The web of voluntary associations: Christian community and civil society in Hong Kong (China)

Scholarship on Christianity in Hong Kong tends to be the domain of theologians, not sociologists. Yet Christianity constitutes a long-standing basis of voluntary association in the former British colony. In this dissertation, I use ethnographic and interview data that I gathered between May 1997 and June 2000, focusing on the membership of four indigenous, faith-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Through analysis of members' conversion accounts, accounts of struggle, and a case study of one public struggle, I argue that middle class Christian religious life within Hong Kong's urban context has become a space for civil society, with Christian affiliation a framework for citizenship.; It has been through church-sponsored activities and church-run schools that many of Hong Kong's young people have established their own relationship to religious community. Moreover, it has been through such community that they have acquired the competencies of self-reflexivity and “voicing out” that play central roles in Christian social engagement. Yet the drive for self-development, as well as tensions between believers and institutionalized religion, has prompted converts to Christianity to move between fellowships, churches and NGOs, bringing with them skills first cultivated as religious novices. Like the multiplicity of group affiliations characteristic of metropolitan life, shifting and diffuse membership characterizes Christian religious life in post-colonial and global Hong Kong. In the end, an expansive notion of community emerges in a Chinese city from the ground up.