Seeking the Christian tutelage: agency and culture in Chinese immigrants' conversion to Christianity

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2002 by Kwai Hang Ng

For different reasons, religion has been regarded as a crucial institutional space both by assimilationists (Gordon 1964; see also Smith 1978) and cultural pluralists (Bankston and Zhou 1996; Mol 1976; Palinkas 1982; Warner 1997, 1998). Assimilationists consider religion the site where core American values are funneled through the socialization of religion. Pluralists, on the other hand, argue that ethnic religions provide the necessary cultural space for immigrants to foster their own identity. They agree, however, that religion is one of the institutional realms wherein values, beliefs, and practices can most powerfully coalesce into a coherent social identity.

Recent studies of immigrants' communities and immigrants' religions have increasingly called into question the once dominant consensus that assimilation and ethnic identification are mutually exclusive processes. Concepts such as "segmented assimilation" (Portes and Zhou 1993), "adhesive pattern of adaptation" (Hurh and Kim 1984), and "adhesive identities" (Yang 1999), have been deployed to demonstrate that assimilation and ethnic identification often take place at one and the same time. While these concepts have served to accurately describe the complex relationship between assimilation and ethnic identification, they do not address specifically the problem of how assimilation and ethnic identification, once considered theoretically contradictory, can take place at one and the same time.

Classic versions of assimilationism (Gordon 1964; Cole and Cole 1954; cf. Newman 1973; Szapocznik and Kurtines 1980) adopt what Herbert Gans calls a "straight-line theory" of acculturation. Assimilationists believe that there is inevitably a linear process of the de-identification of the original ethnic identity when immigrant groups integrate themselves into the American society. Meanwhile, cultural pluralists who argue for the distinctiveness of ethnic culture believe that immigrants and their descendants can retain the core of their ethnic identity amidst the cultural influences they experienced in the host country. As Kim and Hurh (1993) point Out, despite their opposing perspectives, assimilationists and cultural pluralists both share the idea that the struggle between assimilation and ethnic identification is a zero-sum tug-of-war.

The basic objective of this article is to explore the social mechanism through which assimilation and ethnic identification can be conceptualized not as mutually exclusive, but instead as intimately involved. The central argument I will make is that in the process of converting to mainstream religions in the United States, in this case mainline Protestantism, immigrants come to learn the "American way" through a creative deployment of their own cultural categories, symbols, and practices. Agency as the conceptual link allows researchers to see assimilation as well as ethnic identification in a new light -- they are different aspects of the same process of immigrants' social reidentification in their responses to the new environment in the host society. That is, the absorption of American culture does not necessarily imply the eclipse of original ethnic culture. Quite the contrary, assimilation and ethnic identification are two distinct poles of a dialectic process of reidentification that involves creative cultural crisscrossing. The notion of human agency here is understood not as some blanket notion of individual freedom, but like what Emirbayer and Mische (1998:963) suggest, "a temporally embedded process of social engagement" that is informed by the past but also oriented toward the present and the future.

To evaluate the presence of agency in religious conversion, I conducted an ethnographic study of a Chinese immigrant church, looking closely at the process by which new immigrants come to believe in the religion. I investigated the explanations they used to justify their conversion through a close examination of their conversion narratives. What is meant by conversion? Why do immigrants who have never heard of Protestantism before convert? And how do they practice their faith? What do they see as the relationship between their faith and their Chinese identity? And how can our theoretical understanding of conversion be enhanced by a focus on agency?

In what follows, I first review the literature in the sociology of religion, which offers valuable contributions to understanding the role of religion in fostering ethnic identification, but which has also left a lacuna in explaining the significance of convert religions. I then discuss my ethnographic findings, focusing on the immigrants' interpretation of religious conversion, their appropriation of Christian values, and their socialization into American culture. Finally, I will briefly discuss the implications of my study.

EXPLAINING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CONVERT RELIGIONS

Despite a wealth of literature on the role of religion in immigrant communities, the relationship between religion and ethnicity among immigrants who convert to new religions has for a long time been understudied (Warner 1998; Yang 1999). One reason for this, perhaps, has to do with the popular view that religion fosters ethnic identity by serving as a "bridge" between the old world and the new (Williams 1988; Galush 1977; Lucas 1955). Will Herberg, for example, argues that immigrants and their descendants tend to abandon everything of the old country except their traditional religions. The "bridge" theory presupposes that religion is already a part of the ethnic community before migration if it is to be of any visible importance to the community after migration. It is difficult to accord any significance to religions to which immigrants convert after they settle in a new country if one sticks to the explanatory model of religion as a bridge. Such an approach, however, limits our ability to understand the sub tle process of how religions that are nontraditional to the immigrant groups themselves are taken up by ethnic groups like Latino Pentecostals, Korean and Chinese Protestants, and Vietnamese Catholics. In the case of the Chinese, with which this study is concerned, Protestantism, by a wide margin, has surpassed traditional forms of religion like Buddhism and Daoism to become the most practiced institutional religion in the United States, and has been exhibiting a steady pattern of growth since the turn of the last century (Yang 1999).