Browsing by Author "Mabute-Louie, Bianca H"

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    How Chinese Americans Use Religion to Frame Racial Injustice: From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate
    (2022-04-19) Mabute-Louie, Bianca H; Ecklund, Elaine H
    This thesis examines how religion connects to the racial attitudes of Chinese American evangelical Christians. With the growing prominence of evangelicalism among Chinese Americans, many of whom are immigrants and attend ethnic churches, there is a gap in understanding how immigrant and ethnic church contexts shape racial attitudes. Utilizing a multilingual and multigenerational Chinese evangelical Christian church as the site of study, this project interrogates how the increasing proportion of Chinese American evangelicals use religion to explain racial injustice and respond to racial justice movements. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 30 first- and second-generation Chinese American evangelicals from First Chinese Church of Houston (FCCH) conducted between August 2021 through February 2022, I find that Chinese American evangelicals combine dominant evangelical religious frames on race with distinct cultural values, transnational contexts, and experiences of racial discrimination to explain and respond to racial injustice through two major approaches: an anti-structural Confucian approach and a transnational structural approach. These approaches are not binary categories, but represent the dominant religio-cultural toolkits that respondents draw upon to explain and respond to racial injustice. At times, Chinese American evangelicals employ mixed explanatory modes from both approaches. The findings reveal the ongoing salience of race, ethnicity, and the immigrant ethnic church in shaping the racial attitudes of first- and second-generation Chinese American evangelicals. This project bridges the literature on race and immigration, while moving the scholarship on race and religion beyond the Black and White binary.