Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans 9780824884192

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Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans

Asian and Pacific American Transcultural Studies Russell C. Leong David K. Yoo Series Editors

envisionin g religion,

race, and asian americans

Edited by

David K. Yoo and Khyati Y. Joshi

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu In association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles

© 2020 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20   6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yoo, David, editor. | Joshi, Khyati Y., editor. Title: Envisioning religion, race, and Asian Americans / edited by David K. Yoo, Khyati Y. Joshi. Other titles: Intersections (Honolulu, Hawaii) Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press ; Los Angeles : In association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2020. | Series: Intersections: Asian and Pacific American transcultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022812 | ISBN 9780824882747 (cloth) | ISBN 9780824884192 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824884208 (kindle edition) | ISBN 9780824884215 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Asian Americans—Religion. | Asian Americans—Race identity. | United States—Religion—21st century. | United States—Race relations. Classification: LCC BL2525 .E58 2020 | DDC 200.89/95073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022812 Cover art: “Point Reyes” (2017) by Joshua Yoo. University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction David K. Yoo and Khyati Y. Joshi

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Part I. Reflections of the Past and Present 1 Reconstructing Asian America’s Religious Past: A Historiography Helen Jin Kim 2 Asian American Religious Beliefs Reconsidered Jerry Z. Park

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Part II. Glimpses of Religion and Empire 3 Outsider Citizens within the US Empire: Muslim Youth, Race, Religion, and Identity Arshad Imtiaz Ali 4 American Apartheid for the New Millennium: The Racialization and Repression of Asian American Religious Minorities Jaideep Singh 5 Where the History Books End: Religion and Vietnamese America in the Afterlife of the Vietnam War Mimi Khúc

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Part III. Revealing Religious Formations 6 The Gospel According to Rice: The Next Asian American Christianity Rudy V. Busto

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7 Postscript: (Re)Thinking and (Re)Creating Asian American Christianities through a Gospel According to (Fried) Rice? Tat-siong Benny Liew

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8 Modernity in the Service of Tradition: Women and Gender within Hinduism in the United States Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha

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9 Life in the Fishbowl: An Asian American Autobiographical Theological Reflection Joseph Cheah

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Part IV. Visualizing Subjectivities 10 Learning Hinduism through Comics and Popular Culture Sailaja Krishnamurti

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11 Queer Asian American Theologies Patrick S. Cheng

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12 The Roots of Chinese American Religious Nones: Continuities with the Liyi Tradition Seanan Fong and Russell Jeung

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Anyone who has worked on an academic book knows that time is usually measured in years. Given that this is a collective effort, we thank the contributors for their patience, but especially for their scholarship. Their work deepens and joins a conversation in the study of Asian American religions that has developed over the past twenty years or so. In particular, we are indebted to and grateful to be part of the Asian Pacific Americans Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) community. The loose network of people and the sporadic meetings and conferences have nurtured many conversations and collaborations. More recently, we have benefitted from the Wabash Center mid-career workshop hosted by President Jeffrey Kuan and the Claremont School of Theology with additional support from the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Those meetings helped spark a refresh of an APARRI conference that was a collaboration of the Claremont School of Theology, Claremont McKenna College, Pomona College, and UCLA. We thank Phi Hong Su for her amazing research assistance that has extended across many times zones and continents as her own research has taken her to many far-flung places. Without a doubt, she has been the logistical glue that has held this project together. Thanks also to Mike Hoa Nguyen for helping us get over the finish line in delivering the manuscript. At the University of Hawai‘i Press, many thanks to executive editor Masako Ikeda who has provided encouragement and support and to managing editor Grace Wen and copyeditor Helen Glenn Court for their guidance of the production process. We are glad that our book is part of the ongoing partnership between the University of Hawai‘i Press and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center through the Intersection Series. We also gratefully acknowledge that the impetus for this collection was a special issue of Amerasia Journal called “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World” (2014) with guest editors vii

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Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Y. Joshi. Thanks to Keith Camacho, Arnold Pan, Mary Uyematsu Kao, and Barbra Ramos for their work on that issue. Khyati acknowledges Carolyn Chen, Sharon Suh, Tammy Ho, Jane Naomi Iwamura, Janette Ok, and Grace Kao for their support over the years. Special thanks to John and Kedhar Bartlett and my Indian American Hindu community in Atlanta, Georgia, who provide spiritual inspiration that makes this work meaningful. Finally, thanks to University College at Fairleigh Dickinson University for supporting the publication of this book. David is honored to be associated with colleagues at UCLA in Asian American Studies, History, the ethnic studies centers, and the Institute of American Cultures. Much love to Ruth, Jonathan, Joshua, and to Coco, our adorable rescue dog. David K. Yoo and Khyati Y. Joshi

Introduction David K. Yoo and Khyati Y. Joshi

The saying “The more things change, the more they stay the same” may seem an odd way of introducing an anthology on religion, race, and Asian Americans after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. Yet it is an appropriate framing given that the themes that undergird this volume hearken back to the shadow cast by September 11, 2001, but that have much deeper roots in the intertwining of religion and race that have been part of the United States since the very beginnings of the nation. In other words, although certainly elements of Asian American religious experiences reflect more contemporary circumstances, beneath those experiences are deeper currents around religion and race that are core elements of who we are as a nation. Indeed, race and religion are two defining elements of American society. As social constructs, they do not work in isolation but are instead constantly being shaped and formed in relation to one another. Throughout US history, each category has been used to make meaning of the other, thus creating an American culture that, among other things, has been characterized by the exclusion and marginalization of Asians. Religious institutions and theologies have interacted symbiotically with the social phenomenon of color hierarchy and with institutionalized racism, taking the forms of the slave trade and institution of slavery, Jim Crow legislation, and the anti-immigrant laws of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Put simply, racism and European American Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, are 1

2 introduction

foundational elements of American society and culture, and each has reinforced and reinscribed the other since before the formal beginning of the nation and ever since.1 The essays that follow underscore how Asian American individuals and religious communities navigate, obfuscate, and mediate their religious lives in the US, where sometimes they belong and other times are excluded. Although the events of September 11, 2001, had major ramifications for certain racial and religious groups, including Asians, the larger phenomena of racial and religious profiling of course has a much longer trajectory. The history of the racial exclusion of Asians in the US began soon after their arrival in larger numbers during the Gold Rush era and the politics of exclusion and racism have often been intertwined with bias against what were framed as “heathen” or “foreign” religions. Moreover, Asian American Christians have not been spared racial mongering by virtue of a shared religion. The racialization of Asian Americans, regardless of their religious identity, included a suspect morality that presented a threat to white and purported Christian values. Religious Othering of Asians proved to be an effective and expedient shorthand that bolstered arguments for exclusion, discriminatory legislation, and dehumanizing depictions of Asians in the media and popular culture.2 Before 1965, several historical moments mark Asians as the racial and religious Other. Three are instructive: the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which excluded Chinese laborers from entering the United States for ten years (and was renewed multiple times); the Immigration Act of 1924, which prohibited the entry of Asians into the United States (among other things); and Executive Order 9066 (signed February 19, 1942), which resulted in the incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Neither the word “religion” nor any specific religions are mentioned in the exclusionary language of the legislation or the executive order. However, on examining the laws that led up to these three pieces of legislation, the “historical stepping stones,” language about religion is present in both covert and overt manners. For example, the Page Act of 1875 prohibited immigration of “immoral Chinese Women.” The Chinese were thought of as immoral and heathens over the decades. This law was intended to limit the establishment of marriage, reproduction, and Chinese families. “The regulation of gender and sexuality under the aegis of Christian morality was the first step in Chinese immigration restriction.”3 These religious Others were increasingly seen through a miasma of entangled religious and racial



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meanings that justified European domination over peoples whose religions were seen through racial filters. These immigration restrictions remained in effect until 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act (also known as the Hart-Cellar Act) abolished the national origins system. One of the unintended consequences of the passage of Hart-Cellar was the large-scale migrations of Asians and Latinos to the United States. In the decades since, populations of Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs, Taoists, and other religious groups—which had been present, but in much smaller numbers—increased dramatically. Moreover, the imperial foreign policies of the United States in Asia and Latin American during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s resulted in the settlement of refugee populations in various part of the country. Asian American communities grew to a size where they and their houses of worship and religious practices became more legible in American cities and towns. As mentioned, the events of September 11, 2001, and the election of Donald Trump have galvanized tensions in the country in which racial and religious groups have been targeted for harassment and violence from multiple sources, including the US government. This collection of essays critically examines and sheds light on how religion and race have shaped Asian America. Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans uses the theme of visibility (or lack of it) as a layered way of understanding the relationship between religion, race, and Asian Americans. On a foundational level, the book signals a continuing need for scholarship on this topic, even as the body of literature has grown over the past twenty years. The basic call for greater visibility, however, is complicated in that after the attacks of September 11, certain Asian American religious groups, such as Sikhs, experienced a hypervisibility that resulted in violence and intimidation. The misdirected persecution of Sikhs of course uncovers a gaze focused on those presumed to be Muslim. That presumption is most often racialized as Arab or Middle Eastern Muslims, but includes Asian Americans as well. Visibility also entails expanding the parameters of what constitutes the interweaving of religion, race, and Asian Americans. One chapter explores the phenomenon of what is termed religious nones—those who claim no ­religion—and its contours as part of the overall landscape. Another contributor provides an overview of queer theology as it manifests within Asian America, calling into focus both race and lesbian, gay, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) communities in the United States and the tendency to suppress

4 introduction

and marginalize sexuality within Christianity. To envision religion and race and Asian Americans, then, requires an expansive and nuanced imagination. Vision and imagination are requisites in part because of the limits of the conceptual categories that drive the book. Most of the attention thus far has been placed on the relationship between religion and race. Given the dominant role of Christianity in the United States and through the circuits of empire, when religion surfaces, the scholarship has often skewed in that direction, which has held true for Asian Americans. This collection has consciously aimed for greater breadth of religious experiences while also recognizing that Christianity is an important tradition for many Asian Americans. That said, we fully recognize that many traditions and groups are not addressed in this volume. Such is the nature of any collection, but perhaps even more so for categories that encompass so much internal diversity. Even a much larger collection of essays could not claim to be comprehensive, and this was never the aim; instead, it was to try to shed some light on dimensions of Asian American religions that have been less studied and that in light of events such as 9/11 and its aftermath, called for greater examination precisely because of the intertwining of religion and race. Although religion often drops out in the scholarship on Asian Americans, the relative obscurity of Asian Americans in the racial landscape of the United States calls forth greater critical inquiry, especially given that Asian Americans are currently the fastest growing immigrant group in the nation. The discussion of limits also applies to the very term “Asian Americans.” A collective, political term credited to historian Yuji Ichioka during the late 1960s, “Asian American” emerged as a call of solidarity across disparate groups, each with its own history, but also with some commonalities based on their racialization and how their home countries were entangled in the webs of US empire. The term’s usage and usefulness has been stretched as Asian America has grown in numbers and complexity since its inception more than fifty years ago. Moreover, the term has been most associated in the United States with East Asian groups (especially Chinese and Japanese Americans). As a result, many of the other groups under its umbrella have been overlooked. In a related way, the framing of Asian Americans in the racialized color scheme of the United States has been by the term “yellow.” Whether the problematic term has been ascribed, adopted, or subverted, in certain ways the word reflects an East Asian emphasis. In this troublesome taxonomy, some Asian American groups identify not with “yellow” but instead with



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“brown.”4 We have not attended to religion and race among Pacific Islanders groups, another composite term, that are often positioned in relation to Asian Americans. Acknowledging the limits of any study is always important, but the emphasis should be on the essays in the collection and their contributions. The chapters are arranged in four sections. Part I, Reflections of the Past and Present, offers background and context into the history and development of Asian American religious scholarship over the past two decades. In addition, a recent survey by a major research foundation has generated rich data on Asian American religions that represents an opportunity to drill deeper. Helen Jin Kim’s essay on Asian American religious history in chapter 1 provides an insightful overview of the genealogy of the subfield even as she makes a case for future work that is more historically grounded. Many of the chapters that appear here, moreover, are connected to a special issue of Amerasia Journal published in 2014 titled “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World” that paid attention to religio-racial formations of communities, such as those of South Asian and Southeast Asian Americans, whose experiences have been understudied.5 The guest editors of the 2014 issue of Amerasia Journal note that despite notions of a postracial America, “race remains a central determinant of where we live, whom we trust, what we do, and how we believe.” In particular, religion constitutes an important modality for how many Asian Americans have been racialized in the United States.6 The interplay and interconnectedness of religion and race for Asian Americans has been a defining theme for the subfield that dates back to a special issue of Amerasia Journal in 1996 titled “Racial Spirits” and several anthologies that constitute a critical mass of scholarship.7 Helen Jin Kim reminds us in chapter 1 that Asian American religious subjects have been long relegated to the perpetually foreign Other and the assimilated model minority—resulting in flat and stereotypical characterizations. Disciplinary traditions, the ongoing legacy of Orientalism and race, and reductionist understandings of religion present research challenges for those studying Asian American religions. Although limited by a model minority framework, the landmark survey of Asian Americans published by the Pew Research Center in 2012 represented a state of the art sampling of rich data for researchers and that represents a significant contemporary snapshot.8 Jerry Park in chapter 2 drills further down into the survey to pull out more textured understandings of Asian American religiosity for the six largest communities. What emerges

6 introduction

is the incredible internal diversity of religion within Asian America, including those who claim no religion. Park’s essay also is a helpful primer in the limits and the potential inherent in survey research methods. Evident from his analysis is the need for robust quantitative and qualitative studies to better understand Asian American religions. Part II, Glimpses of Religion and Empire, speaks to the outworking of an American empire and its intersections with Asian American communities and their religions. In chapter 3, Arshad Ali engages in qualitative research to examine Muslim youth in the United States in terms of race, religion, and identity. Through interviews with college students in southern California, Ali discovers that Muslims from a variety of backgrounds identify as Muslim first. In other words, religion emerges as a more salient self-identifier than ethnicity for Pakistani and Somalian immigrants. In part, being Muslim first suggests a shared religious identity during a time in which individuals and communities are being targeted for being Muslim. Although religion and race are often conflated, it seems significant that religion takes precedence. This might be seen as a more recent phenomenon, but Ali reminds readers that the racial profiling of Islam is not new and has been taking place well before September 11, 2001. The theme of empire, racialization, and repression resounds in chapter 4. Jaideep Singh explores the notion of the convergence of religion and race producing the status of double minorities. Since September 11, the constitutional guarantee of the freedom of religion for those who are presumed to be Muslim has eroded. The persecution and profiling of certain individuals and communities has resulted in what the author terms a new “American apartheid.” Resonances of empire are evident in chapter 5 as Mimi Khúc delves into religion and Vietnamese Americans in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Although the war has been the subject of much documentation, only scant attention has been given to Vietnamese Americans outside the “rescue” narrative of what the United States has done to “save” refugees escaping communism. Religion can be one of the entry points into the actual lives of Vietnamese Americans as historical subjects. Khúc argues for broadening religion beyond the recognized institutions and structures of organized religion to a politics of meaning—a cultural process in which people negotiate the everyday as well as the transcendent. The author draws on the role of film as a medium in which Vietnamese Americans engage in a storytelling that picks up where the history books end.



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Part III, Revealing Religious Formations, consists of writings that wrestle with how religion is implicated in issues of origins, gender, and migration that in multivalent ways shape individuals, communities, and perceptions of self and other. Rudy Busto in chapter 6 suggests that it is time that Asian American Christianity claim its Asian origins. He wants to challenge what might be termed the European and American captivity of Asian American Christianity in terms of its cultural contexts. In a postscript to Busto, Tatsiong Benny Liew makes a case in chapter 7 that Asian traditions, including religious ones, have been part of Christianity from the outset. Hence it is more helpful to think of Asian American Christianity as ever-evolving, even as one might think of biblical texts not as a fixed, pristine canon, but as dynamic texts filtered through time and in multiple contexts. In chapter 8, Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha take up the themes of gender and migration. They are interested in how gender hierarchies are constructed and imposed through religions of racial minority communities. More specifically, they focus on women and Hinduism in North America. Because of marginalization in places like the United States and Canada and class factors in migration and community formations, Hinduism tends to be homogenized. Much of the internal diversity of Hinduism gives way to sharper distinctions, hierarchies, and patriarchy than in India. In an autobiographical reflection, Joseph Cheah discusses the microaggression embedded in the often asked question of Asian Americans, “where are you from?” The presumption of foreignness extends in Cheah’s case to his own positionality as a Roman Catholic priest who has most often been the lone Asian American clergy person in the various contexts in which he has served. Part IV, Visualizing Subjectivities, addresses the need to think more expansively about how religion operates within the racialized environments of Asian America; this expansion includes how religion influences subjectivities of religion transmitted through transnational popular cultural forms as well as through a framework of racialized sexualities. Making sense of nonreligious affiliation, moreover, raises questions about how we understand religion. In chapter 10, Sailaja Krishnamurti analyzes the transnational transmission of Hinduism through comic books and popular culture during the 1970s and the 1990s. During this period of South Asian migration, many parents and communities turned to comic books to instruct young people about Hinduism. Comic books produced in India received widespread r­ eadership

8 introduction

and approval in Canada and the United States. Although the medium did not always lend itself to a more nuanced understanding of religion, the comics did provide South Asians in the diaspora a way of connecting with their religious and cultural heritage. Popular culture also fostered a sense of belonging and nostalgia for an ancestral home that readers may have only experienced through their parents or in the texts. In chapter 11, and like Khúc and Krishnamurti, Patrick Cheng addresses the relative obscurity of Asian American queer theologies. He notes that writings about the interplay of race, sexuality, and spirituality began to emerge in the mid-1990s by queer theologians. In this overview, Cheng engages with the theme of exclusion that lesbian, gay, transgender, intersex, and queer individuals and communities have faced and continue to face from Christian churches. In addition to this is the reality of white racism within that community that Asian Americans frequently encounter. Cheng also explores the transnational dimensions of Asian and Asian Americans as they negotiate the crossings of space as well as traditions, including Asian religions such as Buddhism. In chapter 12, Seanan Fong and Russell Jeung analyze the phenomenon of religious nones among Chinese Americans. According to the Pew Research Center survey, the majority of Chinese Americans (52 percent) indicated no religious affiliation. Fong and Jeung make a case that one way to understand the non-affiliation is rooted in historical continuities with earlier tradition in China that is marked by three elements. The first is a notion of religion based on proper practice rather than belief—an orthopraxy versus an orthodoxy. A second aspect is a tradition of skepticism. The third is the family as the basis of religion. Taken as a whole, Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans makes a case for understanding the ongoing importance of the religious and racial realities of Asian Americans in the United States. Despite the various shifts in the social, political, economic, and cultural landscapes of the nation, we still have a great deal to learn about the complex and layered role that religion and race play in the lives of individuals and communities of the fastest growing group in the United States. Furthermore, Asian American religions—past and present—are of course worthy subjects in and of themselves, but ever more compelling given that these issues are deeply enmeshed with larger issues as they affect the nation and that also involve the transnational and especially transpacific. As suggested at the outset,



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these themes continue to resonate and are ever in need of our critical and sustained attention. This collection is one effort to add important sight lines to a necessary conversation.

Notes 1.  For a helpful and broad overview, see Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). In addition, a study that focuses on the relational racial formations, especially the historic racial ethnic groups of the United States in connection to one another: Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, and Ramon Gutierrez, eds., Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 2.  For general histories of Asian Americans, see Erika Lee, The Making of Asian America: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Shelley Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2013). 3.  E. L. Wong, Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 70. 4.  Two excellent works in the literature of Asian American studies suggest how these terms are part of the lexicon of race in the United States: Frank H. Wu, Yellow: Race in American Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 5.  Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014) was guest edited by Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Y. Joshi. Two articles in the issue, “The Gospel According to Rice” (reprint) and “The Question of Hypodescent” (revised) appear in this volume and are referenced later. 6.  Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Y. Joshi, “Asian American Religions in the Globalized World,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–xx. 7.  The special issue was titled “Racial Spirits,” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996). See Chan-Malik and Joshi, “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World” and Kim’s “Asian American Religious History” for more information about the development of the subfield of Asian American religions. 8.  Pew Research Center, “The Rise of Asian Americans,” June 19, 2012, http:// www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans. For a discussion of this report by some of the scholars who served on the advisory board, see Jane Naomi Iwamura, Khyati Y. Joshi, Sharon Suh, and Janelle Wong, “Reflections on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 1–16.

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Bibliography Chan-Malik, Sylvia, and Khyati Y. Joshi, “Asian American Religions in the Globalized World,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–xx. ———, eds. “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World.” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–121. Iwamura, Jane Naomi, Khyati Y. Joshi, Sharon Suh, and Janelle Wong. “Reflections on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report.” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 1–16. Lee, Erika. The Making of Asian America: A History. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Lee, Shelley. A New History of Asian America. New York: Routledge, 2013. Lum, Kathryn Gin, and Paul Harvey, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Molina, Natalia, Daniel Martinez Hosang, and Ramon Gutierrez, eds. Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Wong, E. L. Racial Reconstruction: Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Wu, Frank H. Yellow: Race in American Beyond Black and White. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Yoo, David K., ed. “Racial Spirits: Religion and Race in Asian American Communities.” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): vii–307.

1 Reconstructing Asian America’s Religious Past A Historiography Helen Jin Kim

Reconstructions of Asian America’s religious past are located at the intersection of Asian American history and American religious history.1 Yet the historian’s relative neglect of the Asian American religious subject has essentialized and rendered her invisible, resulting in reductive and binary conceptualizations: religious Asian Americans are cast as either the perpetually foreign religious Other or the racially assimilated model minority.2 Flat and stereotypical characterizations have limited the complexity, nuance, and agency available to Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, nonreligious, and Christian Asian Americans as historical actors.3 Historian David Yoo and religious studies scholar Rudy Busto, respectively, posit that the erasure of the Asian American religious subject was due to the nonintersecting intellectual lineages of Asian American history’s indebtedness to Marxian labor history, which obfuscated the category of religion, and American religious history’s privileged analysis of white Judeo-Christian subjects.4 The seemingly incommensurable fields of Asian American history and American religious history required, and still require, intellectual suturing to uncover submerged narratives of the religious lives of Asian Americans. (The nomenclature “Asian American” refers to “North American” and “Asian Pacific America”).5 Since the late twentieth century, an interdisciplinary body of scholars 13

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c­ ritiqued and bridged the fields that bifurcated the study of Asian Americans and religions. They innovated theories and pioneered methods to produce content that made visible otherwise invisible Asian American religious subjects, resulting in the subfield of Asian American religions. Indeed, much literature has been devoted to studying this heterogeneous Asian American religious landscape. Yet the contemporary focus in extant Asian American religious studies scholarship reveals an opportunity to take the long view for more historical excavation—specifically, to write Asian American religious histories. Contemporary data can be traced to religious histories within Asian homelands, transnational connections, and a history of American Orientalism. To address the essentialization and invisibility of Asian American religious subjects, not only are theoretical interventions and social scientific analyses needed, but also stories and historical narratives, reconstructed from archival sources and oral histories. Thus I review the historiography of Asian American religious history and address intellectual opportunities in the emerging subfield.

The 1960s and 1970s: The Asian American Movement and Theologies of Liberation The subfield of Asian American religions has its roots in the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a watershed historical moment when the term “Asian American” was first coined. A growing generation of collegeage Asian Americans mobilized politically by identifying with third world struggles for decolonization and resistance to the Vietnam War. Ideologically, they allied with Marxist and Maoist struggles for justice and liberation, forming reading groups that studied a combination of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought. Students formed revolutionary groups, including the Red Guard Party, Wei Min She, I Wor Kuen, and the Asian Study Group. They allied with the Third World Liberation Front to fight for ethnic studies programs, including Asian American studies, at universities. As much as the movement was born out of an identification with the masses, it was also an intellectual movement that protested the Eurocentrism of university curriculum, resulting in one of its hallmark achievements: the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University in 1968. The secular roots of the Asian American intellectual tradition were planted during this time, largely omitting religion as a category of analysis.

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Ironically, however, this movement was also the context in which liberation theologies for the Asian American context were sown, providing some of the initial seeds for a subfield of Asian American religions. Although mainstream Asian American studies had overlooked religion because of its secular origins, the movement provided an important context out of which a tradition of Asian American Christian thought emerged. The Asian American intellectual tradition, then, has from the beginning blurred the meaning of the sacred and secular even if it has purported to be and primarily has been considered in secular terms.6 Drawing on the class analysis of Marx and Mao, the movement influenced a small number of ministers and theologians, blurring the sacred and secular through religious activism and theological imagination. It produced theologies of liberation and writings specific to the Asian American experience, akin to black theologies of liberation, which drew on the black power movement. Its members not only wrote about “ethnic theology of liberation,” “yellow theology,” and “Asian American theology,” but also lived them out in their everyday activities. They were few in number but became forerunners to a larger critical mass of scholars and activists of Asian American studies and theological as well as religious studies.7 Indeed, in charting the intellectual roots of the subfield of Asian American religions, at least one significant stream can be traced to the development of Asian American theologies of liberation, which spawned a series of networks developed for Asian American ministers and scholars. Lloyd Wake and Roy Sano created in 1972 the Pacific Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies (PACTS), which became an affiliate of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Thereafter, in 1984, the feminist theologians Kwok-Pui Lan and Letty Russell created the Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM), focused on postcolonial and feminist Asian and Asian American theologies and ministries. In 2000, the Graduate Theological Union created the Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American religion (PANA Institute). Led by the theologian Fumitaka Matsuoka, PANA’s mission resonated with the goals of PACTS in fostering a community for those interested in Asian American religious traditions. These networks and organizations laid a foundation for future intellectual communities. Early on, the PANA Institute became an institutional home for the Asian Pacific American Religions and Research Initiative

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(APARRI), which began in 1998; those who created the Asian North American Religions, Culture, and Society (ANARCS) in 1997 as a formal section of the American Academy of Religion also had connections to these forerunners. Thus, the roots of Asian American religions date back to a multifaceted historical moment when theologies of liberation germinated alongside movements of social protest, even when such protest was largely undergirded by ideas that neglected, rejected, or contested those religious ideas as resources.8

The 1990s and 2000s: Asian American Religions as a Field of Study If theologians of the movement era were forerunners, then the critical mass of scholars who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s more formally founded the interdisciplinary subfield of Asian American religions. In 1996, Amerasia Journal published a special issue titled “Racial Spirits” that first documented the scholarly debate among graduate students and early career scholars who became leading voices of the emerging subfield of Asian American religions. “Racial Spirits” culminated in the publication of the first edited volume, New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (1999), which argued for the “reconceptualization of Asian American Studies” so that a “serious and critical treatment of religion becomes an interpretive rule rather than an exception.”9 Since the late 1990s, scholars affiliated with APARRI and ANARCS have produced multiple single-authored journal articles, monographs, and team-authored edited volumes, including Jung Ha Kim and Pyong Gap Min’s Asian American Religions: Building Faith Communities (2002) and Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard’s Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (2004).10 In addition to these, scholars studying the theological and religious experiences of Asian and Asian American women have published a number of resources. Scholars affiliated with PANAAWTM published the edited volume Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (2007). Around the same time, a group of Asian American women, primarily affiliated with evangelical Christian communities, published for a lay audience More Than Serving Tea: Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership, and Faith (2006).11 Many of the contributors were affiliated with Asian American Women on Leadership (AAWOL), which in

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2004 grew out of informal gatherings among Asian American evangelical women in ministry and academia. AAWOL, moreover, was an outgrowth of the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC), a think tank founded in 2006 to bridge church and academia as well as evangelical and mainline Protestant Asian American leaders.12 More Than Serving Tea was one in a series of publications on Asian American Christians published by Intervarsity Press—the largest evangelical press for Asian American publications—and was written for a popular audience. Lay campus ministers and clergy also published practical ministerial books, including Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents (1998) and Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (2006).13 Because these works are not academic texts, they are not part of the scholarly conversation on Asian American religions; they are mentioned here, however, to note the growing interest in Asian American Christian traditions within a popular audience at a time when scholars were publishing academic literature.

The Intellectual Foundations of Asian American Religions Scholarship in Asian American religions has burgeoned into a wide-ranging field of study. Given this heterogeneity, what intellectual and communal goals brought these scholars together? What are the scholarly foundations of their work? At least three significant intellectual concerns undergird the subfield of Asian American religions, including but not exclusive to the critique of disciplinary traditions, rigorous analysis of Orientalism and race, and nuanced treatment of an otherwise reductive approach to religion. First was the critique of disciplinary traditions. In Rudy Busto’s essay “DisOrienting Subjects” (2004), he called for the development of an intellectual path at the intersections and interstices of Asian American Studies and American religions, acknowledging that these fields had operated as nonintersecting parallel narratives. Busto identifies a need for Asian American religionists to not only bridge disciplinary divides but also play an “indicting function” of disciplinary traditions themselves. Analogous to the field of Asian American literature, which also critiques from an interstitial space, Busto identifies in Asian American religions a scholarly position from which to critique “a liberal ‘multiculturalism’ that flattens out the differences among groups, ignores history and hides inequality.”14 Busto’s analysis highlights a critical issue at stake in Asian American religions, which is not only a matter

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of Asian American inclusion in scholarship, but, more urgently, a critique of privilege and power in disciplinary traditions. Along with a critique of disciplinary traditions, Asian American religionists have rigorously analyzed Orientalism and race. As Edward Said writes, at stake in the critique of Orientalism is the agency of the “Orient”: “In brief, because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action.”15 The Saidian critique of Orientalism has become a theoretical foundation for the development of various fields of study, including Asian American religions. The subfield is concerned with a Saidian notion of agency, including the freedom of Oriental subjects in modern Western scholarship. It shares this intellectual labor with mainstream scholars of Asian American studies, but distinctly, at the busy intersection of the category of religion and the study of religious subjects, where rich but incomplete knowledge, discussion, and critique remain. Third, those who study Asian American religions are interested in treating religion as an independent category of analysis. One does not have to go far to observe “religion” at work either in the lives of Asian Americans or in Asian American scholarship, for it is a latent but operative category even if it not theorized or treated thoroughly. A brief look at Said’s critique of Orientalism suggests that it is born out of the tensions between the Occident’s Christian and the Orient’s Islamic world. Similarly, scholars have narrated Asian American history by beginning with the European and American imagination of the Orient, which is concomitantly a religious narrative—the Christian imagination of the Orient. The historian Shelley Lee provides that it was the lure of Confucian philosophy that structured the American elite’s gaze of the Orient as simultaneously mysterious, irrational, and sensuous.16 Yet it is curious that even as Said and Asian American historians speak of religion—in Christian, Islamic, and Confucian terms—as central in constructing the pernicious categories they contest, it remains largely undertheorized. Asian American history has been much more structured by an ambivalent tension between secular and sacred than has been acknowledged and studied. These intellectual foundations of Asian American religions have laid the groundwork to address the invisibility and essentialization of Asian American religious subjects. Narrating the religious history of Asian Americans is not a straightforward proposition, but instead one that calls for reworking fundamental categories in both Asian American Studies and American religions. To write Asian American religious history, then, historians need

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to take into account the identified challenges in terms of the critique of disciplinary traditions, the genealogy of Orientalism and race, and the reduction of religion. These scholarly interventions are necessary because even though historically Asian Americans were the majority practitioners of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the United States—and Christianity is the largest religious category in contemporary Asian America—American religious history and Asian American history did not claim religious Asian Americans as subjects.

Orientalism before Asian American Religions in Historical Narrative “The vast majority of Buddhists in the United States have been Asian immigrants or the descendants of immigrants,” writes historian Thomas Tweed in the opening paragraphs of The American Encounter with Buddhism.17 Tweed appropriately acknowledges the Asian heritage of the majority Buddhist practitioners in the United States and then transitions to the main subject of his research: converts and sympathizers of American or European ancestry. The Orientalist paradigm is at work here—that is, accompanying the distinction between Occident and Orient is the prioritization of the former over the latter in historical narration. The omission of the majority practitioners of Buddhism in the US parallels historian Ann Braude’s critique in “Women’s History is Religious History” in which she argues that recentering American religious history on the majority women practitioners fundamentally changes the narrative. What would it look like to narrate American Buddhist history from the perspective of the American racial majority? In fact, it is not possible to understand the history of American religious life without a rigorous study of the Asian American majority within Buddhism but also Sikhism, Hinduism, and indigenous traditions from Asian and Pacific homelands. Historian Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s turn to the Pacific Rim is promising for the study of Asian American religious history because she calls for a transformation in the very spatial vector of historicizing the nation’s religious past. She disrupts an Atlantic and New England–facing historiography, which she suggests will result in “a world history of American religion.” Yet in her discussion of the indigenous traditions of the Pacific, she refers to the ocean as a “vast liquid desert.”18 Epeli Hau‘ofa suggests that intellectual frameworks that portray the Pacific Ocean as an empty, peripheral space

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risk falling into the intellectual traps that have facilitated the manipulation of the Pacific as a laboratory for European anthropological observation and American nuclear testing.19 To be sure, Maffly-Kipp’s paradigm reaches far, but it would take more than a geographic or spatial turn to grapple with the histories of inequality latent in the study of Asian American religions from the purview of the Pacific. American religious historians have called for a geographic reorientation toward the Pacific in narrating religious history, and have studied the presence of Asian religious traditions in the United States. However, without a critique of the Orientalism latent in the study of Asian religions in the United States or an unmasking of the histories of inequality between practitioners of Asian and European descent, it would be hard to anticipate what is meant by “Asian America” or “Asian American religions.” Indeed, the intellectual challenge in studying Asian religions in the United States is not merely the acknowledgment of Asian and Asian American bodies, or even a geographic turn toward the Pacific, but more fundamentally an understanding of the conditions of power that have rendered these subjects invisible in the historiography. The paradigm of “Orientalism before Asian America” provides an appropriate critique. “The when and where of the Asian American experience,” writes the historian Gary Okihiro, “can be found within the European imagination and construction of Asians and Asia.”20 Even Columbus, Okihiro notes, was searching for the exotic lands of the Orient, which he believed he found when he arrived on American soil. Similarly, Lee suggests that not only bodies but also ideas of Asia, or the “Orient,” provide a productive starting point for narrating Asian American history.21 This “Orientalism before Asian America” paradigm has helped historians take the long view of the formation of Asian America in US history, and it has provided a productive corrective for American religious history in its study of Asian religions in the United States. At the same time, as discussed, scholars of Asian America have been relatively blind to a robust analysis of religion. Not only scholars of American religion but also historians of Asian America failed to study practitioners of Asian religions as historical subjects; they did not theorize religion as an independent category of analysis to make these subjects visible. Even despite ambivalent strains in the 1960s and 1970s within the intellectual heritage of Asian American studies, the Marxian framework did predominate, creating

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a long “secular bias” in Asian American studies, which has prompted intellectual interventions among scholars of Asian American religions. Thus, scholars such as Khyati Joshi whose work simultaneously addressed race and religion, critiqued ethnic studies scholars: “We must stop ignoring religion or treating it as a cultural relic, as an immigrant tool or as mere nostalgia.”22 The task for Asian American religionists has been to rectify these multiple historiographical oversights from a variety of fields.

