How Chinese American Christians Use Religion to Frame Racial Injustice

From #BlackLivesMatter to #StopAsianHate

Bibliographic Data

ID2246049
AuthorsBianca Mabute-Louie (Rice University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Publication date2025-07-10
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1069-4404 • E-ISSN: 1759-8818
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/socrel/sraf017
OpenAlexW4412178950
LanguageEN
References cited76

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

Frame (networking) · Injustice · Political science · Sociology · Engineering · Gender Studies · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies