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EASC Lecture: Fenggang Yang, "The Rise of Christianity in Modernizing China and Its Challenge to Sociological Theories"

Fenggang Yang headshot
April 16, 2024
2:20 pm - 3:40 pm
Zoom (Registration Required)

The East Asian Studies Center presents:

"The Rise of Christianity in Modernizing China and Its Challenge to Sociological Theories"

Fenggang Yang
Purdue University

Abstract: The rise of Christianity in China is one of the biggest stories of religious change in the modern world. The significance of this transformation is not only due to its massive scale—millions of Chinese people have converted to Christianity every year since the 1970s—but also because the growth of Christianity has happened against many odds. Scholars in the East and West have commonly followed the secularization paradigm, which would expect religion to decline along with modernization (see Warner 1993). But secularization theories fail to explain the surprising rise of Christianity in rapidly modernizing China. This talk will discuss modern mass conversions to Christianity in China and then examine some of the social, cultural, and political factors in favor or disfavor of Christian growth. Download the PDF flyer here. 

Fenggang Yang is Professor of Sociology and Founder and Director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University