This dissertation examines how religions, in particular Buddhism and Christianity, provide the institutional and symbolic resources for the construction of new selves and new communities for Taiwanese immigrants in the United States. The structures and traditions that once formed the basis of Confucian notions of community and selfhood in Taiwan are disrupted in the process of migration. In the absence of the extended family and the larger Confucian cultural milieu, immigrants face the challenge of reconstructing new communities and selves based on the American imperatives of choice and voluntarism rather than tradition and duty. Given the structural conditions of American religious pluralism, immigrants naturally gravitate towards religion as a way to build and organize community. The search for community among immigrants in America leads to a transformation in the symbols that they use to make sense of their new realities.
For Christian converts, it is through belonging to the immigrant church community that they come to believe in an otherwise foreign faith. “Word becomes flesh” as they experience Christianity within a shared community. Bound by economic and social interdependence, the new voluntary religious community replaces the hereditary family.
The growing presence of Christian converts among Taiwanese immigrants in turn holds significant consequences for the formation of Buddhist identity and the transformation of Buddhist religious experience among Taiwanese Buddhists in the United States. In the face of perceived Christian opposition, Buddhism becomes a chosen identity rather than an inherited tradition.
Conversion to Buddhism and Christianity provides immigrants with new symbols and meanings to reconstruct new selves in the United States. The Buddhist concept of self-transcendence and the evangelical Christian idea of being born again offer immigrants with a new vocabulary to reconstruct themselves as autonomous and individuated selves in the United States. Immigrants strategically use these religious narratives to achieve the greater personal autonomy that resonates with their American realities. Individualism and autonomy, however, present their own set of problems for creating moral order and governance. In the quest for other-worldly salvation, Buddhism and Christianity provide this-worldly practices for internally monitoring and disciplining the individual's own behavior, will and consciousness.