Reimagining Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the US Asian American religionists have innovated theories and methods that address the concomitant neglect of racial inequalities and the serious treatment of religion in the study of Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the United States. The nomenclature “Asian religions in the US”—often used to describe these religious traditions—is itself problematic because it suggests the importation of so-called foreign religions into the United States, which assumes Christianity as the nation’s native religion. Studying these traditions from the perspective of Asian American practitioners shows that these religious traditions are integral, not foreign, to their families and everyday experiences. To address not only problematic intellectual frameworks endemic to the Western Christian roots of the category of religion, but also to uncover data from understudied populations, a cohort of scholars produced scholarship on the significance of Sikh, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist religious experiences among Asian Americans. Despite scholarly predictions that the color line would melt away for Asian Americans, much as it did Jewish Americans, race continues to shape the everyday experiences of Asian Americans, and even more powerfully, at the intersection of race and minoritized religions. Bandana Purkayastha shows that unlike white immigrants who have “ethnic options,” middle-class, second-generation South Asian Americans, including those of Indian, Pakistani, Nepali, and Bangladeshi descent, must negotiate their marginalization as “racially liminal” subjects in a nation divided by a black-white racial binary.23 Racial marginalization was exacerbated by religious exclusion because Purkayastha’s subjects were “constructed as potential recipients of civilizing influences.” Christians in the US often imagined a hierarchy of religions in their attempts to convert her subjects from their Hindu, Islamic, and Sikh

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religions.24 Purkayastha thus shows that her subjects actively negotiated with the powerful centripetal force that whiteness and Christianity had in shaping their development as second-generation, middle-class South Asian Americans. Jaideep Singh’s subtle read of the concomitant power of racialization and religious discrimination in his case study of the construction of a Sikh gurdwara in California similarly highlights the normative white and Christian culture with which Sikh Indian American practitioners had to contend in contemporary America.25 Unlike Gurinder Singh Mann’s focus on explicating the religious ideas and practices internal to Sikhism in the US, Singh situates the tradition in a thick sociopolitical context charged with the powerful encounter with white Christian supremacy.26 The construction of a sacred site became a battleground through which xenophobic ideas about Indian Americans and their religious practices excluded them from American suburbia—the hallmark locale of middle-class America—revealing the enduring construction of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. Extending the scholarly conversation on the racialization of religion, Khyati Joshi studies second-generation Indian Americans and their Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and Christian beliefs and practices in New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground (2006).27 Prior studies such as John Fenton’s Transplanting Religions Traditions (1988) focused on first-generation Indian immigrants and often fell into stereotypical characterizations, such as an overly positive view of the Hart Cellar Act in granting immigration, including the portrayal of Asian Indians as the mythical model minority: “Indians . . . did much better occupationally than blacks.”28 Joshi interrogates the racialization of her subjects at the intersection of religion. She shows that her subjects negotiated their “double minority” status as racial and religious minorities, and even those who subscribed to Christianity, the nation’s dominant religion, were often misrecognized as Hindu, showing that race often became a proxy for religion. Religion also served as a proxy for race. When a second-generation Indian American Sikh was targeted for wearing a turban at a nightclub— “Sorry, we don’t serve turbans”—it was nearly impossible to tease out whether Joshi’s subject was targeted for his race or religion as the categories were conflated. Yet Joshi ultimately identifies the power of “religious oppression” in shaping, perhaps even more powerfully than race, the experiences of second-generation Indian Americans: “discrimination based on religion is a uniquely formidable force in the ethnic identity development for second-

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generation Indian Americans.”29 For those scholars who explain religion as epiphenomenal, Joshi shows the enduring significance of religion in shaping Indian American experience, and for those who are swift to neglect race in their study of the “model minority,” she shows the power of this fiction as a misunderstanding of the US racial landscape. The events of September 11, 2001, heightened the racial and religious discrimination endured by Indian Americans in particular and South Asian Americans in general, especially because hate crimes targeted those perceived as “Muslim.” The first hate crime after September 11 was against Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh Indian American gas station owner who, in spite of having no affiliation with Islam or terrorism, was violently attacked and killed on September 15, 2001. Violent attackers have identified everyday Sikh American males as “terrorists” because of their pheonotypical features and their religious garb, especially the turban. Singh has called the post-911 culture of targeting those perceived as Muslim a “new American apartheid,” in which, “religion and its physical markers are a central component in determining who is racially marked as ‘other.’ ”30 Purkayastha and Joshi’s research show that upward economic mobility could not prevent second-generation South Asian Americans from being potential targets of such xenophobic crimes. In spite of their lack of affiliation with Islam, terrorism, or even the nationality of so-called terrorists, those of South Asian descent in the US are often lumped together and misidentified as the state’s political enemy, revealing the harmful consequences of the racialization of religions. Simultaneously, those South Asians who do identify as Muslim are also often lumped together with Arab American Muslims without distinction, further underscoring the ways in which the United States has mobilized “Muslim” as a quasi-racial category to imagine the boundaries of the nation and citizenship through a monolithic Other. Yet a growing body of literature shows that American Muslims are taking on a “Muslim first” identity as a “fundamental form of social cohesion and organization,” which challenges the state’s reductive use of the religious identity, and fosters interracial alliances among Muslims.31 African American and South Asian American Muslim youth, for instance, create a “hybrid, collective identity” across racial lines.32 Note, though, that within efforts to embrace an umbrella Muslim identity, interracial tensions—as well as opportunities for alliance—emerge. Jamillah Karim shows in American Muslim Women (2009) that, despite a shared

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experience of marginalization post-911, South Asian American and African American Muslim women have “distinct histories and relations vis-à-vis American whites,” which can make Muslim sisterhood challenging. In the local ummah, where South Asian Americans were the majority and African Americans the minority, South Asian Americans often played into “model minority” stereotypes, distancing themselves from their African American co-practitioners.33 Karim’s work points to the challenges of forging religious community across racial lines and the merits of Afro-Asian American religious studies. However, a longer treatment of the history of American Orientalism would have illuminated the extent to which African Americans are also implicated in the orientalization of South Asian Americans, and that South Asian Americans are more closely linked to African Americans in a common, not just distinct, history of civil rights. For, indeed, recall that the systems of thought and institutions that perpetuate discrimination against racial and religious minorities in the US harkens back to a longer history of exclusion from US immigration and citizenship. Thus, though the fear of terrorism in the United States generated severe backlash against those perceived as Muslim, the events of 9/11 itself were not the origins of such a xenophobic climate. Singh’s study of a Sikh gurdwara was from 1997, and much of Joshi’s data was collected before September 11, 2001. Singh, Bandana, and Joshi’s contemporary data point to the longer history of a nation built on a series of racial and religious exclusions. Moreover, consider the legacies of Japanese American internment during World War II, in which Japanese Americans were not only racially but also religiously targeted and corralled into concentration camps because they looked like the “enemy.” Recall that when officials of the US state recruited Japanese Americans into concentration camps, Japanese American Buddhist clergy were targeted before Christian leaders for FBI surveillance.34 With this historical backdrop of racial and religious exclusions in mind, scholars have also reimagined the study of Buddhism in the United States.35 Sharon Suh and Carolyn Chen, respectively, provided ethnographic and sociological studies of Korean American and Taiwanese American Buddhists, providing crucial data through in-depth study of a Korean American temple in Los Angeles and a comparative approach with Taiwanese American Christianity.36 In Virtual Orientalism (2011), Jane Iwamura bridged theoretical gaps, simultaneously taking to task the Orientalist gaze of American religions and the reduction of religion among Asian Americanists. Iwamura

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traced a genealogy of the “oriental monk” in American popular culture to uncover the Orientalist gaze on Asian religions in the United States, lodged into American consciousness through the virtual realm. American media had portrayed Japanese American Buddhists as less “authentic” than white American Buddhists who took up supposedly elite and sophisticated Eastern religions. In her ominous last lines, she highlighted how the logic of the “oriental monk” ultimately limited the “Oriental” subject’s agency: “At our immediate disposal and making no demands of his own, [the Oriental monk] has indeed become virtually ours.”37 Iwamura exposes the commodification and commercialization of Asian religions in the United States, suggesting that Asian practitioners themselves have been relegated to the status of nonsubjects, more closely paired with objects available for consumption. Yet the Orientalist gaze continues to remain in the study of religion in the US, as evinced by discussions concerning the most recent 2012 Pew Research report. Scholars published and organized conference panels to critique the categories used to evaluate the practice of Asian religions in the United States as Christian normative assumptions went unnoticed in the surveying and analysis.38 For instance, the survey questions on Buddhism reveal a meditation-focused bias that dominates Western conceptions of the tradition in the wake of the mindfulness movement. Suh shows that this does not necessarily reflect the experience of Asian American Buddhist practice and in her most recent work Silver Screen Buddha (2015), she has argued for a more critical read of the everyday practice of the laity.39 Scholars have reimagined the study of Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in the United States. Yet, given the contemporary focus and the use of theoretical, sociological, or ethnographic methods, what would it look like to apply a historical imagination to this rich data? How would sources from rigorous archival research or oral histories change and strengthen the narrative?40

Imperialism, Agency, and Transnationalism in Asian American Christian Traditions How has the study of Christian traditions fared among Asian Americans? Unlike Asian American practitioners of Buddhism, for instance, Asian American Christians have historically been the racial minority in their religious tradition in the United States. Moreover, whereas Asian American

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­ ractitioners of Asian religions are stereotyped as the “religious Other,” Asian p American Christians are often framed as the “racially assimilated.” Yet, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s work shows, the process of institutional racial formation has prevented Asian American assimilation, debunking sociologist Robert Park’s predictions.41 Thus, the dilemma of the “religious Other” and the “racially assimilated”—or, in other words, the “perpetual foreigner” or the “honorary white”—are like two sides of the same coin of the Orientalist gaze in that they are forced binary categorizations that obscure reality and limit possibilities for Asian American agency. Thus, across the study of the variety of religious traditions in Asian America, scholars share a critique of theories of assimilation that naively predict Asian American absorption into whiteness. Yet one of the unique intellectual challenges in studying Asian American Christian traditions is an interpretation of what it means for Asian Americans to subscribe to the dominant religious tradition of the modern West, especially as Christian institutions have propagated Orientalism, including projects of empire and colonialism. Among the heterogeneous strands of Asian American Christian traditions, the literature on American evangelicalism is particularly salient given the religious tradition’s close association with the suppression and exclusion of Asian America and her “foreign” religions, especially in late twentieth and twenty-first century American politics. The extant literature, therefore, debates assimilation of Western culture versus retention of Asian heritage. Is Asian American Christianity in general and Asian American evangelicalism in particular a form of colonial mimicry or indigenous expression? The categories of assimilation, hybridity, and transnationalism emerge as central concepts in debating this question. The initial literature on Asian American evangelicalism argues for assimilation. Busto suggests that evangelicalism reinforces the stereotype of the model minority for Asian American evangelical college students, pressuring them to conform to ideals of piety and performance. They have made it into the elite halls of American higher education, yet their upward mobility paradoxically burdens them as the exoticized “model moral minority.” Yet another “trap,” evangelicalism “reinforces” the pressure of academic performance with moral performance.42 Sociologist Antony Alumkal provides a similar critique of the evangelical ethos to which contemporary Asian Americans subscribe, diagnosing them as the “scandal of the ‘model minority’ mind.” In spite of their racially marginalized status, they uncritically suffer from the

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same scandal of anti-intellectualism as the evangelical mainstream.43 Asian American evangelicals, as analyzed by Busto and Alumkal, passively adopt and collaborate with the mythic status of the model minority, rendering them duped by mainstream evangelical thought. Both scholars’ works have had considerable traction in intellectual debate, even as others have departed from their theorizations. In sociologist Sharon Kim’s work, she concludes that Korean American evangelicals neither assimilate into mainstream churches nor remain in the ethnic churches of their immigrant parents, but establish their own “independent religious institutions,” revealing “hybrid third spaces to inhabit.”44 Rather than reading Korean American evangelicalism as white mimicry, she suggests that practitioners have innovated a hybrid religious expression. The scholarly debate over assimilation and hybridity reflects an underlying concern about the agency that Asian American Christians, specifically evangelicals, are able to exercise as a minority population within a brand of Christianity that prioritizes a theology of universalism that can obscure and ignore difference. The discussion concerning assimilation and hybridity, however, can be pushed one step further. The literature in African American religious studies provides a helpful point of comparison. In Jonathan Walton’s work, for example, he argues that the black liberation theology paradigm has cast a long intellectual shadow that has rendered others, including black Pentecostals and televangelists, as invalid subjects of study.45 His work highlights the complex and heterogeneous landscapes of religious black America, which includes not just prophetic social movement figures, but also televangelists and accommodating Christians—and much more. A similar assessment can be made about the intellectual trajectory of Asian American religious studies as the lineage of the subfield holds a preference for liberationist critique and subjects. The study of Christian traditions in Asian America reveals a need for more nuanced discussion that not only acknowledges theological and racial binaries, or dichotomous categories such as assimilation versus hybridity, but also moves beyond them to reflect the full range and complexity of Asian American Christian lives. In part, this complexity and comprehensiveness needs to come from acknowledging transnational connections as Asian American Christian traditions are placed within their global contexts. Indeed, the scholarly debate over assimilation and hybridity among scholars of Asian American Christianity parallels the scholarly discussion in world Christianity. On one hand,

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historians argue that Christianity is a world religion that has adapted to nonWestern contexts through indigenization and vernacularization.46 On the other, scholars argue for the primarily Western and American character of world Christianity; still others view Christianity in non-Western contexts as primarily or solely an agent of imperialism and colonization.47 If Asian American Christianity has roots in Asia, then the indigeneity of Asian Christianity and its transnational dimensions are significant for evaluating the complex agentive possibilities of Asian American Christian traditions. The study of Syro-Malabar Catholics is an example of a Christian tradition that originated in the Indian state of Kerala, and therefore, reflects the importance of setting Indian American Christian formations in particular in global context.48 Furthermore, in a response to the Amerasia Journal series “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World,” Tat-siong Benny Liew raised the critique that Christianity has been influenced by Asian religious traditions since its beginnings, suggesting the inaccuracies and limitations of framing modern Christianity in a Western frame.49 Especially for a field that takes the Orientalist critique seriously, the Asian American adoption of Christianity—the religion of the West—can be a troubling phenomenon. But as Said’s critique of essentialized categories shows, and as the analytical frameworks of hybridity and transnational reveal, in the study of Asian American Christianity, the distinction of East versus West itself needs to be troubled. Scholars are increasingly critiquing the Western roots of modern Christianity, especially as Christianity has been enculturated into local non-Western contexts. The racialized experiences of racial and ethnic minority Christians in the United States cannot be understood without their global contexts.50

The Future of Asian American Religions and Asian American Religious History Almost two decades after the inaugural Amerasia Journal issue “Racial Spirits” (1996), the journal published a sequel of sorts in 2014 titled “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World.”51 The two issues bookend a significant development in the scholarly conversation within the subfield. A third wave of scholars and conversations is now emerging. In this third wave, newly emerging Asian American religious studies scholarship challenges the categories of the religious and secular, and studies

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Asian America beyond the world religions of Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Mimi Khúc approaches her interdisciplinary study of Vietnam War memorials with a lens of the “ ‘politics of meaning’ ”—in which religion is framed as “meaning-making” in a “social and cultural context structured by power”—through which she uncovers religious expression in so-called nonreligious spaces.52 Justin Tse contests the categories of the religious and secular in his study of “grounded theologies” and “Pacific secularities” in which he uncovers the theological valence of secular civic engagement among transnational Cantonese Protestants.53 Brett Esaki, moreover, studies “multidimensional” or “ ‘nonbinary’ silences” through which Japanese Americans projected outward assimilation ( gaimenteki doka) to enfold religious ideas into seemingly nonreligious practices such as Japanese American gardening.54 In Russell Jeung’s emerging work, coauthored with Seanan Fong and Helen Jin Kim, he studies nonreligious Chinese Americans, the largest ethnic group in the US.55 Exemplifying this intellectual trend beyond the world religions frame, historian Melissa Borja uses archival sources and oral histories to study the animist traditions of Hmong Americans in her study of refugee resettlement programs.56 In the subfield of Asian American religions, theoretical interventions have been made and sociological and ethnographic analyses conducted to revise the intellectual frameworks used in studying Asian religions in the US and Christian traditions in Asian America. Studies have produced rich content and incisive theoretical tools, providing interventions into longstanding theories of immigrant assimilation as well as US religious diversity. Biblical and theological scholars have also developed Asian American hermeneutics and postcolonial theologies to provide contemporary applications for ancient texts and traditions.57 These works have innovated on the frontier of theological thought, providing alternatives and complexity to Eurocentric and colonial theological imagination. However, historical narratives of these traditions have been limited, and archives as well as oral histories underutilized. Indeed, it is fair to say that Asian American religions as a subfield in general has had a contemporary focus, particularly given that sociologists, political scientists, ethnographers, geographers, and critical theorists have studied and continue to study post-1965 Asian immigrant and second-generation groups. However, in this third wave of scholarship and scholars, much-needed historical narratives of Asian American religious traditions are also emerging as scholars use archives and oral histories to excavate the past. In ­addition to

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Borja’s work, Christopher Chua has written a history of a Presbyterian church in Chinatown in San Francisco, the oldest Asian church of any Christian denomination in North America and the first Chinese Protestant church outside China; Dean Adachi is currently writing a transnational history on the legacy of Kanichi Miyama.58 These works build on David Yoo’s Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (2010) and Derek Chang’s Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (2010), which have uncovered late ­nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese and Korean American religious histories.59 These works represent a scholarly effort to fill a lacuna in the religious history of Asian Americans, not only as it relates to nonintersecting parallel histories in Asian American history and American religious history, but also as it concerns the contemporary bias in Asian American religions.

Conclusion How do we construct a historical imagination of Asian American religious life? This is not a new question but one that nonetheless needs to be asked perennially for the growth and expansion of Asian American scholarship. The invisibility and essentialization of religious Asian Americans cannot be rectified in the historical record with theory and social scientific data alone; stories and narratives need to be told and past lives and worlds reconstructed. A more complex and comprehensive understanding of Asian American agency is at stake in the historiography of Asian American religions in particular and American religions in general.

Notes This chapter is an updated version of the essay by Helen Jin Kim, Timothy Tseng, and David K. Yoo, “Asian American Religious History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Asian American History, ed. David K. Yoo and Eiichiro Azuma (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 360–372. I am grateful to David Yoo, Tim Tseng, and Eiichiro Azuma for their collaboration on this earlier version. Many thanks to Khyati Y. Joshi for her additional guidance. 1.  This parallels what Albert Raboteau has written about African American religious history: “Historians have long recognized the crucial role of religion in the social, political, cultural and economic life of black Americans. Nonetheless, the

Kim 31 story of African American religion has often been neglected in books and courses on African-American history and American religious history” (Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], x). 2.  Timothy Tseng, “Beyond Orientalism and Assimilation: The Asian American as Historical Subject,” in Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, ed. Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez (St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2003), 69. 3.  The ethnic and religious composition of Asian Americans and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders has been historically diverse, though the contemporary growth of Asian American religions is primarily a result of the 1965 Immigration Act, which ended a long period of Asian exclusion. As of 2012, Asian Americans religiously affiliate as 42 percent Christian, 26 percent unaffiliated, 14 percent Buddhist, 10 percent Hindu, 4 percent Muslim, 2 percent Other Religion, 1 percent Sikh, and 1 percent Don’t Know/Refused to Answer. A deeper dive into these numbers shows high concentrations of religious affinity by ethnic group: approximately half of Indian Americans identify as Hindu; a majority of Filipinos (89 percent) and Koreans (71 percent) identify as Christian; and, over half of all Chinese Americans identify as non-religious (52 percent), the largest ethnic group in the United States to affiliate as “religious nones.” See Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” July 19, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/Asian​-Americans​ -religion-full-report.pdf, 43. For more analysis, see Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Joshi, eds., “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–121. 4.  See Yoo’s introduction in David K. Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999); and Busto’s essay “DisOrienting Subjects: Reclaiming Pacific Islander/Asian American Religions,” in Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, ed. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 9–28. 5.  Scholars have used a variety of nomenclature to name the field, including Asian Pacific America Islander Religion, Asian North American Religion and Pacific Asian North American Religion. The very term “Asian American” or “Asian America” is a construction—a term that has evolved over time to describe those of Asian descent; the term has been used as a category of political empowerment as in the Asian American Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but also has evolved out of the state’s arbitrary and racist process of “lumping” those of Asian descent together for its political and bureaucratic ends. See Yen Le Espiritu, Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); Timothy Tseng, “Asian American Religions,” in The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, ed. Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 253–264.

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6.  David Kyuman Kim argues that the secular terms of Asian American studies, including key terms such as “diaspora,” are actually sacred terms. See “Enchanting Diasporas, Asian Americans and the Passionate Attachment of Race,” in Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred. 7.  See the archival holdings at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley titled “Pacific and Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies Collection, 1972–2002”; see also Helen Jin Kim, “Niseis of the Faith: Theologizing Liberation in the Asian American Movement” (BA thesis, Stanford University, 2006). 8.  Jonathan Y. Tan, Introducing Asian American Theologies (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008). 9.  David K. Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 10. 10.  Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim, Asian American Religions: Building Faith Communities (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2002); and Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 2004. 11.  Rita Nakashima Brock, ed., Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007); Nikki Toyama et al., eds., More Than Serving Tea: Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership, and Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). 12.  ISAAC’s publications include the Journal of Asian American Christianity and Timothy Tseng and Viji Nakka-Cammauf, eds., Asian American Christianity: A Reader (Lulu, 2009). 13.  Jeannette Yep, Peter Cha, and Paul Tokunaga, Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); Peter S. Cha, Steve Kang, and Helen Lee, eds., Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006). 14.  Rudy Busto, “DisOrienting Subjects: Reclaiming Pacific Islander/Asian American Religions,” in Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 24. 15.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 3. 16.  Shelley Lee, A New History of Asian America (New York: Routledge, 2014), 9–13. 17.  Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent 1844–1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 18.  Rudy Busto highlights this point in “DisOrienting Subjects: Reclaiming Pacific Islander/Asian American Religions,” in Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 14. See Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim,” in Retelling U.S. Religious History, ed. Thomas Tweed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 132. 19.  Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our

Kim 33 Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva, Fiji: The University of South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993). 20.  Gary Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 7. 21. Lee, New History, 5–26. 22.  Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 144. 23.  Bandana Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 30. 24. Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, 39–44. 25.  Jaideep Singh, “The Racialization of Minoritized Religious Identity: Constructing Sacred Sites at the Intersection of White and Christian Supremacy” in Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 87–106. 26.  Gurinder Singh Mann, “Sikhism in the United States of America,” in The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain, Canada, and the United States, ed. Harold G. Coward, John R. Hinnells, and Raymond Brady Williams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 259–277. 27. Joshi, New Roots. 28.  John Y. Fenton, Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians in America (New York: Praeger, 1988), 20. 29. Joshi, New Roots, 144. 30.  Jaideep Singh, “A New American Apartheid: Racialized, Religious Minorities in the Post-9/11 Era,” Sikh Formations 9, no. 2 (2013): 128. 31.  See chapter 3, this volume. 32.  Jamillah Karim, “Between Immigrant Islam and Black Liberation: Young Muslims Inherit Global Muslim and African American Legacies,” The Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 498. 33.  Jamillah Karim, American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 10, 5. 34.  Duncan Williams, “Camp Dharma: Japanese American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of World War II,” in Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles Prebish and Martin Baumann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 191. 35.  Sharon Suh, Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Carolyn Chen, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For an earlier narration of Buddhism in America from the

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­ erspective of Asian Americans, see Tetsuden Kashima, Buddhism in America: The p Social Organization of an Ethnic Religious Institution (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977). 36.  See also Joseph Cheah, Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 37. Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism, 165. 38.  See introduction in Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes; Busto, “DisOrienting Subjects.” 39.  Sharon A. Suh, Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); see also Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” July 19, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07​ /‌Asian-Americans-religion-full-report.pdf, 43. For more analysis, see Sylvia ChanMalik and Khyati Joshi, eds., “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–121. 40.  For a recent rich historical study of Japanese American Buddhism, see Duncan Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 41.  Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2014). 42.  Rudy Busto, “The Gospel According to the Model Minority? Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students,” in Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes, 178–179. See also Rebecca Kim, God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 43.  Antony Alumkal, “Scandal of the ‘Model Minority’ Mind? The Bible and Second-Generation Asian American Evangelicals,” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 237–250. 44.  Sharon Kim, A Faith of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 3. 45.  Jonathan Walton, Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 46.  Dana Robert and Lamin Sanneh, respectively, argue for Christianity as a world religion and indigenization through vernacularization. See Dana Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009); and Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 47.  Mark Noll emphasizes the American character of world Christianity in The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009). A close reading of Said’s work, for instance, shows the role of missionaries as primarily forces of imperialism and colonization. 48.  Clara A.B. Joseph. “Rethinking Hybridity: The Syro-Malabar Church in

Kim 35 North America,” in South Asians in the Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen and P. Pratap Kumar (Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Publishing, 2004), 101; and Jaisy Joseph, The Struggle for Identity among Syro-Malabar Catholics (Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2009). 49.  Amerasia Journal, “A Response to Amerasia Journal’s ‘Asian American Religions in a Globalized World’ by Tat-Siong Benny Liew,” May 6, 2014, http://www​ .amerasiajournal.org/blog/?p=2440. 50.  For an anthology that moves in this direction, see David K. Yoo and Albert Park, eds. Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America (Honolulu and Los Angeles: University of Hawai‘i Press in association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2014). 51.  See introduction in Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes; and Busto, “DisOrienting Subjects.” 52.  Thu Thanh (Mimi) Khúc, “The Afterlives of the Vietnam War: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Meaning” (PhD diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2013), vii. 53.  Justin K.H. Tse, “Religious Politics in Pacific Space: Grounding Cantonese Protestant Practices in Secular Civil Societies” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia at Vancouver, 2013), 4. 54.  Brett Esaki, “Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening.” Journal of Asian American Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 238–240; see also Esaki’s Enfolding Silence: The Transformation of Japanese American Religion and Art under Oppression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 55.  For discussion on Chinese Americans’ “religious nones,” see Russell Jeung, “Second Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious,” in Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, ed. Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, 197–221 (New York: New York University Press, 2012); see also Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 56.  Melissa Borja, “ ‘To Follow the New Rule or Way’: Hmong Refugee Resettlement and the Practice of American Religious Pluralism” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014). 57.  For a few representative examples, see Kwok Pui-Lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005); Anne Joh, Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006); and Fumitaka Matsuoka, Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches (Cleveland, OH: United Church Press, 1995). 58.  Christopher Chua, “The Sacredness of Being There: Race, Religion, and Place-Making at San Francisco’s Presbyterian Church in Chinatown” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2014).

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59.  Derek Chang, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History 1903–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). See also Timothy Tseng, “Chinese Protestant Nationalism in the United States, 1880–1927,” in Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes, 19–51; “Trans-Pacific Transpositions: Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese North American Protestantism,” in Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 241–271; and “Unbinding Their Souls: Chinese Protestant Women in Twentieth-Century America,” in Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, ed. Margaret Lambert Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 136–163.

Bibliography Alumkal, Antony. “Scandal of the ‘Model Minority’ Mind? The Bible and SecondGeneration Asian American Evangelicals.” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 237–250. Borja, Melissa. “ ‘To Follow the New Rule or Way’: Hmong Refugee Resettlement and the Practice of American Religious Pluralism.” PhD diss, Columbia University, 2014. Braude, Ann. “Women’s History Is Religious History.” In Narrating American Religious History, edited by Thomas Tweed, 87–107. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Brock, Rita Nakashima, ed. Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007. Busto, Rudy. “DisOrienting Subjects: Reclaiming Pacific Islander/Asian American Religions.” In Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 9–28. ———. “The Gospel According to the Model Minority? Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students,” in Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes, 178–179. Cha, Peter S., Steve Kang, and Helen Lee, eds. Growing Healthy Asian American Churches. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006. Chan-Malik, Sylvia, and Khyati Y. Joshi, eds. “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World.” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): vii–121. Chang, Derek. Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Cheah, Joseph, Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Chen, Carolyn. Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Kim 37 Chen, Carolyn, and Russell Jeung. Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Chua, Christopher. “The Sacredness of Being There: Race, Religion, and PlaceMaking at San Francisco’s Presbyterian Church in Chinatown.” PhD diss, University of California, Berkeley, 2014. Esaki, Brett. Enfolding Silence: The Transformation of Japanese American Religion and Art under Oppression. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ———. “Multidimensional Silence, Spirituality, and the Japanese American Art of Gardening.” Journal of Asian American Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 238–240. Espiritu, Yến Lê. Asian American Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993. Fenton, John Y. Transplanting Religious Traditions: Asian Indians in America. New York: Praeger, 1988. Graduate Theological Union. “Pacific and Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies Collection, 1972–2002.” Berkeley: University of California. Hau‘ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” In A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa. Suva, FJ: University of of South Pacific in association with Beake House, 1993. Iwamura, Jane Naomi. Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Iwamura, Jane Naomi, and Paul Spickard, eds. Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Jeung, Russell. “Second Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious.” In Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, edited by Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, 197–221. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Joh, Anne. Heart of the Cross: A Postcolonial Christology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2006. Joseph, Jaisy. “Rethinking Hybridity: The Syro-Malabar Church in North America.” In South Asians in the Diaspora: Histories and Religious Traditions, edited by Knut A. Jacobsen and P. Pratap Kumar. Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Publishing, 2004. ———. The Struggle for Identity among Syro-Malabar Catholics. Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2009. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Karim, Jamillah. American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class and Gender within the Ummah. New York: New York University Press, 2009. ———. “Between Immigrant Islam and Black Liberation: Young Muslims Inherit

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Global Muslim and African American Legacies.” The Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 498. Khúc, Thu Thanh (Mimi). “The Afterlives of the Vietnam War: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Meaning.” PhD diss, University of California Santa Barbara, 2013. Kim, David Kyuman. “Enchanting Diasporas, Asian Americans and the Passionate Attachment of Race.” In Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, edited by Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard, 327–340. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Kim, Helen Jin. “Niseis of the Faith: Theologizing Liberation in the Asian American Movement.” BA thesis, Stanford University, 2006. Kim, Rebecca. God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kim, Sharon. A Faith of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Kwok Pui-Lan. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005. Lee, Shelley. A New History of Asian America. New York: Routledge, 2014. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie. “Eastward Ho! American Religion from the Perspective of the Pacific Rim.” In Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas Tweed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Mann, Gurinder Singh. “Sikhism in the United States of America.” In The South Asian Religious Diaspora in Britain, Canada, and the United States, edited by Harold G. Coward, John R. Hinnells, and Raymond Brady Williams, 259–277. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Matsuoka, Fumitaka. Out of Silence: Emerging Themes in Asian American Churches. Cleveland, OH: United Church Press, 1995. Matsuoka, Fumitaka, and Eleazar S. Fernandez, eds. Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans. St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2003. Min, Pyong Gap, and Jung Ha Kim. Asian American Religions: Building Faith Communities. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2002. Noll, Mark. The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009. Okihiro, Gary. Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pew Research Center. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, July 19, 2012. http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07​ /Asian-Americans-religion-full-report.pdf.

Kim 39 Purkayastha, Bandana. Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Raboteau, Albert. Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Robert, Dana. Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Sanneh, Lamin O. Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Singh, Jaideep. “A New American Apartheid: Racialized, Religious Minorities in the Post-9/11 Era.” Sikh Formations 9, no. 2 (2013): 128. ———. “The Racialization of Minoritized Religious Identity: Constructing Sacred Sites at the Intersection of White and Christian Supremacy.” In Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred, 87–106. Suh, Sharon A. Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. ———. Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Tan, Jonathan Y. Introducing Asian American Theologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008. Toyama, Nikki, et al., eds. More Than Serving Tea: Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership, and Faith. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006. Tse, Justin K.H. “Religious Politics in Pacific Space: Grounding Cantonese Protestant Practices in Secular Civil Societies.” PhD diss, University of British Columbia at Vancouver, 2013. Tseng, Timothy. “Asian American Religions.” In The Columbia Guide to Religion in American History, edited by Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum, 253–264. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. ———. “Beyond Orientalism and Assimilation: The Asian American as Historical Subject.” In Realizing the America of our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, edited by Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez, 55–72. St. Louis, MO: Chalice, 2003. ———. “Chinese Protestant Nationalism in the United States, 1880–1927.” In Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes, 19–51. ———. “Trans-Pacific Transpositions: Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese North American Protestantism.” In Iwamura and Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, 241–271. ———. “Unbinding Their Souls: Chinese Protestant Women in Twentieth-Century America.” In Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, edited by ­Margaret

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Lamberts Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton, 136–163. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Tseng, Timothy, and Viji Nakka-Cammauf, eds., Asian American Christianity: A Reader. Lulu, 2009. Tweed, Thomas. The American Encounter with Buddhism: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent 1844–1912. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Walton, Jonathan. Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Williams, Duncan. American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. ———. “Camp Dharma: Japanese American Buddhist Identity and the Internment Experience of World War II.” In Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, edited by Charles Prebish and Martin Baumann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Yep, Jeannette, Peter Cha, and Paul Tokunaga. Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998. Yoo, David K. Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History 1903–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. ———. “For Those Who Have Eyes to See: Religious Sightings in Asian America.” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): xi–xxii. ———, ed. New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999. Yoo, David K., and Albert Park, eds. Encountering Modernity: Christianity in East Asia and Asian America. Honolulu and Los Angeles: University of Hawai‘i Press in association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2014.

2 Asian American Religious Beliefs Reconsidered Jerry Z. Park

The Asian American population is fast approaching a record eighteen million, yet most reports based on national surveys that present racial minority opinions often leave them out. This is due in part to the nature of major survey research which aims for “national representativeness.” In effect, this approach results in surveys with few to no cases of Asian American survey respondents as they constitute less than 6 percent of the US total population. The Pew Research Center in 2012 conducted a survey on Asian Americans to address this absence.1 Although the Pew Asian American Survey (PAAS) illuminated a number of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors until then unknown, the Pew reporting of these attitudes to the public often veered in the direction of problematic generalizations of all Asian Americans. Scholars and activists alike took issue with the focus on aggregate findings and the minimal attention given to the complexity within this racialized population. In like fashion, the Asian American survey included a number of questions regarding religion which have never before been asked to a representative sample of diverse religious Asian Americans. After more than two decades of qualitative and nonrepresentative survey studies of various Asian American religious communities we were now given more accurate assessments of the size and prevalence of those communities. We could know the extent to which the beliefs and practices of Asian American religious communities vary within and between religious faith traditions. But similar to 41

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the initial Pew report on Asian Americans, its follow-up report on Asian American religions illuminated some aspects of religious diversity in this population but glossed over important problems in the way “religion” and the beliefs, practices, and identities tied to it are defined and measured in contemporary survey research.

Counted, Uncounted, and Undercounted Surveys are often criticized for lacking nuance on complex topics or issues, and rightly so: surveys are not designed to capture deep discursive reflection. Instead, the benefit of surveys is assessing prevalence of discrete responses to questions. At its most effective, a survey is representative of a particular population, and thus these small bits of information can be attributed generally to that population. Second, a survey allows researchers to examine statistically probable relationships between responses to different questions. To analyze these statistical relationships, theories provide the foundation for understanding how one set of responses is associated with another set of responses. Often these theories are generated from nonrepresentative qualitative studies of particular groups. In this way, survey research relies on qualitative research and illuminates whether such research applies to large segments of a target population, and whether observed relationships between attitudes or behaviors in such research can be verified through mathematical probability (that is, statistical analysis). To tackle the first issue, representativeness, the Pew survey was administered to an oversample of 3,500 Asian Americans that included specific oversamples of the largest six ethnic groups. An oversample is a cost-effective strategy to gain larger numbers of respondents in a target subpopulation.2 To create an oversample, researchers rely on a combination of standard sampling procedures and supplement it with other sources of information. The PAAS used surname databases from marketing firms that have identified households as “likely Asian,” based on surname. Using census information they then implement survey weights, or values that adjust each respondent’s answers so that they reflect a larger population. Applying these weights enables the claim that the five hundred respondents of a particular ethnic group reflect that particular subpopulation within a given margin of error (usually 3 to 5 percent). With the Pew survey, researchers can better estimate the prevalence of previously unknown social attitudes and behaviors.

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As a result of the effort involved in creating the PAAS, we have gained greater clarity in the prevalence of religious faith traditions within Asian America and in specific ethnic groups. For example, Pew’s religious landscape survey in 2014 suggests that the percentage of Asian American Buddhists is 8 percent of all Asian Americans. However the survey was administered only in English and Spanish. The Asian American survey, which included some language translation, corrects the figure to 14 percent. Similarly, the Christian population among Asian Americans according to the religious landscape survey is 35 percent; the Asian American survey shows the rate to be closer to 42 percent. The prevalence of Hindu and unaffiliated Asian Americans in the religious landscape survey (16 and 33 percent, respectively) is revised down in PAAS (10 and 26 percent). Even with these revisions, the Asian American unaffiliated rate is still higher than the overall US rate (23 percent). The Asian American survey also shows us that Chinese and Japanese unaffiliated rates well exceed the national average (52 and 32 percent). Through the PAAS, then, we have a better understanding of the distribution of religious affiliations (and nonaffiliation) among Asian Americans. Reliance on the Asian American survey for gauging the prevalence of religions should be taken with caution as well. When a national US survey is touted as representative it is often in actuality representative of Englishfluent, middle-class, economically stable, and non-institutionalized adult Americans. This is the case due to certain limitations in the administration of every survey. If the survey relies on a household address, the survey cannot be delivered to someone who does not have a home or is temporarily away from home. This rules out adults who are homeless, incarcerated, hospitalized, on active military duty, or on a college campus, to name a few. Even if the potential respondent has a home, they may not be fluent in English in which case an invitation to complete a survey is quickly discarded. This excludes significant segments of immigrants for whom English is not the preferred language. Furthermore, survey response rates based on landline and cellphone invitation are quite low because most phones have caller identification, which discourages invitees to answer an unsolicited inquiry. Similarly, surveys administered through email invitation are readily dismissed and presume that most individuals of a population have an email address that can be mapped to create a representative sampling base for the population. In addition, low-wage-earning households require long hours at their place of employment, making them unavailable to complete a survey at home or

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over the phone. High-wage-earning households may also spend long hours at their place of employment and avoid completing a survey. Because of these limitations, the term “nationally representative survey” is often misleading because it minimizes the many ways surveys do not in fact represent a given population. Therefore when survey results describe the “religious landscape” of the United States, it more appropriately refers to the religious landscape of adults in mainstream American society. All of these problems apply to all national-level surveys, but several additional factors affect Asian American survey participation and this has bearing on the Pew survey. As noted, that survey included translation into seven major languages but not for ethnic groups smaller than the largest six. Thus Cambodian, Indonesian, Lao, Pakistani, and Thai respondents who completed the survey are more likely to be well-established, better educated, and economically stable relative to the average in their ethnic group. Also, the Pew survey relied on “likely Asian” surname databases from market companies that target specific groups for advertising. This is a useful strategy because it eliminates a considerable amount of guesswork in the sampling process. However, such databases are problematic for several reasons. Some surnames, such as Gonzalez, Lee, and Park, are often found in Asian American populations but also in non-Asian populations. A follow-up survey question that asks the respondent whether they identify as Asian would disqualify such a respondent. This problem extends to married individuals, particularly women. Consider that about 25 percent of married Asian Americans are interracially married.3 A certain proportion of those have altered their last name. Lists of households that are “likely Asian” based on surname will include non-Asians who now have the Asian surname of their spouse, and it will exclude married Asian Americans who have changed their surname to that of their non-Asian spouse. Further intermarriage rates vary for Asian American men and women and across Asian ethnic groups. As Pyong Gap Min and Chigon Kim show, 55 percent of marriages to post-1965 US-born Asian Americans were racially exogamous.4 The gender imbalance is about 5 percent on average, favoring women’s exogamy. Notably, the Chinese, Filipino, and Korean ratios exceed this average—by 7, 11, and 13 percent, respectively. That is, any sample of Asian Americans that relies on a surname database will underrepresent certain Asian American women who have changed their surname when they have married someone who is not Asian. Surname changes can also pass down to the next generation, some multiracial Asian

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Americans having an Asian surname and others not. Also, adopted Asian Americans who have taken on the surname of non-Asian adoptive parents will be excluded from a surname database. As far as religious prevalence among Asian Americans is concerned, the Pew survey reveals certain details in a much better light than the scholarly community has seen before. However, we know next to nothing of specific populations for which a survey like PAAS excludes or undercounts by standard survey procedures or because of certain unique characteristics of the Asian American population. This includes smaller ethnic group individuals (particularly those with a higher rate of nonfluency in English) and Asian Americans who are homeless, or institutionalized, or no longer have an Asian surname by virtue of interracial marriage, birth to an interracial couple, or adoption. Survey methods in use today are better than any other time in US survey history but do not necessarily reflect important and often marginalized religious subgroups in Asian America.

Cultural Biases in American Surveys on Religion As noted, surveys are designed to capture discrete responses. Using statistical analysis to draw theoretical relationships between these responses requires that the wording of survey questions and the structure of the responses be carefully researched and field-tested. Like survey sampling, survey question instrumentation has a long history and often relies on certain cultural assumptions of the public: shared beliefs, practices, and identities. Over the past sixty years of modern polling, Americans receiving a survey by mail or telephone faced questions that assumed certain cultural characteristics that forced the respondent to choose from a selection of categories that may or may not comport with their perspective. For example, if asked whether the Bible is the literal word of God, the word of God but not always to be taken literally, or a book of myths and fables, the respondent is assumed to know what is meant by “Bible,” “literal,” “word of God,” and “God.” By 2012, American literacy with respect to religion was mediocre at best, despite being one of the most religious nations in the world.5 In most surveys, Asian Americans were undersampled, leaving the religious literacy rate of the most religiously diverse racial population unknown. In the PAAS, Pew saw a significant opportunity to discover basic religious characteristics among followers of non-Christian religions, particularly Buddhism and Hinduism.

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Given the differences in religious terms relative to the wording of surveys administered to the English-fluent Christian American mainstream, Pew recruited an advisory panel to help construct their survey questions. For instance, the PAAS changed the wording of the traditional Bible question to suit the specific religions of the largest respondents. If the respondent was Catholic or Protestant they were asked, “Which comes closest to your view? The Bible is the word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word; not everything in the Bible should be taken literally, word for word; the Bible is a book written by men and is not the word of God.” For those who identified as Jewish, the phrase “the Bible” was replaced by “the Torah”; Muslims received the wording as “the Quran”; Buddhists, Hindus, and other religious followers received the wording as “the Holy Scripture;” and those who reported “unaffiliated” received the wording as “the Bible.” Helpful though it may be to attempt a formal equivalence in sacred text terms, the advisory panel pointed out that it is less clear whether changing the name of a specific sacred text is enough to produce a meaningful comparison between religions regarding their views. For example, whereas 86 and 72 percent of Protestant and Catholic Asian Americans surveyed affirmed that the Bible is the word of God (either literal or not literal), only 24 and 36 percent of Buddhist and Hindu Asian Americans affirmed that the Holy Scripture is (either literal or not literal). This comparison might suggest that Buddhist and Hindu Asian Americans are incredulous with respect to sacred texts relative to their Christian peers, but that would still assume that the question itself is free of American Christian bias and clearly comparable across religious groups,6 and that identifying the sacredness of ancient texts is an appropriate measure of Hindu spirituality or religiosity.7 Despite the counsel provided by the advisory board, Pew made only selective changes to the survey format in an attempt to preserve the comparability of PAAS answers with those in other surveys; this approach provided data, but also great ambiguity as to meaning and utility. In sum, the PAAS has given unprecedented insight on certain basic characteristics of religion among mainstream Asian Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is limited in its ability to be fully comprehensive of the many subgroups (ethnic, demographic, and otherwise) within this diverse group. It is unique in presenting traditional survey questions about religious belief, identity, and practice to a highly religiously diverse sample, but is only modestly sensitive to the differences in how religion is mean-

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ingful to different believers. With these strengths and limitations in mind, I explored the PAAS religious belief questions to illustrate how our understanding of beliefs is both enhanced through this survey’s diverse sample and limited by the wording of the questions. The survey included eleven questions on religious beliefs, ten of which were asked of all respondents. To avoid the problem of comparing response rates between religious groups (given that a number of the beliefs originate with a Protestant Christian American audience in mind), I instead examined response rates between groups within larger traditions by disaggregating respondents along known subtraditions. This approach taps the strength of oversampling and avoids the assumptions that these beliefs are equally comparable across groups. I present the responses based on how they compare against the mean or average of the respondents of the broader tradition as well as any sizable differences between subtraditions.

Caveat: Asian American Muslims Muslim Americans remain an important religious community in the new religious diversity of the United States and though they number a small percentage of the population, the degree of animosity toward them outweighs their size and makes invisible their many contributions to American culture.8 The Asian American Muslim population then would be one group of great interest to our understanding of religion. According to Pew’s 2011 Muslim American Survey, 21 percent of adult Muslim Americans surveyed identified as Asian and the Urdu-fluent response rate was lower than expected, which suggests that the Asian Muslim population may be proportionally larger.9 Nevertheless this amounts to 4 percent of all Asian Americans. Even with the oversampling procedures, the PAAS has too few Muslim respondents to disaggregate their responses relative to others.10 Future survey research could consider adding Urdu translation and the sampling frame strategy of the Pew Muslim American survey to join the Asian American sampling frame strategy.

Asian American Buddhist Diversity According to the PAAS, about 14 percent of Asian American adults identify as Buddhist.

