How Do Religious and Nonreligious Chinese Immigrants Use Religion to Navigate Ethnicity and Social Integration?

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 8: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race

Abstract

This study examines how contemporary, highly educated first-generation Chinese immigrants in the United States deploy religion, alternative spirituality, and nonreligion to reconstruct their ethnic identities and negotiate social integration. Currently, this demographic occupies a precarious structural position characterized by a dual constraint: a post-pandemic surge in overt racial discrimination, particularly that against Asians, and intense double stigmatization stemming from escalating U.S.-China geopolitical tensions. Scholars who study religion and immigration focus disproportionately on the institutional religion paradigm, positing ethnic congregations as the primary infrastructure for assimilation and social solidarity. However, this framework exhibits significant empirical limitations by ignoring both non-religion and non-institutional religion, a deficit given the religious demography of contemporary Chinese migrants.

To address this gap, this research integrates the sociology of nonreligion and symbolic boundary work. Based on forty in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in Houston, Texas, with a socially diverse sample of secular, spiritual but not religious, and religious Chinese, the study reveals distinct epistemological strategies for navigating transnational unsettlement. Diverging from functionalist views, the secular cohort operationalizes a rational identity and deliberate religious indifference. This constructs a structural firewall that maintains cultural linkages to a secular homeland while resisting assimilation into the racialized religious politics of the host society. Conversely, religious participants utilize a superordinate ontological framework, elevating a sacred master identity to actively downgrade and deconstruct the absolute validity of conflicting secular racial and national categories. Furthermore, the spiritual but not religious group demonstrates complex cultural bricolage. These individuals deploy alternative spiritualities as versatile boundary objects and crucial cultural anchors to reconcile scientific rationality, rationalize their transnational trajectories, and buffer against structural impediments. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that for this highly educated demographic, social and cultural integration is not a straightforward process of institutional incorporation. Instead, identity reconstruction functions as an agentic, micro-political negotiation of stratified worldviews.

Author

• Zikang Hou, Rice University