The religious varieties of ethnic presence: a comparison between a Taiwanese immigrant Buddhist temple and an evangelical Christian church

Sociology of Religion, Summer, 2002 by Carolyn Chen

Most immigrants from Taiwan come to America with a weak, if any, sense of religious commitment. While popular religion in Taiwan is a mix of Buddhism, Taoism, and folk religion, it is often deemed superstitious and is not seriously practiced by most immigrants, who tend to come from urban areas. Christians in Taiwan now comprise a mere 2 percent, a figure which is declining, but scholars and religious leaders estimate that 24 percent to 32 percent of the Taiwanese immigrant population in the United States are Christian (Chen 1992; Chao 1995; Dart 1977). Reflecting this difference is the high proportion of Grace members who are converts. About 60 percent of Grace members converted to Christianity in the United States. (13) Similarly, at Dharma Light Temple, approximately the same proportion of the devotees claim to have become "practicing Buddhists" after immigrating to the United States. (14) Both religious communities have a high proportion of first-generation Christians and Buddhists, respectively.

GRACE TAIWANESE CHURCH: SAVING THE WORLD THROUGH EVANGELISM

Theological Orientation: A Mission to Evangelize

Hanging on the church office wall is a map of the world, titled "Status of Global Evangelization," where different regions of the world are color-coded according to the percentage of the population that is Christian. The map is a visible reminder to those at Grace Taiwanese Church of the areas in the world that are still in need of hearing the gospel. Grace flexes its evangelical muscle through an aggressive prosyletizing campaign that has resulted in the planting of over forty Grace Taiwanese Church branches in the United States and abroad in its nearly thirty-year existence.

Like other evangelical congregations in the United States, Grace's evangelical orientation is theologically rooted in Jesus Christ's command for the "Great Commission," calling Christians to spread the Gospel "to the end of the earth" (Roozen et al. 1988; Hunter 1983; Smith 1998). Christians have a duty to proselytize as salvation is offered by God only to those who accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior. Through prosyletization, evangelicals bring salvation to the world. Evangelicals regard social injustices as consequences of individuals' broken relationships with God (Smith 1998; Hunter 1987). The corrective to this problem is reconciling this relationship by making Jesus Christ the head of one's life. This can only be done through conversion, or becoming "born again." As only Christians hold these exclusive keys to salvation their mission to evangelize is ever more critical.

While Jesus Christ's words are certainly to be universally applied, Grace Taiwanese Church practices a selective evangelism as it sees its special mission to evangelize to the Taiwanese and Mandarin-speaking population of the world. And judging from numbers, it seems that Grace Taiwanese Church and other like-minded evangelical Christian organizations have been quite successful in this mission.