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The survey specifically asked these respondents whether they identify with a specific tradition within Buddhism and named several: Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana (the three largest in the world),11 Jodo Shinshu, Soka Gokkai, and Vipassana. The literature mentions these as major or significant subtraditions in the United States, but surprisingly only 13 percent of Asian American Buddhists surveyed selected Mahayana, 8 percent Theravada, and 7 percent Jodo Shinshu. The PAAS results show that nearly half of the surveyed Buddhist respondents chose the category “Just a Buddhist.”12 An additional 15 percent of Asian American Buddhists voluntarily stated they do not know what kind of Buddhist they are or refused to answer the question. This result might suggest that awareness of specific Buddhist traditions is not widespread among Asian American followers, or that distinct traditions are not known by labels. As Jan Nattier notes, Buddhism’s complex history carries into the contemporary US understanding of this religion where communities vary in their practices with little to no interaction and engagement with other followers of Buddhism.13 This is particularly so of immigrant Asian American Buddhists, whose communal experience of this faith is often ethnic-specific. To that end, I combined all Buddhist respondents who selected “Just a Buddhist” or “Don’t Know” and subdivided them by three major ethnic groups with a remaining catch-all “Other Just a Buddhist/Don’t Know” category. This expands the categories provided by the Pew report on Asian American Buddhism to examine more carefully the prevalence of different forms of Buddhism in the US and the possible differences they have in beliefs.14 Table 1 shows the revised distribution of Asian American Buddhists. Those who identified themselves as “Just a Buddhist” make up the largest category (as noted in the Pew report), Vietnamese Buddhists in particular were the largest subcategory by a wide margin (29 percent). Along with the Chinese “Just a Buddhist” respondents, they exceed the population of the largest named tradition, Mahayana (which includes Zen, Son, and Cha’n traditions).15 The other two named traditions (Theravada and Jodo Shinshu), other “Just a Buddhist” categories, and a catch-all for other Buddhists each constitute about 6 to 9 percent of the remaining Asian American Buddhist population. Similar to American Protestantism, no one main subtradition dominates this ancient faith among Asian Americans in the US. This diversity of affiliation extends to formal beliefs as seen in table 2. As mentioned earlier, surveys identify discrete responses and thus one

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Table 2.1  Estimated Prevalence of Asian American Buddhist Traditions Tradition / regional category Theravada Mahayana (Zen, Son, Cha’n) Jodo Shinshu (Higashi Honganji, Nishi Hoganji) Other (Vipassana, Vajrayana, Soka Gokkai [Nichiren], Other) Chinese “Just a Buddhist” /DK Vietnamese “Just a Buddhist” / DK Japanese “Just a Buddhist” / DK Other “Just a Buddhist” / DK Total

Percent     7.7    13.2     6.7     8.9    19.9    29.4     5.6     8.7 100

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

of the conventional approaches to learning about religion through survey research is to inquire into the formal beliefs of respondents. Very often the belief questions asked of American respondents have largely focused on Christian and quasi-Christian ideas and doctrine. Pew’s Asian American survey, however, expanded the battery of belief questions to include beliefs considered dominant in other faiths, particularly Buddhists and Hindus. Thus we have responses to belief items that appear in many Christian-­dominant surveys such as belief in God, heaven, hell, angels, but also several beliefs such as Nirvana, reincarnation, ancestral spirits, astrology, and yoga that are thought to be primarily within the formal beliefs or doctrine of non-Christian religious practitioners. In table 2, I present a cross-tabulation of the affirmative responses to the belief questions for each of the major Buddhist subtraditions and regional categories in table 1. The rightmost column shows the aggregate affirmation to the belief question for all Asian American Buddhists throughout the Pew report. Percentages affirming a particular belief at least 5 percentage points higher than the average shown on the right column are set in boldface; affirmative response levels at least 5 percentage points lower than the average are set in italics.16 What this table shows is a high degree of diversity in affirming beliefs among Asian American Buddhists. For example, only about half affirm belief in Nirvana, versus 69 percent of Theravada Buddhists and 78 percent

God or a universal spirit? Nirvana, the ultimate state transcending pain and desire in which individual consciousness ends? Reincarnation, that people will be reborn in this world again and again? Ancestral spirits? Heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded? Hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished? Angels? Evil spirits? Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives?

Do you believe in . . .

53.0 35.3

48.0 54.9 48.1

49.2 53.0 44.1

67.6 66.0

62.9

80.9 77.8 58.1 30.5 34.0 18.5

26.3

33.9

61.2

82.1

66.0 31.6

59.1 60.8

77.5 69.4

Jodo Theravada1 Mahayana2 Shinshu3

44.7 60.8 52.8

47.6

65.3 47.9

77.5

84.6 77.8

46.5 49.6 52.3

47.6

67.3 59.4

60.1

81.2 36.8

53.5 59.8 61.8

30.7 24.3 30.1

23.8

49.8 39.8

83.4 53.4 66.3

50.1

60.6 39.1

Japanese

69.5

69.1 51.3

Other Chinese Vietnamese

42.4 54.0 42.3

36.4

67.9 41.8

66.3

66.3 49.5

49.1 54.1 50.1

50.6

67.4 52.3

64.5

71.3 51.2

All Other Buddhists

Table 2.2  Rates of Affirmation to Specific Religious Beliefs among Buddhist Asian Americans

52.9 58.8

88.5

68.2 39.1

32.6 70.0

61.3 63.1

40.5 56.6

72.6 35.3

35.7 58.3

61.5 58.1

58.1

3. Includes Vipassana, Vajrayana, Soka Gokkai (Nichiren), Other.

2. Includes Higashi Honganji, Nishi Hoganji.

1. Includes Zen, Son, Cha’n.

Notes: All numbers in percentages. Weighted data. Boldface indicates rate exceeds overall mean by at least 5 percentage points; italics indicate the rate is below the overall mean by at least 5 points.

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

Yoga, not just as exercise, but as a spiritual practice? Spiritual energy located in physical things, such as mountains, trees, or crystals?

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of followers of smaller named traditions (Vipassana, Vajrayana, Soka Gokkai). At the other extreme, only 32 percent of Jodo Shinshu and 37 percent of Chinese “Just a Buddhist” respondents affirm the statement. Strikingly, Theravada Buddhists affirm ten of the eleven listed beliefs at least 5 percentage points more than the average Asian American Buddhist in the sample. At the other end, Jodo Shinshu and Japanese “just a Buddhist” respondents were consistently lower in their affirmation of these beliefs by at least 5 percentage points. Our two largest subcategories of Buddhists, Chinese, and Vietnamese “Just a Buddhist” respondents, show no similarities in their affirmations. Vietnamese Buddhists had affirmation rates higher than the mean on seven of the eleven beliefs; Chinese Buddhists affirmed three above the mean (none of which coincide with the Vietnamese) and three below it (on beliefs that the Vietnamese were higher than the average in agreement). This is curious when we consider that the largest Buddhist tradition, Mahayana Buddhism, is evident mainly in China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. We might expect that those respondents who were “just a Buddhist” from these countries might exhibit similar rates of belief affirmation as the Mahayana in the survey. Instead, we see high variation. The diversity of belief affirmations suggests no clear belief profile as far as these items are concerned. At best, these beliefs appear to reflect Theravada beliefs most consistently and Vietnamese “just a Buddhist” followers partially. Although half or more of all Asian American Buddhists affirm these belief statements, it is also clear that not one belief statement generates an overwhelming consensus. Further, in numerous instances, less than half of a specific subtradition affirms a specific belief. These findings illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of survey research. To the extent that the response categories accurately pick up on a particular affiliation or belief, we can now see how pervasive those beliefs happen to be for Asian American Buddhists. As seen in table 2, these beliefs are pervasive, but not overwhelmingly so. To the extent that categories misidentified a particular belief, doctrine, or affiliation (such as inaccurate belief statements) or were not included (such as specific Vietnamese and Chinese Buddhist traditions), we can only know that these groups are apparently not the same in respect to their beliefs and affiliations as others. Future scholars, then, can use these findings to inform ethnographic and qualitative investigations to illuminate better ways to distinguish the many followers who do not claim any of the major subtraditions, and perhaps identify some distinguishing

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feature or characteristic held in common among Buddhist groups given that the Pew Asian American Survey belief items do not reveal any.

Asian American Hinduism(s) The PAAS allows us to replicate the previous analyses across multiple religious faith traditions that take up large portions of the Asian American population. In this section, we review findings regarding Hinduism and its variants. As it did for Buddhism, Pew included a few well-known subtraditions for respondents to identify.17 As true of Buddhists, a little more than half of the respondents selected “Just a Hindu” and an additional 7 percent reported “don’t know.” Like Buddhism, Hinduism is the only religion with an Asian majority in the US. Noted in a Pew report on the religious landscape of the world, only about 1 percent of all Hindus live outside Asia, and 94 percent are from one country—India. Not surprisingly, the PAAS shows that Hinduism is also the only faith that is overwhelmingly dominated by one Asian ethnic group. Thus no cultural affiliative characteristic allows us to disaggregate the large majority of Hindu Americans who did not select the named traditions in the survey. Often when a single religion is dominated by a single ethnic minority or immigrant group, such as Dutch Calvinism or Russian Judaism, it is characterized by a common core of belief or practice.18 Looking at the same eleven belief questions shown earlier for the Buddhist respondents, however, we see the persistence of variation among various Hindu subtraditions. Agreement is clear on belief in God as well as in yoga as a spiritual practice, and it is widespread (though not overwhelming) in Moksha, reincarnation, and astrology. This is half as many belief statements held in common by the Buddhist respondents. Majorities of those who identified with a specific tradition (Vaishnava, Shaivite, other smaller traditions) affirmed more beliefs (six or seven in eleven) relative to those who were “Just a Hindu” or “don’t know” regarding their Hindu subtradition affiliation (four or five in eleven). On five beliefs at least one group or category differs from the overall mean in either affirming or not affirming a statement. A curious pattern emerges when we review the rates of affirmation against one another. In eight of the eleven belief statements, two traditions will typically have affirmation rates at least 5 percentage points above or below the mean for all Hindus. For example, 34 percent of all Hindu A ­ mericans believe

31.0 39.2 32.6 39.6 22.5 50.6

28.0 63.8 62.5 44.6 38.9 52.4 63.9 40.2

41.1 31.2 19.9 21.3 25.7 59.4 84.8 53.4

36.8 50.4 30.1 40.2 41.6 62.6 76.1 55.1

71.8 43.5

55.6

65.4

60.8

63.4

91.0 60.3

82.4 63.7

86.7 56.2

97.7 60.1

Vaishnava Shaivite Other Hindu1

70.9 33.6

27.5 19.1 43.9

36.4

42.9 57.7

59.1

98.7 43.6

73.0 45.7

37.6 27.9 53.5

34.3

33.7 44.5

58.9

90.6 58.6

1. Includes: Shaktism, ISKCON/Hare Krishna, Vedanta, Other Hindu.

Notes: All numbers in percentages. Weighted data. Boldface indicates rate exceeds overall mean by at least 5 percentage points; italics indicate the rate is below the overall mean by at least 5 points.

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

God or a universal spirit? Moksha, the ultimate state transcending pain and desire in which individual consciousness ends? Reincarnation, that people will be reborn in this world again and again? Ancestral spirits? Heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded? Hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished? angels? Evil spirits? Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives? Yoga, not just as exercise, but as a spiritual practice? Spiritual energy located in physical things, such as mountains, trees, or crystals?

Do you believe in . . . 

All Asian Hindu Don’t American “Just Hindu” Know Hindus

Table 2.3  Rates of Affirmation to Belief Statements among Hindu Asian Americans

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in ancestral spirits but 41 percent of Shaivite and 43 percent of Hindu “don’t knows” do; whereas 38 percent of Hindu Asian Americans believe in angels, only 21 percent of Shaivite and 28 percent of “don’t know” respondents do. On three particular beliefs—heaven, evil spirits, and spiritual energy in physical objects, we see a double pair with two groups above (by at least 5 percentage points) the mean and two below. The pairing pattern loosely reveals a difference between Hindus that identify with a named subtradition and those who do not. On four belief statements (reincarnation, evil spirits, astrology, and spiritual energy), both groups in the pair that affirm these beliefs at rates higher than the mean tend to be respondents from a named subtradition. In all eight pairs, no other pattern of shared affirmation of specific beliefs is clear. In short, PAAS reveals that most Asian American Hindus do not identify with named subtraditions. This follows a similar pattern seen in Buddhism and the rise in nondenominationalism among Protestants.19 Because the overwhelming majority are from one nationality, and given no other information on specific region of origin or ancestry or caste or some other demographic or cultural characteristic, we cannot disaggregate this subcategory as we did Buddhism. Apart from belief in God, which most Americans accept regardless of faith, only one belief, yoga, stands out as distinctly Hindu, though reincarnation is also agreed upon by smaller majorities. Hindu Americans that can name a particular subtradition affirm slightly more of the belief statements, but again these groups are eclipsed by the much larger majority of Hindu Americans who do not identify with any named subtradition. In other words, it is almost clearer to say that Asian American Hinduism is known for what is not agreed upon in terms of belief than what is.

Credulous Christians: Charismatic Catholics and Pentecostal Protestants Comparative work in religious studies has noted the incredible growth of Pentecostalism throughout the global south and in parts of Asia.20 As immigration from Asia continues to grow and outpace entrants from other continents, one would expect more scholarship on Asian American Pentecostalism. Surprisingly systematic quantitative analyses of Asian American Pentecostal congregations or networks are scant. The PAAS provides a glimpse into Pentecostalism through a large and mostly representative ­sample of Asian

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Americans. The Pew report showed that about a third of Asian American Protestants affirmed a Pentecostal or charismatic identity,21 about the same proportion as the US Protestant population overall. Further, about a third of Catholic Asian Americans also describe themselves as Pentecostal or charismatic.22 This figure is considerably higher than white non-Hispanic Catholics (26 percent) but lower than Hispanic Catholics (48 percent). Taken together, the charismatic and Pentecostal movement in Asian American Christianity is a formidable presence if it found common ground despite its roots in either Catholicism or Protestantism. As seen in table 4, if we use the Pentecostal response indicator to subdivide Catholic and Protestant (both evangelical and non-evangelical) Asian Americans, we see that about 14 percent of Asian American evangelical Protestants, 4 percent of non-evangelical Protestants, and 16 percent of Catholics identify as Pentecostal. Using the same belief questions analyzed earlier (with the exception of belief in Nirvana/Moksha, which was not asked of the non-Buddhist and non-Hindu respondents), we see surprising variation in responses, especially on beliefs that are not traditionally considered orthodox to Christianity. Overall, we see either strong affirmation or rejection of belief statements unlike the more moderate affirmation rates among Buddhists and Hindus. Asian American Christians largely affirm (69 percent or more) belief in God, heaven, hell, angels, and evil spirits. Agreement across belief statements is considerable between each group with the exception of belief in ancestral spirits: whereas 37 percent of Asian American Christians affirmed belief, 65

Table 2.4  Estimated Prevalence of Asian American Pentecostals within Christian Traditions Pentecostal Evangelical Protestant Non-Pentecostal Evangelical Protestant  Pentecostal other Protestant Non-Pentecostal other Protestant Charismatic Catholic Noncharismatic Catholic Total

   13.5    18.1     3.7    19.4    15.7    29.7 100

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012. Note: Numbers in percentages.

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percent of charismatic Catholics did so. Charismatic Catholics stand out also as having no rate of affirmation less than 5 percentage points from the mean on any belief statements. They are also the only group to affirm eight beliefs above the overall Christian mean—all other groups exceeded the mean at most on only four belief statements. The significance of Pentecostalism on affirmation rates on these beliefs is notable. On three beliefs, hell, angels, and evil spirits, Pentecostal evangelicals had higher affirmation than their nonPentecostal evangelical counterparts. Similarly other Protestant Pentecostals had higher affirmation rates on five beliefs: heaven, hell, angels, evil spirits, and astrology, relative to other Protestant non-Pentecostals.23 Charismatic Catholics again stand apart: their affirmation rates exceed their noncharismatic Catholic counterparts on nine of the ten items. If these analyses are any indication, charismatic and Pentecostal Asian Americans diverge considerably from their noncharismatic and Pentecostal peers on the affirmation of a number of beliefs, particularly ones that are not usually viewed as orthodox in Christian teaching. The minority of charismatic Catholics who accept nontraditional Christian beliefs is larger than the minority of Pentecostal Protestants with nontraditional Christian beliefs. Both groups have larger minorities affirming these beliefs than their noncharismatic or non-Pentecostal counterparts. Indeed this is particularly curious when we examine the response rates for questions regarding how literally the Christian Scriptures or the Bible should be accepted. Belief in the Bible as the literal word of God has been a mainstay question on surveys of religion in the United States and has usually served as an indicator of conservative and exclusivist theological belief. Majorities of all Asian American charismatic and Pentecostal groups believe that the Bible is the word of God, and among those who assent to this, the majority or a large minority accept that the Bible should be taken literally, more so than their non-Pentecostal counterparts (see table 5). Just as charismatic and Pentecostal Christians lent more credulity to a variety of beliefs about the supernatural than their noncharismatic and non-Pentecostal peers, so too they treat the Bible more literally than their peers. Perhaps charismatic and Pentecostal Asian Americans are not well defined as “conservative Christians” but rather as more credulous Christians. The PAAS provides a broad sketch of particular religious constituencies and their beliefs. The notable differences in belief profiles between charismatic Pentecostals and other Christians invite further investigation as to

God or a universal spirit? Reincarnation, that people will be reborn in this world again and again? Ancestral spirits? Heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded? Hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished? Angels? Evil spirits? Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives? Yoga, not just as exercise, but as a spiritual practice? Spiritual energy located in physical things, such as mountains, trees, or crystals? Which comes closest to your view? (READ)1

Do you believe in . . .  97.0 12.5 22.9 91.3 77.8 88.8 75.1 10.0 16.1 16.0

94.3 15.7 25.5 91.2 85.2 93.4 88.9  9.2 19.9 13.8

19.9

14.3

87.5 80.8 26.3

69.1

30.7 84.5

96.9  3.2

26.2

27.8

71.8 53.5 17.7

54.9

30.8 73.5

92.2 20.2

81.3 64.1 25.6 27.9 25.2

94.8 72.1 40.9 37.2 43.2

66.6

40.7 86.5

64.9 92.6 78.3

97.2 29.1

97.6 37.2

24.8

25.6

84.8 69.2 21.5

70.8

37.0 86.4

95.9 22.9

Non-­ Non-­ ­ entecostal Pentecostal P Pentecostal Pentecostal Other Other Charismatic Noncharismatic Total Evangelical Evangelical Protestant Protestant Catholic Catholic Christian

Table 2.5  Rates of Affirmation to Belief Statements among Christian Asian Americans

92.6  5.1

48.1 41.9

96.2  3.3 64.8 33.2 44.5

46.1

80.9  1.3

48.0 43.2

53.2

88.7  6.2

32.6

73.6 20.1

63.0

34.3

62.7 31.2

47.8

44.7

79.5 15.5

2. Respondents who affirmed the previous statement received this follow-up question. Totals do not add up to 100: respondents who selected “don’t know” to these questions are not displayed.

1. Totals do not add up to 100: respondents who selected “don’t know” to these questions not displayed.

Note: All numbers in percentages. Weighted data. Bold indicates rate exceeds overall mean by at least 5 percentage points; italics indicate the rate is below the overall mean by at least 5 points.

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

[The Bible] is the word of God, OR [The Bible] is a book written by men and is not the word of God. And would you say that? (READ)2 [The Bible] is to be taken literally, word for word, OR Not everything in [the Bible] should be taken literally, word for word.

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the significance of these beliefs in relation to the social life of these religious communities and their broader contexts. Pentecostalism is known for its transformative effect on working- and middle-class individuals and communities that result in a feeling of empowerment or a call to collective protest in the face of structural injustice.24 To what extent is the propensity for greater belief in the spiritual associated with personal and social change? Qualitative scholarship in this area can better inform us on the mechanisms that link the cognitive with the material.

Hidden Believers: “No Religion in Particular” As stated in the Pew report on religion in Asian America, the corresponding survey shows that the “unaffiliated” are the second-largest category in the responses to the questions on religious affiliation. The category consists of those who are atheist and agnostic (8 percent of all Asian Americans surveyed) and those who identify as “nothing in particular” (17 percent). The Pew report joins these three categories of responses, but a disaggregation of these groups reveals that atheists and agnostics are markedly distinct from the “nothing in particulars.” Notably, as is true of Buddhists and Hindus, one category contains the majority of respondents (“nothing in particular”), but the PAAS allows us to disaggregate this group along other characteristics such as age or ethnicity. Because the meaning of the term “nothing in particular” is broad, I turned to their responses on their religious affiliation growing up and created four subcategories alongside atheist and agnostic respondents. The majority of “nothing in particulars” were raised in the same way—about 34 percent of all unaffiliated Asian Americans. The second largest group among the “nothing in particulars” were those who were raised Buddhist (16 percent), followed by those raised Catholic (8 percent), those raised Protestant (7 percent), and those raised in other religions (about 4 percent) as seen in table 6.25 As a general observation, the unaffiliated generally do not have agreement with any of the aforementioned beliefs. The highest agreement (49 percent) was on belief in God and the lowest was belief in hell (21 percent). In nearly every belief measure save one (astrology) at least one group among these unaffiliated Asian Americans showed a majority of support. When we disaggregate this group into specific types of religiously unaffiliated, we find striking differences in religious belief profiles. Among the unaffiliated who

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Table 2.6  Estimated Prevalence of Religiously Unaffiliated Asian Americans Nonreligious affiliation Nothing in particular   Raised atheist, agnostic, nothing   Raised Buddhist   Raised Catholic   Raised Protestant   Raised other religion Atheist Agnostic Total

Percent    33.6    15.9     8.0     6.8     3.7    15.4    16.6 100

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

were raised Catholic, Protestant, or another non-Buddhist religion, majorities of respondents affirmed between three and five of the belief statements. But the affirmative beliefs varied among these categories. For example, the majority of former Catholics affirm belief in God, reincarnation, ancestral spirits, and yoga as spiritual practice, but the majority of former Protestants affirm belief in God, angels, and evil spirits. Those formerly raised with no religion in particular generally showed lower rates of affirmation than those raised in a religion.26 In terms of significant variation from the mean, those raised in any religion tended to have larger percentages affirming various beliefs than those raised with no religion and those who identify as atheist. Former Catholics were most consistent on this point, followed by former other religion respondents, former Buddhists, and former Protestants. On four beliefs (God, heaven, evil spirits, and spiritual energy), all unaffiliated respondents raised in a former religion were consistently at least 5 percentage points higher in affirming the statement. Atheists consistently showed the lowest affirmation rates on all ten beliefs shown. Agnostics largely did not affirm the beliefs listed either with the exception of belief in God (57 percent) and belief in yoga as spiritual practice (49 percent), as seen in table 7. These findings further bolster the concerns raised by Jane Iwamura and her colleagues in the problematic concept of “no religion in particular” among Asian Americans portrayed in the main Pew report. Having no religion in particular can indicate exactly that, or could mean observance

20.8 51.2 52.3 15.1 47.8 39.4

26.3 38.6 45.3 37.8 62.2 48.7

36.5 21.7 34.4 37.4 35.8 40.2

19.5 21.8 27.5 22.4 40.5 33.6

45.2 39.5

51.8 41.5

42.5 33.4

33.7 25.1

72.7 16.2

69.7 50.0

53.7 32.9

42.8 19.6

66.7 52.4

41.0 33.2 34.3

53.0

39.4 60.0

87.1 31.7

23.1 17.5

 8.3 11.1 10.5

 9.1

24.1 11.6

19.4 17.3

49.4 32.6

29.0 24.4 16.8

12.5

41.9 22.1

57.0 30.7

41.8 34.3

25.0 28.9 23.2

21.3

37.4 27.4

49.1 25.8

Note: All numbers in percentages. Weighted data. Boldface indicates rate exceeds overall mean by at least 5 percentage points; italics indicate the rate is below the overall mean by at least 5 points.

Source: Author’s compilation based on PAAS 2012.

God or a universal spirit? Reincarnation, that people will be reborn in this world again and again? Ancestral spirits? Heaven, where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded? Hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without being sorry are eternally punished? Angels? Evil spirits? Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives? Yoga, not just as exercise, but as a spiritual practice? Spiritual energy located in physical things, such as mountains, trees, or crystals?

Do you believe in . . . 

Raised Atheist/ Raised Agnostic/ Raised Raised Raised Other Nothing Buddhist Catholic Protestant Religion Atheist Agnostic Total

Nothing in Particular

Table 2.7  Rates of Affirmation to Belief Statements of Unaffiliated Asian Americans

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and belief among numerous religions, or having a religious heritage that is no longer followed. These findings demonstrate that the latter possibility reveals a diversity of profiles of belief hidden within this broad category. Indeed, the higher (though not always the majority) rate of belief affirmation among those unaffiliated with a religious background affirms Russell Jeung’s finding that for some second-generation Chinese Americans having no religious affiliation is not necessarily an indicator of abandoning all belief and practice.27 Instead, one of our primary ways of identifying religiosity in the United States follows assumptions that are likely biased by the Protestant and Christian historic majority.28 Religious practice and belief can flourish in the absence of affiliation. Given the percentages in belief of the “nothing in particulars,” do any labels or terms resemble nominal identity in a way that is equivalent to traditional Abrahamic categories? Or do we need to reconsider what “counts as religion” such that we can continue comparative analyses of members of different religious groups? Future qualitative research should explore these questions with the goal of informing future quantitative attempts at surveying the religious experiences of the new American religious landscape. In this way, the PAAS, particularly its sample of the unaffiliated, has served as a catalyst for a new conversation on the social science of faith.

Conclusion The Pew Asian American Survey reflects some of the most important survey data available on Asian American religions. Using state-of-the-art sampling techniques, the data acquired provide important insights based on the kind of knowledge that can be gained from discrete responses to categorical questions. Still, the survey is constrained by some of the same limitations that most major surveys today face regarding actual coverage of the population and the wording of survey questions and answer choices that assess concepts like belief and affiliation. This chapter reconsidered the main Pew report by digging deeper into the religious categories and reexamining the belief questions and response rates. Most significantly, the general rates of belief within any particular major faith tradition hide the enormous diversity of belief profiles among believers. The findings may not surprise some readers who already know the tremendous variation in many world traditions. To be clear, however, the diversity of beliefs found in these analyses does not refer

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to highly specific doctrine but on broad concepts thought to be a part of the core tenets of each faith. From here, new investigations can further examine whether these differences in belief profiles affect social and political attitudes and behaviors, whether ethnographically or quantitatively. To the extent that survey research on religion better informs our understanding of religion in the lives of individuals and communities, the Pew Asian American Survey stands as a much-needed resource that will remain useful for decades to come.

Notes 1.  Pew Research Center, “Asian American Survey Dataset,” May 1, 2013, https:// www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/01/asian-americans. 2.  Recall that Asian Americans are a small percentage of the population: of every hundred people reached to complete a national survey, at best five or six respondents will have Asian ancestry. Most national surveys aim for at least a thousand to 2,500 respondents, which results in about fifty to 150 Asian Americans. This is not enough to make reliable estimations of a subpopulation that is as ethnically, religiously, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse as Asian Americans. If one were to run a national survey using conventional survey techniques and wanted to acquire responses from 150 individuals reflecting one Asian ethnic group, the entire sample would number around fifteen thousand, or six to fifteen times larger (and considerably more costly) than the typical national survey sample today. Such a sample would likely have around 150 respondents for the other five large Asian ethnic groups for a total of nine hundred respondents, far higher than the typical number of Asian Americans in a national survey sample today. 3.  Wendy Wang, “The Rise of Intermarriage,” Pew Research Center, February 16, 2012, http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage. 4.  Pyong Gap Min and Chigon Kim. “Patterns of Intermarriages and CrossGenerational In-Marriages among Native-Born Asian Americans,” International Migration Review 43, no. 3 (2009): 447–470. 5.  Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2008); Pew Research Center, “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey,” September 28, 2010, http://www.pewforum.org​ /2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey-who-knows-what-about-religion. 6.  Joshi’s incisive term “Christian privilege” may well apply here where preservation of question wording and answer categories favor Christian respondents whether Asian American or otherwise. See Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Grounds: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).

Park 65 7.  See Jane Naomi Iwamura et al., “Reflections on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 1–16. 8.  Multiple studies have repeatedly shown that public favorability toward atheists and Muslims is lowest relative to other religiously defined groups: Pew Research Center, “How Americans Feel About Religious Groups: Jews, Catholics and Evangelicals Rated Warmly, Atheists and Muslims More Coldly,” July 16, 2014, http:// www.pewforum.org/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups; Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 2 (2006): 211–234. 9.  Pew Research Center, “Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism,” August 30, 2011, 16, 93, http://www.pewforum​ .org​/2011/08/30/muslim-americans-no-signs-of-growth-in-alienation-or-support​ -for​-extremism. 10.  Notably, although PAAS included Hindi translation, it did not include Urdu, which was implemented in the Muslim American survey. A future survey of Asian Americans could benefit from inclusion of both of these languages to potentially increase the Asian American Muslim population. 11.  Pew Research Center, “The Global Religious Landscape,” December 18, 2012, 31, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscape-exec. 12.  Other traditions such as Vajrayana (sometimes termed Tibetan), and Vipassana also appeared, but their sample size was too small to report reliable statistics for them. 13.  Jan Nattier, “Who Is a Buddhist? Charting the Landscape of Buddhist America,” in The Faces of Buddhism in America, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 183–195; Buster G. Smith and Paul Froese, “The Sociology of Buddhism: Theoretical Implications of Current Scholarship,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 4 (2008): 1–24. 14.  Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” July 19, 2012, 49, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian​-americans-a​-mosaic-of​-faiths​-overview. 15.  Fenggang Yang, “Religious Diversity among the Chinese in America,” in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, ed. Pyong G. Min and Jung H. Kim (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002). 16.  In the few instances in which the high or low response level of two groups is within 1 to 2 percentage points, I highlight both. 17.  As with certain strands of Buddhism and Protestantism, several Hindu ­affiliations—including Shakti, ISKCON, and Vedanta—were too small in sample size to disaggregate and provide separate statistics. 18.  Philip Hammond and Kee Warner described this as ethnic-religious fusion,

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one outcome of several when immigrant groups carry with them the religion of their former homeland (“Religion and Ethnicity in Late-Twentieth Century America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527, no. 1 [1993]: 55–66). 19.  Tom W. Smith and Seokho Kim, “The Vanishing Protestant Majority,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 2 (2005): 211–223. 20.  David Barrett, “The Worldwide Holy Spirit Renewal,” in The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901–2001, ed. Vinson Synan (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2001), 381–414; Pew Research Center, “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals,” October 2016, http://www.pewforum.org/files/2006/10/pentecostals-08.pdf. 21.  Indication of Pentecostal or charismatic identity is based on affirmation to the survey questions given to Christian respondents: “Would you describe yourself as a Pentecostal [Catholic or Christian] or not?” and “Would you describe yourself as a charismatic [Catholic or Christian] or not?” 22.  Pew Research Center, “A Mosaic of Faiths,” 46, 48. 23.  Non-evangelical Pentecostals also show adamant rejection of belief in reincarnation, yoga, and spiritual energy, compared to their other Protestant non-­ Pentecostal peers. One might expect some tension between members of this category of Pentecostal and Buddhists and Hindus. 24.  Rebecca Pierce Bomann, Faith in the Barrios: The Pentecostal Poor in Bogota (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999); Hong Jung Lee, “Minjung and Pentecostal Movements in Korea,” in Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition, ed. Allan Anderson and Walter J. Hollenweger (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999), 138–160; Omar M. McRoberts, “Understanding the ‘New’ Black Pentecostal Activism: Lessons from Ecumenical Urban Ministries in Boston,” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 1 (1999): 46–70. 25.  Very few Hindus and Muslims in the survey identified as having no current religion, and thus were merged together with respondents who were raised in small religious traditions such as Jains and Sikhs. 26.  The two minor differences were between those raised with no religion and those raised Protestant on belief in reincarnation and astrology. 27.  Russell Jeung, “Second-Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious,” in Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, ed. Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 197–221; and Russell Jeung, Brett Esaki, and Alice Liu, “Redefining Religious Nones: Lessons from Chinese and Japanese American Young Adults,” Religions 6, no. 3 (2015): 891–911. 28.  Iwamura et al., “Reflections on the Pew Forum.”

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Bibliography Barrett, David. “The Worldwide Holy Spirit Renewal.” In The Century of the Holy Spirit: 100 Years of Pentecostal and Charismatic Renewal, 1901–2001, edited by Vinson Synan, 381–414. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishing, 2001. Bomann, Rebecca Pierce. Faith in the Barrios: The Pentecostal Poor in Bogota. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999. Edgell, Penny, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann. “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 2 (2006): 211–234. Hammond, Phillip E., and Kee Warner. “Religion and Ethnicity in Late-Twentieth Century America.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527, no. 1 (1993): 55–66. Iwamura, Jane Naomi, Khyati Y. Joshi, Sharon A. Suh, and Janelle Wong. “Reflections on the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths Data and Report.” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 1–16. Jeung, Russell. “Second-Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious.” In Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, edited by Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, 197–221. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Jeung, Russell, Brett Esaki, and Alice Liu. “Redefining Religious Nones: Lessons from Chinese and Japanese American Young Adults.” Religions 6, no. 1 (2015): 891–911. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Lee, Hong Jung. “Minjung and Pentecostal Movements in Korea.” In Pentecostals after a Century: Global Perspectives on a Movement in Transition, edited by Allan Anderson and Walter J. Hollenweger, 138–160. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. McRoberts, Omar M. “Understanding the ‘New’ Black Pentecostal Activism: Lessons from Ecumenical Urban Ministries in Boston.” Sociology of Religion 60, no. 1 (1999): 46–70. Min, Pyong Gap, and Chigon Kim. “Patterns of Intermarriages and Cross-­ Generational In-Marriages among Native-Born Asian Americans.” International Migration Review 43, no. 3 (2009): 447–470. Nattier, Jan. “Who Is a Buddhist? Charting the Landscape of Buddhist America.” In The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, 183–195. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

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Pew Research Center. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, July 19, 2012. http://www.pewforum​.org​ /2012​/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview. ———. “Asian American Survey Dataset.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, May 1, 2013. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/05/01​ /‌asian​-americans. ———. “The Global Religious Landscape.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, December 18, 2012. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18​ /‌global​-religious-landscape-exec. ———. “How Americans Feel about Religious Groups: Jews, Catholics and Evangelicals Rated Warmly, Atheists and Muslims More Coldly.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, July 16, 2014. http://www.pewforum​ .org​/2014/07/16/how-americans-feel-about-religious-groups. ———. “Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, August 30, 2011. http://www.pewforum.org/2011/08/30/muslim-americans-no-signs​ -of​-growth-in-alienation-or-support-for-extremism. ———. “Spirit and Power: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, October 2006. http://www.pewforum​ .org​/files/2006/10/pentecostals-08.pdf. ———. “U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey.” Washington, DC: Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, September 28, 2010. http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28​/u​ -s​-religious-knowledge-survey-who-knows-what-about-religion. Prothero, Stephen. Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—and Doesn’t. New York: HarperOne, 2008. Smith, Buster G., and Paul Froese. “The Sociology of Buddhism: Theoretical Implications of Current Scholarship.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 4 (2008): 1–24. Smith, Tom W., and Seokho Kim. “The Vanishing Protestant Majority.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 2 (2005): 211–223. Wang, Wendy. “The Rise of Intermarriage.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends, 2012. http://www.pewsocialtrends​.org​/2012​ /02​/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage. Yang, Fenggang. “Religious Diversity among the Chinese in America.” In Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, edited by Pyong G. Min and Jung H. Kim, 71–98. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002.

3 Outsider Citizens within the US Empire Muslim Youth, Race, Religion, and Identity Arshad Imtiaz Ali

In elementary school I wrote that I am half Muslim and half American in class. . . . When my Dad asked me, “what do you mean?,” I said, “I am a Muslim and am American and I can’t be both. How do you be both?” —Sumaiya, freshman

In relating an experience when she was in grade school, college freshman Sumaiya points to the deeply complicated ways Muslim identities are constructed in the United States. Although the term “Muslim” clearly marks particular bodies, how does that relate to an ethnic, cultural, religious, or racial identity? An initial response points to those who associate with Islam, theologically. Since 1979, and particularly after 9/11, political and social meanings of the term “Muslim” often index individuals who hail from the “Muslim world” broadly, or those who appear to do so, regardless of religious affiliation or belief. Sumaiya recounted her story when she was a seventeenyear-old college freshman in Southern California. Her comments exemplify some of these complexities as she juxtaposed American and Muslim as two non-overlapping identities. Reflecting on her comment more than a decade later, Sumaiya still felt unable to explain precisely what she meant when she was just seven years old, although she did identify the significance of being 71

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Bengali because her parents had immigrated to the US from Bangladesh. Instead, Sumaiya deployed “Muslim” as an opposing pole to “American.” Although she did not know whether American referred to a national, cultural, or ethnic identity, she argued that one could not be both a Muslim and an American. In this chapter, I use the narratives of three young people to explore tensions in this dichotomy between American and Muslim. Beyond the case of Muslims in the US, Sumaiya’s reference of “Muslimness” as a particular, unique, and socially viable identity is particularly salient for those concerned with how difference is constructed in the United States. Indeed, the way Sumaiya expressed confusion about her identities that sit at the intersections of race, religion, and nationality, at age seven, extends beyond children and appears across American social and political life. My own research, along with a growing body of literature, considers how the term “Muslim” functions as a fundamental form of social cohesion and organization that young Muslims across traditional racial lines are developing and deploying in the early twentyfirst-century United States. Scholars across the social sciences, humanities, and legal studies largely agree on the social and cultural construction of race.1 That said, Muslim communities in the United States provide a powerful contemporary case study to explore how notions of race and religion are intimately tied and co-constitutive. The following section provides an overview of the nascent body of empirical literature from which this study grows.

Relevant Literature about Muslim American Histories and Contemporary Issues A growing body of research, including national-level studies by the Pew Research Center, explores the lives of young Muslims in the United States. Surveying more than a thousand participants in 2007 and in 2011, the Pew studies explored the demographics and political beliefs of US Muslims. Among a number of compelling findings about views on political participation were that nearly 50 percent of respondents preferred “Muslim” as their primary form of identification.2 As a prominent theme across several secondary sources, multi- and cross-racial Muslim identity is an emerging area for social researchers in the United States. First, studies of Muslim undergraduates explore how students’ political participation is mediated by tensions between conceptions of US

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nationalism and constructions of Muslim diasporic identities.3 Second, since 2001, South Asian American Muslims have defined themselves as Muslim first and only then by national identity.4 Meanwhile, Muslim Arab American youth have often adopted the “Muslim first” identity as a form of “strategic essentialism.”5 Nadine Naber’s research on an Arab American community, which included individuals from Syrian, Palestinian, Jordanian, and Lebanese descent, found that “diverse individuals were building a collective identity as Muslims to rearticulate their religion and claim their political rights.”6 Further levels of analysis offered through critical and interdisciplinary frameworks shed light on these complex issues. Likewise, Sunaina Maira’s research invokes the notion of flexible citizenship to examine how South Asian Muslim youth have developed identity narratives. Maira finds that although a considerable distance existed between Arab American and South Asian American communities prior to 2001, police and governmental profiling of these communities—which are historically, economically, socially, and culturally distinct—as a homogenous group has led their respective youth populations to find affinity with each other through the Muslim identity.7 Similarly, Karim challenges traditional notions of US assimilation by asking how African American and immigrant Muslim communities (first- and second-generation) “forge new and distinct identities in America” that are indelibly linked.8 Karim’s study examines how immigrant Muslim (Arab and Asian) identities affect the formulations of African American Muslim youth identity. Karim’s research, moreover, helps depict that, although these communities contested formulations of Americanism, gender, and citizenship, the youth actually developed “a notion of a hybrid, collective identity” across traditional racial lines.9 Similarly, Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher’s study of Pakistani American youth found “religification,” or the process of taking on a religious identity (Islam) as an a priori category over racial delineations.10 When discussed in relation to other contemporary authors, these studies recognize multiple and competing formulations and iterations of a Muslim identity within youth cultures. Firsthand perspectives of the youth in these studies depict a growing “Muslim first” identity among Muslim communities in the United States. The work of sociocultural anthropologists and critical race researchers reminds us that racial and cultural communities are socially constructed and based on shared experiences.11 Although a growing body of empirical literature explores how some young people are calling on “Muslim first” identities, debates and uncertainty

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continue about what a Muslim identity actually indexes. In other words, what does this identity point to? Often individuals and institutions do not quite know what Muslim means or indexes, but these same institutions somehow believe “they can recognize it when they see it.” Further, the growth of a “Muslim first” identity has occurred over the past two decades, during which “the state has been recognizing Muslims as a political voice”12 and often engages these diverse communities as homogenous (and often ignoring or erasing African American Muslims in the process).

