Asian American Religion
Why Chinese and Korean Americans adopt Christianity
Religion is a fascinating social institution because it elicits such a spectrum of fervor from charity to hatred. I’ve studied various religions in the course of my education, but I was raised in a Baptist Christian family. I know what it’s like to go to church every Sunday, and being able to understand biblical references is very useful in Western Society. I even took a religion course in the History of the New Testament at USC to gain a more objective understanding. So after all of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that nobody really knows what’s going on spiritually. However, as social institutions on Earth, religion plays a very real role in people’s lives. I’ve noticed that Chinese and Korean Americans are attracted towards Christianity. I did some research and found it’s because Christianity has a value system that’s very similar to Confucianism, and that the church serves as a support community for minority groups.
Introduction
In Asian American studies there has been much focus on the economic, educational, and media representational aspects of the Asian American experience, and how these affect ethnic identity development. However, religion, a significant social institution that has affected all societies since the advent of civilization has been largely ignored as a factor until very recently. As immigrants from Asia arrived throughout the last century, they brought with them new religions to the West such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. In return, Western Christianity also spread to Asia through missionaries. The influence of Christianity on Asian America cannot be ignored as statistics cited in Pyong Gap Min’s introduction to Religions in Asian America1 show that a quarter of Koreans in Korea and three out of four Korean immigrants are Christian. Furthermore, 20 percent of Chinese immigrants are affiliated with Christian churches. Filipino and Vietnamese are slightly different in that that they embrace the Catholic form of Christianity due to Spanish and French colonial influences respectively. Religion is an essential part of understanding Asian America and this article seeks to explore some reasons why Korean and Chinese Americans embrace Christianity. These two ethnic groups were chosen because much of the existing research has been done on Korean Americans while 25 percent of the total Asian immigrant population are ethnic Chinese.1
While Christianity has a strong base in Korea due to the churches role in serving as a rallying point against Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the same is not true in China where Christianity was largely expelled during the Opium Wars.2 Most of the immigrants from China have either no religion or are Buddhist.1 Yet both of these ethnic groups have significant involvement in ethnic Christian congregations implying there may be commonalities between the groups in the role the Christian church fulfills for these Asian Americans that Buddhism doesn’t. In his study on Chinese American college students converting to Christianity, Brian Hall suggest, “The nature of Buddhism allows room for Chinese young people who have been raised in Buddhist households to experiment or ‘dabble’ with Christianity and/or other religions.” 3 In addition Min also states, “many non-Western religions do not put as much emphasis on participation in a religious congregation as do the Judeo-Christian religions.” 1 These two factors of openness and lack of fellowship lead Chinese Americans and Korean Americans who are not already Christian to seek religious organizations that better fulfill a need in their ethnic identity development in America.
Role of Confucian Values
One of the major commonalities between Chinese and Koreans is the strong influence of Confucian values. Some of the views espoused under Confucianism are respect for social hierarchy, authority, and conservative family values. Many of these same values are found in the evangelical Christianity that dominates America. One example is the subordinate position of a wife to her husband. This is part of the Confucian family hierarchy and also stated in the Bible. The church helps to teach and reinforce these social values when the larger mainstream society doesn’t. In an excerpt from Fenggang Yang’s dissertation on Religious conversion and identity construction4 in a Chinese church he notes, “New Chinese immigrants generally trust the educational system…they trust the economic system…However, they do not trust the media and entertainment industry for encouraging liberal moral values and unconventional lifestyles. These Chinese Christians choose evangelical Christianity because its value system fits their desire for order and success.” This attitude from first-generation Chinese Americans carries over to the second second-generation as their children seek to fulfill their parents’ expectations. According to Hall’s study, Chinese American college students also tend toward the conservative side as most had never had premarital sex and held conservative views on abortion, gay rights, and divorce (2006). The evangelical Protestant church can thus be seen as serving a cultural bridge for the first- and second- generations between their ethnic Asian cultural values and the more liberal American values in the West and East Coast metropolitan areas where most of them settle.
