Religious Identity And National Identity Interaction

Christianity has grown rapidly among Chinese minority. It is found that they converted to Christianity collectively, and their own culture and religion have been replaced by Christianity culture. They identify themselves as a Christian besides a member of their ethnic group. On the contrary, Korean-Chinese Christians have strong ethnic identity. And they preserved their own tradition well. In addition, most of the scholars devoted themselves to study the ethnic church in ethnic region in the past years. But they ignored the ethnic churches in metropolises. I chose G Church and C Church in Beijing as my fieldwork sites for case study to review the relationship between the ethnic identity and religious identity.I conducted field work and collected the materials by observing and attending diverse collective rituals and interviewing with Korean-Chinese Christians. And I analyzed them with anthropological theories about identity construction.To put this study in a theoretical framework, Chapter 1 reviews the theories of ethnicity, religion, and identity. To situate Beijing Korean-Chinese Church in broader social and historical contexts, in chapter 2 I briefly introduced the history of Korean-Chinese and their Church. Chapter 3 I described the process of constructing a Christian identity. Chapter 4 focused on the ethnic identity of Korean-Chinese Christians. Chapter 5 will review the relationship between the two identities. The last part is my conclusions.The paper believes that the religion identity is very important to Korean-Chinese Christians. They construct their religion identity through internalization the religion and socializing the religion .Korean-Chinese Church has developed a very strong identity of ethnic traditions. Ethnic identity and Religious identity influence each other and strengthen each other. And it is difficult to distringwish these two identities which have been integrated into a person .