Socio-Political Context We have seen national law enforcement, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as numerous local law enforcement agencies, including the Los Angeles and New York police departments, specifically target and spy on Muslim communities in recent years. Beyond cultural rhetoric and representations of Muslims and Islam in popular media, explicit political statements exemplify the essentialism and discrimination that influence state policies. For example, Representative Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, stated that there are “too many mosques in this country. . . . We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.”13 This statement by an elected official responsible for overseeing domestic safety highlights the perceived causal relationship between anti-Muslim racism and state surveillance. Since 2001, numerous reports have surfaced about the FBI’s surveillance of Muslim communities in California and throughout the country. Among the most egregious examples is the Fazaga v. FBI (2011) lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation for illegally spying on the Muslim community in Orange County, California. In this instance, an FBI agent infiltrated the community in 2006 by publicly converting to Islam at a congregational prayer. The informant spent more than a year gathering information, including political and religious views, emails, and travel plans of individuals, many of whom were undergraduate students in the community. The informant, Craig Monteilh, was instructed to focus his data gathering on more religiously observant and engaged community members, without regard for the criminality (or lack of criminality) of their actions. Despite these efforts, this “investigation”—community infiltration—never resulted in criminal charges against a single individual from this community.14

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Furthermore, the NYPD Demographic Unit was the largest known domestic spying program by a local police department in the US. It collected data on twenty-eight “ancestries of interest,” which included twenty-seven national origins from what could be characterized as “Muslim countries” (although not geographically centralized) and from the “American Black Muslim” as the final ancestry of interest.15 Although Muslim is named only in reference to black communities, leaked data reveals that the NYPD was reporting data only on Muslims within these communities. Through legal protections of religious identities, and also through the legality of ideological (or religious) profiling, as opposed to racial profiling, the myriad of ways Muslimness is directly or indirectly refereed does not always follow clear patterns. Yet it is apparent that the term Muslim is socially significant, and is employed in marking specific bodies, particularly by the state. The overlapping, sometimes complimentary, and often contradictory ways of naming Muslim communities help us recognize that historical US racial designations do not map onto this contemporary identity formation, which I discuss as a “racial project.” These complex, layered, and multifaceted histories have constructed Muslim identities and bodies in ways that continue to resonate in how Muslims are perceived today and how the term Muslim has evolved as a racially inflected social marker.

The Moor, Modernity, and the Making of the Muslim Other Notions of what constitute race and religion are culturally, socially, and politically constructed.16 The intersections between racial and religious identities have long been used to establish oppressive regimes, but also in solidarity and liberation struggles. When considering the place of Muslims in the United States in the early twenty-first century, we need to remember that the contemporary racialization of Islam did not begin in 2001, though this is the story often recounted. This simplistic narrative reconfigures the history of empire and replaces it with a story of progress and renewal of the “great American project.” This re-telling states that anti-Muslim racism comes solely from terrorism paranoia, and that at its core it is actually comparable to anti-Irish or anti-German discrimination of the nineteenth century, or anti-Japanese sentiment during World War II. This line of reasoning culminates with Muslims being the “new minority” who must endure a trial by fire to become “American.” Such a narrative looks ahead with the idea that if Muslim ­communities

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engage wholeheartedly in the “great American project” they will be accepted as fully fledged Americans. Yet if history is prologue, then political targeting, murder, and discrimination do not result in eventual participation in the state in equitable terms. Instead, this trial (by fire) has had a hung jury for centuries of native peoples and the descendants of enslaved Africans.17 The current racialization of Islam did not arise with Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or whoever the Muslim boogey man is for the day. Indeed, Muslim bodies have been relegated to the margins of Western society from the European Crusades, to the Spanish Inquisition,18 to the targeting of enslaved African Muslims in the Americas,19 to various Muslim organizations and institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.20 Muslim and Jewish bodies have served as a template of the existential Other from which Europe defined itself. For example, the year 1492 marks the final eviction of Jews, Muslims (Moors), and Gypsies (among others) from Spain, as well as the year of the ominous Columbian westward voyage. In the earliest moments, even before the founding of the United States, the Muslim, or the Moor, served as a template to define Otherness. 21 For example, the project of the Spanish Inquisition was to conduct an inquest, or examination, to identify whether a person of Jewish or Muslim descent had “actually” converted to Catholicism. This inquisition was built on the idea that one’s history, or blood line, made one inherently suspicious. Religion was the primary way to define who was inside the project of Modernity and who was outside the boundaries of the human. 22 Epistemic difference, what we might think about as “religion,” has served as a marker for Other worldviews and forms of social organization. Through defining epistemic (or religious) difference, the notion of racial difference found power, for genocide and chattel slavery required a psychic and spiritual justification to turn a human into a nonhuman. In turn, religious difference justified enslavement and murder for expansionist and economic goals while colonizing Africa, the Americas, and Asia.23 Thus, the racial categories ascribed to indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, and Asia closely intertwined epistemic and religious xenophobia. Grosfoguel and CervantesRodriguez remind us that Christianity was also central in the constitution of the colonial imaginary of the world-system during the first century of European colonization. The myth of the ‘superiority’ of the ‘civilized’ Westerns/Europeans over

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the ‘uncivilized’ non-Europeans, based on racial narratives on ‘superior/ inferior’ peoples and cosmovisions was constructed in this period.24

Historically, in the colonists’ eyes, race and religion have always been deeply intertwined. A society without Christianity meant that the community wholly did not have access to God’s divine grace. Furthermore, without biblical revelation, individuals were seen as without a divinely ordained soul.25 Beyond the European continent, Islam in the Americas denoted Otherness as well as rebelliousness against chattel slavery inscribed on it—a rebelliousness against human exploitation; a rebelliousness against Western colonialism and militarism; a rebelliousness that, albeit transformed, continues to be mapped onto Muslims today. In the Americas, slaveholders feared the literacy practices of African Muslims (who made up approximately 20 percent of the enslaved population) who could communicate in Arabic, Hausa, or Fulani without oversight. 26 The Bahia slave uprisings in the mid-1800s raised the specter of the Muslim as a potent force to resist slavery.27 Muslim identities, whether they were the Moorish, the North African privateer, or the rebellious enslaved African, fueled colonial fears and defined the Muslim within the North American imagination.28 We must remember that the term “Muslim” has historically marked different bodies with different histories and genealogies than in the West. Although the people associated with Islam change over time, along with their contexts, as Judith Butler reminds us, terms continue to carry meanings from the past—they cite those legacies whether we know those histories or not.29 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, Muslim communities such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam were treated as dangerous and as potential threats to the United States.30 During the past century, African American Muslim communities, along with some Palestinian and South Asian communities, were surveilled and targeted by US law enforcement bodies because of their critiques of global imperialism and radical activism. Beyond simple anxieties of Otherness, the state’s posture toward these individuals and communities is part of the history that informs the contemporary treatment of Muslim communities. Furthermore, particularly through the mid-twentieth century, African American Muslim communities’ advocacy for domestic and international rights and challenges to white supremacy helped cultivate what Sohail Daulatzai refers to as the Muslim International—those cultural and political

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spaces “in which the ‘First World’ and the ‘Third World’ have intersected, overlapped, and bled into each other through slavery, colonialism, migration and war.”31 In many instances, politically active Muslims or organizations represented a particular, unique, and potentially radical threat to the maintenance of the American empire, as evidenced in the FBI’s COINTELPRO surveillance. The Nation of Islam, for example, engaged not only spiritually, but also as a political community that fostered an anti-imperialist program.32 The fear of African American Islam and Muslims persists today as evidenced in the NYPD defining “Black American Muslims” as an ancestry of interest to surveil. Although a history of radical politics is not present throughout all Muslim communities in the US, the historical existence of such postures allows them to be invoked in the contemporary racial project of anti-Muslim racism and violence. South Asians and Arabs have historically been racialized in the United States, and these constructions inform the depiction of Muslims today. Racist portrayals of Arabs date back more than a century in the US, most often characterized with misogyny, hatred for Jews and Christians, and a love for wealth and power. These gendered images depict domineering men and oppressed women.33 Likewise, South Asians have faced racism within the US for more than a century, such as Punjabi migrant laborers in California, who survived violence and housing discrimination via restrictive covenants.34 Referred to as “dirty, lustful and diseased” by the Asiatic Exclusion League, South Asians appeared to be promiscuous, violent, and unclean.35 South Asian political activism via the anticolonial Ghadar Party in the early twentieth century increased the specter of South Asians as a potentially seditious community.36 Similarly, we see the construction of Ottomans as characterized by “theological, military, and martial excess” in antebellum America.37 Many of these Orientalist tropes continue today. Although Muslim communities globally are far more diverse than the regions discussed, through these examples we can examine how historic constructions of Otherness continue to manifest in contemporary racialized identities. To engage questions of race and Muslims in the United States necessarily leads me to explore the intersections of Blackness, Asianness, and Islam. Often written onto these bodies are radical politics within these communities. In turn, the antiracist and anticolonial projects of these communities are evidenced for the present-day suspicion of these specific communities. In a sense, these national identities are invoked in the construction of a singular

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“Muslim.” Even though all of these actors were not themselves Muslim nor do they represent broad swatches of the Muslim world, they are taken up as part of the Oriental Other cited in the construction of contemporary political discourse on Muslims. Thus, anti-Muslim racism includes not simply bodies that are deemed different, but essentially denotes suspicion that these bodies are critics of capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism. Individuals and communities racialized as Muslim contend with these varied and overlapping histories as they construct their own identities. In the next section, I explore how this complex relationship between race and religion continues to resonate in the experiences of young Muslims in the United States.

Methodology The data for this chapter draws from a larger ethnographic project exploring the lives and identities of Muslim undergraduates from four institutions of higher education in Southern California in 2008 and 2009. This study explored the racial, gender, and class identities of Muslim students. I engaged in ethnographic observations on each campus and in community locations over nine months, conducted three- to five-hour semi-structured life history interviews with each student, and held focus groups. These data explore issues of identity and participation in public life. Focusing closely on the individual and her or his particular experience, this study relies on a research model starting from lived experiences to illuminate social theory, or a ground-up process.38 After I logged and transcribed interviews, I asked participants to review their transcripts to confirm their words. I took specific care to ensure that the students were comfortable with their transcripts given the politically sensitive nature of Muslim students discussing state politics. I then triangulated data using the transcripts, audio logs, field notes, and analytic memos to follow a grounded model of analysis. I used tools of critical discourse analysis to explore the way students utilized language by examining word choices, metaphors, pronouns, and other indexical properties of language.39 In this essay, I draw on a critical race case study methodology to hone in on the experiences and narratives of three young people within the larger study.40 Within this methodology, the focus on a single or small sample permits engagement in a much more detailed and nuanced exploration of a topic than is possible with a larger sample.41 I do not contend that either an

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individual or a collection of individuals can represent the vast diversities of experiences. Rather, I tease out some of the tensions and use these as case studies to explore a few pertinent issues in greater depth. As with any study on diverse, multi-identity communities, the research cannot “represent” the demographics of entire communities. I am a male of South Asian Muslim descent who was actively involved with youth of color and Muslim community organizing in Southern California. Because Muslim communities are surveilled by intelligence agencies, building relationships for intimate conversations about political beliefs, affiliations and concerns is challenging. Through my direct and indirect networks with Muslim students regionally, I developed relationships that allowed for sensitive conversations on pertinent political and identity issues.

Muslim Identities on the Margins In working with Muslim students from across the nation, I have witnessed young Muslims thinking about their lives in powerful and complex ways. Potentially because of their unique position of being part of the shifting and reorganizing racial category of “Muslim,” all of these young people recognized the malleable nature of their intersectional and multifaceted identities. Furthermore, many of these students saw themselves not simply as hyphenated Americans, but rather as members of global majorities and the children of displaced peoples. I share some of their words and stories to explore how traditional definitions of race and religion coalesce and re-form themselves through their experiences.

Race, Religion, and Identities in Practice Exploring the impact of religious difference in racial construction is critical to understanding the everyday lives of Muslims in the US. In American history, discrimination has been constructed along racial delineations (among additional forms of Otherness), whether biological42 or cultural racism.43 All the while, a Christian normativity in the United States has been granted invisibility in whiteness.44 The experiences of Muslims must be understood through this context. As noted, the function of Christianity in colonial practices and the construction of the racial Other are central to understanding how identities have functioned in and continue to be mediated though these narratives in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

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Although the concept of race does not have a biological foundation, race permeates all aspects of US life.45 Race is a central lens through which people read each other—one’s body becomes a resource or hindrance for the way one is treated by their society. For youth racialized as Muslim, the intersections of race, religion, and Otherness are increasingly salient to understand how society marks their bodies and constructs notions of community and solidarity. The majority of young Muslims I worked with discussed a history of racism, genocide, and discrimination as central to their lives. Racial identities do not exist in abstracted ideas, but in human-to-human interactions that express violence, feel uncomfortable, and have tensions, irrationalities, and contradictions. In considering the unique ways Muslim identities are deployed, dominant ideologies are first interpellated upon Muslim women and men, which then leads to gendered and racialized characteristics and beliefs about Muslims.46 Ascribing social, biological, and ideological traits upon the body not only enacts forms of social Othering, but also reifies the foundations of racial power and white supremacy.47

Reflections on Experiences of Muslim-First Identities Identities are as much based on social forces and ideological regimes of truth as they are on how individuals find and build community with one another. The way society marks bodies informs individuals of their role in that society, a phenomenon famously discussed by Frantz Fanon.48 Alena, for example, was a young woman who discussed how changing her physical and cultural location required her to think about her identity in radically different ways. Soon after 2001, Alena emigrated from Pakistan to attend college. I met Alena when she was a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in economics in Southern California. Alena said she was quite surprised when she arrived in California to find Muslims identified “like a minority group” in the US. Although Alena was a Muslim, as someone new to the US American social and political context, she felt that publicly identifying as a Muslim did not make much sense to her when she arrived in the country. Nonetheless, she said that after some time in the United States she recognized why Muslims from diverse backgrounds would center a Muslim identity and began identifying as Muslim after “understanding how America works.” We have to remember that public identities are not somehow “natural”; instead, they are based on shared experiences, narratives, or histories. Her experiences of being a Pakistani Muslim woman in a US college shifted what

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parts of her identity were prioritized in a public assertion of self. Alena stated that the way she defined her identity in the US was radically different than in Pakistan: If I were in Pakistan and I had to describe myself I wouldn’t ever write Muslim. Maybe I would write female and Pathan and a few other things about personality, but I wouldn’t write Pakistani or Muslim. [In the US,] You are the Other; you are not part of the majority so you have to say that. In Pakistani universities no one says I am Muslim, but they will say I am Parsi, Sikh, or Hindu, or Christian. Only the Other needs to define themselves. The dominant group doesn’t need to do so.49

Prior to this comment, Alena explained that her university peers primarily marked her as a Muslim, not as a Pakistani. Classmates and roommates would not speak about her as a Pakistani, but as a Muslim. Because of this, Alena felt that the circumstances of Muslim life in the US required her to self-identify as a Muslim. For example, in classroom conversations she said she began to foreground her Muslim identity ahead of her Pakistani national identity so that her peers could “understand the context of a comment I make.” She said her peers had little to no understanding of the political, religious, and social diversities of the “Muslim world” or South Asia. Although we do not know how her peers read her body in those moments, it is significant that Alena herself felt that she was read as a Muslim first. She believed that she was “seen as a Muslim always” by her peers, who she said, “probably don’t even know where Pakistan is on a map . . . do they even know that we already had a woman prime minister?” In the wake of the US war on terror, invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, Alena believed that her peers and most Americans more readily saw her as Muslim before they saw her as Pakistani. In other words, being Pakistani became subsumed under the broader category of being Muslim. Furthermore, Alena recognized the difference between being a racialized Muslim in the US and being in Pakistan, where Muslim bodies are not racialized in the same way. She affirmed that in the US it is important for her, as the Other, to define herself as a Muslim, and that the label Muslim is a social and cultural marker that Americans place on her based on her phenotype, accent, and clothing. As a recent immigrant, Alena was able to recognize how she shifted her presentation of self and had to learn how to engage socially and politically

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in radically different ways because she lived in the United States. Alena said that although her views of herself have not changed, the context of where she lives required her to understand her identity differently. For example, she began using “Muslim” as her primary form of identification in public life. Although she might also consider that her Pakistani immigrant status places her on the outside, Alena believed her body, words, and actions led her to be interpellated as a Muslim rather than as a Pakistani. Even though Alena did not refer to this history, religion has been central in racist and xenophobic perceptions and portrayals of South Asians, who were long called “Hindoos” in racialized discourse. Through Alena’s example, we see the confounding of racial and religious identities in US history. In the post-9/11 era, much of this racialization of religious identities has shifted toward marking South Asian bodies as Muslim, as evidenced by attacks against Sikh and Hindu South Asian American communities as being mistaken for Muslim. Further, immigrants from South Asia have always embodied ambiguous racial spaces in the US, such as Bhagat Singh Thind, who was denied citizenship rights for not being white.50 In the series of legal battles around Thind’s citizenship application, the courts continually found that Indians (“Hindoos” as Indians were called in the US at the time) did not fulfill a “common man’s” vision of a Caucasian, thus a reason for citizenship denial. A hundred years later, young South Asian immigrants like Alena do not consider themselves white, nor do they assume that the state or US citizens will treat them as such.

Tensions across Racialized and Religious Identities Within US racial logic, young people must navigate particular terrains within and across dominant institutions as well as within communities of color based on the meanings associated with their specific bodies. For example, the perspective of Jibril, a junior from San Diego who majored in engineering, extends this discussion of tensions across racialized and religious identities. Jibril came to the United States in the late 1990s as a sevenyear-old child after his family fled war in Somalia. Although Jibril was not officially a refugee, the context of his arrival in the US was radically different than that of Alena or other immigrants. His family did not choose to come to the United States. Instead, the war forced them to flee. Although Jibril described himself as phenotypically Black and ­acknowledged that he would most likely be identified as an African ­American,

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his personal and familial experiences gave him a very different context to understand who he is in the United States. Coming from a country where war and violence manifest through ethnic violence between Black people, Jibril felt that “Americans” see Black people as singular: Not that I am not Black. I am Black, but in Somalia everyone is Black. I’ve dealt with that [racism]. It is not as emotional to me as to an actual Black person [African American]. My ancestors were not enslaved here. I didn’t deal with the N word where I am from or the stigmas for being African American from where I am from. I get the stereotypes, but it doesn’t affect me the same as others. I do get them [stereotypes] because of how people see me or my skin color. They don’t see that I am not Black American, I am Somali. I am a Muslim, but people don’t see that, but when they hear me talk and learn that, they treat me different.51

Jibril reminds us that racial identities inform how young people see themselves, a process that is influenced by the reflections of how a broader public defines who and what one is.52 He noted that he does not “look like what they [the American public] think Muslims look like.” As mentioned, Blackness has a unique relationship to Islam in the United States. In fact, the plurality of Muslims in the US are African American.53 Jibril knows that Muslim identities are racialized, specifically alluding to South Asia and the Middle East within the larger US public discourse. Whereas a generation ago, Islam in the US connoted links to African American identities, it is more complicated in the twenty-first century. Again, we see evidence that the bodies associated with particular racialized markers can change. Although Jibril demonstrated his familiarity with the history of Islam in the US, he did not exhibit a sense of Islam’s legacies in the Americas, or the US, particularly in African American communities. He asked, “I know the Nation of Islam, but they are kinda different from the rest of us [global Islam]?” Just as a broader public is often blind to the multiple histories of Islam and Muslim life in the United States (which inform the contemporary politicization of Muslim identities), young Muslims are often ignorant of this history as well. Despite not being a student of history, Jibril made meaning from his daily, embodied experiences in the spaces he occupied. He viewed Muslim identities in relation to the contemporary racialized readings of West and South Asian bodies in the United States. Jibril noted that he is not

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marked as a Muslim, as opposed to Alena, who said she was read as a Muslim seemingly in all of her interactions. As the war on terror marshaled US foreign policy in the twenty-first century, notions of who was read as a Muslim changed radically from a generation prior. Alena’s belief that she is clearly marked as a Muslim draws on contemporary images of Muslims as being from South Asia and the Middle East. Nonetheless, young Muslims were keenly aware that their race marked not only their phenotypic characteristics, but also the varied ways in which people imbued these markers with social meaning. From these two young people—one who is racially read as Black American while being of Somali descent, the other who said she was read as Muslim while being a Pakistani— we see radically different ways that Muslim bodies are assigned meaning. At least for these two young people, neither of their ascribed identities were “safe” within US racial logic. For example, as Jibril noted, “to Americans, I am just the N-word.” These are a few of the myriad complex and differing ways young people expressed how their identities have shifted based on temporal, spatial, and cultural locations. As people who were not born in the United States, both of them had to reorient their racial logics after arriving in the country. This experience allowed them the opportunity to see how flexible and malleable notions of race and identity are, and how they shift within particular political moments. Interpellating Islam onto people is seldom the only way bodies are read. Instead, people have multiple intersecting layers of performed identity to explore, including racial, gender, and linguistic differences, the focus of this chapter. Although stereotypes collapse Muslims into homogenous portrayals, the breadth of Muslim identities spans ethnicity, race, and gender, particularly for youth after 2001. Beyond their racial and phenotypic differences, Alena and Jibril experienced racializations as Muslim differently as they occupied different gender identities. Alena did not speak directly about how her gender identity mediated the ways in which peers read her body. Jibril’s only related comment was to recognize his peers “treated [him] like a Black guy.” Indeed, the racial crucible of the United States forges unique types of gendered and racialized readings of specific bodies. For instance, Black boys and men consistently face treatment by the police state as suspicious and targeted bodies, as evidenced in contemporary stop-and-frisk policies, as well as the regularity of police ­killings of young Black men (this is not to discount or erase the police violence against

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and killings of Black women). On the other hand, women marked as Muslim have a radically different set of assumptions and meanings written onto their bodies. As evidenced in the literature, Muslim women are often read as “needing to be saved” from tyrannical (or often defined as dominant or literal) readings of sacred texts and the overbearing control of men in their lives.54 In considering the complexity of young people’s experiences, we have to remember that young people are read in various ways and produce their own complex identities that are intertwined and intermeshed. In turn, we cannot disconnect Muslim identities from their gendered and raced inflections (among other forms of distinction). Further, for these two young immigrants, their experiences of gendered and racialized Muslim identities in the United States were mediated by their global migrations.

Intersectional Identities A racialized Muslim identity does not preclude young people from having other identities that are equally important and significant in their lives. As critical race theorists remind us, identities are not simply additive, or stacked on top of each other, but rather each intersection creates a valuable position from which one views experiences and understands the world.55 Consider the perspective of Jasmine, a fourth-year sociology undergraduate at a Southern California college. Unlike Alena and Jibril, Jasmine and her parents were born in the United States. I juxtapose Jasmine’s words and experiences to Alena and Jibril not because they are analogous, but rather because these three young people represent three radically different experiences, histories, and identities. Yet, all of them experienced life within a Muslim body in similar ways. Identifying as Black, female, and Muslim, Jasmine said that her multiple identities interact and inform one another in her daily life. Identifying as Muslim was a significant part of her identity, just like being Black and being female. Jasmine was soft spoken and measured with her words—she took care to occasionally pause in our conversations to reflect on the broader themes of the topics we discussed. Jasmine believed her experience as a young Black woman prepared her for the types of discrimination she began facing as a Muslim woman after 9/11: My own [racial] background has prepared me for certain things. I am used to certain things being fabricated and knowing how to get around it

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and just to thrive. Certain things are said but they are not true. [I know] how to interact with other people when you hear things like that. You may want to crawl into a shell and not interact, but you can’t do that you won’t get anywhere.56

Jasmine explained that before she wore a hijab she was treated as a “Black woman,” experiencing particular types of invisibility and suspicion. Donning a hijab mid-semester, Jasmine explained that classmates with whom she regularly talked became more distanced and treated her as though they did not know her. Jasmine explained that her Black classmates particularly surprised her with this ostracism; she assumed they would have had some familiarity with Islam and Muslims. Teachers also often treated her as if she were an immigrant, new to the US, and did not speak English well. Ultimately, identifying as Muslim “Othered” her in ways that defined her as an outsider in US society. Jasmine’s experiences stand in sharp contrast from Jibril, the Somali American young man we heard from earlier. Jibril was perceived as American because he is Black, whereas Jasmine’s donning the headscarf negated her Blackness and rendered her foreign. Young Muslims are not defining their Muslimness in ways to negate or minimize their racial experiences. Instead, their identities as Muslim are central to how they see themselves and how people engage with them. These students are complicating American norms of race through the racialized interpellations of Muslimness. As depicted, Muslim youth engaged their identities as a complex system of intersectional self-definition. Muslimness in their lives took on dynamic racial meanings and significance. Through these narratives, we may recall Sumaiya’s comment at the beginning of this chapter about being American and Muslim. It is clear that the dominant imagery of Muslim life as being inherently foreign to the United States is written onto the lives of young Muslims. As we have seen in other research, the temporal shift after 2001 changed the way Muslim bodies are read in the US. Although we do not know what Jasmine’s classmates actually thought of her, Jasmine felt that donning a scarf marked her body pejoratively by her peers, in a way analogous to how Alena noted that a geographic shift caused her to be seen (and define herself publicly) as a Muslim. Each of the young people I worked with stated that being defined as—or choosing to define one’s self as—a Muslim became central to their identity in a way after 2001 that they had never quite had before.

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Through her recognition of the temporal and contextual nature of racialized discourses and the construction of racial Otherness, Jasmine’s experience raises a vital issue about the intersections of race and religion in the making of Muslim identities within the United States, an empire built upon the violence of racial Otherness.57 The ways students described being racialized before 2001 were not simply a function of their national or ethnic backgrounds, but were also deeply associated with their geography, class status, and phenotype. As a final note, these three young people would not phenotypically define themselves as white or assume they would be read as white by dominant society. Yet significant segments of Muslim communities do navigate this space. Much as Jibril said that he was read as “just” a Black American, young people from a variety of national backgrounds are often read as white by dominant society. A different set of complexities within the lives and experiences of these young people is not addressed in this chapter. None of them had to create a physical or aesthetic distance from whiteness.

Conclusions: Navigating the Margins Young Muslims navigate an identity that calls on the religious, racial, and political, not as separate spheres, but as a mesh of sometimes contradictory narratives from which the self is articulated. Pragmatically, this allows “Muslim” to act as a strategically essentialist identity formation to function in a liberal race-centered political tradition.58 In being defined as and defining themselves as Muslim, these students also recognized a shared Muslim experience, which developed in part because of their racialization experiences as a targeted minority community. Within this essay, I did not discuss religious practice. Although many of the students actively participated in Islamic rituals, all of them said that Muslimness is not defined by religious practice but instead on self-identification. Muslimness built on a shared cultural history, worldview, and racialized experience.59 Students commented on the multiplicity of meanings associated with a Muslim identity as they described how cultural, spiritual, and regional affiliations all played a role in their own. They defined and redefined the terms and practices of a Muslim identity in real time, which is situationally contextualized yet dynamic. As a targeted minority community in the United States (across traditional ethnic lines), these young people are the creators, practitioners, and theorists of this identity.

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Through this chapter, I presented some of the experiences of three young people who complicate how we conceive of the notion of Muslimness. They represent some of the diversities of Muslim youth experiences spanning multiple nodes of identity. These young people were not all particularly politically engaged. I did not hear young people calling upon the traditions of rebellious Muslims in the West. The young people with whom I engaged were at best marginally cognizant of these histories but did not readily invoke them, and if they do cite them, they rarely engage them. Nonetheless, they are the children of these legacies. Their bodies are interpellated within these histories and their experiences resonate with the way Franz Fanon and Grace Lee Boggs, for example, described western colonialism and the US as a racial state. Knowingly or not, their experiences as twenty-first-century Muslims in the United States embody this history. The history allows young Muslims access to a legacy of Islam that not only has footing in an American experience, but also challenges white supremacy and colonialism. Nurturing a historic and political footing in US anticolonial history has the potential to foster the space for young Muslims to reimagine their identities as rebellious Muslims in twenty-first-century United States. This should be the work of critical educators, activists, and organizers working with diverse Muslim communities in the United States. These narratives display multiple iterations of Muslimness that recognize a much longer history of racial and religious intersectionality in the lives of individuals deemed outsiders within the West. Beyond theoretical interest, the question of who the term “Muslim” indexes and the meanings it elides will grow rapidly in importance. Muslim as a social marker and a self-­identifier will remain salient as the war on terror continues to foster what Howard Winant calls a “domestic foreign policy” targeting Muslims, immigrants, and refugees escaping the material effects of the war on terror in the United States.60 In the moments this identity is being forged, it is particularly useful to learn from youth who are defining and working through its complexities.

Notes 1.  See Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–322; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and

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Antiracist Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Legal Foundation, 1989), 139; and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge, 1989). 2.  Pew Research Center, “Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation or Support for Extremism,” August 30, 2011, http://www.­pewforum.org/2011/08/30​ /muslim-americans-no-signs-of-growth-in-­alienation-or-support-for-extremism; and “Muslims in America: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” May 22, 2007, http://www.pewresearch.org/2007/05/22/muslim-americans-middle-class-and​ -mostly-mainstream. 3.  Arshad I. Ali, “A Threat Enfleshed: Muslim College Students Situate their Identities amidst Portrayals of Muslim Violence and Terror,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27, no. 10 (2013): 1243–1261. 4.  Khyati Y. Joshi, “The Racialization of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism in the United States,” Equity & Excellence in Education 39, no. 3 (2006): 211–226. 5.  Nadine Naber, “Muslim First, Arab Second: A Strategic Politics of Race and Gender,” Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 479–495. 6.  Ibid., 482. 7.  Sunaina Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 8.  Jamillah Karim, “Between Immigrant Islam and Black Liberation: Young Muslims Inherit Global Muslim and African American Legacies,” The Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 498. 9.  Karim, “Between Immigrant Islam and Black Liberation,” 510. 10.  Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, “The Religification of Pakistani-American Youth,” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 1 (2012): 30–52. 11.  Kris Gutiérrez and Barbara Rogoff, “Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice,” Educational Researcher 32, no. 5 (2003): 19–25. 12.  Naber, “Muslim First, Arab Second,” 482. 13.  Daniel W. Reilly, “Rep. Peter King: There are ‘too many mosques in this country,’ ” Politico, September 19, 2007, http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-now​ /2007/09/rep-peter-king-there-are-too-many-mosques-in-this-country-003213. 14.  American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, Fazaga v. FBI, accessed November 22, 2019, https://www.aclusocal.org/fazaga. 15.  “Highlights of AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Probe into NYPD Intelligence Operations,” Associated Press, accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.ap.org/media​ -center/nypd/investigation. As a practice, when writing about African-American racial identity, I capitalize “Black.” I believe that “Black” refers to a people with a shared history, not simply a descriptor of phenotype. For a more thorough discussion, see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity

Ali 91 Politics , and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1244n6. 16.  On race, Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–1791; on religion, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 17.  Arshad I. Ali, “An Empire’s State of Mind: Surveillance and Policing of Muslim Students in New York City,” in With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections of Race, Muslims, and U.S. Empire, ed. Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 18.  Junaid Rana, “The Story of Islamophobia,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–161. 19.  Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 20.  Edward Curtis, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). 21.  Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 25–49. 22.  Gil Andijar, Semites: Race, Religion and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 23.  Ramon Grosfoguel and Anna Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, “Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies: Universalist Knowledges, Decolonization, and Developmentalism,” in The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements and the Geopolitics of Knowledges, ed. Ramon Grosfoguel and Anna Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), xii. 24.  Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodriguez, “Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies,” xii. 25.  Enrique Dussel, A History of the Church in Latin America, trans. Alan Neely (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981). 26. Diouf, Servants of Allah, 45–48. 27.  Joâo José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993). 28.  Anour Majid, We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 161–176. 29.  Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997).

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30.  Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 31.  Daulatzai, xxii. 32.  Ibid., 21–25. 33.  Jack Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People,” Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science 588 (2003): 171–193. 34.  Bruce La Brack, The Sikhs of Northern California, 1904–1975 (New York: AMS Press, 1988). 35.  Ronald Takaki, India in the West: South Asians in America (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994). 36.  Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 37.  Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14. 38.  Herbert Rubin and Irene Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995). 39.  Teun Van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (London: Sage Publications, 2001). 40.  Daniel Solórzano, “Critical Race Theory, Race and Gender Microaggressions, and the Experience of Chicana and Chicano Scholars,” Qualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1 (1998): 133. 41.  See Robert Bogdan and Sari Knopp Biklen, Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods, 4th ed. (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2003); and Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003), 1–56. 42.  “Putting the matter in a somewhat over-simplified form, the dominant racist theory of the early nineteenth century was a biblical argument, grounded in religion; the dominant racist theory of the period from about 1850 to 1950 was a biological argument, grounded in natural science; the racist theory of today is mainly a historical argument, grounded in the idea of culture history or simply culture. Today’s racism is cultural racism” (James Blaut, “The Theory of Cultural Racism,” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 23 [1992]: 289–299). 43.  “Cultural racism assumes that the metropolitan culture is different from ethnic minorities culture but understood in an absolutist, essentialist sense, that is, ‘we are so different that we cannot get along together,’ ‘minorities are unemployed or living under poverty because of their cultural values and behavior,’ or ‘minorities belong to a different culture that does not understand the cultural norms of our country.’ Nevertheless, cultural racism is always related to a notion of biological racism to the extent that the culture of groups is naturalized in terms of some notion

Ali 93 of inferior versus superior nature” (Ramon Grosfoguel, Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003], 195). 44.  David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso Books, 1991). 45.  Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” 46.  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). I contend (those racialized as) Muslim youth are experiencing an ideological construction of hailing the Muslim, or what Louis Althusser refers to as interpellation. In this occurrence, an individual recognizes they are being targeted “because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was him who was really hailed’ (and not someone else)” (1971, 174). Thus, the situation, or context, itself precedes the specific subject of action who is “always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity” (178). 47.  Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 48.  In Fanon’s narrative chapter “The Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin White Mask (1967), he recounts being pointed at by a child who shouts in exclamation, “Look, a Negro!” In theorizing this event Fanon recognizes that he is not simply the Other, but instead the process of calling out to him with an identifying racial description imbued with notions of inferiority carried psychological, social, economic, and political weight. Fanon states, “my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” Fanon’s description of racial interpellation epitomizes the feelings held by the young people I worked with. 49.  Alena, interview by the author, January 20, 2009. 50.  Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 72. 51.  Jibril, interview by the author, September 4, 2008. 52.  Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 53.  Pew Research Center, “Muslims in America,” 2. 54.  Ali, “A Threat Enfleshed.” 55.  Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. 56.  Jasmine, interview by the author, October 29, 2008.

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57.  David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002). 58.  Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1987). 59.  For a more detailed discussion of Muslim identities, see Ali, “A Threat Enfleshed.” 60.  Howard Winant, “A Dream Deferred: Toward the U.S. Racial Future,” in The New Guilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, ed. David Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).

Bibliography Ali, Arshad I. “A Threat Enfleshed: Muslim College Students Situate their Identities amidst Portrayals of Muslim Violence and Terror.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 27, no. 10 (2013): 1243–1261. ———. “An Empire’s State of Mind: Surveillance and Policing of Muslim Students in New York City.” In With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections of Race, Muslims, and U.S. Empire, edited by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971. Andijar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion and Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Bhabha, Homi. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha, 291–322. New York: Routledge, 1990. Blaut, James. “The Theory of Cultural Racism.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 23 (1992): 289–299. Bogdan, Robert, and Sari Knopp Biklen. Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theory and Methods, 4th ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2003. Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Legal Foundation, 1989.

Ali 95 ———. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. Curtis, Edward. Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation and Difference in AfricanAmerican Islamic Thought. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Daulatzai, Sohail. Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Diouf, Sylviane. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Dussel, Enrique. A History of the Church in Latin America. Translated by Alan Neely. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981. Fanon, Frantz. “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Ghaffar-Kucher, Ameena. “The Religification of Pakistani-American Youth.” American Educational Research Journal 49, no. 1 (2012): 30–52. Goldberg, David Theo. The Racial State. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002. Grosfoguel, Ramon. Colonial Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Grosfoguel, Ramon, and Anna Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez. “Unthinking Twentieth-Century Eurocentric Mythologies: Universalist Knowledges, Decolonization, and Developmentalism.” In The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist WorldSystem in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements and the Geopolitics of Knowledges, edited by Ramon Grosfoguel and Anna Margarita Cervantes-Rodriguez, xi–xxx. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Gutiérrez, Kris, and Barbara Rogoff. “Cultural Ways of Learning: Individual Traits or Repertoires of Practice.” Educational Researcher 32, no. 5 (2003): 19–25. Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1707–1791. Joshi, Khyati Y. “The Racialization of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism in the United States.” Equity & Excellence in Education 39, no. 3 (2006): 211–226. Karim, Jamillah. “Between Immigrant Islam and Black Liberation: Young Muslims Inherit Global Muslim and African American Legacies.” The Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 497–513. La Brack, Bruce. The Sikhs of Northern California, 1904–1975. New York: AMS Press, 1988. Maira, Sunaina. Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire After 9/11. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Majid, Anour. We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Marr, Timothy. The Cultural Roots of American Islamism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. Naber, Nadine. “Muslim First, Arab Second: A Strategic Politics of Race and Gender.” Muslim World 95, no. 4 (2005): 479–495. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge, 1989. Prashad, Vijay. The Karma of Brown Folk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Ramnath, Maia. Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Rana, Junaid. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. ———. “The Story of Islamophobia.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 9, no. 2 (2007): 148–161. Reis, Joâo José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso Books, 1991. Rubin, Herbert, and Irene Rubin, Qualitative Interviewing: The Art of Hearing Data. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995. Shaheen, Jack. “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.” Annals of the American Academy of Political & Social Science 588 (2003): 171–193. Solórzano, Daniel. “Critical Race Theory, Race and Gender Microaggressions, and the Experience of Chicana and Chicano Scholars.” Qualitative Studies in Education 11, no. 1 (1998): 121–136. Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Taylor and Francis, 1987. Takaki, Ronald. India in the West: South Asians in America. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1994. Tatum, Beverly Daniel. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Van Dijk, Teun. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage, 2001. Winant, Howard. “A Dream Deferred: Toward the U.S. Racial Future.” In The New Guilded Age: The Critical Inequality Debates of Our Time, edited by David Grusky and Tamar Kricheli-Katz, 211–230. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research: Design and Methods, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2003.

4 American Apartheid for the New Millennium The Racialization and Repression of Asian American Religious Minorities Jaideep Singh

The United States’ numerous faith communities represent some of its most dynamic, vibrant, and visible sources of diversity, but also some of its most vulnerable. Although the Constitution prohibits the establishment of a state religion, Christianity has enjoyed de facto state sanction and exceptional societal privileges since the nation was founded. This historic hegemony has fostered both a strong sense of entitlement and xenophobic entrenchment in significant and vocal segments of the nation’s religious supermajority. Consequently, as Christianity’s unquestioned preeminence in the nation’s public religious life has been challenged, Christian activists have angrily pushed back against what they misperceive as an assault on their faith. Illustrating this irrational persecution complex, a September 2014 Pew poll found that white evangelicals believe that they suffer greater group discrimination than Muslims, blacks, and Hispanics.1 Naturally, when you are accustomed to unrivaled social dominance, egalitarianism feels discriminatory. In recent decades, in particular since September 11, 2001, large segments of an illogically unsettled Christian supermajority have initiated confrontationally aggressive, bias-laden social projects aimed at reestablishing Christianity’s literal and representational dominance. This vocal, right-wing 97

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­segment of Christian America demands the restoration of previously normalized Christian supremacy in disturbingly strident tones: from demands that all pay homage to Christianity by refraining from uttering “Happy Holidays” during a time thick with religious remembrances for most of the world’s faiths, to the maintenance of Christian iconography on public land, to continued dominance of all public sacrality. Not only do Christian extremists assert a stranglehold on all public religious displays, but in stark defiance of the separation of church and state, they have proven eager to manipulate the rule of law to impose their extremist theological strictures on all Americans. Such reactions from an empowered majority threaten not only the nation’s theoretical separation of church and state, but also the religious freedom of minority faiths. Against this backdrop of hegemonic hostility, the nation’s religious diversity continues to surge; Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, and other Asian-­ origin religious communities are all rapidly expanding as a consequence of the Immigration Act of 1965. In addition to being religious minorities, members of these primarily nonwhite immigrant communities also encounter racial bias. Thus, as racialized religious minorities—double minorities— they face recurring manifestations of intersecting racial and religious bias. Race commonly plays a seminal role in the organization of Christian supremacist social projects, undergirding and conditioning the rhetorical attacks upon minority faiths. Although usually expressed through coded language, until the Obama era, racial bias can often be located within these movements. At this intersection of racial and religious chauvinism, both nonwhite bodies and Asian American faith traditions are denigrated through an Othering white and Christian supremacist discourse painting them as undesirable outsiders. The contemporary vilification of these faiths mimics the manner in which they have historically been portrayed as inferior, foreign, and never truly belonging in the United States. As a consequence, members of these communities continue to endure both significant racial and religious bias.

