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Nominalism: Negotiating ethnicity and Christian identity in contemporary Yunnan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2019

GIDEON ELAZAR
GIDEON ELAZAR*
Affiliation:
Bar Ilan University Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article deals with the convergence of ethnicity and faith in the context of Christian Yunnan. Contemporary Evangelical missionaries working in Yunnan encourage the preservation of ethnic markers while attempting to create a form of ‘pristine faith’: a religiosity that severely limits the role of ethnicity in the construction of identity, emphasizing instead individualism and globalism—processes that may be beneficial for the Chinese state. My discussion here revolves around the distinction made by many Evangelical Christians in China between ‘true’ faith, based on an individual experience of salvation and rebirth, and ‘nominal’ faith, a traditional understanding of religion as an identity that is acquired at birth. Thus, minority Christians whose ancestors converted en masse prior to the 1949 revolution and retain a distinctly ethnic form of religiosity are often labelled ‘nominal’ by contemporary missionaries and converts. In contrast, the latter represent a faith that stems from personal experience and belongs to a global and transnational community, transcending the narrow limits of ethnic culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 5 , September 2019 , pp. 1415 - 1449
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

The information presented in this article is based on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in southwest China among foreign missionaries and local minority and Han Christians. This work was supported by the I-CORE Program of the Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1754/12).

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33 Wang, Interview, Manpo, 1 December 2009.

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