‘Jesus Is Asian’: Destigmatization and National Imagination Among Chinese Catholics

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how Chinese Catholic lay believers counter the stigma of Catholicism as ‘foreign religion’ through a sophisticated vernacular narrative: Jesus is Asian. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a historic rural Catholic community in Hubei, China, the study reveals a three‐dimensional discursive strategy of destigmatization. First, believers engage in geographical–continental reconstruction, repositioning Christianity's origins from the West to Asia through cartographic knowledge. Second, they deploy visual–racial dewhitening, challenging the dominant imagery of Jesus as a White Westerner and reclaiming him as a Middle Eastern Asian figure. Third, they perform ethical compatibility and localization practices, demonstrating alignment between Christian values and Chinese traditional ethics while showcasing everyday Sinicization through vernacular practice. This analysis demonstrates how a stigmatized religious minority appropriates the tools of banal nationalism to contest dominant narratives and assert legitimate national belonging, a process here termed vernacular counterflagging , revealing lay agency in the everyday construction of vernacular nationalism.