Refusing educational desire: negotiating faith and precarity at an underground Chinese Christian school

Abstract In the last decade, a Reformed Christian education movement has grown among urban underground churches in China, with the emergence of unsanctioned religious schools that reject state-run educational institutions, secular curricula, and nationalized examinations. At one such underground Christian school in Nanjing, participants actively refuse normative educational desires and work to construct alternative horizons of aspiration for their children. They do so by cultivating children as “little sinners,” challenging mainstream discourses that emphasize education as a means to produce “quality” citizens and gain access to social mobility and economic security. Drawing on ethnographic research on the everyday life of an underground school, this article demonstrates how Christian communities deploy an “ethics of refusal” to resignify the terms of educational striving around the cultivation of spiritual sensitivities.