U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration announced Wednesday that the bibles would be excluded from the categories of Chinese products to which 10% tariffs will be applied from September 1 to December 15.
On the other hand, products such as rosaries and other personal religious items that are imported from China will still be hit by a 10 percent tariffs according to a USTR tariff list just released on Tuesday.
According to Reuters, other products, due to their importance, are also excluded from these categories, such as child safety seats, cranes used in ports and construction, shipping containers and certain types of fish.
Last June, fear spread in the Christian book industry in the United States that tariffs on Chinese goods could affect the availability of religious books, such as Bibles, in the country.
And it is that most of the bibles that are distributed in North American are printed in China, which is the largest bible editor in the world, as reported in 2014 by Christianity Today.
60% of imported religious items come from China, according to Reuters, which states that in May alone, turnover for printed religious texts amounted to $97.7 million.
It is still a strange contradiction that one of the states that most persecutes religious believers in the world is at the same time the largest exporter of religious articles worldwide.
With this measure, President Trump returns to position himself as protector of the “freedom of religion” in the United States and the world.
In fact, the US president, very committed to the protection of religious freedom, received a Falun Gong practitioner in the Oval Office last July in the framework of the Ministerial Meeting to Advance Religious Freedom held at the White House last July.
