A Study On The Identity Construction Of Urban Youth-Christians

In recent years, the development of Christianity among the young people in the city attracted the attention of academic and the community. Urban youth, how to transform their identity to be a Christian, and what factors playing a role in the construction process and what is the formation mechanism in the process, and the above is the focus of this thesis.In this thesis, based on located on the long-term participant observation of the religious organization, and also the in-depth interview of eleven young Christians the thesis tries to analyze the mechanism and the way of the construction of Urban Youth Christian identity. This thesis includes the following main contents: urban youth identity and transformation, namely the reason of trusting religion and the way of obtaining legitimacy identity; they confirm and strengthen the identity through the ceremony and ritual interaction; and through combining identity in daily life to consolidate and complete the identity. Through analyzing the process of construction of urban youth identity, this thesis comes to the conclusion: religious factors and non religious factors both play an important role in urban youth's identity construction, but also the identity construction mainly relies on non religious mechanism to complete. It is reflected in following: in the construction of the initial stage, the individual Christian and the desire to build relationships with them is a driver; in the construction of the struggling and suffering stage, among the members of the frequent interaction with other Christians and the communication about the religion become the breach of the identity dilemma. In the climax and completion stages of the construction, they consolidate their Christian identity through applying the identity in their daily life. In addition, the reliance of the identity construction on non-religious mechanism also makes a dilemma in part, that is, the lack of secular mechanism in identity construction may causes a problem, which should be paid attention to. The above is the purpose of this thesis, which is to investigate the city youth identity mechanism in the construction process.