Constraining Minority Religious Freedom Despite constitutional guarantees protecting religious practice, racial and religious minorities face substantial constraints to enjoying the religious freedoms most Americans take for granted. Among the most illustrative

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manifestations of this oppression is the ongoing hate violence directed at members of these minority communities and their sites of worship, and public opposition to the construction of sacred sites by non-Christian, Asian American congregations. Muslim Americans have been the most affected by this mingling of racial and religious bias. A 2012 Pew study found fifty-three proposed Muslim sacred sites that faced community resistance. Opponents of sacred site construction regularly exposed their bigotry when they “cited fears about Islam, sharia law and terrorism.”2 This study does not even include similar difficulties encountered by numerous non-Christian congregations of color, or dozens of more recent cases plaguing Muslim Americans—particularly in the Trump era. For decades, these recurring examples have made plain the puissant, ground-level effects of the mingling of contemporary white and Christian supremacy, similarly harming Buddhist, Sikh, and Hindu American congregations.3 Time after time, white Americans have utilized local government as an expedient tool with which to signify that their nonChristian neighbors of color do not belong, and to deprive them of their religious freedom. In February 2015, construction on a $3 million gurdwara in Long Island was halted because of resistance from neighbors. Local Sikhs confronted officials at a Town Board meeting, raising cries of discrimination and forcing them to back down with threats of legal action.4 In the summer of 2016, residents of Cumming, Georgia, voiced opposition to the construction of a Hindu mandir in their community.5 A nearly identical situation has been playing out since 2013 among the Muslim community in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Following lawsuits by the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge and the US Department of Justice, signs of settlement finally emerged in the spring of 2017,6 but not before the community received the exclusionary message sent by their neighbors. However, many other Muslim American congregations have not been so fortunate in their battles with local governments who encode into law the biases of local residents. Perhaps the most compelling instance of contemporary sacred site resistance was the 2010 controversy over constructing a Muslim religious complex near the World Trade Center. Because of the depth and virulence of the nation’s bias toward Muslims, a local zoning issue mushroomed into a national debate. A national Washington Post-ABC News poll in September 2010 found that “two-thirds of those polled object . . . including a slim

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­ ajority who express strongly negative views.” Even more distressingly, “14 m percent (9 percent of all Americans) say they would oppose such a building anywhere in the country . . . [and] 49 percent of all Americans say they have generally unfavorable opinions of Islam.”7 Clearly, the words of the late Edward Said from 1995 still ring true: the last sanctioned racism in the United States is that directed at followers of Islam.8 Such fundamental infringements of religious liberty expose the constrictions racialized non-Christians still encounter. But these are only the most obvious manifestations of their repression. Far too often, people of color adhering to minority faiths are reminded that they are not on equal footing with the majority. A representative, jarring reminder of this disparity occurred in the US Senate chambers in 2007. Asserting their primacy, Christian extremists “disrupted a Hindu invocation . . . marring a historic first”: Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers . . . Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest . . . had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters . . . interrupted him by loudly asking for God’s forgiveness for allowing the ‘‘false prayer’’ of a Hindu in the Senate chamber. “Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight,” the first protester shouted. “This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before You.”9

Operation Save America later issued a statement saying, “The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. . . . This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.”10 Not only did this intrusion on a collective, sacred moment—led by a racial and religious minority—reflect and reinforce the marginalization of the speaker’s community, it also signified the lengths to which those who have always benefited from the nation’s racial and religious inequality will go to maintain their undeserved societal hegemony. Americans United Executive Director Barry W. Lynn explicated well the goals of these Christian supremacists: “They say they want more religion in the public square, but it’s clear they mean only their religion.”11 This invasion, overtly denigrating both Mr. Zed and his religious heritage, makes plain the supremacist outlook of the religious activists currently

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pushing back against the slow national shift toward religious pluralism. This ideal will continue to remain elusive as long as powerful members of the supermajority continue to demand the elevation of their faith and beliefs, while openly humiliating minorities seeking equity. Again in March 2015, when Mr. Zed was invited to give the daily invocation for the Idaho State Senate, an identical spasm of bigotry exhibited the depth of the nation’s open Christian supremacy. Three Republican lawmakers refused to attend the prayer. Senator Sheryl Nuxoll explained her absence by asserting that it was “because she believes the United States is a Christian nation.”12 She added, “Hindu is a false faith with false gods. . . . I think it’s great that Hindu people can practice their religion but since we’re the Senate, we’re setting an example of what we, Idaho, believe.” Her colleague Senator Steve Vick exposed not only his gross ignorance of the world’s third largest faith tradition, but also of US history and jurisprudence: “They have a caste system. They worship cows.” He acknowledged the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows any kind of prayer, but said he thinks the Hindu one shouldn’t be allowed to open the Senate, as the United States was “built on the Judeo-Christian not only religion but work ethic, and I don’t want to see that undermined. I’m very supportive of the way this country was built, and I don’t want us to move away from it.”13

This is a small sampling of the numerous Christian supremacist politicians who have employed the powers and influence of their elected positions to lead the assault on minority religious rights and religious pluralism. Even the House of Representatives is not immune from bigotry-ridden tirades against religious minorities. In the aftermath of a Muslim-led prayer service in the National Cathedral in 2014, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) “read from a pair of articles accusing the groups participating in the prayers of using the interfaith service to secretly honor the 100th anniversary of a speech from the last Caliph of the Ottoman empire.” The service itself was disrupted by a heckler, who had driven from Tennessee for the occasion, shouting: “We have . . . allowed you your mosques in this country. Why don’t you worship in your mosques and leave our churches alone? We are a country founded on Christian principles.”14 Bolstered by such powerful Christian supremacist political figures,

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­Christian supremacy continues unabated as members of the majority continue to elbow others out of the way in the public arena. Speaking after his inauguration as Alabama’s governor in 2010, Robert Bentley asserted, “Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.” Bill Nigut, the Anti-Defamation League’s regional director, protested: It is stunning to me that he’d make those remarks. It’s distressing because of the suggestion that he feels that people who aren’t Christian are not entitled to love and respect. . . . On the day that he is sworn in as governor, he’s sending a statement to the public saying if you’re not Christian you can’t be with me. From our point of view that is proselytizing for Christianity and coming very close to a violation of the First Amendment.15

Bentley, forced to resign in 2017 due to a sex scandal and campaign finance violations,16 clearly reflected the prevailing perspective in his social, political, and professional circles. The words he spoke came easily, without fear of any potential social ostracism. Verifying this, many of his constituents saw little wrong with their new governor’s openly Christian supremacist position.17 These Christian supremacist aggressions are the concrete manifestations of a broader ideological war. The bigoted beliefs undergirding this broad Christian supremacist offensive generally have not been voiced openly in recent decades, but encoded in actions and rhetoric. This has changed radically since 9/11. For Muslims and other racialized non-Christians, no longer are assaults on the theological beliefs, sacred sites, personal property, and bodies of non-Christian people of color clandestine Klan matters. Open Islamophobia—fear and loathing of Islam and Muslims—pervades numerous Christian pulpits across the nation, not to mention conservative television and talk radio, and local rumor channels. Driven by this open bigotry, Christian supremacists, marshaling the power of the state to promote their faith and denigrate minority religious traditions, represent the primary threat to religious freedom in the contemporary US.

Spreading Hatred from the Christian Pulpit The supremacist, bigotry-ridden rhetoric of influential white Christian American leaders—directed at their primarily white followers—has been

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particularly harmful to already demonized racial and religious minority communities. White Christian religious and political leaders’ hate speech legitimates and stimulates racism and hate violence, much as it did in the US South following the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision barring public school segregation. Particularly ominously, Christian supremacist political activity has exploded in recent years. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Christian activists generally limited their political activities to protests at medical clinics that provided abortions and demands for prayer in public school. In recent years, however, the Christian right has successfully mobilized anxious churchgoers around such fictitious issues as challenging the teaching of evolution in classrooms, “saving” Christmas, and the placement of a 5,300 pound monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court by then Chief Justice Roy Moore. The latter case was particularly noteworthy because the stone depiction took on startlingly sacred significance. The monument came to represent the apprehensions and resentments harbored by those in the racial and religious supermajority, nostalgic for the days when Christianity held untrammeled dominion over public sacrality: “Almost instantly the chunk of granite became a beacon, a shining light across the South, drawing fundamentalist Christians to Montgomery by the busload. Many dropped to their knees in front of the monument and prayed.”18 Coalescing nationally around this obscure incident, delusional Christians felt suddenly besieged—in the heart of the nation’s Bible belt. A shift in the tenor of the religious intolerance stoked for many decades by powerful Christian American demagogues occurred in 2001. The New York Times reported that “open scorn for Islam has become a staple ingredient in the speeches of conservative Christian leaders since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”19 However, this disdain was merely a modern manifestation of the Christian supremacy that has dogged minority faiths since the birth of the nation. The resulting xenophobic mobilization of angry Christians has been ominous to observe for those who value pluralism. A particularly spiteful episode of the bigoted religiosity—intolerance and bias sheltered by a spiritual shield—that has become so common since 9/11, involved the Southern Baptist Convention. Hardly a fringe group, it is the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Founded by southerners who resented the abolitionism of northern Baptists, the group has tried to

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distance itself from its white supremacist past. “In an attempt to attract black churches to shore up declining convention membership,” it issued a formal apology in 1995 for its support of slavery and segregation.20 Deep structural biases continue to rot the convention from within, however. In June 2002, former president Reverend Jerry Vines told an assemblage of pastors that “many of this country’s problems can be blamed on religious pluralism.” He went on to assert that “pluralists ‘would have us to believe that Islam is just as good as Christianity, but I’m here to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that Islam is not just as good as Christianity.’ ” But he did not stop there, regaling the gathering of religious leaders with the following invective: Islam was founded by Muhammad, a demon-possessed pedophile who had 12 wives—and his last one was a 9-year-old girl. And I will tell you Allah is not Jehovah either. Jehovah’s not going to turn you into a terrorist that’ll try to bomb people and take the lives of thousands and thousands of people.21 (emphasis added)

Demonstrating the mainstream nature of these views within the group, Mr. Vines’ comments were endorsed by the newly elected head of the group. Two months later, Franklin Graham, son and designated successor of legendary evangelical minister Billy Graham and a close ally of former President George W. Bush’s family, called Islam “a very evil and wicked religion.”22 When asked to clarify his comments, he added, “It wasn’t Methodists flying into those buildings, it wasn’t Lutherans. It was an attack on this country by people of the Islamic faith.”23 These inflammatory comments forced President Bush—despite his close ties to the Graham family and his reliance on the Christian right—to publicly distance himself from Graham, who had spoken at the president’s inauguration only a year and half earlier. Undeterred, Graham proclaimed nine months later “that Muslims had not sufficiently apologized for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and that they should help compensate victims’ families.”24 This expression of bigoted religiosity mimics a long-standing racial and religious double standard, freeing white Christians from blame when one of their co-religionists commits an act of terrorism. In response, Ibrahim Hooper, the communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, warned,

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Mainstream political leaders and religious figures must speak out against the growing demonization of Islam by extremist right wing commentators and by representatives of the evangelical Christian community. Defamatory attacks on other faiths can only lead to a spiral of distrust and intolerance that will divide our society along religious lines.”25 (emphasis added)

The succeeding decade and a half have proven him correct. Such xenophobic remarks by numerous irresponsible Christian leaders have helped stimulate widespread, often violent, expressions of bias-laden loathing against targeted communities. Vigilante racism has been normalized26 as hate violence has become a regular part of the lives of the nation’s religious and racial minorities. The recalcitrant prejudice so visible within the Christian right was nourished and exacerbated by the political clout it garnered under the second Bush administration—success that fostered an increasingly aggressive, haughty, and decidedly un-Christian demeanor. As a result, Christian supremacists have been emboldened to act in ways unimaginable just a few years earlier. The expansion of Christian supremacist political activities has been breathtaking in scope. From efforts to outlaw abortion and defund Planned Parenthood, to opposing gay marriage and supporting bills to legalize discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, intersex, and queer people under the guise of “religious freedom,” to the passage of “bathroom bills” demonizing transgender Americans, Christian supremacist politics have a harshly potent effect on the lives of most Americans. These are the most efficacious and disturbing schemes through which extremist Christian theology is imposed on all through force of law. These activities have taken on an even more menacing hue with the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency, and his promise to “totally destroy” the law prohibiting churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates in order to maintain tax-exempt status.27 In a Congress that was 91 percent Christian in 2017,28 religious minorities have real cause for concern for their civil rights. US politicians have a long tradition of mobilizing hatred toward a visibly distinguishable Other to gain power and distract attention from their lack of effective governance. This heritage has been rearticulated by white

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­Republicans, who deploy both race and religion as efficacious social markers through which to channel the political power of US white and Christian supremacy. Generally speaking, contemporary Christian supremacist projects identify Islam and its followers as the enemy within. Consequently, Muslims and other racialized non-Christians must negotiate not only the public manifestations of a chimerical persecution complex within a significant segment of the supermajority, but also the racist misperception of Muslims as dangerous. Through this process, race and religion intersect in an Othering discourse that underscores the dangers racial and religious minorities in the US face.

The Intersection of White and Christian Supremacy In the United States today, white and Christian supremacy have intertwined, augmented by exclusionary nationalism, to blight the daily lives and life chances of non-Christian communities of color. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Muslim Americans, and those mistaken for them, were targeted by a national hate crime epidemic, an air of suspicion following them through their daily lives. Although intense prejudice against members of these communities existed prior to 9/11, since the normalization of open racial and religious bias, the dilemma has been greatly magnified. By despoiling public perception of them, these melding bigotries have exacerbated the bias and racial violence these targeted communities already endure. The power of these intersecting bigotries stems from the supermajority’s fecund, fanciful fear of the Other. The rhetoric of neo-white and Christian supremacy is carefully designed to appeal to those truly frightened and upset that the US is rapidly diversifying. Saturated with ignorance, prevarications, and bigotry, this discourse is precisely crafted to appeal to those fearful of demographic change and difference, such as that represented by communities of color and minority faiths. Persistently bombarded by polarizing prejudice from Christian supremacist pastors, videos, and publications—in addition to the mainstream media and Fox News—this describes a significant swath of white Christian America. A February 2017 Pew Research Center poll found that Americans expressed much warmer sentiments toward Jews, Catholics, and Protestants—who received between 65 and 67 degrees on a feeling thermometer—than Mus-

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lims (48 degrees).29 Muslim Americans were the only religious group in the survey to rank below atheists (50 degrees). Such a situation is the inevitable product of the media’s fixation on Muslim terrorism, despite the far greater occurrence of violent terrorist incidents committed by white men—many of whom claimed Christianity.30 Media sources fail the nation by focusing on the mythical specter of sharia law, instead of the terrorizing of Muslim families in Texas by armed protesters outside their masjid, and an explosion in hate crimes against “apparently Muslim” individuals and their property since 9/11.31 Through these racist media narratives, bias against Muslims and their faith is built, sustained, and normalized. Contemporary Christian supremacist projects explicitly seek the return of Christianity to a place of unquestioned primacy in public life. This phenomenon parallels the political manifestation of the white racial anxiety being produced by the nation’s rapid diversification, integrating the nation’s historical strands of racial and religious supremacy. In short, those who have never questioned their unearned societal privilege “want their country back.” Donald Trump’s candidacy for president is the political expression of this white and Christian fear and resentment, as reflected in his profoundly bigoted discourse denigrating Muslims, African Americans, Chicanx/Latinx, and other oppressed communities. Numerous scholars have shown that Trump voters “were significantly less likely than other Americans (and supporters of other Republican presidential candidates) to think that racial and ethnic diversity improves the United States,” and that “Trump does best among Americans who express racial animus.”32 In fact, numerous studies have found that racial bigotry and resentment were the primary forces animating Trump voters.33 In a historical moment of increasing economic uncertainty and concerns about internal national security, misplaced majoritarian rage at visibly distinguishable scapegoats animates much of this activity. In fact, indicating the increasing importance of bigotry in life in the United States, “racial resentment, anti-Muslim attitudes, and white identity, were all much stronger predictors of support for Trump in the 2016 primaries than they were for prior Republican nominees.”34 The ire driving most Christian supremacist projects stems not only from the actual de-centering of Christianity in public sacrality, but also from the perceived temerity of the religious and racial Others demanding equal

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r­ ecognition and respect. Thus, at the root of many white and Christian supremacist projects is an intensely supremacist desire for ongoing racial and religious hegemony, supplemented by deeply racialized notions of American identity. Undoubtedly, the popularity of such shameless bigoted religiosity is distressing. But even more disturbing is how these sordid appeals to racialist chauvinism—deeply ingrained into the culture after centuries of denigrating peoples of color—have become increasingly brazen and vicious. Combating contemporary white and Christian supremacy is particularly difficult because they have become normalized and thus, largely invisible. In fact, members of society’s dominant religious and racial groups are trained to ignore otherwise obvious expressions of racial and religious bias. And they are rewarded for doing so. Despite denials by many that they even exist, comments like those of the religious and political leaders cited remove the veneer cloaking these intersecting bigotries, making them palpable. The pointedly exacerbated public performances of white and Christian supremacy during the Obama years have removed any doubt of their ongoing power and persistence. The repercussions of ideological racism are clear. By legitimizing the dehumanization of already demonized minorities, demagogues stimulate racial and religious chauvinism and hatred. Gathering followers through polarizing prejudice, they simultaneously increase the incidence of hate crimes directed at Othered communities. The unavoidable consequence of this sustained, open bigotry has been an ongoing crisis level in hate crimes throughout the nation against Muslims, Sikhs, Arabs, Hindus, and other peoples of color. For years, their bodies, property, and sacred sites have been marked as Other, and they remain especially vulnerable to vigilante racists.35 Despite the ongoing ubiquity of the problem, the issue has essentially disappeared from public discourse—except in the most extreme cases—as if these communities should expect a certain level of racialized religious violence. Such instances of bigoted religiosity toward racialized non-Christians have exposed an increasingly malevolent inclination within the nation’s public discourse. In the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, not only have non-Christian faiths been openly denigrated by members of the majority, but the xenophobic cores of the nation’s white and Christian supremacist streams of thought have melded. The result is a condition in which minority faith traditions have accrued negative associations that have historically been coupled with race. Although race itself is still a determining component

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of this racialized coding, the identity includes dual aspects with racial and religious specificity. Again, although not a new phenomenon, this racialization of religious identity has intensified in the post-9/11 era.

The Racialization of Religious Identity Since 9/11, the new racial classification of “apparently Muslim” has emerged. Although not officially recognized as a racial category, it has become a defining reality in the lives of those who fall under its scope. Those encompassed by this designation are too often reminded in their daily lives—when traveling, when dealing with police, when applying for jobs, when receiving poor service in restaurants—that they have become de facto members of this new racialized group, defined primarily by their appearance, religious beliefs, and international events. Members of the ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, and national groups contained within this appellation are both racially and religiously marked as Other. This can be seen in how those targeted for hate crimes in the wake of the terrorist attacks—and for many years afterwards—were singled out for their physical appearance. Notably, their racialization relied primarily on religious symbols—such as facial hair, non-Western attire, and religious headwear. Although physical appearance normally correlates to race in the United States, the visible markers that distinguished the victims of post-9/11 hate crimes were not solely or even primarily racial, but in fact religious signifiers, such as the turban or hijab. In this context, these religious symbols became racialized indicators in the eyes of the perpetrators of these barbaric assaults. Although the subtlety of this distinction was likely lost on these soldiers of hatred, the phenotypical coding shared by many of the victims of post-9/11 hate crimes included both a religious and a racial component. So, although racialization is still generally governed by phenotype, the addition of racialized religious markers greatly complicates the equation for non-Christians of color. In essence, for members of these communities, the “sphere of racialization” expands from the body to its racially weighted accouterments. The experiences of the Sikh, Muslim, South Asian, and Arab American communities after 9/11 have offered convincing evidence of an ongoing process in which religious identity has become racialized. Among these communities, race and religion have commingled to form indispensable aspects

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of an Othered identity which is not only clearly outside the nation’s mainstream, but also one that has been criminalized by the state and demonized by powerful and influential political, religious, and media figures. Accordingly, visible religious identity emerges as the determining factor rendering individuals vulnerable to the phenotypically based social degradation—and potential violence—attached to racialized minorities in this nation’s history. Of course, despite the importance of religious signifiers, race remains seminal. Certainly, the skin color of those the state has harassed, registered, cataloged, incarcerated, and deported since 9/11 has been a fundamental factor in the lack of public outcry over these unconstitutional atrocities. The same can be said for the Muslim men grotesquely tortured in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and the secret CIA torture chambers around the world. The result is a complex amalgamated public identity, which may or may not correlate to one’s chosen personal identity, composed of visibly distinguishable signifiers that can be either racial or religious in nature, or both. Ultimately, religion, with all of its attendant physical markers, has become the racialized vehicle through which to channel the latest stream of abhorrence toward the enemy in national life. A person’s religious identity (or perceived identity) has been deployed as a tool with which to differentiate and mark those who have been designated Other, much as race has been used historically. For racialized non-Christians, the factors that make one identifiable—and reviled—by the nation’s racial and religious majorities are often essential, immutable aspects of personal identity and heritage, the maintenance of which places them at risk of discrimination and both verbal and physical abuse. The experiences of “apparently Muslim” communities in recent years illustrate the manner in which religious identity becomes racialized in the intensely white supremacist historical moments following terrorist attacks. In the tense, fearful aftermath of these attacks, logic and compassion become casualties of the need for xenophobic reprisal by the majority. This occurred in World War II with the mass incarceration of Japanese American families, and more recently with those thought to be Muslim. Racialized logic reigns supreme in these moments, which can apparently last for many years. Perhaps the clearest instance of the contemporary racialization of religious identity is visible in the racial profiling conducted on “apparently Muslim” men. Although examples abound on a daily basis in every US airport, two prominent examples from one year after 9/11—as well as a

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third more recently—illustrate well the trajectory of public sentiment and state action. On September 11, 2002, two Sikh American men—one a US citizen— encountered America’s latest form of acceptable racism, when they transgressed the newly defined parameters of acceptable public conduct by men who fit a specific profile. The two Sikh Americans’ problems began when they entered an airplane just before departure, coincidentally followed by a Latino. The New York Times reports “the sudden appearance of the men seemed suspicious to the three flight attendants who asked burly passengers to keep an eye on them.”36 Already on alert because of racist stereotypes saturating the media and public discourse, the crew panicked unnecessarily when Gurdeep Singh Wander failed to return to his seat from the restroom immediately on the request of a frazzled flight attendant—who was operating under the racist assumption that “an explosive device can be assembled if separate individuals carry the components.” She claims that Wander “intimidated” her while shaving in the cramped airplane bathroom. A witness contradicts her characterization of Wander, calling him “very polite” and “cooperative.”37 Nonetheless, the two Sikh Americans spent more than a week in a county jail following the incident. As Wander freshened up in the restroom, having reached the conclusion of a two-day ordeal of delayed connections and missed flights, the unnerved flight crew truncated the flight and landed in Arkansas. The flight crew claims they became suspicious when the two Sikhs and the Latino all attempted to use the same restroom. Considering there are usually only two restrooms available to coach passengers, this is neither absurd nor unlikely. Nonetheless, their story is a lie. The suspicion of the flight attendants was actually raised when the men . . . boarded moments before the gate closed, carrying identical small bags similar to shaving kits. . . . While the plane . . . was still on the ground, nervous flight attendants quietly recruited 6-foot, 260-pound Jim Humphrey and three other passengers to watch them, Humphrey said. One other recruit was known by flight attendants to be a black belt in karate.38

Based on the flight attendant’s statement, the men were clearly watched from the moment they boarded the plane, because of their coincidental proximity

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to each other, their assumed religion, and their race. Such suspicion is typical for visibly non-Christian men of color in contemporary society—racial profiling by untrained, biased, and often bigoted members of the citizenry. Humphrey, who had been recruited by the flight crew to watch the men, then did a remarkable thing. He “followed the man back to his seat and began a conversation”: The man from the lavatory identified himself as “Gary” from New Jersey. He told Humphrey he was a Sikh who came to the United States from India in 1984, was married and has two children. . . . He said he was conscious of 9–11 and all the turmoil that was going on, so he didn’t have the headwrap,” Humphrey said.39

Here was a man who had abandoned his religious heritage by removing his turban—in fear of being targeted for a hate crime—now being subject to arbitrary racialized scrutiny even after he had tried to assimilate into the American mainstream. This is a constant refrain in the long, tortuous history of racialized minorities in US history. Then things became even worse, and more racially informed: Another of the four men . . . walked to the rear of the plane, sat down in front of Gary and began a conversation in a language Humphrey did not understand. “I was scared, very scared then,” said Sherry Tizzano, a passenger from Nashville, Tenn., who was sitting in front of the men. “We were all scared.”40

Tizzano’s racist terror on hearing men of color speaking a tongue she could not understand, and her consequent criminalization of “apparently Muslim” individuals, reveal the constraints imposed on their public behavior. Verifying the racial and religious bigotry undergirding the entire incident, all three men, as well as a fourth man from Egypt, were detained by authorities. Only the two Sikh men were charged with crimes. In the wake of the incident, the Washington Post asked incredulously how Wander could be facing twenty years in jail for shaving.41 An equally revealing incident occurred two days later in Georgia. A massive manhunt netted three young Muslim American medical students—all US citizens—on the way to a clinical rotation in Miami. They were arrested

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because a white woman, Eunice Stone, claimed she overheard them make references to terrorism at a restaurant. Kambiz Butt, Ayman Gheith, and Omer Choudhary insist that she was lying. Nonetheless, her accusation not only carried enough weight for the police to shut down the major highway in south Florida for most of the day, but also overwhelmed the presumption of innocence. The accuser’s credibility seemed to originate almost exclusively from her race, because it certainly did not emanate from her astuteness. She claimed to have heard the men speaking Arabic, a language only one of them understood. Ms. Stone also “said she was surprised to hear the three speaking in a perfect American accent,”42 betraying her rather remarkable ignorance of the fact that non-Christian people of color could be American born. Clearly, in the post9/11 era, speaking a “foreign” language is dubious and suspicion-generating enough to get you arrested, or at least stared at with concern and malevolence. Unlike those of the Muslim American men, her motives, credibility, and veracity were never questioned—an unmistakable by-product of her white privilege. Meanwhile, the innocent, unwitting Muslim American medical students became the evidence-devoid targets of a racialized indictment, augmented with a religious enhancement: Shortly before the men were released, officials said that they were not being charged but that the matter would continue to be pursued as a possible hoax. “We’re looking into seeing what laws might be applicable,” said John Bankhead, the director of public affairs for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He added, “These people are going to learn a lesson.”43 (emphasis added)

Because of their bias against the non-Christian men of color, the representatives of the state asked the wrong questions. They never thought to ask, “Why was Ms. Stone eavesdropping on the men anyway?” How was she certain of what she heard, while distantly intruding on the conversation? What if she were wrong? These possibilities never entered the racially imbued public discourse surrounding the incident. Adding to the discriminatory nature of the state’s response, the men were cited by sheriff ’s deputies for not paying the toll at a booth. Video of the incident showed that the men had indeed paid, and the sheriff was forced to throw out the $126 citation. It appears clear that racial and religious identity

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were central to the type of policing the medical students encountered, as well as in the baseless allegations directed at them. Ms. Stone’s “vigilance” was rewarded with a pat on the back from then Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who commended her on voicing her racially misinformed suspicions, and pointedly refuted any who dared suggest that anything except patriotism lay behind her deeply harmful error: Some Muslim groups have called Stone a racist, saying she acted on her prejudice against the men, who are of Middle Eastern descent. . . . ‘‘I was really surprised at how critical people were of her actions,’’ Bush said. ‘‘So I called her up on Saturday morning and said, ‘You did exactly what the President of the United States has asked people to do.’ ’’44

As a result of Stone’s unfounded accusations and the prejudicial response by the state, the men lost the opportunity to participate in the medical rotation. Altaf Ali, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, explained: We are very concerned that mere suspicions, possibly based on prejudice and stereotyping could so damage the lives and livelihood of hardworking young people whose only wish is to be productive citizens and to contribute to the medical profession.45

The students were also incensed: “They are not sure where they will continue their education, saying their lives are in limbo. ‘We have no idea where our lives are going to head right now, all because of the statement of some woman,’ ” (emphasis added).46 Gheith, stunned at the authority given to the woman’s baseless accusations and the impact they had on the men’s lives, had pointed comments: How many other people witnessed this event that supposedly took place, first of all? Did they ask the server who served us? Did they ask anybody else that was in the restaurant? How is it that one person can pick up a phone and make any statement that they will and we end up [in custody]? . . . I think it’s time for us as Americans to put down our big sticks and pick up our books and read about other people . . . before we jump to conclusions.”47 (emphasis added)

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When asked whether he and his friends had been joking about 9/11, Gheith expressed frustration at the insensitivity and ignorance of the media about the daily realities of “apparently Muslim” men: “Of course not. Would you lose control of the conversation and joke about September 11th? . . . Is that even an option?” (emphasis added).48 His exasperation stems from a verity that he and other non-Christians of color have internalized since 9/11: that they do not have the same freedoms as other Americans. As one commentator put it, Are you young, male and dark-skinned? If so, watch what you say in public. With the government issuing new public threat levels switching back and forth between every color in the rainbow, it’s no wonder why Americans are nervous. Whether driving in a car or walking the dog, citizens everywhere have turned into dog-eared sleuths trying to pick up the slightest trace of a terrorist plot. And for people who fit a certain profile, this new hostile environment spells trouble. . . . Let’s cut to the chase, as soon as those three men walked into that restaurant, they were automatic suspects. . . . The men were guilty of only one thing—fitting the “profile.”49

The passengers of the flight curtailed in Arkansas exhibited a similar selfcongratulatory delusion: “The pilot addressed the passengers, telling them with tears in his eyes: ‘I am very proud of the crew and passengers on the flight. . . . The big concern was the unknown,’ Humphrey said, crediting the pilots and flight crew with making ‘the best call that they could.’ ”50 The rueful, incontestable lesson derived from these and innumerable other unheard stories is that white men who had committed identical actions in an identical situation would not have been subject to the disparagement, harassment, and state oppression that these men encountered. It is hardly likely that they would have received such scrutiny had they looked more like Timothy McVeigh or John Walker Lindh, than Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Usama bin Laden, or Mohamed Atta. As the Washington Post explained, such race- and religion-based profiling is wrong, even in the xenophobically driven society in which we reside: In a climate of fear, people get suspicious. But it is critical that people be willing to back down when an error becomes clear. Instead, all too often,

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the scrutiny carries significant costs even for people against whom no charges are brought—like the three Muslim medical students recently denied a scheduled rotation at a Florida hospital after they were stopped in a terrorism scare. The case of Mr. Wander is particularly ugly, because although he clearly is not a terrorist, he is being charged like one. . . . Shaving is not a crime—not even on an airplane on Sept. 11.51

Plainly, we now confront a new American apartheid, one that has been operating since 9/11. It identifies and criminalizes a distinct group of men— brown-skinned, dark-haired, possibly bearded, and “apparently” Muslim. Men who fit this racialized profile constitute a distinct, new class in our nation: the men of profile (MOP). The men in this new class, the mysterious MOP, range from an Egyptian to a turban-wearing Sikh from India, to a Guatemalan or Filipino. Citizenship is not a relevant factor. The only component of true import is race, the way someone looks. And perhaps more than at any previous time in US history, religion and its physical markers are a central component in determining who is racially marked as Other. MOP do not have the same rights as other Americans. Their civil liberties, indeed their very freedom, can be suspended, revoked, or circumscribed on the whim of virtually any white person—because MOP are guilty until proven innocent, as demonstrated by numerous instances of mistaken identity and official harassment since 9/11. They can be fired from their jobs, thrown in jail without their families being told where they are being held, or even the charges against them. In addition are the innumerable, ongoing, neverending hate crimes and the attacks on their sacred sites by bigots. They can also be deported through a secret hearing. In both of these cases, the accusers were found to be grossly mistaken about the criminal intent of the MOP. Yet a general feeling remains among many Americans that they did the right thing. After all, men who looked like those law-abiding MOP—whose lives were horribly disrupted by white paranoia—might do our nation harm; so much for the presumption of innocence on which our legal system is founded, if you are an MOP. This racial profiling extends to brown women as well. In December 2015, Valarie Kaur—a national interfaith leader, filmmaker, lawyer, and activist then employed by Stanford University—stood in line to board a flight home from a meeting of interfaith leaders. After removing a tag from her already screened carry-on bag, she was angrily confronted by a white man. In the

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end, the young Sikh American mother was forced to reveal a breast pump to prove that she was not a terrorist.52 Although the placebo of targeting and humiliating innocent citizens of color may placate the masses, it brings us no closer to being safe as a society. In fact, such backward reasoning splinters the republic even further by dividing us more deeply along religious and racial lines.

Conclusion In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, an astonishing historical amnesia seems to have afflicted many white Americans—many of whom only recently learned that racial profiling remains prevalent in this country, and that it is immoral. A crack has appeared in the nation’s collective moral opposition to the continuing use of race as a law enforcement tool, to suppress people of color and sustain white supremacy. The fear driving this mutation allowed the Bush administration an opening to launch a multipronged assault not only on the civil liberties of all Americans, but also to target a racialized religious group for inequitable and arbitrary scrutiny and scapegoating. Unfortunately, the Obama administration did little to improve the situation. Various apologists have rushed to defend the necessity of profiling and carefully watching MOP. In the wake of the incident with the Sikh men, an editorial in the Fort Smith, Arkansas, Times Record brayed, right or wrong . . . someone who looks Middle Eastern gets more scrutiny than others. It did not help matters that these men looked as if they were indeed from the Middle East. . . . But in the heat of the moment, those distinctions aren’t going to get much attention.” This editor further insulted his readers’ intelligence by claiming “had someone who didn’t fit the terrorist profile done what these guys are purported to have done, we can see the pilot doing the same thing.53

The ramifications of this heavy-handed government ploy to deflect blame from their own inadequacy and errors have had serious, real consequences for dark-skinned US citizens. They not only have reason to fear terror from abroad, as well as from domestic terrorists who carried out hate crimes, but also from the state and its various functionaries. For months and years after 9/11, immigrant communities lived under a virtual state of

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siege; entire neighborhoods feared leaving their homes. Some law-abiding, outspokenly antiterrorist Muslim American communities still do, dreading police and FBI monitoring and harassment within their sacred sites, among other places.54 As a consequence, many frightened, dark-skinned immigrants have sought to curtail all interaction with government agencies because of the terror inflicted on them by the state in its fumbling investigations. This hurts all of us who seek an end to terrorism and a just, unified society. Most painfully, this isolation has prevented disadvantaged immigrants from accessing the government relief agencies that have been so vital in helping so many maintain their families in the wake of the economic fallout from the terrorist attacks. Evidently, a new form of the system of white supremacy created and enforced by southern whites, after they violently overthrew Reconstruction, has been put into place. With the blessing of the FBI director down to local sheriffs, white Americans are now encouraged to help sleuth out the terrorists that national intelligence and investigative agencies could not find. Although the flailing government and police agencies are understandably desperate for help, the ordinary American is highly ill suited for the task. We have seen the ugly, regrettable results. What were the true crimes of these five men of profile? Essentially, making white individuals uncomfortable with their mere presence—a presence defined in many American minds by their racialized identities, their religion, and their mother tongues. This is not all that different than the white supremacist system set up in the South more than a century ago, except with more of the niceties of today’s surreptitious racism. For much of American history, the verity of the saying that “A Black man has no rights, except that which a white man chooses to give him”55 has rankled those who have taken the creed represented in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution seriously. Unfortunately, most Americans have denied the precision of this indictment of our collective history, choosing instead to exercise the racial privilege that allows them to not have to think about, and deal substantively with, matters of race. Their silent complicity, if not active participation, in racism has perpetuated the racial inequalities within our society; meanwhile, they enjoy the unearned benefits of white privilege at the direct expense of Americans of color. For MOP, however, no such choice, nor entitlement, exists.

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Notes 1.  Pew Research Center, “Religion in Public Life,” September 22, 2014, http://​ www.pewforum.org/2014/09/22/section-1-religion-in-public-life. 2.  Pew Research Center, “Controversies over Mosques and Islamic Centers across the U.S.,” September 27, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/09/27​ /‌controversies-over-mosques-and-islamic-centers-across-the-u-s-2. 3.  Jaideep Singh, “The Racialization of Minoritized Religious Identity: Constructing Sacred Sites at the Intersection of White and Christian Supremacy,” in Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America, ed. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2003), 87–106. 4.  Chris Fuchs, “Sikh Congregation, Town Settle Lawsuit over Stopped Temple Construction,” NBC News, November 17, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com​ /news/asian-america/sikh-congregation-town-settle-lawsuit-over-stopped-temple​ -construction-n685531. 5.  Isabel Hughes, “Proposed Hindu temple in Cumming draws opposition,” Forsyth County News, August 2, 2016, https://www.forsythnews.com/local/local​ -government/proposed-hindu-temple-in-cumming-draws-opposition. 6.  Dave Hutchinson, “Settlement may be near in battle over N.J. mosque,” NJ.com, March 30, 2017, http://www.nj.com/somerset/index.ssf/2017/03/­settlement​ _may_be_near_in_battle_for_proposed_mosq.html. 7.  Jon Cohen and Kyle Dropp, “Most Americans object to planned Islamic center near Ground Zero, poll finds,” Washington Post, September 9, 2010, http://www​ .washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/08/AR2010090806231.html. 8.  Sam Husseini, “Islam, Fundamental Misunderstandings About a Growing Faith,” EXTRA!, July 1, 1995, http://fair.org/extra/islam-fundamental​ -misunderstandings-about-a-growing-faith. 9.  Chidanand Rajshatta, “Christian activists disrupt Hindu prayer in US Senate,” Times of India, July 13, 2007, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/Christian​ -activists-disrupt-Hindu-prayer-in-US-Senate/articleshow/2199387.cms. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12.  Huffington Post, “Idaho Senate Invocation Protested by Lawmakers Because of Hindu Prayer,” May 3, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/03/hindu​ -prayer-idaho-senate_n_6794758.html. 13.  Spokesman Review, “North Idaho Senator Objects to Hindu Prayer,” March 2, 2015, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/mar/02/north-idaho-senator​ -objects-hindu-prayer. 14.  Abby Olheiser, “Why a woman drove to Washington from Tennessee to

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protest Muslim prayers at the National Cathedral,” Washington Post, November 17, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/11/17/why​ -a-woman-drove-to-washington-from-tennessee-to-protest-muslim-prayers-at​ -the-national-cathedral. 15.  Russell Goldman, “New Alabama Gov. Criticized for Christian-Only Message,” ABC News, January 19, 2011, http://abcnews.go.com/US/alabama-gov-robert​ -bentley-criticized-christian-message/story?id=12648307. 16.  Alan Blinder, “Robert Bentley, Alabama Governor, Resigns Amid Scandal,” New York Times, April 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/us/robert​ -bentley-alabama-governor.html. 17.  Bob Johnson, “New Governor’s Words Don’t Upset Many in Alabama,” Associated Press, January 20, 2011, https://townhall.com/news/us/2011/01/20/new​ -governors-words-dont-upset-many-in-alabama-n888590. 18.  Jeffrey Gettleman, “Judge’s Biblical Monument Is Ruled Unconstitutional,” New York Times, November 19, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/us/judge​ -s-biblical-monument-is-ruled-unconstitutional.html. 19.  Susan Sachs, “Baptist Pastor Attacks Islam, Inciting Cries of Intolerance,” New York Times, June 15, 2002. 20.  Lawrence Ware, “Why I’m Leaving the Southern Baptist Convention,” New York Times, July 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/17/opinion/why-im​ -leaving-the-southern-baptist-convention.html. 21.  Allen G. Breed, “Church Head Won’t Repudiate Comments,” Associated Press, June 12, 2002. 22.  Michael Wilson, “Evangelist Says Muslims Haven’t Adequately Apologized for Sept. 11 Attacks,” New York Times, August 15, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com​ /2002/08/15/us/evangelist-says-muslims-haven-t-adequately-apologized-for-sept​ -11-attacks.html. 23.  CNN, “Franklin Graham conducts services at Pentagon,” April 18, 2003, http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/04/18/graham.pentagon. 24.  Wilson, “Evangelist Says Muslims.” 25. Ibid. 26.  Bill Ong Hing, “Vigilante Racism and the De-Americanization of Muslim Americans,” Huffington Post, November 6, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com​ /bill-ong-hing/vigilante-racism-and-the-_b_945919.html. 27.  Mark Landler and Laurie Goodstein, “Trump Vows to ‘Destroy’ Law Banning Political Endorsements by Churches,” New York Times, February 2, 2017, https://​ www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/politics/trump-johnson-amendment-political​ -activity-churches.html. 28.  Jonal Engel Bromwich, “The New Congress Is 91% Christian. That’s Barely Budged Since 1961,” New York Times, January 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com​ /2017/01/03/us/politics/congress-religion-christians.html.

