldwide in their quest to suppress religious freedom. “We are seeing something unprecedented, really, right now in the world,” Brownback stated. “There’s an alliance of nations that’s emerged, that sees religious freedom as the greatest internal threat to their dictatorial control. This alliance of communist, authoritarian, [and] totalitarian regimes will literally stop at nothing to control people of faith.”