Renegotiating Religious Transnationalism: Fractures in Transnational Chinese Protestantism

This paper questions the extent future generations of immigrants will engage in transnational religious institutions. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork involving observations, interviews, and content analysis, I examine the participation of the leaders of the next generation of Chinese-Canadian evangelicals in a ‘negotiated transnational religious organization’ named the Chinese Coordination Centre of World Evangelism (CCCOWE) Movement. CCCOWE’s documents reveal it advances a notion of the ‘Chinese elect’ grounded on a pan-Chinese identity for global evangelism. I first demonstrate that this ethnically based mission is different from cross-cultural missions in mainstream evangelicalism. I then present how the subjects made sense of the CCCOWE experience at the global CCCOWE congress. I argue the rallying call grounded on Chinese ethnicity for global evangelism stands on tenuous grounds and propose linguistic, geographical, generational, and ideological fractures as salient factors that diminish future generations’ participation in transnational religious organizations. I argue these developments will push ‘negotiated transnational religious networks’ into a state of ‘renegotiation.’