Chinese conversion to evangelical Christianity: the importance of social and cultural contexts

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 1998 by Fenggang Yang

Suffering in wars, social turmoil, political campaigns, and natural disasters, many Chinese were forced into unwilling migration, both physically and spiritually. Many fled from home to strange places, where they had to struggle for life. Paul Tang, born in 1941 in Hunan, recalled the difficulties his family endured in Hong Kong as refugees.

After the Chinese Communists swept the mainland, my father led our family to flee to Hong Kong. But we did not know the local dialect [Cantonese] and customs. After many difficult struggles and great efforts we started to hold on. However, although we settled down physically, my soul could not find anything to rest on. We were lost and did not know what could make life meaningful. Then I met a pastor who introduced the love of Christ to my heart. Only then I began to see that life was interesting and hopeful, thus I committed myself to the Lord and decided to be a pious believer forever.

In this process of unwilling migration, many experienced "chain migration" - running from one strange place to another: they first left home to flee from war, then left the mainland for Taiwan or Hong Kong to flee from the Communists, then came to the United States as refugees, students, or immigrants, and wandered for years before settling down. For some of these unwilling migrants, the experience in the United States further intensified their spiritual needs. Fred Yu was very articulate about the sense of unrootedness resulting from his complex experiences in mainland China, Taiwan, and the US. Born in 1929 in Shandong, Fred was a college student when he fled to Taiwan along with the Kuomintang in 1949. After completing a college education in Taiwan, he came to the US for graduate study. He was baptized in 1959 in Minnesota. During a phone interview he said to me:

Mainland China is our dear homeland, but going back to that home is impossible because of the horrible Communists. Taiwan is not really our home, because we are regarded as waishengren [a person from a 'foreign province,' or mainland-born people]. The Kuomintang was terrible. They took flight from the mainland with little resistance to the Communists. In Taiwan they treated us who were not in the military or government as second-class citizens, whereas native Taiwanese were treated even worse. You see, we dare not go back to the mainland and we are unwilling to go back to Taiwan. We have to seek to plant our roots in the American soil [luodi shenggen]. However, here we have to fight hard battles for civil rights as a racial minority. It is not all that easy.

Because of the hardship of settling down anywhere in the world, some sojourners have a deep sense of homelessness, and consequently seek permanence or eternity in the heavenly world promised by Christianity. On the membership application form there is an item "permanent address." Many members left it blank and quite a number of them wrote down Tianjia (the heavenly home). This answer is not frivolous because many of these people truly have no permanent residence anywhere in this world. "The only permanent home," as one man said, "is in the Kingdom of God."