Renegotiating Religious Transnationalism: Fractures in Transnational Chinese Evangelicalism

Abstract

This article questions the extent future generations of immigrants will engage with practices of religious transnationalism through its ethnic institutions. I examine how leaders of the next generation of English-speaking Chinese-Canadian evangelicals made sense of their participation in the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism, a movement that rallies behind both pan-Chinese and Chinese elect identities. I argue that the call to religious mobilization grounded on Chinese ethnicity stands on tenuous grounds and propose linguistic, geographical, generational, and ideological fractures as mechanisms on how the Chinese diaspora’s future generations’ participation in ethnically based transnational religious organizations may diminish. I conclude that these developments would push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation.’