The politics of sacred space in Chinese Christianity

This chapter explores the spatial dynamics and trajectories of contemporary Chinese Christianity with a focus on the high-profile Christian communities in Wenzhou, a place popularly known as “China’s Jerusalem,” and their diaspora in Europe. Drawing on two-decade ethnographic research tracing the journey of Wenzhou Christian merchants and traders in China and across the world, I describe the production of church space by upwardly mobile local lay leaders and transnational merchants, and the recent demolition and removal of Christian crosses as a symbolic site of contested spatial practices. This politics of spatial conquest has also extended to the diaspora where a new mission movement was launched to express and enact these merchants’ ambition to be a “blessing to Europe” through the material process of resacralizing former sacred spaces and places abandoned by Europeans. Current discussion on Chinese Christianity is still dominated by a dichotomous framework that emphasizes state domination and church resistance at the expense of the spatial and cultural dimensions of religious development. I seek to offer an alternative religio-geographical understanding of the transnational rise of Chinese Christianity by engaging with the interaction between Chinese Christians’ interpretations of place and landscape, and their religious experience.

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