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

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2002 by Kwai Hang Ng

This study is the result of ethnographic fieldwork completed during a period of 18 months (1997-1998) at the VPCC. All the people I mention in this study have been given pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality. At the beginning of the study, I contacted the church's pastor, Rev. Chung-kee Tang, to make known my intention to come to the church to study as an outsider. (3) I was permitted to become a participant observer of the church. Throughout the period, I made no effort to conceal my identity as a non-believer coming to the church for a sociological study. I attended Sunday services, Bible studies, brother's club meetings, and many of the social gatherings spun off from the church circle. My role as a researcher at first raised some eyebrows among the church members, but after about a month, I found that most people forgot that I was a researcher and began to see me as yet another curious seeker of faith. I share a biographic profile with many of the newcomers visiting the church -- an ethnic Chinese coming t o the United States to study. I speak Mandarin, English, and Cantonese; the first two are the official languages of the church and the third is one of the more popular regional dialects used in the church. On many occasions, I found myself privy to the intimate sharing and interaction among the church members.

Primary data sources for this paper are ethnographic field notes, supplemented by an extensive review of the annual reports, church letters, and denominational statements from 1985-1999. During Sunday services and other larger gatherings, I wrote detailed field notes and quotations. In other more intimate settings, I participated in the events as fully as a curious outsider could and did my best to be open-minded, writing field notes in detail later the same day when I returned home. I did not rely on formal, structured interviews with the church members. (4) By being a participant in a variety of church functions, I found ample opportunities to ask questions in the natural setting of lunch conversations, small group discussions, or direct one-on-one conversations. My conversations covered a wide range of practical topics, from important life decisions like changing jobs or finding a job and applying for a new visa to relatively less important matters like getting a responsible car mechanic or finding the che apest Chinese food market in town. One recurrent theme was the reason(s) why they came to the church and what they thought their faith meant to them. Indeed, I found that most of them were forthcoming, if not enthusiastic, about sharing this with me.

THE CONVERSION NARRATIVE AS CULTURALLY EMBEDDED

I begin the description of my ethnographic site by analyzing the conversion narratives used by the congregants. An important issue regarding the social scientific studies of religious conversion is the objectivity of self-reported data. Can a self-reported account reflect what the person himself or herself has really gone through? Previous studies have been skeptical, suggesting that conversion testimonies are often a reconstruction of subjective experiences based on guidelines and priorities endorsed by the religious group to which the person belongs (cf. Beckford 1978a, 1978b; Snow and Machalek 1984; Zinnbauer and Pargament 1998). Yet the key point for the present analysis is not the individual, subjective experience of religious conversion per se. Throughout the analysis, I work from mainly a Durkheimian ([1912] 1995) perspective that focuses not on individual religious conversion as such, but on the common forms of presentation, or more precisely, re-presentation of religious conversion within a given rel igious community. Conversion narratives are thus a window into the cultural frames, concepts, and values that are cherished by a religions community.