Identity Development
Although Asian American churches are fairly homogenous in terms of ethnic makeup, both the Chinese and Korean churches studied in the cited research usually adhered to the rituals defined by white American Evangelical Protestantism. There wasn’t much evidence of ethnic adaptation or deviation beyond language and food served at catered lunches after services. The exception to this was Koreans would recite personal prayers out loud referred to as tongsung gido, which may have come from traditional Korean Shamanism.2 The churchgoers did not view themselves as accepting an Anglo-American tradition but rather values that are supposed to be universal. There is also strangely not much evidence of conflict or questioning of beliefs. Many Asians are in the fields of science and engineering where evolutionary theory is overwhelmingly accepted yet they are willing to accept the literal Bible for the Creation story. Antony Alumkal reconciles these facts in his dissertation Ethnicity, Assimilation, and Racial Formation in Asian American Evangelical Churches2, “A sense of cultural conflict can still be substantial even for the second generation. Combined with a sense of racial exclusion, this can produce a strong desire for a secure basis for identity, which evangelical Christianity can provide.” The function of the church in providing an ethnic identity is one of the biggest draws to Christianity for Asian Americans, and congregating results in community formation.
In both the cases of Korean and Chinese Christian groups, the Asian Americans can feel accepted like an insider in the church instead of like an outsider in mainstream American society. This is accomplished through “rhetorical oppositions” created through doctrinal teachings. The immigrants are made insiders of both the church and Christendom, a socially dominant group, while the “larger society, both in the United States and in China, [become] outsiders.” 5 One might wonder why these individuals would want to explicitly separate themselves from mainstream society. One explanation could be that this strategy of identity development helps to realign their worldview with the reality they face daily. They are not members of mainstream American society so instead of trying to become members, they have reoriented the situation so that it becomes preferable to be an insider of the morally righteous church rather than be aligned with the outside world which is seen as sinful and corrupt.
Church as Community
Probably the most important reason for the existence of Asian American Christian congregations is the sense of community it can provide and how this affects ethnic identity development. According to an Ecklund and Park study6, “Religion gives Asian American immigrants opportunities for leadership and a sense of meaning and belonging, resources that help individuals overcome a deficiency in social status” while at the same time also providing “members of the second generation opportunities to sustain ethnic identity through maintaining networks with those who share a common national history.” In many Korean churches, the organization serves not only a religious role but also helps in the process of acculturation. Many people in the community seek help as immigrants or just want to be with others who they can feel comfortable socializing with. This is especially important as these new Asian Americans are coming from a collectivistic society back in Korea or China. They are used to having a close social network and the support that comes with it. Subsequently, not everybody attending these churches is there for purposes of faith. In fact, some people are simply curious and want to socialize.
For an example specifically pointing to second-generation Chinese American college students, Hall mentions the “diaspora into the suburbs of America” as young Chinese Americans grow up separated from each other and how “this ethnic detachment from other Chinese…plays an important role in their eventual increased receptivity to Chinese Christian community.” 3 Similar phenomena are found in Korean churches as well. Kelly Chong 7 found in her studies that racial prejudice and discrimination in mainstream American society caused many individuals to “rediscover” or “reclaim” their ethnic identity and participate in Korean American churches. The desire for finding others who share their experiences can be found on both the East Coast where Alumkal and Hall did their studies in New York and New Jersey respectively, but also in Los Angeles. At the University of Southern California there are no less than 12 Asian affiliated Christian groups servicing Asian American, international, and immigrant students. The Asian American church is a place where members can feel accepted as they are. They don’t have to be Asian or American, but are instead forming something new altogether.
- Min, P. (2002). Introduction. In P. Min & J. Kim (Eds.), Religions in Asian American: Building Faith Communities (pp. 1-14). Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.
- Alumkal, A. (2000). Ethnicity, Assimilation, and Racial Formation in Asian American Evangelical Churches: A Case Study of a Chinese American and a Korean American Congregation. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
- Hall, B. (2006). Social and Cultural Contexts in Conversion to Christianity Among Chinese American College Students. Sociology of Religion, 67, 131-147.
- Yang, F. (1997). Religious Conversion and Identity Construction: A study of a Chinese Church in the United States. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Catholic University of America, Washington, DC.
- Palinkas, L. (1989). Rhetoric and Religious Experience: The Discourse of Immigrant Chinese Churches. Fairfax, VA: George Mason UP.
- Ecklund, E., & Park, J. (2005). Asian American Community Participation and Religion: Civic “Model Minorities?”. Journal of Asian American Studies, 8, 1-21.
- Chong, K. (1998). What it Means to be Christian: The Role of Religion in the Construction of Ethnic Identity and Boundary among Second Generation Korean-Americans. Sociology of Religion, 59, 259-286.
Asian American Religion by Daniel Yang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.