Singh 121 29.  Pew Research Center, “Americans Express Increasingly Warm Feelings Toward Religious Groups,” February 17, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/02​ /15/americans-express-increasingly-warm-feelings-toward-religious-groups. 30.  Joanna Plucinska, “Study Says White Extremists Have Killed More Americans in the U.S. Than Jihadists Since 9/11,” Time, June 24, 2015, http://time.com​ /3934980/right-wing-extremists-white-terrorism-islamist-jihadi-dangerous. 31.  Justin Wm. Moyer, “Armed anti-Muslim protesters stage ‘strange’ protest outside mosque in clock kid’s hometown,” Washington Post, November 23, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/11/23/armed​ -anti​-muslim-protesters-stage-strange-protest-outside-mosque-in-clock-kids​ -hometown. 32.  Dana Milbank, “Yes, half of Trump’s supporters are racist,” Washington Post, September 12, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clinton-wasnt​ -wrong-about-the-deplorables-among-trumps-supporters/2016/09/12/93720264​ -7932-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html. 33.  German Lopez, “The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment,” Vox, December 15, 2017, https://www.vox.com​ /identities/2017/12/15/16781222/trump-racism-economic-anxiety-study; Niraj Chokshi, “Trump Voters Driven by Fear of Losing Status, Not Economic Anxiety, Study Finds,” New York Times, April 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04​ /24/us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html. 34.  Michael Tesler, “The education gap among whites this year wasn’t about education. It was about race,” Washington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www​ .washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/16/the-education-gap​ -among-whites-this-year-wasnt-about-education-it-was-about-race. 35.  South Asian Americans Leading Together, “From Macacas to Turban Toppers: The Rise in Xenophobic and Racist Rhetoric in American Political Discourse,” October 28, 2010, http://saalt.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/From-Macacas-to​ -Turban-Toppers-Report.small_.pdf. 36.  Edward Wong, “Bound for Las Vegas, 2 Men Take a 9/11 Detour to Jail,” New York Times, September 20, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/us/bound​-for​ -las-vegas-2-men-take-a-9-11-detour-to-jail.html. 37.  John T. Anderson, “Passenger Fined for Incident,” Times Record (Fort Smith, AR), September 26, 2002, http://www.sikhmatrimonials.com/Sikhnet/discussion​ .nsf/78f5a2ff8906d1788725657c00732d6c/a33c20d2d21f981d87256c340066f2b2!​ OpenDocument. 38.  Reno Gazette-Journal, “Four men under watch from moment they boarded diverted plane,” September 11, 2002, http://www.sikhmatrimonials.com/Sikhnet​ /discussion.nsf/78f5a2ff8906d1788725657c00732d6c/a33c20d2d21f981d87256c3 40066f2b2!OpenDocument. 39.  Ibid., James Dunn, “Sikh mother breast pump out ‘to prove she wasn’t

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a t­ errorist’ by ‘angry’ passenger and staff on flight to LA,” Daily Mail, December 4, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3345955/Sikh-mother-forced​ -BREAST​-PUMP-prove-wasn-t-terrorist-angry-passenger-staff-flight-LA.html. 40.  Dunn, “Sikh mother breast pump.” 41.  Washington Post, “Twenty Years for Shaving?” September 23, 2002. 42.  David M. Halbfinger, “Terror Scare in Florida: False Alarm, but Televised,” New York Times, September 14, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/us/terror​ -scare-in-florida-false-alarm-but-televised.html. 43. Ibid. 44.  Mitch Stacy, “Gov. Bush thanks woman who tipped police to possible terror threat,” Associated Press, September 17, 2002, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus​ /f-news/752392/posts. 45.  Natalie P. McNeal, “Students try to clear names after terror scare,” Miami Herald, September 16, 2002, http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2002-09-16/news​ /0209160063_1_larkin-community-hospital-eunice-stone-medical-students. 46.  CNN, “ ‘Bring it down’ was about a car, student’s lawyer says,” September 15, 2002, http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/15/fla.terror.students/index.html. 47.  CNN, “Man in terror scare says woman is lying,” September 13, 2002, http://​ www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/13/alligator.alley. 48. Ibid. 49.  Rodney Jay C. Salinas, “Guilty until proven innocent: The new American paradigm,” September 19, 2002, http://www.mbulletin-usa.com/mbusa/mbusapg​ .aspx?doc=17753&area=opinions&sec=%20main&mnu=1. 50.  Reno Gazette-Journal, “Four men under watch.” 51.  Washington Post, “Twenty Years for Shaving.” 52.  Dunn, “Sikh mother forced.” 53.  Times Record (Fort Smith, AR), “Flight Crew’s Caution Exemplary,” September 17, 2002. 54.  Suzanne Manneh, “Bay Area Arabs and South Asians Call for an End to Discrimination,” New American Media, September 26, 2016, http://newamericamedia​ .org/2010/09/bay-area-arabs-and-south-asians-call-for-an-end-to-discrimination​ .php; and Jerry Markon, “Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque,” Washington Post, December 5, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost​ .com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/04/AR2010120403710.html. 55.  Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393 (1857).

5 Where the History Books End Religion and Vietnamese America in the Afterlife of the Vietnam War Mimi Khúc

Of the Vietnamese American experience, film director Ham Tran states, “Our story begins where the history books end.”1 In one sense, Tran is noting the erasure of Vietnamese American experience in mainstream US historical memory, especially in regard to the Vietnam War. We can also read this in another sense, that this erasure, the “end” of history, is the “beginning” for Vietnamese Americans precisely because the erasure forms the conditions of Vietnamese American experience and self-narration. Indeed, the story of Vietnamese Americans must always write against and over and through US narratives, the production of memory and knowledge around the Vietnam War, an overnarration through memorialization, films, literature, and other cultural forms.2 But American “history books,” this mainstream landscape of memory, also include the overdocumentation of refugees, an effect of US imperial bureaucracy. Vietnamese Americans are one of the most documented populations in the country, and yet this overdocumentation renders little depth about Vietnamese American life.3 Yes, we know that the weeks before the fall of Saigon would see the beginning of the mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, that most of these refugees would resettle in the United States and Western Europe. We know that the following decade would see the plight of boat refugees, only a portion of whom would survive 123

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and resettle permanently in receiving countries, many dying at sea or languishing in refugee camps for years. We know that Vietnamese refugees in the United States would start sponsoring family members, that they would refuse the intentional dispersal of them across the country, migrating and creating large enclaves, especially in Westminster, San Jose, Houston, and the DC metro area. But what we are only starting to discover, through the last decade and a half of scholarship in Vietnamese American studies, is the complexity of Vietnamese American lives on the ground: the intricate shape of their experiences, the ghosts that haunt their nights, and days, the trajectory of their dreams.4 The study of religion offers one avenue into the texture of Vietnamese American life. But if we are to take seriously Ham Tran’s suggestion that the Vietnamese American story begins where formal documentation stops, that it is intertwined with dominant US cultural systems, that it is fundamentally shaped from experiences of war and displacement, then we must develop a lens that captures these complexities. From within religious studies, this demands a more expansive understanding of religion itself. For Vietnamese Americans, the historical crises of war and exile, particularly in the late twentieth century, have engendered forms of religious reckoning that powerfully shape Vietnamese American life but remain invisible to those looking for religion as traditionally understood. The usual story of Vietnamese American religious life chronicles the religious traditions brought over by Vietnamese refugees and immigrants and how these traditions have changed in the US context: Mahayana Buddhism from China, in contrast to the Theravada tradition of the rest of Southeast Asia; Catholicism introduced by Portuguese missionaries but developed by the French over three hundred years of, first, missions and, later, colonialism; and “indigenous” traditions ranging from ancestor worship dating back beyond historical memory, to Cao Dai, an eclectic twentieth-century formation.5 This kind of historical mapping, though, which limits itself to traditional understandings of religion, ultimately limits itself in how it captures Vietnamese American life. Thinking religiously about Vietnamese American experiences requires approaching religion more expansively than as a catalog of beliefs and practices situated within organized religious structures.6 This essay considers the Vietnam War as a force that continuously shapes the religious imagination of both the Vietnamese diaspora and the United States in mutually constitutive ways. Indeed, the act of making religious meaning around the Vietnam

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War encompasses layers written and rewritten over each other as Vietnamese Americans grapple with dominant US narratives and the urgent necessity to tell a story that feels like their own. It is in this struggle with storytelling within history that this essay locates the work of the religious imagination of individuals and of a community. This essay approaches religion as meaning-making: in other words, as the cultural process by which life is made sense and given meaning through negotiating one’s relationship to the everyday and transcendent dimensions of life. This process is both individual and communal, tying the individual to communities of meaning through shared meaning-making but also through the work of defining the boundaries of community and locating an individual’s place within that community.7 Thus I pay attention to how meaning is made and negotiated in relation to critical historical events but also in a web of differential investment and power, in a landscape of competing meaning and a context of competing resources, what I suggest we call the “politics of meaning.”8 Although definitions of religion that focus on function, particularly in creating meaning, are not new, emphasizing religion as a process of meaning-making here and locating that process within differentializing systems of power allows us to emphasize the religious imagination as dynamic and agentive—as always laboring in response to historical and structural conditions. Approaching religion as meaning-making allows us to expand where we look for religion as well. If religion is a cultural process by which meaning is made, might we trace these labors in cultural forms not only within traditional institutions but also without?9 Bringing a religion lens to Vietnamese American studies and to ethnic studies more broadly, especially one that uses an expansive notion of religion and that locates religion within structures of power, allows us to further develop our understanding of the intersections of religion, race, and ethnicity. We can trace the ways in which ethnic identity and racialization are informed by and intersect with religious processes, and vice versa. What we will find is that Vietnamese American–ness is formed through a religious process of reckoning of the community’s own historical trauma but also religious and racial forces in the larger American landscape. This essay argues that Vietnamese American experiences require us to expand our conceptualizations of religion and further develop its intersections with race and ethnicity. The close reading that follows is both evidence that the Vietnamese American experience requires new interpretive practices, and also an example of what

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it might look like to apply such practices. The story is not comprehensive in any way but attempts to capture a dimension of Vietnamese American religion and ethnicity, the religious imagination of a people formed and forming themselves at the crucible of war, displacement, and national racial and religious structures. Ham Tran’s 2007 film Journey from the Fall is an important example of Vietnamese American meaning-making and provides a case study, for applying an expanded frame of religion and of examining religion in cultural texts outside of institutionalized religion. This independent Vietnamese American film is unique in its popularity, garnering the approval, even acclaim, of such diverging communities as the Vietnamese American immigrant community and the international film world. Led by a 1.5- and second-­generation production team and a cast of mostly non-actors from the Vietnamese American community who are refugees themselves, this film represents both its director’s vision and a collective community attempt to speak for Vietnamese America at large. Tran locates the impetus for the film directly in the erasure of Vietnamese experiences of the war within the US popular imagination: “For years I watched Hollywood tell their version of the Vietnam War, where Vietnamese people are faceless, nameless background objects instead of living, breathing, three-dimensional people whose lives were torn apart by war. No American film has ever been made about these struggles and sacrifices. My question was always: why not?” To answer this question, Tran’s film documents two sets of struggles, those of boat people and of reeducation camp prisoners, asserting that their stories require telling, recognition, and healing, because “the pain of a people can only be reconciled once the world has born witness to that pain.” Through a close reading of Tran’s film, I explore how Journey from the Fall offers an attempt to renarrate the Vietnam War and define the Vietnamese diasporic community—its losses, its hopes, and ultimately its place within the United States—­specifically through the refugee nuclear family. The film makes meaning of war by connecting large-scale violence to personal-scale loss, locating both that loss and the ways to redress it within the intimacies of the hetero-nuclear refugee family. It is through the family’s traumas and then healing that we are to “witness” and “reconcile” the pain of an entire people, linking issues of war trauma, the family, and diaspora. And it is through this process of creating meaning out of historical experiences of war within larger structures of meaning in the United States that this essay locates an important dimension of Vietnamese American

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religious life. In approaching religion in this way, I hope to broaden what it means to think about Asian American religion, and specifically Vietnamese American religious life, by expanding our theories of religion, and by placing religion within historical and political contexts of war and race. Looking at this film in particular, and asking questions about diasporic meaningmaking, I trace the ways the contemporary Vietnamese American religious imagination dreams of identity, peoplehood, and futurity.

Journey from the Fall: War as Family Drama Ham Tran’s Journey from the Fall is first and foremost a rejection of the dominant cultural narratives engaged in the Vietnam War film genre, what Viet Thanh Nguyen has identified as “the Vietnam War” structure of feeling, and what I add is also a structure of meaning: a meaning system that comes to dominate culturally how Americans make sense of the war with respect to larger narratives about the nation.10 Nguyen argues that as a structure of feeling, “the Vietnam War” relies upon a compulsory empathy for the American veteran, one that leaves no room for other forms of empathy and ultimately “stunts” the American “moral imagination.”11 The Vietnam War film works within this structure, engendering empathy for veteran victimhood and narrating this victimhood through depictions of damaged American masculinity, lost innocence, and the violence of war. From a religious studies perspective, and one that expands its lens beyond religious institutions to other cultural forms of meaning-making, these narratives also perform religious work because they define what is meaningful, how to make sense of loss and community. In other words, these films rework and reconfirm the boundaries of the nation and its peoplehood by defining what counts as loss, how loss is to be addressed, and for whom all this should matter.12 As a Vietnamese American response, Tran’s film intervenes by centering Vietnamese refugees and reeducation camp prisoners, identifying them as the main sites of trauma in the war. But the film engages narrative and affective strategies that do more than simply assert Vietnamese presence and loss in a terrain dominated by American national memory. These strategies locate that loss, and also healing, specifically within the Vietnamese nuclear family.13 In the film, the family is what is broken by the war, physically separated but also emotionally scarred. Communication, relationships, and ultimately love take significant casualties. We see these struggles and their effects mainly

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through the characters of Mai (mother), Bà Nội (paternal grandmother), and Lai (son) as they attempt to escape Vietnam by boat and then as they resettle in the US. In locating loss and healing within the family, the film engages labors of meaning that locate Vietnamese American identity and peoplehood in the family and its relationships. The family’s escape from Saigon after its fall is the focus of the first half of the film.14 The stress of the escape is expressed in the mother’s tense silence and frustration with her son, the grandmother’s constant concern for the boy, and the son’s confusion and stubborn reluctance to obey his mother. On the boat, they all struggle with tight quarters, nausea, hunger, and thirst as well as perpetual terror about being discovered. A pirate attack occurs and Mai is raped, but luckily left on the boat after Bà Nội pours boiling water on her and her rapist as many other women are taken. In the United States, the tension in the family actually seems to increase. New challenges arise, layering over unresolved issues: Lai has trouble in school, bullied by classmates and then vilified by the racist principal. Bà Nội tries to protect Lai but struggles with her limited English. Mai works long hours in a sewing factory, and then takes English classes in the evenings. She is barely home and goes through her days in a routinized and disconnected way. We discover that Bà Nội is encouraging Lai to write letters to his father, which she pretends to send but actually keeps in a secret box. We also discover that the boat captain, Nam, has become close with the family since the escape, helping them resettle in California, but his place in the family is unclear because there is still no news about Mai’s husband in the reeducation camps in Vietnam. Throughout the film, feelings seethe beneath the surface, hidden in loud silences, meaningful glances, and averted eyes. Indeed, it is not until the final scenes that the family’s dynamics reach an explosive climax. These scenes begin with Mai discovering over the phone that Lai has been suspended and hiding it from her for weeks. She then discovers Bà Nội’s secret box of letters. Bà Nội enters the scene and Mai confronts her, accusing her of harming Lai with the false promise of reaching his father, who is most likely dead. Bà Nội argues that Lai needs hope and that she herself as a mother holds out hope for her own son; Mai, on the other hand, does not “deserve” to be Lai’s mother. “A stone has more warmth than what you have shown him.” Lai then returns home with Nam, and Mai confronts Lai about his suspension. Lai’s response is to accuse Mai of neglecting him and of not thinking about his father. He even lashes out at Nam. Then, shockingly, we see the first instance of physi-

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cal violence in the family. First, Bà Nội slaps Lai twice for his outburst. Lai continues, and then Mai finally reacts, slapping him as well. She yells back at him, “I died the day they took your father. I died again out on that ocean, Lai.” She compares herself to a corpse, animated only to take care of him.15 In this scene of confrontation, we learn how the family members struggle with pasts that continue to haunt them. We come to understand why they are estranged, why Lai struggles to adjust, why Bà Nội tells Lai to write those letters, and why Mai cannot provide emotionally for the family. Mai’s speech is particularly illuminating, testifying to the kinds of gendered death that occur in war. Mai represents the kind of emotional death that accompanies gendered violence and its connection to gendered forms of loving—indeed, it is her motherhood that suffers. As a portrait of womanhood and motherhood during war and trauma, Mai’s character speaks to the unspeakable losses that women experience and testifies to what it takes to live afterward. For Mai, she is a “walking corpse,” living, in a sense, only for her son now. Her love for her son, however, is unrecognizable to Bà Nội or Lai, perhaps even to the viewer. We learn, then, that a major casualty of war is a woman’s selfhood, her motherhood, and her love for family members, which transforms into something unrecognizable. Although the confrontation scene testifies to these kinds of deaths, the reconciliation scene that follows gives voice to Mai’s love, making both her death and love now fully recognizable to her family and the viewer. In this scene, the family members lie together on the floor, including Nam, and Mai tells a nostalgic story of when Lai was three years old and was lost in the woods. As she tells the story, Mai confesses this moment has been the scariest of her life—implying it was even scarier than the war, the boat journey, and the rape. She continues: after they found him, she had promised not to let him out of her sight ever again. She ends the story by apologizing to Lai: “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you. But I promise you, from now on, I will always be there.” This scene resolves the family tensions, Mai finally expressing her love in a recognizable way and bridging the gap to both her son and her mother-in-law. This resolution is also about a kind of healing: Mai’s expression of both her pain and her love leads to healing of herself, Lai, and the family as a whole. Here, the family becomes how and where one heals from traumas. This familial healing is made clearest in the final scene of the film, taking place one year later. The film ends with the four family members, now including Nam very comfortably, on the beach,

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­making and flying a kite. This scene gestures to flashback scenes throughout the film of happy kite-flying in Vietnam when Long the father and husband was still alive and with them. In the final scene, the family is relaxed, happy, and intimate. This is the telos, a linear but also circular endpoint, as it expresses familial resolution, progress, and restoration. The family resolves its tensions, progresses in its “emotional growth,” and also becomes restored, made “whole” again by a new father-husband figure. Indeed, Nam’s character functions as a way to mark the family’s wholeness. The missing father-husband figure haunts the family throughout the film, and Nam’s ambivalent presence works to highlight this absence in the second half. As we watch the growing tensions in the family, we also see a growing relationship between Nam and Mai, and Nam and Lai, in scenes that portray Nam as a gentle, kind, and indulgent husband and uncle-father figure. Nam finds an old stereo for the family, he and Mai exchange looks while the stereo plays a Vietnamese love song, he picks Mai up from work daily, and he and Mai spend quiet dinners at home together. In these gestures, we even see bending of some gender roles: Nam takes care of Mai domestically in ways unusual to traditional gender roles, such as setting up the dinner table and serving her food. With respect to Lai, we see Nam telling Lai stories, picking him up from school, and making toys for him to comfort him. Thus, even before the reconciliation, the narrative is rebuilding the family with this new male figure.16 Once the tensions are resolved, Nam can fully be integrated into the family and complete it. So, what does it mean for a film like Journey from the Fall to centralize the Vietnamese family in a Vietnam War narrative and to cite the family as the war’s main casualty—and modality of healing? In other words, what kinds of religious meaning-making is this film engaging, through a family war story? Again, this film is first a rejection of dominant American war memory. But using the family to define trauma, loss, and healing in war also demonstrates the intimate effects of war. For this film, the family is a site burdened by the crushing weight of historical forces that find their way in to psychic and affective lives and intimate relationships. Tran’s narrative choices work to illuminate what he sees as the kinds of violence that occur, their effects, the avenues available for redress and healing, and the possibilities for the Vietnamese in the war’s aftermath. Specifically, the casualties of war, here, are family, familial self, and familial love. So I ask, if familial self and love are what are lost or transformed by war, then what do they look like and become? The happy end-

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ing that this film envisions (and defines) for the Vietnamese American family depends not only on a particular configuration of generational, familial, and community relationships but also on making recognizable the familial self and familial love, aspects of Vietnamese refugee life that the film shows to have transformed to the point of unrecognizability. The final scenes of the film represent Tran’s imagination of this process of recognition: what kinds of communicative and affective work are necessary for expressions of love and for healing. However, although these scenes are emotionally climactic, Tran admits that they represent things that the Vietnamese American family “feels but cannot say.”17 Indeed, this scene resolves the film a little too well, reflecting, I suggest, a second-generation desire about parental remorse, admission of failure, and expressions of love. Thus, to make love recognizable between his characters—and to the viewer—Tran must make his characters say things that he admits would not usually be said. What does this mean, then, for the Vietnamese American family, where maternal love transforms into unrecognizability and is unable to become recognizable within existing structures of feeling and communication? Further, although the film successfully points to the family as a site of loss, it depicts and depends on a particular kind of family. In using a missing father-husband figure to mark the family as at first broken and then healed, the narrative is invested in a heteronormative nuclear vision of the family. Overlaying this vision with a message of wholeness links it with a discourse of healing: the healing that the family finds is not simply through communication of trauma but also through reinstituting the “normal” and “healthy” family structure. Although an investment in the heteronormative family exists historically in both Vietnam and the US and thus makes discursive sense, the film’s insistence on a nuclear unit is perplexing. Indeed, the film’s narration of a nuclear family struggle (with the one exception of the grandmother figure) is not representative of Vietnamese kinship organization in general or even Vietnamese American kinship organization in the United States. Although nuclear families were what the US government and nonprofits recognized for sponsorship and resettlement purposes, Vietnamese Americans, upon establishing stability after first arrival, quickly sponsored extended family members and migrated all over the US to reestablish these larger kinship networks. I read the film’s nuclear and heteronormative familial narrations as discursive strategies to navigate a larger American context. First, as a seemingly private and thus apolitical site, the family allows the film

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to seem to bypass politics of the war and politics of memory. Tran himself states that the film is not meant to be “political” but instead about a family and its struggles—as if politics and family are mutually exclusive. “We didn’t want it [the film] to be political. We wanted it to be about a family. And ultimately, it’s about Vietnamese people. This is a Vietnamese family and what they had to go through, what they had to suffer.”18 But the very legibility of the family—its relationships, intimacies, tensions, and struggles—relies heavily on normative notions. We as viewers are able to make sense of these very struggles as familial because of our shared understanding of what a family is supposed to look like. This recognition goes further, allowing for the legibility of certain affect. It is through familial relationships that we as an audience can most powerfully read intimacy, love, and even conflict. The American cultural context forms the historical guidelines for how we understand what intimacy and love look like. This racialized, gendered, classed, heteronormative context is what makes a viewer able to read Mai as a “stunted” mother at first and then as a loving one in the end, existing affective familial discourses shaping how we understand what maternal love is supposed to—and not supposed to—look like.19 The film’s focus on the family points to important social, psychic, and affective processes, but this comes at a certain cost.20 It forecloses any notion of loss and healing outside the nuclear family, other relationships besides familial, and other avenues of hope or futurity for Vietnamese people outside the refugee family and an imagined community of exiles. The survival of the refugee family as portrayed in the final scenes forms a kind of telos for a narrative arc that names this form of survival as success, defining what both success and failure mean for the refugee family and the diaspora. We might ask, what might other forms of thriving look like beyond adjusting to the United States, achieving a middle-class life, maintaining a cohesive heteronuclear family unit, and “overcoming” the traumas of the war? For example, can we imagine a “successful” Vietnamese American subject that continues to be maladjusted to life in the US that is still haunted by war and violence? When might haunting be good?21 The future of the Vietnamese people forms a major subtext of the film in that Tran ties generational issues to diasporic ones. In depicting a restored and healed family in the US, the film ultimately works to imagine a Vietnamese peoplehood completely outside Vietnam, siting the Vietnamese people and its future in the diaspora, and even more specifically, in future genera-

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tions of the diaspora.22 The nuclear family, then, becomes the beginning point from which a people are to thrive and a diaspora to flourish. All hopes are laid on the generations that come from it, and the viability of these generations depends on the family’s state of health and wholeness. In an interview, Ham Tran explains further what he sees as the second generation’s role and responsibility: “Hope can be taken in terms of [sic] for the younger generation, what we have to do, what our responsibilities are: Number one, not to forget. Number two is to bring something to Vietnam.”23 Here, Vietnam as a country is still alive, but perhaps still on the brink of death, in a state of ruin, its flickering life becoming a ghostly presence that haunts the future of the Vietnamese diaspora. Tran names the future of not only the Vietnamese diasporic community but also Vietnam as a country as a major part of the diaspora’s children’s responsibility. Thus the possibilities of a diasporic community, including the homeland, can be realized only through a particular set of subjectivities. The question arises whether the restored nuclear refugee family is enough for the diaspora to sustain itself and thrive under its new conditions—and whether this a burden fairly placed on the second generation.24 Indeed, can we envision an alternative set of subjectivities through which to engage meaningful peoplehood? Specifically, can we imagine a second-generation identity related differently to family, nation, and diaspora, with different political and ethical concerns? Journey from the Fall attempts to make meaning of historical experiences of war within larger structures of meaning in the US, an act of the religious imagination that forges together issues of war trauma, familial love, generational responsibility, and diaspora. For Vietnamese America, this film offers serious reflection on what it means to live through war, to remember, to be displaced, to be part of a community of the displaced, and to love. In some ways, these meanings are clearly a way to deal with family trauma, especially for the 1.5 and second generation. But for Tran, they are also a way to forge connections among estranged family members, a way for the second generation to deal with “post-memory,” transforming a post-memory that has often been implicit, vague, and opaque to something more transparent, historical. Tran describes the main goal of the film as opening “dialogue” between the generations: “I always say that there’s an association between war and silence. The generation that lived through the war—what they pass on to their kids is that silence. What their kids have to do is break through that silence and understand what happened during the war.” It is the younger generation’s

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responsibility to open and continue that dialogue to facilitate healing within the community: “I think as the 1.5 and 2.0 generation, we need to know these stories and know ourselves so that we can start the healing process for our parents.” What we are left with in the end are continuing questions about what it means to be 1.5- and second-generation Vietnamese American, what stories we are ethically compelled to discover and tell, and what possibilities are opened and foreclosed as we make our choices.25 On the one hand, Tran offers us answers that are remarkably refreshing in the context of American war memory and full of hope and possibility for the future of the Vietnamese American community. But it is also replete with choices that set clear boundaries and meanings that may or may not fit, or be enough for, Vietnamese America or the Vietnamese diaspora as a whole.

The Future of Memory and Meaning This essay, and the larger project from which it derives, is an Asian American religious studies project that argues the importance of religion as a lens while expanding theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of religion. To approach religion as meaning-making provides new ways of thinking about the shape that religious life takes as well as new ways to connect religion to other categories, particularly race, ethnicity, migration, colonialism, and war, in the case of Asian Americans. For Vietnamese Americans, this essay bridges the study of Vietnamese American religions with current trends in Vietnamese American cultural studies that critically examine the historical and cultural contexts of the Vietnam War. It locates Vietnamese American religious life within this context, asking how Vietnamese Americans engage meaning-making to make sense of the war, its legacies, and the current conditions of their racialized, postwar lives. Ham Tran’s film is one example of this kind of meaning-making, and this essay traces the film’s narrative strategies and briefly meditates on their political, ethical, and religious efficacy for Vietnamese Americans. From here, I suggest we continue to ask these questions of efficacy, particularly in the relationship between postwar meaning-making and healing: How do we make sense of and then recover from the overwhelming violence of war and empire? Tran performs a kind of memory practice that offers new ways of making meaning about and from war—but what does healing actually look like in the wake of such historical violence? And in the pres-

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ence of overwhelming continual violence? If injury is a condition of living in the afterlife of war and empire; if, as Ann Cvetkovich suggests, depression is a condition of living in contemporary capitalism; if, as James KyungJin Lee suggests, “woundedness” is inherent in the human condition; if, as Johanna Hedva suggests, wellness is a lie constructed for the state to withhold care—then what we think of as healing must shift away from notions of personal or even collective redress or even “repair.” We must ask, if the world is full of violence, if life is the negotiation of wounds, then how do we make meaning from these experiences, and how do the meanings we make actually address our wounds and the wounds of those around us? In other words, are the ways we make meaning sufficient for the kinds of injury we experience—and cause—on a daily basis? Perhaps we need to explore what Cvetkovich suggests, “new ways [or practices] of living,” or Lee’s “pedagogy of suffering,” which he hopes will create new ways of acknowledging and living in “inherent” woundedness, allowing us to “make social meaning in that woundedness.” Indeed, what might it look like then to approach healing as a relentless life practice? These questions are the purview of not only theologians but also those of us engaged in political inquiry and practices for justice, such as ethnic studies. To bring together religious studies with Asian American studies and ethnic studies more broadly is to reflect on the labors of the religious imagination of our communities and their complex negotiations of violence, injury, loss—and to ask where we go from here. As this essay suggests, this is an urgent task for the Vietnamese American religious imagination, for a people so wounded by war, diasporic exile, and now the conditions of racialized life in the United States, living at the center of twenty-first century empire—and an urgent task for us all.26

Notes 1.  Ham Tran, “Director’s Statement,” accessed January 12, 2011, http://www​ .journeyfromthefall.com/DirectorsStatement.aspx. 2.  For some of the most cited work on the cultural impact of the Vietnam War in the United States, see Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Patrick ­Hagopian, The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the

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Politics of Healing (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009); Keith Beattie, The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Renny Christopher, The Vietnam War, the American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). 3.  Indeed, Yến Lê Espiritu would argue that Vietnamese Americans have been written into mainstream narratives as background figures, the scenery on which to stage narratives of American masculine heroism and loss, and even of US multicultural meritocracy, through images of the rescued, grateful refugee. Thus, the erasure is not simply one of invisibility but of intentional flattened imagery to serve certain cultural, political ends. “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in U.S. Scholarship,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1 (2006): 410–433. 4.  Two special issues of Amerasia mark the coalescing of Vietnamese American studies: Linda Trinh Vo, ed., “Vietnamese Americans: Diaspora and Dimensions,” Amerasia Journal 29, no. 1 (2003): ii–286; Yến Lê Espiritu and Nguyễn-Võ ThuHương, guest eds., “30 Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans & U.S. Empire,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): v–204. Recent monographs include Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011); Nhi T. Lieu, The American Dream in Vietnamese (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Lan P. Duong, Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012); Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Kieu-Linh Caroline Valverde, Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013). 5.  A subfield within Vietnamese American studies does deal directly with religion, but these scholars and works are few, usually are not in conversation with the rest of Vietnamese American studies (but instead with, say, American religions and immigrant religions), and usually engage institutional forms of religion in more traditional types of scholarship. Most remain in the form of articles and book chapters, though a few monographs have been published. Major essays include Chloe Anne Breyer, “Religious Liberty in Law and Practice: Vietnamese Home Temples in California and the First Amendment,” Journal of Church and State 35, no. 2 (1993): 367–404; Louis-Jacques Dorais, “Religion and Refugee Adaptation: The Vietnamese in Montreal,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 21, no. 1 (1989): 19–29; Cuong Tu Nguyen and A. W. Barber, “Vietnamese Buddhism in North America: Tradition and Accul-

Khúc 137 turation,” in The Faces of Buddhism in America, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth Ken’ichi Tanaka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 129–146; Carl L. Bankston III, “Vietnamese-American Catholicism: Transplanted and Flourishing,” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 36–53; Jonathan Huoi Xung Lee, “Ancestral Veneration in Vietnamese Spiritualities,” The Review of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 1–16; Jean-François Mayer, “Healing for the Millennium: Master Dang and Spiritual Human Yoga,” Journal of Millennial Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 1–7; Janet McLellan, “Hermit Crabs and Refugees: Adaptive Strategies of Vietnamese Buddhists in Toronto,” in The Quality of Life in Southeast Asia, ed. Bruce Matthews (Montreal: Canadian Asian Studies Association, 1992), 203–219; Peter C. Phan, “Vietnamese Catholics in the United States: Christian Identity Between the Old and the New,” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 19–35. Books include Don Farber, Taking Refuge in L.A.: Life in a Vietnamese Buddhist Temple (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1987); Paul Rutledge, The Role of Religion in Ethnic Self-Identity: A Vietnamese Community (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); and Peter C. Phan, Vietnamese-American Catholicism (New York: Paulist, 2005). 6.  The study of religion in the United States is heavily informed by Christian, particularly Protestant, understandings and definitions of religion, a kind of “Christian hegemony,” to use Khyati Joshi’s term, that focuses on belief, a monotheistic divinity, a “church,” Sunday “worship,” and so on. Joshi’s work observes the force of this Christian context in American daily life and its effects on non-Christians. See New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 7.  This definition of religion draws on Clifford Geertz’s social scientific understanding of religion as a symbolic system that gives order and creates realities, on Catherine Albanese’s assertion that religion consists of locating oneself in relation to these dimensions of reality, and on Erika Doss’s conclusion that religion’s ultimate work, or achievement, is in the creation of meaning throughout this process. See Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2007); Erika Doss, Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). 8.  The term “politics of meaning” has been used in other fields to discuss discourse and contested social and cultural meanings, but not usually used in a religious sense. The most notable use in religion would be Micheal Lerner’s A Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (New York: Basic Books, 1997). In it, he proposes a “politics of meaning” that shifts a materialismoriented culture to a “meaning-oriented” one, from “a focus on profit or other material values to a focus on ethical, spiritual, social, and ecological values” (216). Lerner is using “meaning” in its religious sense and proposes a particular formation

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of politics of meaning. I suggest the term here to highlight the political nature of meaning, which resonates with Lerner’s use, though I do not propose an adoption of a particular kind of meaning system, simply an investigation of the politics that meaning systems are shaped by and engage. I introduce this briefly here to begin a shift in how scholars approach religion. I hope to further develop this concept and approach in a larger project. 9.  This essay is not a methodological rejection of quantitative or qualitative methods, and not even a move toward “lived religion” or “religion on the ground” as critique of a focus on texts or doctrine, but instead a theoretical expansion on religion and an offering of cultural studies methods as another tool for capturing this expanded understanding. 10.  American civil religion, or the religious meaning system centered on the US nation, is a useful concept for thinking about historical structures of meaning in the United States, which I do not have the space to engage here. See Robert N. Bellah for the origins of the concept in its most recent use. “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005): 40–55; The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a historical overview of American civil religion, see Albanese, America: Religions and Religion. For an application of the concept to racial-ethnic minorities in the US, see Jane Naomi Iwamura. “Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion,” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 937–968. 11.  Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 20 (2009): 165. 12.  The most famous films within this genre include Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), and the Rambo series (beginning in 1982). 13.  Other aspects of the film that could not be covered here include the film’s use of the Vietnamese myth of Le Loi, its use of (a)political characters, the role of the father figure in representing the death of Vietnam, and “second” generation issues of postmemory and relationships to the modern nation of Vietnam. 14.  These scenes are interwoven with scenes of Long, the father, in the reeducation camps in Vietnam. 15.  Nam is a silent background character in this scene, holding Mai back, and up, as she lunges and flails during her outburst. 16.  Nam’s character offers an interesting opportunity for exploring Vietnamese American immigrant-refugee masculinity, which this essay does not have the space to engage. Both Long and Nam’s masculinities revolve around their roles as husbands or partners and fathers; a question to explore is in what ways Nam enacts an immigrant-refugee, diasporic, postwar masculinity shaped by wartime experiences

Khúc 139 and also resettlement and adjustment. Previous work in Asian American studies has examined changing gender roles in immigrant families, and I would be interested to see how gender roles and subjectivity shift in response not only to migration but the particular forms of Vietnamese migration as refugees, as broken and piecemeal families, as dispersed in resettlement. 17.  Ham Tran, “Cast and Crew Roundtable,” Journey from the Fall, DVD, 2007. The actress who plays Ba Noi, Kieu Chinh, is distinctly uncomfortable with the confrontation scene between Mai and Ba Noi, and implies in the cast commentary that the disrespectful language that Mai employs would not “really happen.” 18.  Ham Tran, “Cast and Crew Roundtable.” 19.  I suggest this context as a first step and recognize that a deeper historical and cultural investigation into discourses of family and affect in contemporary mainstream American culture is needed to develop this further. Another possible point of exploration is a comparative look at alternative forms of motherhood across racial and ethnic lines, for a fuller understanding of the ways motherhood is constrained, even foreclosed, for certain women historically, and the ways certain forms of motherhood—usually privileged, white, middle class, married—have been held up as ideals, marking what is recognizable as “good” and “healthy.” 20.  For example, the film’s decided avoidance of politics around the war is a missed opportunity. It avoids any critical reflection on US involvement, issues of neo-imperialism, politics of refugee displacement and resettlement, and the impact of war on Vietnam. Moreover, its assertion of the family as an apolitical site denies the ways in which memory, affect, and kinship—indeed, subjectivity—are inflected by politics and structures of power, even as the film reflects these very relationships. 21.  Here, Avery F. Gordon’s sociological notion of haunting might be useful. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 22.  This is achieved also by narrative strategies that mark Vietnam as dead and as the end of possibility. 23.  Tran, “Ham Tran Discusses His Film.” 24.  Tran’s nuclear family solution doesn’t address the social-structural and cultural conditions that he himself alludes to in the family’s struggles in the US. 25.  Brian Hu, “Confronting the Past: Ham Tran on the Making of Journey from the Fall,” Asia Pacific Arts, March 3, 2007, https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs​ /article/65736. 26.  Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 26; James Kyung-Jin Lee, “Elegies of Social Life: The Wounded Asian American,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2.7 (2012): 21; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory,” Mask Magazine, January 2016, http://www​ .maskmagazine.com/not-again/struggle/sick-woman-theory.

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Bibliography Albanese, Catherine L. America: Religions and Religion, 4th ed. Belmont, CA: Wads­ worth Publishing, 2007. Bankston, Carl L., III. “Vietnamese-American Catholicism: Transplanted and Flourishing.” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 36–53. Beattie, Keith. The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Bellah, Robert N. “Civil Religion in America.” Daedalus 134, no. 4 (2005) (Reprint of original 1967 issue): 40–55. ———. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Breyer, Chloe Anne. “Religious Liberty in Law and Practice: Vietnamese Home Temples in California and the First Amendment.” Journal of Church and State 35, no. 2 (1993): 367–404. Christopher, Renny. The Vietnam War, the American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Dorais, Louis-Jacques. “Religion and Refugee Adaptation: The Vietnamese in Montreal.” Canadian Ethnic Studies 21, no. 1 (1989): 19–29. Doss, Erika. Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Duong, Lan P. Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012. Espiritu, Yến Lê. “Toward a Critical Refugee Study: The Vietnamese Refugee Subject in U.S. Scholarship.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 1, no. 1 (2006): 410–433. Espiritu, Yến Lê, and Nguyễn-Võ Thu-Hương, eds. “30 Years AfterWARd: Vietnamese Americans & U.S. Empire.” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): v–204. Farber, Don. Taking Refuge in L.A.: Life in a Vietnamese Buddhist Temple. New York: Aperture Foundation, 1987. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hagopian, Patrick. The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009. Hass, Kristin Ann. Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Khúc 141 Hu, Brian. “Confronting the Past: Ham Tran on the Making of Journey From the Fall.” Asia Pacific Arts, March 3, 2007. https://www.international.ucla.edu/ccs​ /article/65736. Iwamura, Jane Naomi. “Critical Faith: Japanese Americans and the Birth of a New Civil Religion.” American Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2007): 937–968. Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Lee, James Kyung-Jin. “Elegies of Social Life: The Wounded Asian American.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2.7 (2012): 1–21. Lee, Jonathan Huoi Xung. “Ancestral Veneration in Vietnamese Spiritualities.” The Review of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 1 (2003): 1–16. Lerner, Micheal. A Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism. New York: Basic Books, 1997. Lieu, Nhi T. The American Dream in Vietnamese. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Mayer, Jean-François. “Healing for the Millennium: Master Dang and Spiritual Human Yoga.” Journal of Millennial Studies 2, no. 2 (2000): 1–7. McLellan, Janet. “Hermit Crabs and Refugees: Adaptive Strategies of Vietnamese Buddhists in Toronto.” In The Quality of Life in Southeast Asia, edited by Bruce Matthews, 203–219. Montreal: Canadian Asian Studies Association, 1992. Nguyen, Cuong Tu, and A. W. Barber. “Vietnamese Buddhism in North America: Tradition and Acculturation.” In The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth Ken’ichi Tanaka, 129–146. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. “Remembering War, Dreaming Peace: On Cosmopolitanism, Compassion, and Literature.” Japanese Journal of American Studies 20 (2009): 149–174. Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy. This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011. Phan, Peter C. Vietnamese-American Catholicism. New York: Paulist, 2005. ———. “Vietnamese Catholics in the United States: Christian Identity Between the Old and the New.” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no. 1 (2000): 19–35. Rutledge, Paul. The Role of Religion in Ethnic Self-Identity: A Vietnamese Community. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.

