What Difference will Asian American Christians Make?

We don’t fit the typical evangelical mold, which can be a good thing.

By Gregory W. Lee

Igrew up in a Korean American church and have remained involved in Asian American Christian communities for much of my adult life.

Yet for the last decade, my family and I have lived and worshipped in a low-income African American neighborhood in West Side Chicago with among the highest rates of poverty, violent crime, and incarceration in the city.

These communities rarely intersect. We are the only Asian American family we know in our neighborhood. As anti-Asian racism spiked during COVID-19, my wife and I turned to outside Asian American friends to process our vulnerability in this country (even as we witnessed COVID slay African Americans at alarming rates). Then George Floyd hit, which devastated our community of worship in ways that many of our Asian American friends have struggled to understand.

The Asian American Christian March for Black Lives and Dignity on June 28, 2020, which Raymond Chang aptly detailed, was a collision of our worlds, disorienting and exhilarating at the same time. Shouting “Black lives matter!” with nearly a thousand Christians of Asian descent. Praying for racial justice alongside black, brown, and white brothers and sisters in Christ. Worshipping with gospel songs as well as praise music familiar to second-generation Asians.

I left the march asking myself two questions: Why was this a first? And what might it signal for the future of American Christianity? I believe there are answers in the history of Asian American immigration and the history of evangelicalism, both of which are central to Asian American Christianity identity.

The first context has to do with our newness in this country. While Asians have been in America since the mid-1800s, and even earlier, the vast majority of us came to this country through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. 

Many of the immigrants were escaping trauma in their country of origin. I grew up hearing stories about my grandmother’s experiences under Japanese colonial rule, the hunger, hypothermia, and shrapnel that pierced my father’s young childhood during the Korean War; the economic hardship of post-war South Korea that prompted my parents to pursue better opportunities in the United States. 

For much of this generation, life in America was a matter of survival—struggling to provide for one’s family against linguistic and cultural headwinds, in a country that had no idea who you were or where you were from. My generation was taught to make good on our parents’ sacrifice, to pursue the American Dream through education and conciliation. 

But our efforts have not succeeded. Despite our academic and professional accomplishments, we are still not accepted as full Americans. Our reputation as model minorities has been weaponized against other racial groups. (“Why can’t Blacks be like Asians? Asians work hard and don’t cause trouble, and they’re doing fine.”) Our children will suffer the same racialization that we have. And these realities have raised questions about the Christianity we learned in church—which brings us to the second context.

Evangelicalism is the dominant form of Christianity among Asian American Protestants. In its present form, evangelicalism traces its roots to the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy of the 1920s, when white liberal Christians defined the faith in terms of social justice and white conservative Christians defined the faith in terms of individual salvation. 

Asian American Protestants have found evangelicalism a friendly home because our spiritual histories have been shaped by Western missions and evangelism. As religious studies professor Rudy Busto discerned decades ago, evangelicalism also aligns with model minority values in its emphases on individualism and hard work, and its spiritualization of racial identity.

But many of us now wonder if our churches conflated Christian faith with material success. We suspect there is more to discipleship than simply reading the Bible, praying, and getting good grades. And as we have become more racially aware—of both our own status and that of other minority groups in this country—we have begun exploring questions concerning justice. 

Despite important pockets of progressive evangelicals, social justice remains a loaded term in evangelicalism. As skeptics argue, justice is a distraction from the gospel. There is a slippery slope from social justice to denying orthodox doctrines. Talking about race is divisive. The best way to address racism is to save individual souls, who will be less racist by virtue of their relationship with Jesus.

Yet evangelical organizations have also come under pressure to promote diversity, especially in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, when about 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump. Great emphasis has been placed on representation, and how the leadership of an organization should reflect the diversity of its constituents.

In recent years, an impressive array of Asian Americans has taken the helm at historically white institutions: Walter Kim at the National Association of Evangelicals; Tom Lin, Jason Thomas, and Greg Jao at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship; Julius Kim at The Gospel Coalition; Joel Kim at Westminster Seminary California; Felix Theonugraha at Western Theological Seminary; Michael Oh at the Lausanne Movement; Alexander Jun at the Presbyterian Church in America (serving a one-year term as moderator of the assembly). Wheaton College has just announced Karen Lee as its first minority provost, my new boss.

The question is what comes next, and the answer is not clear. These new leaders bring impeccable credentials to their roles. I am heartened to see my community represented at the top. But part of me wonders why so many organizations have chosen Asian Americans for leadership as opposed to other racial minorities. Is this another iteration of the model minority myth, where Asians are perceived as “safe” persons of color who will not challenge white power structures? What difference will Asian Americans make?

On the one hand, many of these organizations remain systemically white at the level of donors, alumni, partner organizations, sending institutions, and other sources of revenue. Minorities must attend to these realities even when they occupy the highest positions of leadership. 

On the other hand, Asian American Christians complicate categories. Asian American evangelicals abide by the same doctrines and styles of worship as white evangelicals. Yet we quietly depart from white evangelicals on political matters. As American studies professor Janelle Wong’s work has revealed, only 37 percent of Asian American evangelicals voted for Trump, and Asian American evangelicals are considerably more liberal than white evangelicals on many other political issues. (Wong identifies two notable exceptions: abortion and homosexuality.)

These discrepancies reflect our immigration history. Since most Asian American Christians came to this country after the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, we do not have the same ax to grind against social justice. In the Asian American communities of my spiritual upbringing, evangelicalism was not a term of great interest. We understood ourselves simply as Christian. It was primarily in white Christian communities that the term carried so much weight, and it often operated as a marker against something, namely liberals who care about justice at the expense of orthodox doctrine.

There are thus resonances between Asian American evangelicals and Black Protestants who, having been excluded from white Christian communities, observed the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy as a squabble between white liberals and white conservatives. Black Protestants match or exceed white evangelicals in theological conservatism and religious activity but they vote as Democratic as white evangelicals vote Republican. The dividing differences between white evangelicals and black Protestants are not doctrine or piety. They are social and political. White evangelicals have often opposed racial justice. Black Protestants support it, for obvious reasons.

As Asian American Christians enter these conversations, we confront a white-Black binary whose history long precedes most Asians’ arrival to this country. We have pursued acceptance and security in white contexts, even as they have marginalized and ignored us. Are we now abandoning this project? Can we retain it without betraying Christ’s solidarity with the oppressed? Asian American Christians who embrace justice will not be able to avoid such questions, nor the threats they pose to our privileges. Our answers will test the sincerity of our commitment to Black lives and dignity.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

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Gregory W. Lee grew up in a Korean American Presbyterian church in Northern Virginia. He now serves as associate professor of theology and urban studies at Wheaton College (IL) and as theologian in residence at Lawndale Christian Community Church. Greg lives with his wife and two children in the Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago and teaches regularly for Wheaton in Chicago, a residential program in the Woodlawn neighborhood. He served for several years as board chair of Manna Christian Fellowship, an Asian American campus ministry at Princeton University. He earned his AB in philosophy from Princeton University, his MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and his PhD in Christian Theological Studies at Duke University.