This panel examines the intersection of Christianity, gender, and political life across twentieth-century Chinese and Taiwanese history. The first paper recovers women's central—though institutionally overlooked—role in Protestant rural reconstruction programs across wartime West China (1937–1945). The second traces Taiwanese Christian broadcaster Eileen Yiyi Chang, whose Cold War-era transpacific activism demonstrated that physical displacement from Taiwan enabled rather than constrained her influence on the island's democratic movement. The third analyzes how Taiwanese churches' responses to the marriage-equality transition (2017–2019) deployed layered theological grammars that narrowed ecclesial futures for LGBTQ+ Christians, proposing an imago Dei-centered alternative in response. Across wartime villages, Cold War airwaves, and contemporary church debates, these papers collectively argue that gender is constitutive to Christian political engagement, and that marginalized actors have persistently labored to reimagine the futures available to them.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), Chinese Christian organizations expanded social service programs into rural areas of the wartime interior. This paper examines the gendered dynamics of these initiatives, focusing on women workers associated with the National Christian Council of China and related Christian institutions in wartime West China. It argues that gender structured the everyday practice of Christian rural service: while Protestant leaders promoted rural reconstruction as part of a broader project of “Christianizing society,” female teachers, nurses, and social workers carried these programs into village communities. Drawing on institutional records, field reports, and local sources, including village surveys and county-level materials, the paper reconstructs how women workers adapted reform initiatives to village conditions. In doing so, it highlights the central role of women’s labor in shaping Christian engagement with rural society during wartime.
This paper examines Taiwanese Christian women’s transpacific political activism through the case of Elieen Yiyi Chang, who founded the Voice of Taiwan, a New York-based broadcast network, in 1977. Analyzing recordings of three broadcasts and the three kingdoms ideology of Chang, I argue that Chang fused political reporting with Christian moral conviction and that, although she was not in Taiwan during the democratic movement, her influence on democratization was not constrained by her physical location. Instead, the fact that she was in the United States empowered her to conduct transpacific Christian activism without the Kuomintang government’s direct interference and to freely reflect her Christian faith alongside her Taiwanese identity. Centering a Taiwanese Christian woman’s leadership within Cold War transpacific activism, this paper challenges the predominant assumption of Christian women being passive in political activism and demonstrates how Taiwanese Christian women contribute to imagining alternative political futures beyond East Asian settings.
This paper analyzes LGBTQ+ contestations and ecclesial retrenchments in Taiwanese churches during the marriage-equality transition (2017–2019). Using a bounded public corpus—network statements and pastoral guides, recordings and handouts from an evangelical forum, and reflections by LGBTQ+ Taiwanese Christians—it reads these debates as theological anthropology-in-practice. I argue that the controversy activates a two-layer “grammar of desire”: a Cheng–Zhu–inflected tianli/renyu binary that codes desire as moral risk and a received Protestant idiom often imagined through a competitive grace/nature frame. When these grammars resonate, desire is construed less as a site of formation than as a danger-sign; LGBTQ+ lives become especially legible within a single moral register, and ecclesial futures are narrowed in advance. Drawing on Kwok Pui-lan as a lens on taboo and normativity, the paper concludes with an imago Dei-centered alternative that treats desire as formable and proposes examen-like discernment to reopen horizons of possibility for communion and vocation.