Justin K. H. Tse

Grounded theologies ‘Religion’ and the ‘secular’ in human geography

This paper replies to Kong’s (2010) lament that geographers of religion have not sufficiently intervened in religious studies. It advocates ‘grounded theologies’ as a rubric by which to investigate contemporary geographies of religion in a secular age. Arguing that secularization can itself be conceived as a theological process, the paper critiques a religious/secular dichotomy and argues that individualized spiritualities presently prevalent are indicative of Taylor’s (2007) nova effect of proliferating grounded theologies. Case studies are drawn from social and cultural geographies of religious intersectionalities and from critical geopolitics.

Homo Religiosus ? Religion and Immigrant Subjectivities

Once ignored in national and international public policy, religion has made a comeback as policymakers have noticed the significance of the resurgence of religion, especially due to migration flows. While laudatory of these developments, this chapter specifies the need for a theological reading of the migrant religious practitioner as homo religiosus. First, we describe the social geographies of immigrant religion in an international context, drawing attention to the vibrancy of religious devotion, especially Christianity from the global south, among migrant groups. Second, we re-conceptualise religious belief through the theoretical work of John Milbank and Charles Taylor as they recuperate a theological reading of religion that is cautious in imposing secular categories on religious phenomena. Third, we perform an interpretive experiment on immigrant churches through Victor Turner’s hermeneutics of the stranger, arguing that a theological interpretation of migrant religions, including those of some social and economic means, demonstrates that they often comprise a liminal ‘church of the poor’. We contribute to the geography of religion with a call to conceptualise religious belief and practice by ways that draw out the inner logics of such phenomena instead of imposing foreign theoretical categories on them.

'Highway to Heaven': the creation of a multicultural, religious landscape in suburban Richmond, British Columbia

Abstract We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity.

Under the Umbrella: Grounded Christian Theologies and Democratic Working Alliances in Hong Kong

Taking the geographies of the 2014 Umbrella Movement as its point of departure, this paper provides a geographical reading of democratic landscapes in Hong Kong. Using a new cultural geography approach, this study unpacks the grounded theologies that undergird the participation of Christians in democratic movements in Hong Kong. The central argument is that two Christian grounded theologies in Hong Kong—collaborative and critical—have been generated according to how Christians acting within two different working alliances have positioned themselves vis-a-vis the Hong Kong government. Drawing from both ethnographic and public archival research, I trace the origins of a democratic working alliance back to the 1978 Golden Jubilee Incident, after which a democratic consensus was developed in Hong Kong. Following this thread through the 1997 handover, I demonstrate that this consensus bifurcated into two groups of Christians who disagreed theologically as to whether collaborating or critiquing the government was the ideal way to implement democratic reform. This paper contributes to the study of religion in Chinese societies by providing a geographical approach that can be used for comparative work in the social scientific study of religion and democracy.雨傘之下：香港基督教兩種接地神學與民主合作聯盟摘要本文以二零一四年雨傘運動為起點，從地理學的角度研究香港的民主景觀。此硏究乃以一個新的文化地理學路徑去分析多種的接地神學如何從下面支撐起香港基督徒對於民主運動的參與。其中心論點是已經形成了兩個不同的香港基督教接地神學 —— 合作性的和批判性的，其不同之處在於如何定位自身與香港政府之間的關係。本文通過民族誌和檔案硏究法追溯作為民主合作聯盟之起源的一九七八年金禧事件。從金禧事件到一九九七年回歸，民主共識在神學上演變為訴求方式不同的兩派，一派認為與政府合作乃執行民主改革的理想途徑，另一派則認為批評政府才是執行民主改革的理想途徑。本文使用地理學路徑做宗教和民主運動研究，對華人社會的宗教社會科學硏究或有助益。

The Umbrella Movement and the Political Apparatus: Understanding “One Country, Two Systems”

Prior to the Umbrella Movement, there was little reason for people who were not from Hong Kong to care much about its politics, unless, of course, one were a devoted reader of The Economist, which did cover Hong Kong as a former British colony. Alas, my experience in the academy corroborates the former sentiment: when I began studying Christian involvement in Hong Kong’s politics in the late 2000s, nobody was interested. “You have to study Christianity in China,” one advisor said, “because that’s where the jobs are.” The growth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially the explosion of Christianity in China, was what people wanted to talk about. The fascination was tied to the economic spectacle of China’s spectacular urban landscapes, the political force of China’s increasing influence on international relations, the social impact of Chinese immigration to Anglo-American metropolises.1 Indeed, with the recent spate of church buildings being demolished in Wenzhou and crosses being taken down in Zhejiang Province, China proper is still the only thing in the Greater China region that everyone wants to talk about. In this context, Christianity was fascinating because it told the story of China’s human rights record as well as missionary impulses still alive and well in the West.2 Another faculty committee member told me: “I know people who go over to China and go through networks in Hong Kong. You should follow them on a missions trip and do an ethnography on them.” Hong Kong, it turns out, was only interesting as it was tied to doing research on China proper. The local politics of Hong Kong and the engagement of Christians with them were not on my Anglo-American advisors’ radar screens. When I finally did get myself over to Hong Kong in 2010, people there confirmed to me that, as an Asian American, I was ill equipped to study China and Hong Kong’s relations with the motherland. Indeed, theologians and social scientists in Hong Kong were already studying Christianity in China, and church leaders were getting heavily involved in various kinds of missionary projects.3 They told me to go home.

Working Evangelicalisms: Deploying Fragmented Theologies in Secular Space

Reviewed by Justin K. H. Tse, Department of Geography, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Over the last three years, three new important books have contributed to critical geographies of American evangelicalism: Jason Dittmer and Tristan Sturm’s Mapping the End Times, Jason Hackworth’s Faith Based, and Justin G. Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions. Demonstrating that evangelicals are ignored at geographers’ peril in political, economic, and cultural geography, these new books each demonstrate that evangelical usages of space have contemporary salience in secular geopolitical formations, domestic economic policy, and the interpretation of cultural landscapes. Because these three books represent three different subfields in human geography (political, economic, and cultural geography), they can be taken together to critically interrogate the ways in which evangelicals use their theologies to exert secular power on a variety of modern spatial constructions. The strengths of each of these books are thus also their weakness, for although their critiques rightly interrogate the secular ends of some evangelical practices, the varieties of evangelical theologies are seldom explored, particularly in how contestations over the word evangelical shape the ways in which self-identifying evangelicals have made places.