Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience

by Carolyn Chen

What does becoming American have to do with becoming religious? Many immigrants become more religious after coming to the United States. Taiwanese are no different. Like many Asian immigrants to the United States, Taiwanese frequently convert to Christianity after immigrating. But Americanization is more than simply a process of Christianization. Most Taiwanese American Buddhists also say they converted only after arriving in the United States even though Buddhism is a part of Taiwan's dominant religion. By examining the experiences of Christian and Buddhist Taiwanese Americans, Getting Saved in America tells "a story of how people become religious by becoming American, and how people become American by becoming religious." Carolyn Chen argues that many Taiwanese immigrants deal with the challenges of becoming American by becoming religious. Based on in-depth interviews with Taiwanese American Christians and Buddhists, and extensive ethnographic fieldwork at a Taiwanes

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

256 pages, Hardcover

First published February 19, 2008

About the author

Carolyn Chen is Associate Professor Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her doctorate in Sociology from UC Berkeley in 2002. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, she was Associate Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she served as Director of the Asian American Studies Program.

Reviews

[Garret Shields · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 - I liked this book. The prose was ore readable and poetic than many academic books. Argument: For Taiwanese immigrants, becoming American involved becoming religious, either Christian or Buddhist.

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Long study of Taiwanese Americans who are either Buddhist or Christian, and the ways they ended up identifying as one or the other after immigrating to the USA. Particularly interesting points are how Taiwanese (and many other immigrant groups) tend to become Christians because the USA is both isolating from a language standpoint as well as job security. It's a survival technique, although it's also related to how Christianity pushes evangelizing. In some neighborhoods, not being in a church group can be the difference between having friends or tips or job opportunities.

What's also interesting is that becoming Christian or Buddhist in the USA, is often in part due to the person viewing the Taiwanese cultural practice of Buddhism as outdated (due to various rituals that one may not believe in, or seeing Taiwanese as backwards). So there's also an implicit, internalized American superiority to people who convert after moving to the USA, *even* when choosing to follow Buddhism.

I imagine this might be a little different for my generation, but it was great to get an insight into my parents' and grandparents' generations and why/how they chose to incorporate Christianity into their lives.

[Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

The United States has a long history of immigration. Many come here for new opportunities and a better lifestyle in a land of freedom. In addition, many come here with their religious beliefs and traditions while other come here and convert to a new religion. Religious conversion and immigration in the U.S is a significant topic in the religious studies field. In Getting Saved in America, Carolyn Chen lets us see how immigration and religion impact the Taiwanese community living in the United States.
The theme of how immigration reconstructs “new communities” and “new selves” (Chen 4) in the United States guides us to Chen’s study on how immigrants from Taiwan either convert into Christianity or identify themselves as Buddhists in an American land. In this book, Chen looks at how immigrants create new foundations of community and moral traditions in the U.S in the aspect of challenges such as changing their moral traditions, adjusting to new American realities, and adjusting to becoming a minority in the U.S. Chen argues that for “Taiwanese immigrants these are the challenges of becoming American and that religion – especially religious conversion – plays a pivotal role in the way they understand, define, and address those challenges” (Chen 4). Furthermore, she argues that religion reconstructs Taiwanese immigrants into Americans and they “offer new moral vocabularies, institutional structures, and ethical traditions,” (Chen 5) that creates a new community, identity, and self in the U.S.
This book is organized into five chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter, Chen looks at the many types of factors that shaped Taiwanese immigration and religious experience in southern California, where she did her field site at two churches (Grace Evangelical and Dharma Light Temple). In chapters two and three, Chen shows us how religious conversion for the Taiwanese offers new self and new communities for them, and how new formed religious practices with roots of other religions such as Buddhism are changed in the U.S. Chapter four talks about how Taiwanese immigrants use religious examples of “authentic selfhood” (Chen 112) to re-shape their new identity in the U.S. In the last chapter, Chen shows us how Buddhism and evangelical Christianity in the U.S offers “salvation ethics” (Chen 147) to organize the lives of those converted. Then in the conclusion, she restates how Taiwanese immigrants become American by becoming religious.
In overall, this book is very informative in giving us information such as personal interviews with actual Taiwanese immigrants to show us their story of conversion and religious experience in the U.S. Carolyn Chen purposely persuaded her arguments in this book. She argued that the challenges of becoming American that Taiwanese immigrant cope with plays an important role in how they define those challenges and she used Mr. Hou’s conversion into Christianity once he migrated into the U.S to show us how he defined those challenges as difficult because “by becoming Christian, [he] not only rejected his inherited religious traditions, he also rejected an accompanying set of social obligation to his family in Taiwan” (Chen 39). Lastly, she argued that religion changed Taiwanese immigrants into American and offer new moral skills. To prove this argument, in her conclusion, she points out that “migration to the United States – the experience of displacement and finding one’s place in a foreign country – draws religious questions to the forefront and opens people to change” (Chen 187). The challenges these immigrants faced made them change. With this, Chen proved her arguments in this book with fieldwork, interviews, and historical research background of Taiwanese immigrants.