How Chinese American Christians Use Religion to Frame Racial Injustice: From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which religion shapes the racial attitudes of Chinese American evangelical Christians, particularly regarding anti-Black and anti-Asian racism. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 30 Chinese American evangelicals from a Chinese evangelical church in Houston conducted between August 2021 and February 2022, I find that respondents combine dominant evangelical religious frames on race with East Asian spiritual discourse, transnational contexts, social movements, and experiences of racial discrimination to explain and respond to racial injustice through three major approaches: antistructural liyi narrative, racial structural narrative, and transnational structural narrative. While some narratives demotivate responses to and discussions of racial injustice, other narratives engender curiosity about structural racism with potential for interracial solidarity. This article fills empirical and theoretical gaps, bridges the literature on race and immigration, moves the scholarship on race and religion beyond the Black and White binary, and extends the understandings of racialized religion.