Fractured Lives, Newfound Freedoms? The Dialectics of Religious Seekership among Chinese Migrants in Singapore

ABSTRACT

This article explores the negotiations involved in the process of Chinese migrants converting to Christianity in Singapore. For many Chinese people, migration involves being exposed to religion for the first time, and for some, it involves them converting to Christianity. In Singapore, the conversion of Chinese migrants to Christianity occurs in a context of “shared” Chinese ethnicity, which can provide both bridges and barriers to the formation of Chinese Christian identities and communities. This “shared” ethnicity causes many Christian groups in Singapore to target Chinese migrants in their evangelisation efforts, which can result in migrant and non-migrant Chinese communities being formed and fractured through religion. Drawing on qualitative data, we use four dialectical pairings – freedom and control, giving and receiving, questioning and authority, community and identity – to understand the negotiations and compromises involved in the conversion of Chinese migrants to Christianity. Through these understandings, we show how conversion often involves reconciling different mindsets, practices and expectations in the transition to Christianity for Chinese migrants in Singapore.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• conversion
• Christianity
• Singapore
• China
• community

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Shee Siew Ying for fieldwork assistance.

Notes

1. The “migrant” and “Singaporean” suffixes are used throughout the article to clarify, where necessary, which group is being referred to.

2. While statistics regarding the number of Chinese immigrants in Singapore are not available, Liu (2014) estimates that more than 400,000 Chinese migrants have settled in Singapore since the 1990s.

3. It should be noted that, generally speaking, the incidence of conversion to Christianity remains low among Chinese migrants in Singapore.

4. City Harvest Church is one of Singapore’s largest megachurches, with a congregation of approximately 25,000.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1 grant [grant number 17-C242-SMU-005].