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Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, Culture, and Politics in the Diaspora. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013. Vo, Linda Trinh, ed. “Vietnamese Americans: Diaspora and Dimensions.” Amerasia Journal 29, no. 1 (2003): iii–286.

6 The Gospel According to Rice The Next Asian American Christianity Rudy V. Busto

The Church began in Asia. Its earliest history, its first centers were Asian. Asia produced the first known church building, the first New Testament translation, perhaps the first Christian king, the first Christian poets, and even arguably the first Christian state. Asian Christians endured the greatest persecutions. They mounted global ventures in missionary expansion the West could not match until after the thirteenth century. —Samuel Hugh Moffett By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” —Psalms 137:1–3 What is more important than the rice which we eat twice a day and which is our main food? It is what we are, or we are what it is. —Jade Snow Wong

I am always struck giddy by the boldness of Samuel Hugh Moffett’s introduction to his A History of Christianity in Asia. In my annual course on Asian 145

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American religions, I introduce the topic of Asian American Christianity with a quotation of his. Moffett’s startling claim, however, is tempered, given that he all too quickly reminds the reader that Christianity was eventually pulled into the “West” and the great promise of “Nestorian” Christianities was pronounced dead on the world stage by the fifteenth century. Students are initially shocked by Moffett’s opening, and over the years I’ve noticed that Asian American students, for the most part, are intrigued by the idea, and that non-Asian students tend toward skepticism and even offense. Later, I’m disappointed by how many students fail the exam question requiring them to fill in the blanks: “The church began in ______, its first centers were ______.”

Asian American Religions I begin my lectures on Asian American Christianity with Moffett’s audacious claim to literally reorient students’ assumptions. The topic is the last in the course because students must approach it using concepts and contexts learned earlier in the quarter. That is, by filtering the Christian tradition through the lens of Asian American religious studies, they learn to view Christianity from within the history and experience of Asian America. Likewise, this essay presumes this vantage point and contends that we are poised toward the redefinition of Christianity in Asian America but must first accomplish two tasks: first, recalibrate the priority accorded social scientific views of religion in Asian America and, second, acknowledge that a redefinition must be informed by a deeper historical acknowledgment of Christianity’s “captivity” by the West. By the time students are assigned Moffett’s chapter “The First Missions to India,” they have been warned not to believe everything they read about Asian and Asian American religious traditions. They have early on encountered Edward Said and Jane Iwamura on Orientalism, struggled with the issue of race in American Buddhism, endured the Rudy Busto-Rachel Bundang theory of the balut and Filipino religion, untangled the yoga craze as a modern search for an authentic ancient Asian practice, and in general, learned that the narration of “world” religions involves scholarly construction, imagination, and alliance with imperialism. They learn early on that the history of the study of religion is not an innocent one. Because the course is cross-listed with Asian American studies, students are also exposed to anti-Asian immigration and naturalization legislation,

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and have heard, discussed, and are tested on race and ethnicity models. The class as such is the conjoined twin of religious studies and Asian American studies: more than the sum of each field’s concerns and disciplinary objects of interest, and at times an ungainly creature meant to defy disciplinary conventions. To get to this basic starting place I open the course projecting the 1894 photograph of Chinese immigrant Polly Bemis, formally posed in her buttoned-up Victorian dress, standing next to a table with her right hand resting on a large book. Bemis, the feisty Idaho pioneer, remains the subject of controversy over the details of her life: Had she been a prostitute? Was she really won in a poker match? Just how “Chinese” was she?1 I ask the students to “read” the image and wait for the inevitable observation that Bemis is standing with her hand on the Bible, a testimony to her affiliation or conversion to Christianity, and, by association, her allegiance to the United States. Was Bemis in fact Christian? Did she mark her conversion by arranging this portrait at what must have been great expense? Actually we do not know whether Polly Bemis formally confessed Christianity. But for my students the expectation is that the road to full citizenship for early Asian immigrants surely included Christianity. For many of them this was indeed true. In Bemis’s case, however, this expectation is foiled upon closer inspection. The portrait has come down to us with the caption “Polly Bemis in Her Wedding Dress,” though even this fact is disputed. The “Bible,” as it turns out, is likely a prop supplied by the photographer for the occasion, and if it is indeed a Bible, in this rural context, it signals wealth rather than fidelity to religion.2 More tantalizing is Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s research on Polly’s name before her marriage: Lalu Nathoy (pronounced Nasoi) as a Mongol/ Daur name, and that “Lalu means either Islam or Long Life.”3 So, more questions. Was Bemis Muslim? Does her likely non-Han Chinese origins explain why she kept to herself and appeared to be aloof from other Chinese immigrants? This exercise in group hermeneutics of suspicion is the first of many unmet and upended expectations about Asian Americans and religion. By the time students arrive at Moffett’s declarations about the Asian origins of Christianity, they are suspicious learners. Moffett details the demise of Asian Christianity by the fifteenth century, and recounts the conventional rebooting of (Western) Christianity’s successes and failures in Asia with sixteenth-century Roman Catholic missionary efforts in China, Japan, India, and the Philippines. His account of Asian Christianities might be foreign to most students but for the twenty-

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first-century California context where Indian Syro-Malabar, Armenian, Orthodox, and Assyrian Christians have all passed through my classroom. As for Asian American Christianity, the now conventional narrative continues to be largely a “two-party Protestant” affair with a scholarly focus on evangelicalism.

Beyond the Two-Party Protestant Paradigm The study of Protestant Christianity in the United States continues to affirm the “two-party” thesis as an expedient concept. That is, scholars of American Protestantism find it convenient to adopt the idea to describe d ­ ifferences— real and imagined—in American Protestantism.4 This serviceable divide between liberals and evangelicals is shorthand for comparing the two parties on theology, politics, ecclesial polity, and social issues. William Swatos succinctly describes the creation of the “two-party” paradigm as the reification of an idea willed into being: the mental image is taken as one and the same with external “reality,” leading in turn to social behavior predicated on its existence as a condition of actual social relations. People believe that there are two parties and act on that basis; hence, “reality” becomes socially constructed. The “construction” of the “two-party” thesis in American Protestantism since the 1960s . . . has been abetted especially by social scientists through the ordering of data in some ways rather than others, particularly through a need to simplify social attitudes and actions in order to fit the constraints of survey research.5

Despite this suspicious origin and affirmation through self-fulfilling research agendas, the two-party thesis is a useful heuristic in the college lecture hall for moving students into the broad definitions, problems, and issues that contextualize Asian American Protestantism. I use this trope to leapfrog over the complexities of American denominational history to get to Asian American materials. But this quick and dirty classroom tactic also, I admit, imposes an organizing principle that avoids substantive issues in Asian American Protestantism. Swatos’s critique of the two-party paradigm boils down to specific limits within social science survey research and the inability of scholars to prove

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historically two distinct types of Protestantism in the lived religious experience of believers. He demonstrates that by taking into account various ­factors—such as gendered bureaucratization, localization, and theology— the two-party thesis is much too simple a scheme for explaining Protestant liberals and conservatives. Nevertheless, the two-party formula persists and has shaped the study of Asian American Protestant Christianity for reasons largely pragmatic. A survey of the scholarship on Asian American Protestantism bears this out, most notably in Russell Jeung’s landmark Faithful Generations. Even Timothy Tseng’s careful introduction to his Asian American Christianity Reader reluctantly concedes to the Protestant divide despite his appeal for a wider inclusivity. 6 Another reason for this persistent Protestant duality is the emphasis on evangelicalism in Asian America, beginning with the challenge posed by my 1996 Amerasia Journal essay, “The Gospel According to the Model Minority?”7 My essay rested on two arguments, one theological and one functional. The theological argument took seriously the biblical prescription that all believers are “one in Christ” without distinction for race, nationality, gender, and so on.8 This universalism did not erase human distinctions but located faith as the criteria for becoming a citizen in the Kingdom of God. The second, functional argument proceeded as a point of tension with the universalism of the theological one, suggesting that evangelicalism served as a release valve and a haven for Asian Americans stereotyped as “model minorities” on the college campus. Given the lack of research data at the time, “The Gospel According to the Model Minority?” was suggestive, dependent upon anecdotal evidence and launched from a particularly elite Asian American evangelical college universe at Stanford University and websites from similarly competitive schools. The essay ended with a plea for “empirical study and research on Asian Americans (in their diversity) and their involvement with evangelical Christianity” and, at the time, I had no idea that other scholars would actually heed that call.9 As noted, the essay offered two arguments, but the functional one became the focus of debate. The questions around the relationship between religious faith and racial identity provoked specific responses because of the suggestion that evangelical Christian identity operated as a competing, even incipient form of racial/ethnic identity. The essay endorsed the view of Christian identity as an alternative and preferred view Asian American Christians themselves proclaimed. Although I have not changed my view

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about the primacy of religious identity among Asian American evangelical college students (more about this later), I have been surprised by the vigor with which other scholars have worried about it. The core issue in Asian American Christianity scholarship emerging out of the 1990s turned out to be the tension between commitments to evangelical identity and Asian ethnic identity in the second generation. If my essay promoted the unpopular view that evangelical faith won over ethnic identity (even though I was careful to note instances when this was in fact not the case), Mark Mullins’s influential “Life-Cycle of Ethnic Churches in Sociological Perspective” posed the generational question within a sociological frame.10 There, Mullins predicted that as Asian immigrant religious institutions wrestled with the inevitable tension between the immigrant generation’s control of congregational life and the second generation’s assimilatory moves (English language, outmarriage, and so on), a choice had to be made. Either the church or temple opened its doors to non-coethnic members, that is, de-ethnicize, or died as an entity. Constructed as a problem of the second generation, Mullins’s “Sophie’s choice” for Asian religious institutions provided a clear, observable research question for scholars. That is, my 1996 essay posed a question about individual Asian American, evangelical identity from a religious studies, cultural history perspective, whereas the identity issue framed through Mullins as a sociological quantifiable question focused on congregational life. This reorientation of the topic eclipsed and effectively removed the theological argument. In the Asian American evangelicalism literature, the trajectory fueled by the problem as Mullins took it up and the funding of social science projects aimed at studying “New Immigrant” religion is clear.11 As a result, the question about what happened to the second generation framed not only the study of Asian American Christianity, but it spilled over into other, nonevangelical second generation ethnic forms of religious life. For instance, the recent collection Sustaining Faith Traditions, edited by Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, compares the second generation predicaments between Asian Americans and Latin@s. The project demonstrates the influence of Jeung’s superb and compelling scholarship, and also Chen’s earlier provocative comparison between Taiwanese immigrant Buddhists and born-again Christians.12 However, creating a parallel data set between Asian Americans and Latin@s on the predicament of the second generation is problematic from a historical perspective given the many differences between and among

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Asian American and Latin@ histories of immigration, negotiation of assimilation pressures, generational dynamics, and religious beliefs and practices. Casting the project on the argument that Asian American and Latin@s in a post-1965-immigration era constitute a “new second generation” allows for comparison, but inadvertently reinforces an older paradigm of racial and ethnic division and conflates the experiences of two very large and diverse populations. What is striking in the scholarship on Asian American evangelicalism and Asian American Christianity broadly is that Asian Americans produce almost all of it, and that the literature on Asian “New Immigrant” nonChristian traditions is written predominantly by whites. This division in topic choice indicates the ongoing influence of Orientalism in religious studies, but also suggests that Asian American scholars of religion are caught in a series of ironies. Whereas Asian American scholars insist on setting the record straight with regard to a majority Christian affiliation (42 percent) in Asian America, that is, declaring that we are not all immigrants confessing Oriental religions; they are nevertheless locked into the old Hansen’s Law fiction about the second generation’s rejection of immigrant parent culture.13 In other words, Asian American scholars of religion may be inadvertently promoting the perpetual foreigner image by continuing to ask what happens to the second generation. The further irony here is that the ongoing spotlight on Christianity and the “problem” of assimilation only perpetuates distance between Asian Americans and other Americans. The give and take between Asian American and evangelical identities continues, although largely through social science survey data and congregational studies. As such, interpretations and conclusions are limited by research parameters in search of institutional integrity and measurable forms of identity.14

Asian American Christianity: Rice Kernel or Husk? Whereas the identity issue defines the scholarship on Asian American evangelicalism, again, almost entirely by social scientists, the identity question revolves around what to do with non-Christian cultures and influences at the liberal end of the Christianity spectrum. This topic has been taken up mainly by theologians and humanities scholars. In my course, I provoke the issue by projecting an image of the Madonna and child figure from the San Francisco St. Mary’s Chinese Mission Chapel (figure 1). I anticipate and get

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the same reaction every time I show students this “Chinese” Mary holding the infant Jesus. There is an initial burst of laughter and then an immediate nervous silence as students try to reason out the meaning of their discomfort. The Madonna and child statue arrived as part of the conscious renovation of the chapel in 1969 to reflect the local San Francisco Chinatown Catholic community. Along with this imported, Chinese-manufactured image, the chapel has a rosewood altar and sanctuary chair reportedly from a Buddhist temple and displays large banners with Chinese text draped on either side of the altar.15 What is most striking in this Madonna and child image is the

Figure 1. Madonna and Child at St. Mary’s Chapel, St. Mary’s Chinese Mission, San Francisco. Photoprint from the “Sacred places of San Francisco” project, BANC PIC 1991.008:78— PIC. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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infant Jesus’s peach-shaped forelock tonsured in the symbology of Chinese royalty, filial piety, and associated with the baby Buddha in East Asia.16 How to interpret this image as a decidedly Christian one becomes the pedagogical question. Of course, the St. Mary’s Madonna and child is an expression of the long history of Christian “inculturation,” that is, the introduction of Christianity into a new culture through skillful and measured appropriation of the target culture’s forms, themes, and ideas. But other possibilities for interpreting Mary and Jesus here bear on the issue of Asian American Christianity’s interactions with Asian cultures and traditions. At the institutional level, this Chinese Mary and Jesus warrant the inculturation interpretation as part of a missiological strategy to bring people into a location where the familiarity of Asian decor and sensibility work toward the goals of the Church. Another possibility is that the parishioners themselves are actively crafting a meaningful Christianity less concerned with the institution’s goals and rules and more attuned to their Chinese worldview. Such acts of indigenization teeter on the edge of heterodoxy in that otherwise well-intentioned believers, those at the top fear, could err by “going native.” To remain good and faithful Roman Catholics, are Chinese American Catholics required to see through the veneer of race in the St. Mary’s icon? And if so, are they to replace the Asian faces with more familiar and “normal” images of Mary and the infant Jesus handed down to us and embellished by European symbols of royalty and empire? To what extent can contextualization safely challenge or influence orthodoxy before something or someone is declared non-Christian? Yet another option on the spectrum of negotiations between Christianity and Asian cultures open to us here is syncretism.17 Here we would find that Mary and Jesus have merged with, for example, Kuan Yin and the infant Buddha to create something new; indeed, the syncretism idea here is strengthened by the infant’s tonsure and the presence of Buddhist items in the chapel. Of the three processes described—inculturation, indigenization, and syncretism—the first two have been effectively contained by Christian institutions as contextual; the last, syncretism, has always been viewed as a danger to the integrity of the faith (mostly by Christian apologists) of muddying the tradition. All three possible positions in Christianity’s interaction with non-Christian traditions respond to a theological necessity for comfortable boundaries imposed by orthodoxy, but only two of them are acceptable options.

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Alternatively, theology’s kernel and husk analogy as descriptive of the relationship between Christianity and culture is helpful. Adolf von Harnack, the early twentieth-century liberal Protestant theologian and church historian, likened the “essence of Christianity” to a seed kernel and the husk to ecclesial accretions and the influences of cultures within which Christianity exists. “Either the gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest form,” Harnack argues, “in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity.”18 That is, Harnack did not think that the “real” faith had died along with the first generation of believers, but that, in fact, an essence of Christianity, the something—the kernel—persevered “under differing historical forms”—the husk.19 Seen this way, inculturation and indigenization involve disposable husks, whereas syncretism threatens to change the kernel, the “essence” of Christianity. In my 1996 essay, I presented the question about dual identities (Christian versus Asian) as a horizontal and competitive relationship, whereas it is clear to me now that it is more useful to see them as kernel and husk. Preserving both forms of identity in various proportions—say, thick or thin husks, smaller or larger kernels—according to context seems to me a more productive model. As such, for evangelicals, the extent to which the husk matters depends on the social ecology of particular contexts: the college campus, the immigrant church, or the pan-ethnic or multicultural congregation. Applying the kernel and husk idea more broadly to the question of Asian American Christianity can be germinal for suggesting possibilities for Asian American Christianities beyond the current paradigm of two-party Protestantism, the debates over the primacy of competing religious-ethnic identities, and the predicaments of the second generation. Asian American liberal Christians have already made provocative strides in contextualizing the tradition. Throughout the twenty versions of my introduction to Asian American religions course, I have relied upon Rita Nakashima Brock’s “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward an Asian American Thealogy” to do important heavy lifting by introducing students to constructive theology, the power of theological discourse, and the interreligious use of non-Christian traditions. For example, Brock’s brilliant suggestion that Buddhist teachings on suffering offer transformative insight into Christian suffering argues powerfully for the centrality of compassion as a feature of interdependent human suffering. Her openness to the global

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context of Asian American women’s lives leads her to a broad understanding of Christianity’s “kernel,” even if it means rubbing institutional authority the wrong way. “I search all the places I feel rooted for my connections,” Brock writes: I do not screen my sources for ideological purity, discriminating between Christian or pagan, Western or Eastern. I am not alone in this approach. In our interviews with Asian American women, Naomi Southard and I found that many spoke of their private searches for spiritual resources in Asian religions. They often spoke hesitantly, as if treading on forbidden ground, but they found their inner spiritual resources for strength and integrity.20

If students are intrepid enough to read past her construction, Brock offers them a powerful model for imagining a future Asian American Christianity. In Brock’s example, what is the distinction between kernel and husk? I have also assigned Chung Hyun Kyung’s controversial World Council of Churches Canberra address to force the question. Kyung’s invocation of the spirits of the Amazon rainforest and of earth, air, and water, an appeal to the Daoist life force, and his claim that the Bodhisattva Kuan Yin embodies the Holy Spirit sparked a firestorm of criticism, including the charge of “flagrant syncretism.”21 Other texts I teach that assist in opening up the question of the kernel’s integrity include Michael Yoshii’s meditation on the meaning of his Methodist congregation’s bazaar with origins in the Japanese Doll Festival, Andrew Park’s theology of Tao, and, more recently, Patrick Cheng’s theology of the hybrid Christ where “Kuan Yin can be understood as a manifestation of the Queer Asian Christ, both in terms of her multiple identities [as Asian, as transgender], but also from a Buddhist and Christian interfaith perspective.”22 The appropriation of non-Christian Asian ideas and beliefs has a longer history of development by Asian theologians, of course, and, indeed, work by C. S. Song, Thomas Thangaraj, R. S. Sugirtharajah, Kosuke Koyama, and others overlap with and support Asian American theological innovation. Nevertheless, contextualized Christianity remains constrained, captive to Western modes of logic, rhetoric, tradition and theological orthodoxy. What, for example, does Christianity look like without the influence of Greek philosophy? Without Nicaea or C ­ halcedon? It is encouraging that

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Asian American theologians are exploring the borderlands of contextuality and religious hybridity, although exactly how open-ended and meaningfully reciprocal these forays into non-Christian traditions are remains a question. Among evangelical-leaning Asian American theologians, the attraction to Buddhist and Daoist ideas is also evident, but with less flexibility. For example, Young Lee Hertig’s yinist paradigm borrows a Daoist view of recognizing opposites as a tool to retrieve women’s voices, dismantle patriarchy, and erase margin/center distinctions. Yet Hertig’s deployment of the yin/ yang apparatus evacuates the actual content of Daoism in favor of the mechanism’s utility for fostering “an Asian women’s feminism, called yinist, which is holistic, dynamic, synthesizing, and complementary with yang, the male energy.”23 At every instance in Hertig’s analysis, examples of the mechanics of yin-yang dynamics are measured against biblical example: “The yin and yang paradigm weakens the gridlock of center or margin. Jesus, throughout the gospel, models balance. He pays attention to the marginalized ones, thus giving them voices.”24 Similarly, Amos Yong’s declaration that “Asian American theology cannot be any less than Asian” presumably engages non-Christian ideas and beliefs, yet is undercut by Christian exceptionalism: “Contemporary Asian American evangelical theology must responsibly engage that which is distinctively Asian, prophetically judging what needs to be judged according to the Gospel on the one hand, even while being reconciled to all things good as made possible by the redemptive power of the Gospel on the other.” More pointedly, Yong claims, the prophetic-redemptive stance I am recommending assumes that the glory and honour of Asia will also be brought into the eschatological kingdom (Rev. 21:26). Might not the Asian American return to, retrieval from, and reappropriation of elements from the wellsprings of Asia not only contribute toward this redemptive vision, but also serve as a springboard for the church to speak prophetically to the Asian world? 25

From a Roman Catholic perspective, Jonathan Tan describes 1.5 and American-born Asian American theologians as “grappling with the ambiguities that emerge when the blurring of the boundaries between Asians and Asian Americans is giving rise to an increasingly multivalent and complex

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intertwining of social, cultural, and religious identities.” Tan’s proposal for “a common theological method for constructing Asian American theologies” is a welcome suggestion, but he forecloses any real engagement with Asian traditions: “the internal coherence of any Asian American theology to the Gospel is necessary for it to be specifically Christian and not one of the many syncretistic fads that come and go in a postmodern world.”26 The recent festschrift for Fumitaka Matsuoka clearly reveals this “complex intertwining” with Asia that continues to bedevil Asian American Christianity. The essays in that collection are in fact framed front and back by the problem of what to do with “Asia.” Eleazar Fernandez’s introduction to the horizons of Asian American theology shifts the problem of Asia away from an essentialized geography in favor of “Asia as a constructed geopolitical discourse.” This flexible and dynamic view of Asia and Asians allows for “the new generation of Asian North American theologians [to] become more daring in transgressing constructed boundaries of various sorts, whether geographic, racial/ethnic, nation-state, or fields of discipline.” At the end of the collection, David Kyuman Kim’s meditation on the nostalgic longing by Asian Americans for an Asian home locates “Asia” as the fulcrum around which Asian Americans pivot between the weight of “the demand to assimilate to cosmopolitan ideals of cultural pluralism” and “the pull for Asian Americans to dissimulate their desires for ‘Asia.’ ”27 The husk, it would appear, is not so easily removed and discarded. Harnack’s analogy held that the kernel preserved Christianity’s essence, and Asian American theologians continue to work through and even challenge this view. It is also possible to turn Harnack’s analogy inside-out and view the kernel as Asian American identity, with Christianity in all of its represented forms as the husk.28 Such a proposition, however, requires avoiding the essentializing of Asian identities, but lets us track the transformation of religious traditions alongside the histories and experiences of rich and diverse Asian American communities. Harnack’s seed was no doubt wheat; for Asian Americans it is rice. Chinese American author Jade Snow Wong’s assertion over half a century ago that rice “is what we are, or we are what it is,” and more recently chef Roy Choi’s declaration “that rice is how you live; it’s everything you are,” articulate simple but powerful affirmations of how the material sustenance of everyday Asian American life cannot be abstracted from who we imagine and believe we are.29

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Christianity’s Captivity My thinking about Asian American Christianity has long been influenced by Joseph Kitagawa’s The Christian Tradition. What I appreciate about Kitagawa is that he writes as a Christian minister and a historian of religion, connecting theology to history in a discerning view of Europe’s long meddling in Christianity; note, for example, his folksy but pointed comment that “I hope the Christian tradition will realize that the European captivity has made Christianity hermeneutically illiterate.”30 Kitagawa’s assessment of the ill-fitting imposition of Western modes of Christianity in Japan is, mutatis mutandis, helpful for thinking about Asian American Christianity. For example, one of Kitagawa’s central arguments for why Christianity remains captive is the error of Western Christianity’s “provincial autobiographical understanding of the inner meaning of the church—as formulated in the nonbiblical dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“no salvation outside the church”).31 As the church turned this exclusionary soteriology outward into ecclesial and then statesponsored policy, it forestalled the options for Christianity’s engagement with other religious traditions. What might the consequences for Christianity have been without this powerful condemnation against other traditions and its impact on spreading Christianity into new contexts? Kitagawa also laments Western Christianity’s blindness to Paul’s understanding that Christian faith was the best option among “gods many and lords many” in I Corinthians 8:5–6: “For though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth (as there be gods many, and lords many). But to us there is but one God.” Kitagawa’s history of religious training compelled him to understand Paul as revealing both the “inner” way Christians understand their monotheism, and the “outside” view of Christianity as a monolatry, recognizing the existence of other gods but choosing to follow only one. Here, the validity of Christian faith does not have to run counter to the reasonableness that Christianity holds no exclusive claim over the mandates of Heaven. Specifically, Paul’s admission of other gods is not necessarily contradicted by the claim “But to us there is but one God.” This coincidentia oppositorum (unity in opposites) is for Kitagawa the “two-sidedness” of religion. “Lamentably,” Kitagawa writes, “such a formula had been forgotten by European Christianity for—being the dominant, only official religion for so long—it fell into the common error of assuming that the inner meaning of Christianity [that is, monotheism, Christianity’s exclusive claim to truth],

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based on its self-authenticating circular logic of finality, is the uncontested self-evident universal truth.”32 I am also encouraged by a second Asian American use of the captivity theme in Soong-Chan Rah’s The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. As if to echo Kitagawa’s point about I Corinthians 8, Rah writes, The phrase “captivity of the church” points to the danger of the church being defined by an influence other than the Scriptures. The church remains the church, but we more accurately reflect the culture around us than the characteristics of the bride of Christ. We are held captive to the culture that surrounds us. To speak of the white captivity of the church is an acknowledgement that white culture has dominated, shaped, and captured Christianity in the United States.33

Rah’s progressive evangelicalism rails against the accretions of individualism, consumerism, materialism, racism, trendy church growth formulas, and, in general, white Western cultural imperialism. Writing with the hope of a “dawning of the next evangelicalism,” Rah is convinced “the change that must come may find its inspiration from nonwhite expressions of Christianity in the United States.” Whereas Kitagawa’s take on Christianity’s captivity is a restrained historical argument, The Next Evangelicalism is a no-holds-barred preacher’s indictment of a prophetic tradition’s transformation into a complacent, self-absorbed cultural imperialism. Rah observes that the rapidly changing demographics in the United States will determine what the future of American Christianity will look like and contain. “Can the church provide a countercultural model of embracing the alien and the stranger among us?” he asks.34 His question is rhetorical, of course, alluding to Ephesians 2:19—“Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.” Rah’s allusion to the “alien/stranger and foreigner” in the Kingdom of God surely resonates with Asian American readers.35

Remembering Zion: The Next Asian American Christianity It is time for Asian American Christianity to reclaim its Asian origins. The cumulative effort to transcend Christianity’s Western captivity by Asian

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American scholars, theologians, writers, and communities has brought us to this threshold. It is time for Asian American Christianity to free itself by refusing to yield to the forces that have rendered Asian Americans a minority and the traditions that continue to divide Christians between camps decided in the Atlantic world and received wholesale and continued by Asian Americans over the generations. What is true of Latin@ Christians is also true for Asian American Christians: across denominations they have more in common with each other than they do with white counterparts within their particular church traditions. We have inherited these divisions but also a common history of race discrimination, caste stratification, glass ceilings, stereotyping, and immigration concerns argues against division by someone else’s historical narratives and crisis events.36 The weight of Asian American history and religious diversity inclines us toward Jenny Daggers’s call for the “relocation of the long Western Christian tradition within world Christianity, amid the religious diversity of the postcolonial world.”37 It is no coincidence that Jaggers builds her argument on the writing of Asian and Asian American feminist theologians who continue to be at the forefront of regenerating Christianity. We thus see her ambitious renovation in the ways that Asian Americans can be both Buddhist and Christian, or Christian and Asian American. But, as I suggest, these identities do not need to be insular, bounded, and horizontally competitive, but like the kernel and husk, they are wrapped within one another and open to transformation. As Asian American theologians continue to incorporate the ideas, nuances, and dynamics of other Asian traditions, their work will confirm what many of our communities already know about the permeability and fiction of religious boundaries.38 Such multiple, hybrid, syncretic, overlapping “amphibolous” forms of religiosity, as Fumitaka Matsuoka observes, occurs even though “traditional ‘Christian’ expressions of faith still prevail among many Asian Americans.” Nevertheless, the interpenetration of divergent religious traditions and practices and the improvisation of rituals in Asian American communities are increasingly common phenomena . . . these new and amphibolous practices of faith stem from the value orientation of harmony and an affirmation of the web of life rather than a boundary-making and an oppositional dynamic of relationship that is prevalent in American culture and society.39

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In his musing over the future of Christianity, Moffett refers to the Christian church in the West as “faltering,” as the “old Christendom.” Moffett and other contemporary scholars of the tradition argue that the future of Christianity cannot be the pouring of “new wine into old wineskins,” but will instead take on the forms produced by a globalized humanity.40 The resources for amphibolous Asian American Christianity are extensive and as complex as the communities that make up Asian America. Asian American Christianity would also benefit from planting the kernel of faith far from the colonizing West, as when in AD 781, a Christian monk in China summed up the teachings of the “Luminous Religion” in Buddhist and Daoist nuance, familiar to anyone there open to the good news: True Lord, without beginning Profound, firm and unchanging He created the universe and transformed it. He made the earth to come forth and established the heavens. The detached Person entered into the cycle of generations, To save all without exception. The sun rose and the darkness disappeared. All bear witness to the True Mystery.41

Notes This chapter originally appeared as Rudy V. Busto, “The Gospel According to Rice: The Next Asian American Christianity,” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 59–79. It is reprinted here with permission. It was not possible to include the image of Polly Bemis referenced in the essay, but please refer to the Amerasia Journal article that contains the image. Epigraph. Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume I: Beginnings to 1500 (New York: Orbis, 1998), xiii; Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter (New York: Harper & Bros, 1950), 60. 1.  Bemis’s life was popularized in Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s Thousand Pieces of Gold (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004). Ruthanne Lum McCunn, emails with the author, September 30, 2010, and March 28, 2013. See Priscilla Wegars, “Researching Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer,” Pacific Northwest Library Association (PNLA) Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2004): 4–20; and Ruthanne Lum McCunn, “­Reclaiming

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Polly Bemis: China’s Daughter, Idaho’s Legendary Pioneer,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24, no. 1 (2003): 76–100. 2.  Priscilla Wegars, email with the author, March 21, 2013; Seth Perry, online exchange with the author, March 24, 2013. 3.  McCunn, “Researching Polly Bemis,” 93. 4.  Martin Marty, Righteous Empire (New York: Dial, 1970). 5.  William H. Swatos Jr., “The Politics of Gender and the ‘Two-Party’ Thesis in American Protestantism,” Social Compass 44, no. 1 (1997): 23. 6.  Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Timothy Tseng, “Asian American Religions,” in Asian American Christianity Reader, ed. Viji Nakka-­ Cammauf and Timothy Tseng (Castro Valley, CA: Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity, 2009), 93. 7.  Rudy V. Busto, “The Gospel According to the Model Minority?: Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students,” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 133–147; Sunny Hyon, “The Gospel According to Asian Americans: Perspectives on Religion, Culture and Asian American Community,” Symphony of Voices: An Asian/Pacific American Women’s Journal 2 (1992): 38–44; and David Kyuman Kim, “Becoming Korean Americans, Faith and Identity—Observations on an Emerging Culture” (MA thesis, Harvard Divinity School, 1993). Both Hyon and Kim made important statements on Asian American evangelicalism but were not widely available. 8.  Gal 3:28, Rom 3:22, I Cor 12:13. 9.  Busto, “The Gospel,”143. 10.  Mark Mullins, “Life-Cycle of Ethnic Churches in Sociological Perspective,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14, no. 4 (1987): 321–334. 11.  See the collections by R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner, Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998); and Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Washington, DC: Altamira, 2000). 12.  Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, eds., Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 13.  Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” July 19, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths​ -overview. 14.  Note, for example, the insertion of “prayer support” as a quantifiable measure of generational difference in Sharon Kim’s A Faith of Our Own: Second-­Generation

Busto 163 Spirituality in Korean American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 36. 15.  Ruth Hendricks Willard, Carol Green Wilson, Roy Flamm, Joseph Armstrong Baird Jr., and San Francisco Alumnae Panhellenic, Sacred Places of San Francisco (Novato: Presidio Press, 1985), 174–176. The statue is currently in the sacristy of Old St. Mary’s Cathedral on Grant and California. Jeffrey Kwong, principal, St. Mary’s School, email with the author, July 29, 2013. 16.  Global Times (Beijing), “Ask Auntie Wang,” May 17, 2012. The infant Buddha is traditionally depicted following the legend that immediately on his birth he took seven steps and pointed upward, declaring himself the Venerable One. The forelock tonsure as a symbol of royalty is a later cultural addition. 17.  The literature on syncretism is vast. The gap between the theoretical product of syncretism as a tertium quid, a new end product, versus the variety of possibilities for the comingling of traditions including dissimulation, mosaic, and hybridity is significant. 18.  Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (Das Wesens des Christentums), Reprint, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1986), 13–15. Emphasis added. 19.  As a liberal, Harnack was not arguing for the contemporaneity of the earliest Christians with modern-day believers. Rather, as a historian he was interested in how various forms of Christianity could in fact reveal the essence of the Gospel in the life of the individual. 20.  Rita Nakashima Brock, “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward an Asian American Thealogy,” in Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper, 1989), 240–241. The essay she mentions coauthored with Naomi Southard is “The Other Half of the Basket: Asian American Women and the Search for a Theological Home,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3, no. 2 (1987): 135–149. 21.  For a description of Kyung’s address and its reception, see Alan Neely, “Come Holy Spirit(s),” Journal for Case Teaching 6 (1994), http://caseteaching.files.wordpress​ .com/2011/06/table-of-contents3.doc. 22.  Michael Yoshii, “The Buena Vista Church Bazaar: A Story within a Story,” in People on the Way: Asian North Americans Discovering Christ, Culture and Community, ed. David Ng, (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1996), 43–61; Andrew Sung Park, “A Theology of Tao (Way): Han, Sin, and Evil,” in Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, ed. Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez (Atlanta, GA: Chalice, 2003), 41–54; and Patrick S. Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ (New York: Church Publishing, 2012), 136. 23.  Young Lee Hertig, “The Asian American Alternative to Feminism: A Yinist Paradigm,” Missiology 26, no. 1 (1998): 15.

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24.  Hertig, “Asian American Alternative to Feminism,” 17. 25.  Quoted in Jonathan Y. Tan, Introducing Asian American Theologies (Mary­ knoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), 159; and “Whither Asian American Theology? What Asian, Which American, Whose Evangelion?” Evangelical Theological Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 34–35. 26.  Jonathan Y. Tan, “Asian American Theologies,” in Global Dictionary of Theology, ed. William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Karkkainen (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008), 74; Introducing Asian American Theologies, 165–166, 175. 27.  Eleazar S. Fernandez, “Orchestrating New Theological Overtures: Heterogeneity, Dissonance, and Fluidity vis-à-vis Imperial Monophony,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–30; and David Kyuman Kim, “Worlds Made a Part,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–27, http://​ raceandreligion.com/JRER/Volume_3_(2012).html. 28.  I am deeply indebted to Steven B. Hu for this suggestion, and to Jane Iwamura for her insight on the idea (personal communication, November 23, 2013). I’m reminded of Peter Cha’s Growing Healthy Asian American Churches [InterVarsity, 2006] where . . . he speaks of the second (and third) generations returning to Asian churches after the ‘silent exodus’ in the ’80s. Cha notes the reason for the return is that many second gen[erationers] want to reconnect with their Asian heritage (and also for their children), and many are seeking reconciliation with their elders because of the generational and cultural conflicts that drove them out in the first place. I’ve also observed this in my own ministerial context where second and third gen[eration] Chinese Americans are more willing to stay in an immigrant church because they seek to be rooted in the heritage. Perhaps they realize at the core (kernel) they are more Asian than they think they are and that the church (‘ecclessial accretions’) is just a viable context where this type of socialization occurs. (online communication, September 17, 2013) 29.  Roy Choi, interview with Renee Montagne, Morning Edition, National Public Radio, November 5, 2013. In his book L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food (New York: HarperCollins, 2103), Choi describes the “beauties and spirituality” of rice preparation, especially in the act of washing the grains as an act of self-cleansing (325–326). See also Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 30.  Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, The Christian Tradition: Beyond Its European Captivity (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity, 1992): 247. 31.  Ibid., 67.

Busto 165 32.  Ibid., 199. 33.  Soong-Chan Rah, The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 21–22. 34. Rah, The Next Evangelicalism, 22, 191. 35.  See Gale Yee’s adroit use of the “perpetual foreigner” theme in her reading of the book of Ruth in “ ‘She Stood in Tears amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth, the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2007), 45–65. 36.  For example, note David K. Yoo on Japanese American Buddhists and Christians sharing a common situation of racialized religion in “A Religious History of Japanese Americans in California,” in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, ed. Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2002), 121–139. 37.  Jenny Daggers, Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. 38.  See Todd LeRoy Perreira, “Sasana Sakon and the New Asian American: Intermarriage and Identity at a Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley,” in Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries, ed. Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 313– 337; Thomas Douglas, “The Cross and the Lotus: Changing Religious Practices Among Cambodian Immigrants in Seattle,” in Revealing the Sacred in Asian & Pacific America, ed. Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard (New York: Routledge, 2003), 159–176; Sharon Gettys Stanley, “Theology from Bamboo, Border and Bricks,” in Asian American Christianity Reader, ed. Viji Nakka-Cammauf and Timothy Tseng (Castro Valley, CA: Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity, 2009), 291–304; Peter C. Phan, Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003); and Aihwa Ong, Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 39.  Fumitaka Matsuoka, Learning to Speak a New Tongue: Imagining a Way That Holds People Together—An Asian American Conversation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 113. 40.  Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume II: 1500 to 1900 (New York: Orbis, 2005), 648; and Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford, 2002). 41.  The text is from the Xi’an Stele. Yves Raguin, S.J., “Jesus-Messiah of Xi’an,” trans. Betty Ann Maheu, MM, Le Christ chinois: héritages et espérance (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer; [Montréal]: Bellarmin, 1998). Reproduced in Tripod 22, no. 124 (2002), www.hsstudyc.org.hk/en/tripod_en/en_tripod_124_05.html.

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Bibliography Brock, Rita Nakashima. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs: Toward an Asian American Thealogy.” In Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 240–241. San Francisco: Harper, 1989. Busto, Rudy V. “The Gospel According to Rice: The Next Asian American Christianity.” Amerasia Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): 59–79. ———. “The Gospel According to the Model Minority?: Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students.” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 133–147. Chen, Carolyn, and Russell Jeung, eds. Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Cheng, Patrick S. From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ. New York: Church Publishing, 2012. Daggers, Jenny. Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity. New York: Routledge, 2013. Douglas, Thomas. “The Cross and the Lotus: Changing Religious Practices among Cambodian Immigrants in Seattle.” In Revealing the Sacred in Asian & Pacific America, edited by Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard, 159–176. New York: Routledge, 2003. Ebaugh, Helen Rose, and Janet Saltzman Chafetz. Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations. Washington, DC: Altamira, 2000. Fernandez, Eleazar S. “Orchestrating New Theological Overtures: Heterogeneity, Dissonance, and Fluidity vis-à-vis Imperial Monophony.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–30. Hertig, Young Lee. “The Asian American Alternative to Feminism: A Yinist Paradigm.” Missiology 26, no. 1 (1998): 15–22. Hyon, Sunny. “The Gospel According to Asian Americans: Perspectives on Religion, Culture and Asian American Community.” Symphony of Voices: An Asian/ Pacific American Women’s Journal 2 (1992): 38–44. Jenkins, Philip. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford, 2002. Jeung, Russell. Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kim, David Kyuman. “Becoming Korean Americans, Faith and Identity—Observations on an Emerging Culture.” MA thesis, Harvard Divinity School, 1993.

