I’ve been working on hammering out these ideas of correlating Asian American identity and worship. And it’s been really comforting to know that I’m not the only one (hope to meet you someday soon, Courtney ).

I got asked to present some of my thoughts at the TransGeneration (TG) Conference this August and had a great time. The idea of intentionally pushing the art form of worship to help shape identity was helped when I heard Shane Hipps quote Marshall McLuhan at the recent Poets.Prophets.Preachers seminar:

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

And it has become more clear to me that while the identity crisis that we face in the Asian American Christian community seems fairly innocuous now, I believe dire consequences such as the propensity for suicide, depression, alcohol abuse comes from this self-hatred and self-denial (i.e. lack of identity). In other words, it seems silly to make the case that worship (not just musical forms) matter so much, but that’s just the tip of the iceburg. And if we could address it in the one venue that dares to claim that people can truly be themselves and be healed, redeemed, and even saved from their past and to their future, wouldn’t that be good news? In any case, I welcome your feedback and comments.

Here is the audio recording of my presentation and the ensuing conversation and below are my presentation slides. Enjoy.

Audio:

The following words below are my thoughts alone, and not representative of NG.AC.

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I’ll say it outright. I believe one of the most important things that needs to be addressed among Asian-American Christians is the fundamentalism that pervades our expression of Christianity, propagated especially by the likes of John Piper and his brand of neo-puritan protestantism. Also, I will leave Tim Keller out of this. I think he’s much more reasoned and intelligent with his faith.

Some personal history…

My college church was multi-ethnic in name, but Asian-American in reality. It was also typically conservative in its theology. So naturally, John Piper’s work was standard summer reading. Desiring God would be found on our proverbial recommended reading list, as well as his “secondary” work of Let The Nations Be Glad and Future Grace. However, it wasn’t till my post-college church (very similar in demographics, but more puritan in theology, in comparison to my college church) that I had celebrated and defended the neo-puritan theology that Piper preached. I remember listening to sermon after sermon on my iPod and watching his sermons on the One Day DVDs with delight. Regardless of how embarrassing this is to tell, I even once cheered, yelling “PIPER!!”, when his face came up on display at a 7.22 event I went to about 4 years ago.

However, it was when a white-American couple came to our church that the foundations began to shake. Knowing they were fervent and passionate Christians, seminary-trained, and experienced in overseas missions, I was saddened to hear that John Piper considered their faith as secondary due to their being Arminians (Methodist). Here, in front of me, were two upstanding and wonderful Christians, who were actively being judged and pitied by someone I had looked up to so much. A conflict of interest began to take form within me.

But it was only when I had left my post-college church that I learned the notion of theological idolatry, this idolatry that i had committed for 7 years…

I consider theological idolatry an active assumption of God-ordained certainty regarding one’s theological worldview. One commits theological idolatry when she assumes her interpretation of Scripture is incontestable, as defended by self-referencing biblical arguments. It is this theological idolatry that I believe Asian-American Christians who subscribe to Christian neo-puritanism (i.e. new fundamentalism) engage in. Brothers and sisters, we must exercise humility.

Recently, John Piper’s rhetoric has been crossing my path upon reading about his relative disdain towards multimedia and hateful judgment towards homosexuality. It is these things along with his theological views of gender, culture, and God’s sovereignty that I believe are negatively affecting Asian-American churches.

Drew Tatusko wrote of Piper’s comments to the ELCA:

This sort of “theology” tries to divine God’s pre-destined program for us by picking and choosing natural events that appear to confirm a pre-existing ideological condition. It’s not theology, it’s insurance to justify one’s own ideology.

It is not theology, but idolatry. It is extracting what you want God’s will to be from nature rather than attend to that progressive revelation which may, and likely will, send this sort of Pharisaism asunder. For that is what we learn from Jesus. The more you think you have the Gospel cornered, the more you are relying on your own divinations and ideas. When this happens, as with learning anything new, one is less attentive to revelation. One becomes more attentive to one’s own whims and God looks just like you – an epiphenomenon of your own foolishness and absurdity.

I agree with Tatusko. Furthermore, although I cannot say that it is Christian fundamentalism alone that is driving many 2nd-gen Asian-Americans away from the church, I firmly believe it is one of the key motivating factors. Kelly Chong, an Asian-American sociologist and professor, wrote an article in 1998 surveying the 2nd-generation ministry of two Korean churches in the Chicago area. These churches embraced a very conservative theology, while exhibiting behaviors of conformity, exclusivity, and judgmental behavior towards others not like them. 11 years later, things are changing, but not changing quickly enough to where I can confidently say things are healthy these days.

