Merchants and missionaries: Chinese evangelical networks and the transnational resacralization of European urban spaces

Abstract

This article sheds new light on the diverse modes in which migration and religion intersect in shaping everyday transnational practices by exploring the articulations of religion and business migration in an emerging Chinese-led transnational mission field. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Wenzhou, Rome and Paris, I show how a large group of transnational Chinese merchants has adopted a vigorous homegrown evangelical Christianity as the spiritual and social anchor of their territorial mercantile culture in diaspora. These merchants have actively engaged in producing religious activities and events that link China to Europe and in resacralizing secular real estate and attaching evangelistic meanings to Europe's historic urban spaces. For rural-originated migrants who embrace a global hierarchy of places, the evangelical discursive distinction between the mundane and the transcendent spheres finds expression in their perceived opposition between the peripheral local and the modern global centre in the global market economy.

Beyond migration? Alternative articulations of transnational religious networks

“…In either case they are 'religions in motion' . Cao's (2023) paper in this special issue contributes to understanding how a 'reverse mission' has unfolded among a Chinese merchant group who adopts a home-grown mode of evangelical Christianity to re-enchant Europe's urban spaces. He emphasizes the importance of Christian cosmology and the ways this has been taken up and adapted by Wenzhou merchants in a religious missionary movement from the Global North to the Global South.…”

From cosmopolitan convergences to situated religious cosmopolitanism: The early spread of the Bahá’í Faith in Singapore and Malaya (1950–1975)

“…This theoretical orientation centres migrants within the context of the national imaginary and is the result of methodological nationalism, that is, the tendency to naturalize the nation state within the social sciences (Anderson, 2019, 2006; Sager, 2016; Wimmer & Schiller, 2003). This approach is limited in its ability to shed light on alternative imaginaries and cultural configurations as well as non‐state agents (see Cao this, issue; Dean, this, issue). I go beyond this by situating transnational religious expansion within the debate on alternative cosmopolitanism (van der Veer, 2001).…”