Shirley received a Global Religion Research Initiative (GRRI) award for her project titled, ‘Politicizing Christianity in Taiwan and the US.’
This study explores how transnational church organizations pursue their political and religious agendas across two national contexts, namely Taiwan and the United States. Contending with national boundaries in a global world, these organizations necessarily navigate two separate political and social systems in order to realize their political functions. As such, this study probes the process of packaging political and religious views and how these organizations maintain a cohesive message across Taiwan and the US. By viewing these church organizations as invested political actors, my project contributes an often-neglected meso-level analysis of identity formation to sociology of religion literature as well as scholarship on diasporic Chinese identities.