PHILADELPHIA—Pastor Mark Crabtree watched Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Miller Theater on March 10. Mr. Crabtree said that he enjoyed being able to learn about traditional Chinese culture.

According to Shen Yun’s website, China was once known as “the land of the divine,” and its people believed that their culture was a gift from the heavens. However, since the Chinese Communist Party seized power, the close connection the Chinese people had with the divine was severed and replaced with atheist ideologies. Luckily, Shen Yun honors the spiritual elements of traditional Chinese culture in its performance and keeps it alive.

Mr. Crabtree said that he was able to see similarities between his own faith and the spirituality in traditional Chinese culture.

“A lot of what we hear … about China is about communism, and about the totalitarianism and the authoritarianism in it,” Mr. Crabtree said. “There’s almost a fear of it here. But when we bring this (Shen Yun), which is beauty and grace, and people that feel and think, and want peace and love and just coming together as one, just like we do, it builds a bridge between the two cultures.”

“I got the message from this show … that we have to transcend the violence and the evil that’s in the world, and we all have to come together to do what’s better and what’s good for all of mankind—not just for each subset or us individually even, but for us to do what’s best for all of us. And we can only do that if we do it together and not separate pieces working against one another.”

“It’s devastating, it really is,” he said. “It’s devastating that even today, I think in America, we kind of get callous or maybe desensitized to it all, but it needs to be put in our face like that so we can be more aware of what is going on outside of our borders.”

“I think it’s really important for her,” he said. “She got a lot out of it. She’s only six, and she sat through that whole show. She absolutely loved it. She even took it when the communist police were coming after the people. She really did not like the idea of that. Not that it scared her, but she took it to heart … We look at little kids sometimes as, oh, they don’t know any better, but they know better than we do a lot of times. It’s amazing, absolutely.”

“We don’t have enough voices speaking to what this show does as far as … bringing people together and transcending culture, transcending individual desires over what’s best for all of us,” Mr. Crabtree said.

“There’s not enough of it, and so when we can take a show here and have it in a city like Philadelphia or New York, or even in other cities that are across the world such as Paris or London … it’s so important to bring that message all around the world because, again, we’re all made callous and almost unaware of what’s going on outside of our own bubbles.”