Chinas governing party has asked citizens who live in poverty stricken areas of the country to remove images of Jesus Christ and replace them with that of president Xi Jinping or forget about any government intervention.

According to the South China Morning Post, the Communist Party officials told Christians in Yugan county, a rural, impoverished area in southeast China to believe in their party rather than seeing Jesus Christ as their savior.

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The said order follows a plan by the party to “transform believers in religion into believers in the party.”

The South China Morning Post further reports that the order “hearkens back to the era of the personality cult” surrounding the late Communist dictator Mao Zedong, whose portraits were once universally displayed in Chinese homes.

Chairman of the Huangjinbu people’s Congress and the person responsible for the township’s poverty-relief efforts, Qi Yan is reported to have said “Many poor households have plunged into poverty because of illness in the family. Some resorted to believing in Jesus to cure their illnesses. But we tried to tell them that getting ill is a physical thing and that the people who can really help them are the Communist Party and General Secretary Xi.”

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Qi Yan added that “Many rural people are ignorant. They think God is their savior. After our cadres’ work, they’ll realize their mistakes and think: we should no longer rely on Jesus, but on the party for help.”

However, Qi Yan again said “We only asked them to take down [religious] posters in the center of the home,”They can still hang them in other rooms, we won’t interfere with that. What we require is for them not to forget about the party’s kindness at the center of their living rooms.

“They still have the freedom to believe in religion, but in their minds, they should [also] trust our party,” he added.

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Meanwhile, a resident from Yugan county, Liu said “Some families put up gospel couplets on their front doors during the Lunar New Year, some also hang paintings of the cross. But they’ve all been torn down.

“They all have their belief and, of course, they didn’t want to take them down,” he said. “But there is no way out. If they don’t agree to do so, they won’t be given their quota from the poverty-relief fund.”