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Chesterton House Presents:
The Rise of Christianity in Modernizing China
And its Challenges to Sociological Theories
April 11th, 2024
7pm – 8:30pm ET
Reception to follow
Physical Sciences Building 120
or remotely via Zoom (Registration Required)
Does Christianity have a chance of surviving the age of modernization? The rise of Christianity in China is one of the biggest stories of religious change in the modern era. According to the dominant secularization paradigm, Christianity and other organized religions should be shrinking in modernized countries like China. But today China is proving this paradigm to be wrong. Purdue University Professor Fenggang Yang is an expert in the sociology of religion in the Global East and has studied these trends for many decades. He argues that, while this growth might be unexpected, it is not historically unprecedented for Christianity to flourish in the soil of opposition. Join us as Professor Yang highlights the challenges this poses for widely accepted sociological theories.
Co-Sponsored by Cornell Levinson Program in China and Asia-Pacific Studies
Fenggang Yang; Professor of Sociology & Director of Center on Religion and the Global East; Purdue University
Fenggang Yang is Professor of Sociology, the founding Director of the Center on Religion and the Global East at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He is the founding Editor of the Review of Religion and Chinese Society. He has been elected and served as the President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (2014-15) and the first President of the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (2018-2020). His research focuses on the sociology of religion, religious change in China and immigrant religion in the United States. He is the author of Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographical Contexts (2018), Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (2012), and Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (1999), and the co-editor of more than ten books. Among his numerous journal articles, two won distinguished article awards. He has given many invited lectures and keynote presentations at major universities and professional associations in the US, Asia and Europe. His media interviews have appeared on the National Public Radio, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Time, Economist, CNN, BBC, etc.
