What God Has Done and Will Do Through Our Asian American Experience

DEADLY SHOOTINGS IN Atlanta this spring left eight dead, including six women of Asian ancestry. In the aftermath, Rev. Byeong Cheol Han, lead pastor of Atlanta’s Korean Central Presbyterian Church, exhorted his congregation to “not just pray, not just worry,” because “it’s time for us to act.” Han continued, “I’m going to urge people with love and peace that we need to step up and address this issue, so that ... our next generation should not be involved in tragic ... violence. ... That’s what Christians need to do.”

Han wasn’t alone. Similar calls to action have been amplified throughout Asian American churches. This heightened awareness of faith and culture’s entanglement with sociopolitical realities signals a call to redefine the essential meaning of Asian American Christianity.

For many first-generation Asian immigrants, ethnic-specific churches foster communities of care and cultural preservation essential for survival. For second- and third-generation Asian Americans, our faith provides spiritual resources for negotiating a cultural identity between a majority culture that never fully accepted us and a similarly foreign minority culture from distant shores. Some Asian American theologies focus on this liminality and how God’s presence is with those stuck between worlds.

The recent surge in anti-Asian hate is a reminder that such liminality also increases vulnerability to the whims of the majority’s gaze and the world’s geopolitics. Whether we like it or not, Asian American experience is subject to events taking place across Asia. For example, the coronavirus began in China and exploded across the globe. As China attempts to build its own sense of empire against waning U.S. dominance, the pandemic became highly politicized. Asian Americans, not only Chinese Americans, have been caught in the conflict. Stop AAPI Hate, a leading aggregator of coronavirus-related hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, reported 6,603 incidents between March 2020 and the end of March 2021. More than 2,800 of those occurred in March this year.

While Asian American churches foster communities of care and cultural heritage, Asian American Christianity is and must be political and transnational.

The term “Asian American” began as a racial category in the early 1900s, used to collectively stereotype diverse peoples to justify anti-immigration policies, such as the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act that was a prototype to bar immigrants from other Asian countries until 1965. During the civil rights movement, Asian Americans claimed this term for themselves to strengthen unity out their shared immigrant struggle and to combat accusations of “yellow peril” linked to the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Was there any other way to bring Indian, Filipino, and Chinese Americans under a single identity? Cognizant of their interconnections, Asian Americans such as Detroit-activist Grace Lee Boggs and social justice leader Yuri Kochiyama marched alongside African Americans in common cause.

Moreover, the early Asian American movement was also transnational. Asian American activists tied their pursuit of justice in the U.S. with similar struggles in South Korea, the Philippines, and other regions resisting oppressive regimes. Roy I. Sano, a United Methodist bishop and internment camp survivor, was a prominent faith organizer among these networks.

Considering this history, Asian American Christianity must reclaim and proclaim a sociopolitical vision for what God has done and will do in and through Asian American experience.

Historians Jane Hong, Melissa Borja, and Helen Jin Kim are reframing the history of American religion and its impact on society through Asian American perspectives. Sociologists Russell M. Jeung and Jerry Z. Park have advanced the study of Asian American Christian life. Theologian David C. Chao is convening new conversations on the lived theologies grounded in Asian American experiences, which include issues of social injustice. Jonathan Tran’s forthcoming book, Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism, utilizes ethnographic studies of Asian American congregations to identify their place in larger systems of racial and class hierarchies. Pastoral activists Raymond Chang and Michelle Reyes of the Asian American Christian Collaborative and Sung Yeon Choimorrow of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum lead from both the pulpit and the streets.

While faith is foundational to Asian American Christian identity, we are more than inherited doctrines and practices. We are histories and genealogies of places and people near and far. We are embedded in social structures and hierarchical systems that confine us to race and nationality.

Asian American Christians cannot naively discard these earthly contingencies for a heavenly home. We must embrace a political and transnational Asian American Christianity that questions and analyzes the world in a way that honors our allegiance to God, our cultural heritage, and our socio-political conditions.