When beliefs cross borders

Above: SMU Assistant Professor Orlando Woods giving a talk on 'Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms: The Politics of Religious Seekhership Amongst Chinese Migrants in Singapore'.

By Sim Shuzhen

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – Religions are almost impossible to contain – as people move from place to place, so do their beliefs, cultures and worldviews. Evangelical movements further accelerate the spread and influence of religions, and in today’s globalised, hyper-connected and social media-fuelled world, religions have gained still greater mobility.

How has the movement of people and beliefs across borders affected religious landscapes, cultures and identities? Scholars explored these questions and others at the ‘Religion On the Move in the Global East’ session at the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion’s inaugural conference, held from 3-5 July 2018 at Singapore Management University (SMU).

Buddhism, nationalism and evangelism

Above: Assistant Professor Huang Weishan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong speaking on how Chinese culture has influenced Han Buddhism.

In her talk, titled ‘Toward a Transnational Buddhist Nationalism: The Sinicisation of Dharma and Buddhist Evangelism’, Assistant Professor Huang Weishan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong examined how Chinese culture has influenced Han Buddhism, and in turn helped increase the international reach of the religion.

This influence of Chinese culture, or sinicisation, can take the form of several narratives, said Professor Huang. For example, monastic narratives – official announcements or communications from temple abbots – may place religious stories in a historical Chinese context, or touch on how the functions of the temple align with secular social functions such as the preservation of Chinese art or architecture.

State-level narratives that touch on “telling the Chinese story in a righteous way” can also validate or provide more legitimacy for temples, said Professor Huang. Through interviews, Professor Huang also documented local government narratives that consider Han Buddhism part of Chinese culture, as opposed to other ‘foreign’ religions. “There is less tension between the government’s policy and Han Buddhism [as compared to other religions],” she said.

At least one abbot has used the emerging discourse of sinicisation – along with social media platforms like WeChat – to position and gain support for international evangelical projects, such as the ‘Hundred Temples For Buddhism Promotion’ initiative to build temples overseas, said Professor Huang. This temple-building initiative has seen considerable success, with donations of land and money from benefactors in countries such as the US, the UK, Hong Kong and Australia.

These trends may indicate a shift towards what Professor Huang called a new transnational religious solidarity and a new transnational Buddhist nationalism – two phenomena her research aims to more deeply understand, she concluded.

A new country, a new religion

It’s not just religious beliefs that cross borders. People, too, are on the move, and migration can bring them in contact with religions they would otherwise not be exposed to in their home countries.

Many migrants from China to Singapore, for example, encounter religion for the first time in their host country; indeed, many Christian groups in Singapore actively target Chinese migrants in their evangelisation efforts, said SMU Assistant Professor Orlando Woods in his talk, titled ‘Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms: The Politics of Religious Seekership Amongst Chinese Migrants in Singapore’.

Having grown up in a system where religion is repressed, migrants who convert to Christianity in Singapore are likely to go through a renegotiation of their values and identities, Professor Woods added. “For many [Chinese], the Chinese identity and Christian identity are mutually exclusive. Bringing them together is problematic and involves various forms of negotiation of difference.”

In work done together with SMU Provost Professor Lily Kong, Professor Woods is exploring how Chinese Christian converts in Singapore reconcile these differences, as well as how their conversion affects their relationships with groups such as other Chinese migrants, Singaporeans, family and friends.

At the beginning of the project, the researchers assumed that religion’s harmonising, inclusive aspects would help to overcome differences and bring people together. “However, what our findings have shown so far is that the opposite is the case,” said Professor Woods. “The [inclusive] teachings of religion are there in Singapore, but they often fail to overcome differences within society, and in many cases actually create new forms of difference and division.”

Conversions and conflicts

After conducting in-depth interviews with Chinese Christian converts in Singapore, Singaporean Christians and Singapore-based Christian clergy, Professor Woods and his team structured their findings in four dialectics: freedom and control, giving and receiving, questioning and authority, and community and identity.

The dialectic of questioning and authority, for example, explores how Chinese migrants, having gone through an extremely secular education system, approach Christianity with a much more analytical attitude and with many critical questions.

This level of scrutiny sometimes rubbed Singaporean Christians the wrong way, said Professor Woods. One Chinese interviewee, for example, recounted causing offence during a bible study when she persisted in questioning the study leader’s views on human evolution; Singaporean Christians, for their part, described Chinese migrants as “demanding” converts. “[Chinese migrants’] Christian peers were ill-equipped to answer these questions in a sufficient way, and so this caused tensions within the community,” said Professor Woods.

Both migration and conversion involve leaving communities and identities behind and forging new ones – ideas the researchers explored in the dialectic of community and identity. Here, too, interviewees reported conflict and division. Some Chinese converts, for example, recounted distancing themselves from non-Christian Chinese friends as they could no longer get along; other converts felt out of place or in a position of ‘in-betweenness’ when they subsequently returned to China, said Professor Woods.

The impact of religion on societal integration and communities is particularly pertinent for Singapore, which in recent years has increasingly relied on Chinese and other migrants to fill various skills gaps in the workforce, added Professor Woods. “The Singapore context is helpful for giving us empirical insights into the process of how these ideas of being Chinese and being Christian are paired together,” he explained.

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