Friends, my request is that when we preach, teach, encourage, and admonish, we do so with humility and fear and trembling. There is a philosophical notion which states that when we say ‘God’, God escapes our assumptions. Likewise, when Meister Eckhart prayed, ‘God, rid me of God,’ we must do the same. I believe it is imperative that we Asian-American Christians practice theological humility and be militaristic, instead, about love, (hey, militarism and love co-exist easily with Asian-Americans) grace, and justice. This is not a call to teach watered-down theology or preach a culture-neutered gospel. Rather, it is a call to do what Asian-American Christians have the worst time doing while following in the way of Christ, loving the world as Jesus did.

Let’s repent and change our ways, for the sake of our future generations.

The Next Gener.Asian Church conversation kicks off with David Park talking about his and Dan Ra‘s experience at the 12th annual Korean Worship & Music Conference.

Listen to this conversation (running time=14:17 min; powered by podOmatic)::

This was the first time that this conference had an English track, and it was fascinating to hear how the Korean-speaking and English-speaking could harmoniously worship with one another and learn from one another.

A comment came in recently with questions that I’ve wrestled with before from an Asian perspective. Of course, the question does have its biases, although you can’t really blame him since Christian fundamentalists get so much play in the media in the worst ways. But how would you answer Jason’s questions?

I have many questions on why Asians believe in Western religions.

1) Why do Asians believe in a faith that is primarily spread by Westerners. Some of the paintings depict Jesus as a white person, and is believed by some Asians.

2) Yes, the bible can be interpreted however ways by the believer, but unfortunately, in America, the believers are fundamentalists who do deny Homosexuals, immigrants, etc. of things that a non-believer wouldn’t.

3) Why must evangelical tactics be used to convert others? I visited http://www.buddhabook.org and found it to be a bit sickening. Buddhism is one of the most understanding form of spirituality and this Cioccolanti person wrote a book on how to convert a person from that.

All my findings and understanding of Christianity/Catholicism/etc. points to prejudice, discrimination, and narrow-mindedness. I would like to have some clarifications.

Thanks,
Jason

Amidst a rather morbidly morose topic, albeit candidly true, the author of this article dug deeper and excavated our East Asian roots and its Confucian influence — this is a selected excerpt:

But why is education so deeply ingrained in the Confucian culture?

Long before America existed, something of the American dream already had taken root in East Asia through the scholarship and examination system of the Mandarins. Villages and towns pooled their resources and sent their best and brightest to compete in the imperial court, hoping that one of their own would make it to the center of power.

Mandarins of various ranks were selected by how well they fared on extremely rigorous examinations. The brilliant few who passed ran the day-to-day operations of imperial China and Vietnam. A Mandarin could become a governor, a judge, or even marry into the royal family. A peasant thus could rise high above his station, elevating the status of his entire clan and honor his ancestors in the process. It all hinged on his ability to pass the difficult exams. 

Of all the temples in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, the most beautiful is arguably the Temple of Literature, dedicated to all the laureates who passed the extremely rigorous imperial exams… Dedicated to Confucius and founded in 1070, it was Vietnam’s first university. It eventually became a temple, as if only befitting a trajectory in a world where education is literally worshiped. 

So worshiped that not getting good grades often means failing to achieve your destiny and thereby failing your own and your family’s expectations. Many of us consequently learned to measure the world and ourselves solely through a pedagogic lens. You are how well you do in school. Indeed, many are being caught in the Asian educational pressure cooker and, with little time for anything else, also robbed of much-needed social skills and independent thinking that could give them a different way of looking at themselves. 

An old mythology follows many of us across the sea: Only perfection matters and, by logic, its opposite, failure is rooted in shame. In his analects, Confucius recommended this philosophy when it comes to ruling people: “Lead the people with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously.” Even if much of the Confucian ethos have eroded, many old rites and ritual practices long forgotten since communism takeover and modernization began, the one thing that remains in operation is that sense of shame, and how it still profoundly grips the East Asian psyche. To lose face may still cause many an Asian to commit suicide. 

Asian Americans have excelled higher education in the last few decades. Less than 5 percent of the country’s population, Asian Americans typically make up 10 to 30 percent of the best colleges. What’s barely explored, sadly, is the darker narrative, that subterraneous stream that runs parallel to this shining path to academic success: stress, disappointment, depression, and, when failing to make the grade, a profound if not deadly identity crisis.

