Search Results (6)

The Chinese Christian community occupies an essential position in the pluralistic religious landscape of modern Singapore, which is known as a multicultural and multiracial immigrant society. Despite being a minority compared with Buddhists and Taoists in Singapore, the historical formation and contemporary existence of the Chinese Christian community in Singapore not only embodies religious diversity, but also contributes significantly to Singapore’s social development. This paper zooms into the founding and evolution of the Jubilee Church to see how Chinese Christians contributed to the revolutionary cause, took part in the anti-opium movement, and advanced educational activities in Singapore. Particularly, by establishing the Singapore Reading Room, participating in the founding of the Anti-Opium Society and the Chinese Kindergarten, the Jubilee Church played an important role in Singapore’s history, contributing to the modernization of Singapore in terms of advancing ideas, improving social order, and promoting education. We aim to shed light on how Chinese Christians were engaged in social activities, taking up significant roles in the transformation of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore. More importantly, we argue that these varied social engagements significantly impacted the development of Christianity. Through a detailed historical case study on the Jubilee Church, this paper proposes that social functions and religious evangelization are mutually constitutive, thus complicating our understanding of the entangled relationship among Chinese diaspora, Christianity, and motherland China. Full article

In 1935 the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) accepted its federal mission policy which had racial segregation enshrined in it as a core and divinely sanctioned principle. As the foremost missiologist within South African church circles during the middle half of the 20th Century, Gustav Bernhard Augustus Gerdener was the chief formulator and disseminator of this policy. Convinced that the future fate of South Africa’s multi-racial society rested squarely on evangelisation, white guardianship, and mission work, Gerdener lobbied for secular racial theory to be based on the formula of the DRC mission church. By 1946 this racial theory espoused by Gerdener, as well as the majority DRC, was internationally questioned by the post-World War Two onset of general human rights and rapid decolonialisation spearheaded by the newly constituted United Nations Organisation. This paper sets out to track the influence Gerdener had on the formulation of the DRC mission policy. It will make the case that as advocate of this policy and through his position as chairman of the DRC Federal Mission Council Gerdener played a critical role during the incubation years of the apartheid ideology leading up to the nationalist’s political victory in 1948. Finally, it will aim to elucidate the justification for apartheid which Gerdener’s racial theory afforded to a religious nation. A justification which formed the moral bedrock of South Africa’s opposition to the broader international context of decolonialisation and advocation of a domestic social system guised as one geared toward equal, albeit separate, development but which ultimately proved to be a new strain of colonialism. Full article

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints emerged within the Mauritian landscape in the early 1980s after the arrival of foreign missionary work. With a population of Indian, African, Chinese, French heritage, and other mixed ethnicities, Mauritius celebrates multiculturalism, with many calling it the “rainbow nation”. Religiously, Hinduism dominates the scene on the island, followed by Christianity (with Catholicism as the majority); the small remainder of the population observes Islam or Buddhism. Although Mauritian society equally embraces people from these ethnic groups, it also has historically marginalized communities who represent a “hybrid” of the mentioned demographic groups. This article, based on ethnographic research, explores the experiences of Mauritian Latter-day Saints as they navigate the challenges and implications of membership in Mormonism. Specifically, it focuses on how US-based Mormonism has come to embrace the cultural heritage of people from the various diaspora and how Mauritian Latter-day Saints perceive their own belonging and space-making within an American born religion. This case study presents how the local and intersecting adaptations of language, race, and local leadership within a cosmopolitan society such as Mauritius have led to the partial hybridization of the Church into the hegemony of ethnic communities within Mauritian Latter-day Saint practices. These merging of cultures and world views prompts both positive and challenging religious experiences for Mauritian Church members. This article illustrates the implications and pressures of the Church trying to globalize its faith base while adapting its traditionally Anglocentric approaches to religious practices to multiracial, multicultural cosmopolitan communities such as Mauritius. Full article

U.S. immigration policy over the last 100 years has changed the onus of political acculturation from public programs to private groups like churches. After this significant policy change, how do religion, social capital, and nativity intersect in the political mobilization of racial minorities? Furthermore, after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, the country of origin of immigrants shifted from European countries to Latin America and Asia. Scholars have theorized that churches play a pivotal role in the socialization of immigrants by providing a place of belonging and a community willing to teach newcomers about the goings-on of American political society. How have these acculturation policies worked under new immigration populations? Previous scholarly work has connected social capital with churches, though their relationship to political participation has been minimal. We hypothesize that social capital and religious tradition have a multiplicative effect on the participation rates of believers, but that race mitigates that effect. The positioning of racial groups in broader society impacts the significance and role of churches within these communities. We use Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS) 2016 data to examine the connection between social capital, religion, and political behavior in a novel attempt to systematically identify the unique role of churches in the mobilization of racial minority communities. We use these results to suggest that the current policies of privatizing political acculturation have had less success with more recent waves of immigrants. Full article

The concept of ethnic transcendence—defined as the process of co-formulating a shared religious identity among diverse members that supersedes their racial and ethnic differences through congregational involvement—captures a critical aspect of successfully integrating different racial and ethnic groups into a single, commonly shared, multi-ethnic congregation. Drawing on classic theoretical resources from Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, this paper expands on previous scholarship by conceptually articulating two different paths for the achievement of ethnic transcendence in multiracial congregations. In the first path, ethnic transcendence supports and encourages congregational diversification by inspiring members and mobilizing them to contribute their efforts to accomplish a common religious mission. In the second path, the achievement of ethnic transcendence involves the sublimation of congregational members’ religious selves to an overarching moral collective. Both paths involve privileging religious identities in favor of a particularistic ethnic or racial identity. Moreover, through both paths, the development of congregationally specific religious identities results in joining with co-members of different ethno-racial ancestries as a type of spiritually-derived kinship. Due to the fact that ethnic transcendence is an interactive process, congregational diversity is a bi-directional phenomenon representing the extent to which members allow for the integration of separate ethnicities/races into a common congregation through idealized and richly-symbolic notions of connection and belonging to a congregation. Overall, this paper suggests a heuristic framework that productively expands the concept of ethnic transcendence, allows an approach for observing cross-ethnic/inter-racial organizational processes, and ultimately contributes toward understanding how congregations (whether church, temple, or mosque) pursue alternative identity reconstruction projects to sustain cohesive collective identities. Full article

Since the 1990s, evangelical efforts to create multiracial churches (MRCs) have grown exponentially. This article analyzes the experiences of Asian American evangelical ministers leading MRCs. Through interviews we explore how Asian American evangelicals came to be involved in MRC-ministry and how they approach issues of racial diversity in this context. We compare the racial attitudes of Asian American evangelical ministers leading MRCs with those of White and Black evangelicals delineated in Emerson and Smith’s Divide by Faith. Rather than conform to the colorblind approach of many White evangelicals, the majority of our respondents utilize structural explanations for social inequality and promote a colorconscious approach to diversity. We conclude that Asian American evangelicals utilize a unique framework for MRC-ministry, what we call a ‘racialized multiculturalism,’ that has much to offer American evangelicalism. Full article