It’s been said that if you build your identity on anything other than God, that’s idolatry. If the ethnic Asian church doesn’t call it idolatry, who will?

Hey folks.

I was recently interviewed by Nick Fiedler and Josh Case for The Nick and Josh Podcast.

I talk about Asian-Amergence. We met at Starbucks and so please pardon the “ambience”. I’d love to hear your thoughts on… my thoughts!

Dan

The Nick and Josh Podcast: Dan Ra and AsianAmergence

This is a guest post from Ian North, who is a new diamond of a friend here in the Atlanta area. You can listen/read his work here and get a glimpse of his life here. When I met Ian a couple of months ago, it soon became apparent that he has a sense of depth for what it means to be American. That is to say, he has a sense of what others think of Americans (and Whites) and a sense of what it means to carry himself in that tension as he devotes his life in a variety of ways to live and work among foreigners, immigrants, and refugees. Perhaps it is because he has spent most of his early life in the Philippines. Perhaps it is because he has been both guest and host in the setting of the church. But either way, I hope you enjoy what he has to share and that you find him as rich and as provocative as I have. Thanks, Ian.

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My sister and I stood in a Xerox center in Cagayan De Oro City in the Philippines nearly ten years ago, when we heard a whistle blow. The instrument was squeezed between the lips of another American, who was somewhere between overweight and grotesquely obese.  I looked around and saw an armed Filipino guard, a clean-cut young man from the barrio given an AK-47 to guard the store, jump to attention and pull open the glass door.

I don’t remember the American’s name, but let’s call him “Joe,” which is what the Filipino people call us white people, which is a shortened form of “GI Joe,” which is a somewhat uncomfortable association with our military occupation during and since World War II. So Joe came barreling into the shop, preceded by his smell and the lasting ear ring from his whistle.  He wore a bandana.  I imagine that it’s an American flag now, but it could have been anything.  An American flag would have been a garish symbol in a story so obvious that I would have thrown it out had it not actually happened.

But there he was, our fellow American, round, hairy, stinking, and carrying a whistle to alert the natives that he had arrived, was arriving, or was thinking of arriving and wanted everyone ready just in case. And suddenly we were linked in the eyes of the clerk, although we had been speaking in his tongue moments ago, listening to the answers in his terms.

“HOLY ROLLERS!”

Joe looked straight at us, his booming voice filling the small shop.

My sister stared resolutely at the price list on the counter. “Um…” I replied when I saw that he was looking at us for some sort of reaction.  The clerk, with whom we had been conversing in Cebuano, the local language, looked nervously at the invader and inched away.

“What are holy rollers?” I asked.

“JESUS FREAKS. BIBLE THUMPERS. YOU KNOW, HOLY ROLLERS.”

“Yeah, that’s us, I guess,” I replied, then, “how about you?”

He moved to the counter, resting his sweaty bulk on the glass, covering the Please Do Not Lean on Glass sign.

“THE GOSPEL OF JOE,” he said, “THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT.”

We went back to our transaction, and he went back to his, then whistled his way back out into the street, and thank God we never saw nor heard of him again.

I left that shop deeply troubled. I recall realizing that I was a child not responsible for my presence in Southeast Asia, but there I was regardless, in another man’s land, feeling the weight of all the things my people had done wrong, all the places we had misstepped, and all the miscommunications that flowed freely between us and our host culture.

I’m writing this out now in Maum, a Korean owned and operated café in the outskirts of Atlanta. Across the table from me, my brother Eric and a Liberian refugee named Aziz work on their own projects. When we first entered, I thought this would be strange to Aziz, being the only black person here.  Then I realized it should feel just as strange for Eric and me, seeing as how we’re the only white people here.

Then I realized that the only thing that felt strange about it was that I thought it probably looked strange, and I’m sitting here now with a strange sense of comfort that comes from being around people who know what it’s like to be something like what I was, although they have no idea that I know what it’s like to be something like what they are. We are all aliens in a culture that doesn’t understand us and looks at us with, at best, a sense of apprehension, and at worst, derision and condescension.

And what do we do about it? In my opinion, we would do well to find each other and meet at that strange point between being Asian-American and American-Asian. I will stop here and ask you what to do with our odd intersection.  Can I offer anything to you? Can you offer anything to me?

Will we find, as our conversation moves forward, that God has put us in this time in this land together for a reason? It’s at least worth a try.