Busto 167 ———. “Worlds Made a Part.” Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–27. Kim, Sharon. A Faith of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Kitagawa, Joseph Mitsuo. The Christian Tradition: Beyond Its European Captivity. Philadelphia, PA: Trinity, 1992. Marty, Martin. Righteous Empire. New York: Dial, 1970. Matsuoka, Fumitaka. Learning to Speak a New Tongue: Imagining a Way that Holds People Together—An Asian American Conversation. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011. McCunn, Ruthanne Lum. “Reclaiming Polly Bemis: China’s Daughter, Idaho’s Legendary Pioneer.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24, no. 1 (2003): 76–100. ———. Thousand Pieces of Gold. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004. Moffett, Samuel Hugh. A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume I: Beginnings to 1500. New York: Orbis, 1998. ———. A History of Christianity in Asia, Volume II: 1500 to 1900. New York: Orbis, 2005. Mullins, Mark. “Life-Cycle of Ethnic Churches in Sociological Perspective.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14, no. 4 (1987): 321–334. Neely, Alan. “Come Holy Spirit(s).” Journal for Case Teaching 6 (1994). Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Ong, Aihwa. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Park, Andrew Sung. “A Theology of Tao (Way): Han, Sin, and Evil.” In Realizing the America of Our Hearts: Theological Voices of Asian Americans, edited by Fumitaka Matsuoka and Eleazar S. Fernandez, 41–54. Atlanta, GA: Chalice, 2003. Perreira, Todd LeRoy. “Sasana Sakon and the New Asian American: Intermarriage and Identity at a Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley.” In Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries, edited by Tony Carnes and Fenggang Yang, 313–337. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Pew Research Center. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” July 19, 2012, http://​ www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths​ -overview. Phan, Peter C. Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003.

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Rah, Soong-Chan. The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009. Raguin, Yves, S.J. “Jesus-Messiah of Xi’an.” Translated by Betty Ann Maheu, MM. Le Christ chinois: héritages et espérance. Paris / Montreal: Desclée de Brouwer / Bellarmin, 1998. Southard, Naomi. “The Other Half of the Basket: Asian American Women and the Search for a Theological Home.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3, no. 2 (1987): 135–149. Stanley, Sharon Gettys. “Theology from Bamboo, Border and Bricks.” In Asian American Christianity Reader, edited by Viji Nakka-Cammauf and Timothy Tseng, 291–304. Castro Valley, CA: Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC), 2009. Swatos, William H., Jr. “The Politics of Gender and the ‘Two-Party’ Thesis in American Protestantism.” Social Compass 44, no. 1 (1997): 23–35. Tan, Jonathan Y. “Asian American Theologies.” In Global Dictionary of Theology, edited by William A. Dyrness and Veli-Matti Karkkainen, 70–74. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008. ———. Introducing Asian American Theologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008. ———. “Whither Asian American Theology? What Asian, Which American, Whose Evangelion?” Evangelical Theological Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 34–35. Tseng, Timothy. “Asian American Religions.” In Asian American Christianity Reader, edited by Viji Nakka-Cammauf and Timothy Tseng, 83–95. Castro Valley, CA: Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC), 2009. von Harnack, Adolf. What Is Christianity? First published as Das Wesens des Christentums in 1900. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1986. Warner, R. Stephen, and Judith G. Wittner. Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. Wegars, Priscilla. “Researching Polly Bemis: A Chinese American Pioneer.” Pacific Northwest Library Association (PNLA) Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2004): 4–20. Willard, Ruth Hendricks, Carol Green Wilson, Roy Flamm, Joseph Armstrong Baird Jr., and San Francisco Alumnae Panhellenic. Sacred Places of San Francisco. Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985. Wong, Jade Snow. Fifth Chinese Daughter. New York: Harper & Bros, 1950. Yee, Gale. “ ‘She Stood in Tears amid the Alien Corn’: Ruth, the Perpetual Foreigner and Model Minority.” In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 45–65. Louisville, KY: Westminster/ John Knox, 2007.

Busto 169 Yoo, David K. “A Religious History of Japanese Americans in California.” In Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, edited by Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim, 121–139. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2002. Yoshii, Michael. “The Buena Vista Church Bazaar: A Story within a Story.” In People on the Way: Asian North Americans Discovering Christ, Culture and Community, edited by David Ng, 43–61. Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1996.

7 Postscript (Re)Thinking and (Re)Creating Asian American Christianities through a Gospel According to (Fried) Rice? Tat-siong Benny Liew

Rudy Busto emphasizes in the beginning of his essay in this volume that he always prepares his students for their exploration of Asian American Christianities by showing how “the study of religion is not innocent” so that his students can approach the topic with suspicion. To further sharpen our consideration of Asian American Christianities, allow me to play the role of a suspicious reader. Busto’s chapter reads to me as an attempt to rebalance some of the dynamics that partly resulted from his influential article from two decades ago.1 As he points out, although his 1996 article makes a theological as well as a functional argument, the latter seems to have become the sole focus of subsequent scholarly conversations. Accordingly, we see Busto not only urging for a reassessment of “the priority accorded social scientific views of religions in Asian American” but also using part of his chapter to discuss sociological studies and another part to discuss theological work on Asian American Christianities. Similarly, given how his previous article addresses only “evangelical college students,” Busto speaks against the “two-party Protestant paradigm” (of “evangelicals” and “liberals”) in both the beginning and the end of his chapter. A reader may question whether Busto’s discussion relies on and hence ends up reinforcing the very division that he decries (despite, 170

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or especially with, his inclusion of several “evangelical-leaning” scholars in his discussion of Asian American theologies), or whether he is again using this two-party assumption as a “useful heuristic . . . to leapfrog over . . . complexities . . . to get to” what he wants to focus on (as he does “in the college lecture hall”). I prefer to use this occasion to query a few seemingly unexamined assumptions.

Limits of a Rice and Husk Analogy? Using rice as a metaphor to think about Christianity in Asia and in Asian America is not new, though Busto does not give us this trail or delineate this tradition, despite his citing many Asian and Asian American theologians. Because rice is the staple diet in many Asian countries, several theologians have used rice to symbolize sustenance and life and thus in association with God in Japan,2 with heaven in Korea,3 and with the gospel in Taiwan.4 The use of rice is equally prevalent in the work of Asian American feminist theologians. Rice is turned by a group of Korean American women into a verb, “ricing,” to denote the offering of hospitality.5 It also becomes a “no-­ explanation-needed” and “taken-as-obvious” shorthand for Chinese Canadian Christianity in an exploration of solidarity with Aboriginal women.6 For these theologians, rice often represents an understanding of Christianity that has been nurtured and developed within Asian or Asian American contexts and traditions and hence a way to resist, challenge, or subvert the Christian triumphalism of the West. Busto also uses rice to launch his discussion about the balance between Christianity and culture in Asian American theologies through Adolf von Harnack’s kernel and husk analogy. Emphasizing that kernel and husk are “wrapped within one another” and that both can not only change in size but also be interchangeable as representing Christianity or culture, Busto seems to hope that his resurrection of Harnack’s century-old analogy may move Asian American Christianities beyond the race or religion struggle, the evangelical versus liberal divide, as well as the first from second generational gap. I am not clear how this tactic is free of the dialectic assumptions in talks of inculturation, indigenization, and syncretism. After all, the reference to kernel and husk assumes two entities that are in the final analysis separable; further, kernel is often read as the edible and nourishing content and husk the disposable exterior or container. The reference remains stuck, in other

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words, in what Busto refers to as the two-party paradigm, even when the parties involved now are Christianity and other religious or cultural traditions, especially Asian ones. To quote Busto quoting Swatos, this paradigm assumes or “believes that there are two parties and act on that basis.”7 Just as Busto wonders whether the focus on the second generation actually reinforces the idea of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, I wonder whether his duplication of the paradigm does not end up replicating Moffett’s move in giving Christianity an Asian origin only to detail its demise in the fifteenth century and then its dependence on Western Christianity since the sixteenth and thus normalize Christianity as Western. More than that, I question whether Busto’s discussion of bringing together Asian traditions and Christianity is not, in effect, committing the same mistake of his students, who failed to remember Moffett’s point about Christianity’s Asian origin by the time they took the final examination. After all, given Moffett’s point about Christianity’s origin in Asia, is it not likely that Asian traditions and Christianity were always already mixed at the beginning? What if Christianity was a movement with Asian traditions from the start? Unless you are a latter-day Marcionite, Christianity’s roots in Judaism should not be in dispute; most scholars are also in agreement that Judaism’s ideas about resurrection, heaven, and hell likely came from Persian Zoroastrianism given Persia’s colonization of Israel from the sixth through the fourth century BCE.8 Persia is after all more or less today’s Iran, and so is part of West Asia, even if the word “west”—unlike “east,” “south,” or “­southeast”—is rarely seen together with the word “Asia.” Moreover, virtually every introductory textbook to the New Testament mentions Hellenization and the influence of the Greek empire as an important background to the production of these early Christian writings. Let us not forget also that Alexander the Great’s empire reached as far as India. Some scholars have also argued that the New Testament contains many ideas that sound Buddhist.9 If Asian traditions, including religious ones, have been inside Christian traditions from their beginnings, then Busto’s using Fumitaka Matsuoka’s description of hybrid and overlapping “amphibolous” practices of the Christian faith as something “new” risks reducing the meaning of “reorienting Christianity” to something like a second-generation movement that we do now, as opposed to something that has always already been happening and that we must continue to do.

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Biblical Captivity of Both Right and Left? Dialectics that assume the presence of two entities often also involve some essentialist understanding of them. The two theologians Busto lifted up as having helpfully argued for freeing Christianity from Western captivity— Joseph Kitagawa and Soong-Chan Rah—both define culture through a comparison with the Bible: what is “nonbiblical” for Kitagawa and what is “other than scripture” by Rah. These words, written in the context of Christianity’s captivity by Europe or by the West, may well be read as affirming the Bible’s and hence Christianity’s origin in Asia, especially if readers do not assume that the Bible came about in a cultural vacuum. This is, however, not Kitagawa’s or Rah’s intention or emphasis. Their move to define culture as what is not “biblical” or not “scriptural” in an attempt to think and talk about Christianity in Japan (Kitagawa) or in the twenty-first century (Rah) is, using Busto’s use of Harnack’s idea by basically taking the Bible to be Christianity’s kernel. Busto is aware of this essentialist implication in Harnack’s kernel. He even warns against the danger of essentializing racial identities when he suggests that racial and religious identity can take turns being kernel and husk in his gospel of the rice, and his warning appears right before his discussion of Kitagawa and Rah. Also before his reference to Kitagawa and Rah, Busto openly asks whether Christianity can be “reoriented” away from “ ‘Western’ modes of logic, rhetoric, and theological orthodoxy . . . [or] without the influence of Greek philosophy . . . [w]ithout Nicaea or Chalcedon.” He makes no mention, however, of how Kitagawa and Rah remain under biblical captivity, as he does in critiquing Young Lee Hertig’s consistent use of biblical examples to measure her construction of an Asian American feminist theology. Perhaps Busto is too captivated by Kitagawa’s and Rah’s release-from-captivity language to notice or to discuss the essentialization of the Bible as Christianity’s kernel in them. He also does not cite one prominent Asian American theologian, Peter Phan, who does address this issue. Like Busto, Phan wonders how to bring Christianity and Asian cultural contexts and traditions together, despite his claim in the same book that Christianity has its origin in Asia. Phan makes explicit two things that Busto does not. First, rather than giving and explaining ideologically loaded terms that have been used to characterize attempts to bring together culture and Christianity (such as “inculturation,” “indigenization,” and “syncretism”), Phan discusses several hermeneutical models to do

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so by way of a Latin American liberation theologian, Clodovis Boff, although Boff uses different terms as he tries to figure out this equation between culture and Christianity. Boff rejects the “gospel/politics model” that normalizes and applies “the gospel” automatically and nondialectically to a contemporary context, and the “correspondence of terms model” that assumes a perfect equivalence between a biblical writer’s context and a reader’s current context. Instead, Boff advocates for a “correspondence of relationship model” that emphasizes equally the importance of context for both the biblical writers and contemporary readers, a model that, in Phan’s words, supposedly allows “both creative freedom in biblical interpretation . . . and basic continuity with the meaning of the Bible.” Second (and more important), Phan is explicit that Christianity is represented or measured by the Bible for many people, including leftist liberation theologians. At this point, Phan astutely points out that though Boff does not read the Bible with a hermeneutics of suspicion, those of Asian heritage, given Asia’s multireligious context, may not assume the Bible as normative.10 Whether it comes from a so-called evangelical or liberal, assuming the Bible as Christianity’s kernel is problematic on many fronts, even if one sees the Bible as having its origin in Asia. As biblical scholar Timothy Beal points out, no pristine, singular, or original Bible exists or has ever existed.11 The story of the Bible is one of messy beginnings; oral traditions and transmissions were handed down before anything about Jesus was written, and then writings about Jesus varied and manuscripts varied for each writing. The story of the Bible is also for Beal one of “Word without end,” because translations by language specialists, new packaging and formatting by publishers, and interpretations by readers are always creating and giving us a different Bible. Consider, for example, the Masoretic text’s vocalization of the Hebrew, Stephen Langton’s and Stephanus’s addition of chapter and verse divisions, or the New Revised Standard Version’s use of punctuation in its English translation; these interpretive acts actually reformat and transform biblical texts. The Bible has continually been interpreted, rewritten, and remade, because the line between interpreting and composing scriptures is a fine one. As Timothy Beal writes, “There is no ‘The Bible,’ only ‘the Bibles’.”12 Sadly, too many people, including theologians and biblical scholars from so-called evangelical and liberal camps, often assume and reinforce the idea of a “finished” Bible as the privileged “original” that can become the core norm of Christianity. Even if a single and fixed Bible existed, its diversity of contents and theologies

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have often led to questions about a kernel within the biblical canon. As the nineteenth-century debates over slavery and its abolition make clear, however, the location and meaning of that kernel differs for different readers.13

A Different Emphasis through a Different Source? Another manifestation of essentializing Christianity is the assumption of an orthodoxy (however defined), which has a close counterpart in racial or cultural identity discourse—namely, authenticity. Within Asian American studies, one of the most well-known debates over authenticity is the one that involves Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston.14 In response to Chin’s accusation that she is “faking” Chinese culture, Kingston wrote a book tellingly titled Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.15 Significant for my purposes here is how Kingston chooses to address this question about cultural or racial authenticity through a text that also implies religious authority or perhaps even orthodoxy. In an episode in Tripmaster Monkey, the protagonist, a Chinlike playwright called Wittman Ah Sing, stays up at night, crosses out every line and throws away every page he has written that evening because he is wrestling with the meaning of a somewhat enigmatic climax of a Chinese classic, Journey to the West: Wittman was working out what this means: After two thousand days of quest, which takes a hundred chapters to tell, and twenty-four acts, seven days to perform, Monkey and his friends, Tripitaka on the white horse, Piggy and Mr. Sandman, arrive in the West. The Indians give them scrolls, which they load on the white horse. Partway home, Monkey, a suspicious fellow, unrolls the scrolls, and finds that they are blank scrolls. “What’s this?? We’ve been cheated. Those pig-catchers gave us nothing. Let’s demand an exchange.” So, he and his companions go back, and they get words, including the Heart Sutra. But the empty scrolls had been the right one all along. Back at his table, Wittman put his head down and groaned.16

The protagonists in Journey to the West went to India to secure Buddhist scriptures to take back to China for the enlightenment of Chinese people.17 Similarly, Wittman tasks himself with the mission to bring China’s cultural traditions—a kind of sacred texts, if you will—to the United States. He, being

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generations removed from China, is not sure what exactly count as Chinese cultural traditions, though he knows they exist. Kingston expresses a similar sentiment, or sense of puzzlement, regarding Chinese culture in Woman Warrior, when she asks in a much-cited paragraph, Chinese Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?18

In Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston suggests that Chinese cultural traditions, like the religious or scriptural traditions of Buddhism in Journey to the West, is a dynamic, ever-changing process that has no clear origin and no clear end. To begin with, Journey is only one of the four so-called Chinese classical or famous works, which include also Water Margin, The Three Kingdoms, and Dream of the Red Chamber. These four works are, however, only “classical” representatives of fictional writings in premodern China, as they were all written in the fourteenth to sixteenth century. Phan, for example, mentions the “Five Classics and Four Books” as having “canonical status” in Chinese culture as he attempts to provide “the contours” of or some “unsystematic reflections” on a Vietnamese American theology.19 These refer, of course, to the authoritative books of Confucianism that were composed and collected in ancient China. Even if one dismisses this plurality of texts and determines somewhat arbitrarily that Journey will be the kernel of Chinese culture, it is important to bear in mind that this sixteenth-century book is supposedly also an inventive retelling of the story about Xuanzang’s (or Hsuan-tsang’s) pilgrimage to India during the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century, which is itself retold by a seventh-century text compiled by Xuanzang’s disciple Bianji, called Great Tang Records on the Western Regions.20 Cultural and religious traditions, as the story of Journey shows, are processes of rewriting what has been written and writing what has not yet been written. That is why the scripture seekers were given empty scrolls and why “the empty scrolls had been the right one all along.”21 Neither is fixed or static, but instead characterized by—­borrowing the well-known phrase Lisa Lowe uses to describe (Asian American) culture—“heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity.”22 That is

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why Kingston ends Tripmaster Monkey with Wittman improvising on a new script and performing a play in the community. This play is a parody or an improv(ed) version of the other classics of China’s premodern period I have mentioned: Water Margin and The Three Kingdoms. In contrast to these texts of war and warfare, Wittman’s new script or postscript is peaceful and it “had lots of holes for ad lib and actors’ gifts.”23 Although Tripmaster Monkey comes to an end, Kingston is clear that the (re)‌construction of tradition, whether cultural or religious, will not because “one big bang-up show has to be followed up with a second show, a third show.”24 In fact, the last two pages of Tripmaster describe how Wittman’s audience interprets—or misinterprets?—his monologue after his masterpiece play as his wedding announcement.25 Kingston continued, therefore, Wittman’s story in a subsequent book, The Fifth Book of Peace.26 Culture or religion—like text or as text, and even one that has been deemed classical, canonical, or biblical—“is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice and recreate it.”27

Conclusion Just as Asian and Asian American theologians who recycled and redefined the term “rice Christians” from a reproach of “nominal Christians” who converted for material benefits into a particular understanding of Christianity that emphasizes rather than downplays the importance of material sustenance of Asian and Asian American lives,28 Asians in many countries have recooked leftover steamed rice in a wok with other (often also leftover) ingredients and created numerous varieties of fried rice dishes that have now become first-order choices in many restaurants. If we do want to use rice as metaphor, perhaps we should not think of Asian American Christianities in terms of rice through Harnack’s “kernel and husk” idea with its essentialist and dialectical assumptions; perhaps it is more helpful to think of it in terms of fried rice through Hong Kingston’s textual improvisations.

Notes 1.  Rudy V. Busto, “The Gospel According to the Model Minority? Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students,” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 133–147.

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2.  Masao Takenaka, God Is Rice: Asian Culture and Christian Faith (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 1986), 8–26. 3.  This reference to heaven as rice is often attributed to a poem by Kim Ji Ha or Kim Chi Ha. See a translation of Kim’s poem in Meehyun Chung, “Water and Rice: A Korean Eco-Feminist Theological Perspective,” in Breaking Silence: Theology from Asian Women, ed. Meehyun Chung (Delhi: Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, 2006), 95–96. 4.  C. S. Song, Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asian Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 19–20, 40–42. 5.  Su Yon Pak et al., Singing the Lord’s Song in a New Land: Korean American Practices of Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 87–94. 6.  Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng, “Salmon and Carp, Bannock and Rice,” in Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion & Theology, ed. Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 197–215. Tellingly, although Ng does make a point to explain what “bannock” is and hence why it is chosen as a shorthand for Native American traditions, she does not do the same with rice (“Salmon and Carp, Bannock and Rice,” 212n2). 7.  The same assumption is present in Busto’s discussion of sociological and theological studies. Is it not thinkable that what is sociological may also be theological and that what is theological is always already sociological? The same is true of raceethnicity and religion, given that racial-ethnic identity is often already embedded in religious identity and vice versa. After all, early Christians used to refer to themselves as “the new race” or “the third race” (see, for example, Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005]). The idea or desire to balance or bridge two parties or entities may also imply a kind of Hegelian dialectics. Instead of Hegelian dialectics, Mikhail Bakhtin, has, with what he calls heteroglossia and dialogism, suggested a messier but arguably more dynamic and helpful way to think and talk about situations that are always already diverse internally. For a more accessible resource to Bakhtinian thought, see Simon Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), 14, 22–40, 44, 195–224. In some way, Bakhtin’s ideas might be comparable to the Daoist yin yang—which, as Busto discusses, Young Lee Hertig uses for her Asian American feminist theology to erase or remedy the distinction between margin and center—as long as one remembers that the seeming opposites are in Daoism not only complementary and interconnected but also present in and interrupt each other. 8.  The literature on this subject is vast. See, for instance, Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 96–99; and Bryan Rennie, “Zoroastrianism: The Iranian Roots of Christianity?” Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2007): 3–7.

Liew 179 9.  See, for instance, Zacharias P. Thundy, Buddha and Christ: Nativity Stories and Indian Traditions (Leiden, NL: Brill Publishers, 1993). Almost two decades ago, R. S. Sugirtharajah had already argued for the need to include India in the consideration of the so-called Mediterranean world of New Testament times (see “A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation,” in The Postcolonial Bible, ed. R. S. Sugirtharajah [Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1998], 107–111). Sugirtharajah has since written another book to explore in greater depth not only the mentions of Asia in the Bible but also the connections between the Bible and Asia (The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013]). For examples of introductory texts to the New Testament that reference Alexander the Great’s Hellenization and India, see, for example, Pheme Perkins, Reading the New Testament (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988), 10, 19; Eugene Boring, An Introduction to the New Testament: History, Literature, Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 74. 10. Phan, Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003) 234, 29, 40, 121–122. 11.  Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). 12.  Timothy Beal, “Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures,” Biblical Interpretation 19, no. 4/5 (2011): 368. 13.  J. Albert Harrill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10, no. 2 (2000): 153–156, 165–168. As Harrill shows, even if proslavery writers and abolitionists agreed that the so-called Golden Rule—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31)—was the kernel of the Bible, proslavery writers read the Golden Rule in terms of a conservative love patriarchalism, whereas abolitionists read it in terms of a love egalitarianism. 14.  See, for example, King-kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 234–251. 15.  Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). One stunning feature about this book is how Kingston’s protagonist is characterized after Frank Chin. Rather than simply write Chin off, Kingston uses this work to give a platform to some of Chin’s ideas and simultaneously parody Chin when and where needed. In addition, note that David Leiwei Li actually reads Kingston’s move to make a Chin-like character the protagonist of her work in terms of Bakhtin’s internal, dialogical tension (Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 68).

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16. Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 42. 17.  Cheng-en Wu, Journey to the West, 4 vols., trans. and ed. Anthony C. Yu (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2012). 18.  Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girl among Ghosts (New York: Vintage, 1976), 5–6. 19. Phan, Christianity with an Asian Face, 241. 20.  John J. Deeney, “Of Monkeys and Butterflies: Transformation in M. H. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and D. H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly,” MELUS 18, no. 4 (1993): 38n2. See also Anthony C. Yu, introduction to Cheng-en Wu, Journey to the West, 2012). 21.  Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 42. 22.  Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Rather than thinking in terms of orthodoxy and heresies, Karen L. King has suggested that we need to pay attention to these same dynamics in our study of religion in general and of early Christianity in particular; see Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 23. Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 277. 24.  Ibid., 306. After the third show, Wittman, in response to reviews of his play, delivers what appears to be a critique of the two-party paradigm in terms of East meeting West, insisting that the so-called East is already in the so-called West. Kingston writes, “Come on, you can’t like these reviews. . . . Look. Look. ‘East meets West.’ . . . There is no East here. West is meeting West. This was all West. All you saw was West. This is The Journey In the West” (307–308). 25.  Ibid., 339–340. 26.  Maxine Hong Kingston, The Fifth Book of Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). 27. Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey, 306. 28. Song, Tell Us Our Names, 19–20. This earlier meaning of “rice Christians” does point to how conversion to Christianity may bring about the possibility of socio-economic mobility in certain contexts. Busto also discusses this regarding Polly Bemis’s 1894 photograph, which involves a thick book as a prop. Although Busto ends up questioning if Bemis’s thick book in the photograph is really a Bible and whether the book signifies wealth or assimilated citizenship through connection with if not necessarily conversion to Christianity, one should remember that citizenship for early framers and subsequent interpreters of the US Constitution often carries, among others, racial (read: white), economic (read: property-owning), and religious (read: Christian) assumptions and implications (see Catherine Holland, The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Differences in the American Political Imagination [New York: Routledge, 2001], 66–68). In other words, capital, citizen-

Liew 181 ship, and Christianity are all mutually constitutive rather than mutually exclusive. Busto’s discussion of Bemis’s photograph also reminds me of Vincent Wimbush’s recent work on Olaudah Equiano, an African slave who was able to purchase his freedom and settled in England; pointing to Equiano’s eighteenth-century autobiography that also has a cover picture of himself holding a Bible or a book that visibly contains a biblical verse (“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,” Acts 4:12, King James Version), Wimbush examines “scripturalization” or “the use of texts, textuality, and literacy as a means of constructing and maintaining society” (Vincent L. Wimbush, White Man’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 87). Wimbush’s term, “scripturalization,” includes of course the Bible and the Christian traditions; his work therefore points to the connection not only between race and religion but also among capitalism, imperialism, Christianity, and the national body politic of exclusion and inclusion.

Bibliography Beal, Timothy. “Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures.” Biblical Interpretation 19 (2011): 357–372. ———. The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Boring, Eugene. An Introduction to the New Testament: History, Literature, Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012. Buell, Denise Kimber. Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Busto, Rudy V. “The Gospel According to the Model Minority? Hazarding an Interpretation of Asian American Evangelical College Students.” Amerasia Journal 22, no. 1 (1996): 133–147. Cheung, King-kok. “The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?” In Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, 234–251. New York: Routledge, 1990. Chung, Meehyun. “Water and Rice: A Korean Eco-Feminist Theological Perspective.” In Breaking Silence: Theology from Asian Women, edited by Meehyun Chung, 90–102. Delhi: Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, 2006. Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Deeney, John J. “Of Monkeys and Butterflies: Transformation in M. H. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and D. H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly.” MELUS 18, no. 4 (1993): 21–39.

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Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Harrill, J. Albert. “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 10 (2000): 149–186. Holland, Catherine. The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Differences in the American Political Imagination. New York: Routledge, 2001. King, Karen L. What Is Gnosticism? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Fifth Book of Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. ———. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. ———. Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girl among Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1976. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Ng, Greer Anne Wenh-In. “Salmon and Carp, Bannock and Rice.” In Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion & Theology, edited by Rita Nakashima Brock, Jung Ha Kim, Kwok Pui-Lan, and Seung Ai Yang, 197–215. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007. Pak, Su Yon, Unzu Lee, Jung Ha Kim, and Myung Ji Cho. Singing the Lord’s Song in a New Land: Korean American Practices of Faith. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005. Perkins, Pheme. Reading the New Testament. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988. Phan, Peter C. Christianity with an Asian Face: Asian American Theology in the Making. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003. Rennie, Bryan. “Zoroastrianism: The Iranian Roots of Christianity?” Council of Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin 36, no. 1 (2007): 3–7. Song, C. S. Tell Us Our Names: Story Theology from an Asian Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984. Sugirtharajah, R. S. The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. ———. “A Postcolonial Exploration of Collusion and Construction in Biblical Interpretation.” In The Postcolonial Bible, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, 91–116. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Takenaka, Masao. God is Race: Asian Culture and Christian Faith. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1986. Thundy, Zacharias P. Buddha and Christ: Nativity Stories and Indian Traditions. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1993.

Liew 183 Wimbush, Vincent L. White Man’s Magic: Scripturalization as Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Wu, Cheng-en. Journey to the West, 4 vols. Translated and edited by Anthony C. Yu. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2012. Yu, Anthony C. Introduction to Cheng-en Wu, Journey to the West, 2012.

8 Modernity in the Service of Tradition Women and Gender within Hinduism in the United States Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha

Discussions of women and gender in Hinduism cannot be set apart from the sociocultural circumstances in which Hinduism unfolds. Female deities abound within Hinduism, and female gurus (spiritual leaders of sects) and yoginis (female leaders who have renounced the world) command large followings.1 In India and in other places where Hinduism is practiced in a variety of ways, the positions of women—as symbols, leaders, and p ­ ractitioners— are shaped by ideologies, practices, and institutions that construct their social locations in those contexts. The ideologies, practices, and institutions do not inevitably lead to marginalization of women as the public discourse and many Western scholarly works suggest. Instead, both privilege and marginalization are intertwined in complex ways. In this chapter we discuss Hindu women’s location in the US to interrogate the tropes of modernity and tradition. In his seminal work on modernity and tradition, Ashis Nandy argues that three aspects of modernity enhance divisions within and between religious (and other) communities.2 First, groups that are able to homogenize the population, in ways that nuances and subtleties are replaced by single or few means of expressing ethnic (ethnoreligious) identities, are able to centralize power. Second, this process, which replaces blurred boundaries between people with sharp boundaries, usually contributes to the new forms of hierarchies. The need for nation-states to count people inevitably requires 184



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people to choose sharply defined identities. One is primarily either Hindu or Christian; one cannot be both. One is either a female or a male; one cannot be both. Yet both these conditions are extant in countries such as India.3 Third, far from reducing the distinctions between masculinity and femininity, centralization and homogenization erode androgyny and enhance the power and status of hyper masculinities. These insights are key to our discussion of women, gender, and Hinduism. Focusing on the US diaspora, on women and gender within different types of religious communities, we argue that in particular this process of change is central in structuring power relations in ethnic communities which, in turn, create, and enhance specific forms of gender distinctions. In many spaces, patriarchies are resurrected and reinscribed; in others, they are challenged. Some of these trends are also evident in virtual spaces. Women become subjects of extra scrutiny precisely because many religious groups able to rise to power look to reinscribe their power in the new structural circumstances; reinvigorating patriarchy is a route to claiming such power. Due to their minority status and the relative lack of choice, women become the focus of further scrutiny within ethnic communities and the mainstream; many also participate actively in reinscribing gendered distinctions. This chapter looks at the ways that gender distinctions are constructed in the United States. We argue that understanding the nature of modernity is crucial to unlocking the puzzle of how a diverse, diffuse, dispersed religious group with substantial disparities of intersecting gender, religion, ethnic, class, and caste regimes are transformed into homogenized, centralized religious congregational style communities, and how this transformation shapes gender ideologies, structures, and practices. This essay is not about the power of men over women, but instead about the power of men and women of certain classes, castes, and ethnicities and their ability to enforce certain gender relations, which are then reinvented as tradition. Our primary research question is how gender hierarchies are constructed and imposed through the construction of religious communities among racial minority communities. We do not begin by assuming that traditional gender norms are replicated in new settings. Although we do not subscribe to the idea that traditional ways of life are somehow gender free, we also do not subscribe to the idea that exposure to “modern Western ways” minimizes gender hierarchies by improving women’s positions. We argue that certain structural aspects of modernity—its core organizational processes

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of homogenization, centralization, bureaucratization, and ­rationalization— can exacerbate gender hierarchies among minority immigrant communities because these women are subject to both community controls and the extra gendered and racialized controls that modern nation-states exert on minority populations. Equally important, although much of the Western scholarship emphasizes a linear upward progression of women’s status with increasing modernity, here we use the frameworks proposed by scholars who emphasize that modernity depends on linking the privileges of some with the marginalization of others.4 Thus we explore how the processes involving the construction, representation, and reproduction of Hinduism and Hindu identity in the United States create new gender hierarchies. The two case studies that follow highlight some of these dimensions by focusing on the South Asian diaspora in the US and the construction of ethnoreligious identities. We draw on ethnographic fieldwork we conducted in two Hindu temples in the Northeast (and some scholarly work on temples in the US), narratives of lived religions from a collective project of writing and a study of religions in web spaces to outline some broad patterns of gendered practice.5 These studies focused on the construction of Hindu religious community in the United States and explored the emergence of gender ideologies and hierarchies as structures of religious practice. These data form the bases of our discussions.

Gendered Practices Ever since their migration in large numbers from the mid-1960s, Hindus from India have been establishing temples in the US to carve out spaces where they can practice their religion. For many Hindu groups in India, going to temples is part of their regular routine and to that extent temples are an appropriate religious space for their faith-based worship. For others, going to temples is not part of regular practice; instead religious practice occurs within homes and in more public spaces.6 For instance, small shrines to Hindu gods and goddesses stand on roadsides for public worship. Similarly, religio-cultural celebrations such as Diwali are widely celebrated in India by setting off firecrackers on public streets. However, in the United States these festivals can be practiced only as semiprivate community gatherings, as “cultural” events that feature food, and as cultural performances. In other words, only those aspects of culture that fit into the preset structural conditions can



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be expressed or practiced, inevitably making temples “the” religious space for Hindus in the United States. However, in the process of establishing places of worship, we observed a series of compromises based on what is permitted. First, unlike the diffuse concept of Hinduism with its varied meaning and levels of affiliation, the boundaries established by the temples are more clearly defined and strongly influenced by the bureaucratic demands of the state. Conventional Hindu temples in India do not operate in a congregational mode, but the temples we studied have perforce become “Hindu congregations” with clearly identifiable memberships. One of the temples we studied originated from the Bhakti (devotion)–centered movement in the early sixteenth century started by a saint who lived in Bengal and recreated in the West by an Indian in the 1960s. Essentially congregational, this temple espouses a unitary and clearly defined Hinduism and entails strict adherence to a popular Hindu scripture. Its members believe in monotheism and belief in a supreme god. The second temple we studied, which was set up by mostly professional Hindu immigrants, follows the more generic form. However, the boundaries of this temple are clearly defined. A not-for-profit status with the government—a key condition for claiming any public space for worship—requires clear membership categories. This temple initially operated on a loose understanding of Hindu identity but has moved on to well-defined congregational membership: some members can vote in temple affairs, others cannot. Separately, the second temple has developed a pattern of participation that few are likely to have encountered in India. For instance, most religious events take place on Sundays, the only official “neutral” holiday available for religious purposes. Because different regions of India follow different culture-specific calendars, Hindu holy days occur on a variety of days during a week and are rarely uniform across India. However, in the temples we studied, Sundays and parts of Saturdays are the only days set aside for matters of worship and have no choice but to schedule major events on these days. Similarly, the devotional temple we studied is based on a guru-sisya (teacher-disciple) relationship, where the guru or leader, most often male, is venerated by his band of followers. These temples are gathering places for these devotee-congregations, upholding a structure of faith-based “missions” much like evangelical Christianity. In addition, temples initiate many cultural activities to instill cultural pride and teach religious practices, because part of their objective is to teach Hinduism to the next generation. In the process,

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they invent new ceremonies, such as the gift-giving tree in December (to parallel Christmas and Hanukkah), institutions such as the Hindu Sunday schools, and new lessons on “how to do puja.” (Puja is treated as a singular practice, ignoring the vast multitude of practices that differ by caste, region, community, family, sex, age, and occupation of the worshipper in India.) Hinduism is a diverse religion and it is not surprising that Hinduism in America should develop forms that respond to local circumstances. However, the organizational transformation that is occurring is the homogenization (“McDonaldization”) of Hindu practices in ways that shrink the diversity of opinions, beliefs, practices, and decentralization that has been its hallmark. Temples appear to be taking on church-like organizational practices that favor a simplification at the expense of diversity of opinions and beliefs that characterize the religion to make it more compatible with American society. Not surprisingly, the move to modernize Hinduism and the alteration of the content of their practices to fit the requirements of the host society—the United States—lead to the construction of power relations in ethnic communities in ways that create new gender distinctions. The overlapping processes of clearly defined membership and homogenization contribute to the emergence of specific types of gender hierarchies in ethnic communities. The delineation of clear membership moves the location of religious worship primarily to temples. Within Hinduism, the multiple sites and forms of worship and decentralized forms of organizations leave open the question of who becomes the leader of any Hindu group. Local circumstances can yield hundreds of options of leadership and modes of worship. Females and males of different classes and castes can be leaders of such groups and indeed they are. Given the lack of a centralized religious leadership structure, no single leader commands absolute status or clout. The absence of that power and a singular and uniform religious identity (however simplistic), we argue, has institutionalized gendered forms of power. Thus we find that these temples offer few spaces for women as authority figures. In India, the role of female gurus, who operate outside temples, is well known, but temples are spaces where male authority prevails. In the United States, some women serve on temple boards, but this phenomenon is not widespread. Most women are involved in the tasks of cleaning, decorating the temples spaces for celebrations, and cooking for and organizing community activities. Second, the intersection of racism and patriarchy has also influenced religious expression in these temples. Hindu deities are usually depicted in



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a variety of roles—as mischievous children, as loving spouses, as beloved daughters, and as personifications of righteous female or male might—but in racial minority religious spaces, where the modes of worship are reduced to the faith-based god-and-disciple form, varieties of masculinities and femininities are rarely allowed full play. Because the family relationships are complex, a great variety of love and obligation is expected of males and females (even within an overall patriarchal structure) depending on their age, life stages, centrality of relationship, and other sociocultural factors. Depictions of deities as children, siblings, lovers, spouses, and parents mirror these complexities and mitigate against reducing them to just males or females. Men and women, depending on their stage of life, are supposed to be enmeshed in a variety of loving and caring relationships: these feminine qualities are not the preserve of females alone, nor are power and might the preserve of males. Yet, given the objective of being culturally inclusive and sensitive to attacks by Christian fundamentalist groups, the temples in practice are not able to accommodate this variety of ways that all US Hindus, especially the post-migration generation, actually understand the diversity that is central to the religion. Nor do temples depict a central principle of Hindu deities—androgyny. The overriding themes depicted in American temples are of chaste and self-sacrificing goddesses as spouses of male gods. God as ardhanariswara (half male and half female) and goddesses with aggressive female powers are not visible in these temples.7 Not surprisingly, our data on women’s accounts of their status within Hinduism and their practices in the US show a variety of responses. Among the immigrant generation are those who are grateful to find temples and the coreligionists networks temples facilitate among populations that are often geographically dispersed. Many women who make temples a significant part of their lives described how they devoted a great deal of time to tasks such as cleaning, food preparation, decorating the spaces for events, behind the scenes organizing of events, and other tasks that are typically associated with ideologies of women’s responsibilities within homes.8 Other women were more critical of the transformations that relegated them to these “feminine” tasks in “Hindu spaces,” and recalled the lack of centrality of temples in their lives in India. The post-migrant generation, however, is less aware of these choices. Often required to declare their religious identities in schools, and experiencing marginalization for not being Christian, many in the 1.5 generation search for “Hindu identities.”9 Thus Hinduism is associated with

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temples or religious events held in community halls and within homes, but the principle that religion can be practiced anywhere at any time, focusing on a range of crafted deities (as personifications of principles), or objects in a natural world, or through the exercise of intellect or through work, or a focus on androgyny as the object of worship, are not normally part of their lived experiences of religion. Thus the ideologies and gendered practices reconstructed through temples take on a particularly potent power among the post-immigrant generation that is looking for ways to “be Hindu.”

Gendered Ideologies The power of the gendered ideologies was quite evident in our study of webbased data of Hindu student groups in the United States. As we examine the public assertions of ethnoreligious identities in the virtual sphere, we find similar themes being reconstructed and claimed as tradition. Established in the 1990s, these organizations are run by students and have thousands of members across college campuses. They have a strong and robust online presence that includes a primary website and several chapter websites.10 Through a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the discourse on these websites, we traced the gendered, racialized aspects of the public assertion of ethnoreligious identities on the websites of Hindu school groups in the United States.11 The Hindu student group discourse on the websites primarily attracts members looking to collectively construct a positive identity to counter ideologies that stigmatize their culture as subordinate and regressive. Because the subservient position of women is often used as the main symbol of their denigration, the groups emphasize the distinctiveness of Hindu female identities to challenge such racialization.12 However, the data also demonstrate that the discussion of Hindu women’s empowerment is conducted within a cult of domesticity in which family, motherhood, and community are critical components. These seemingly conflicting views help reconstruct and strengthen patriarchal ideals as “the” version of Hinduism. First, these websites assert the feminine principle and the importance of women as fundamental to the Hindu worldview. They support this perception through two frames: strong Hindu goddesses and obedient epic women. From the vast array of Hindu goddesses, they most often cite Durga, or Kali, the powerful female goddess representing Shakti. Shakti, which embodies



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strong female energy, is seen as intrinsic to Hinduism—which the websites stress as the fundamental reason for the high status of women in the religion. At the same time, they paint Sita and other goddesses who epitomize purity, obedience, and complete loyalty to their husbands, as determined, resolute, liberated women, likening them with such powerful and mighty goddesses as Durga and Kali.13 For the most part, the websites use images of goddesses and epic heroines to imply that Hinduism allows women a wide array of role models. Their tacit implication is that the religion wants women to take on powerful roles in the public sphere—provided that they are submissive and dutiful in the private sphere. Second, these groups aspire to restore the lost glory of Hinduism, allegedly tarnished by the invasions of Muslims, the British, and the postcolonial rule of “pseudo-secular” Indians. In their rendering of history and version of Hinduism, gender is critical. The websites make explicit that gender equality in Hinduism distinguishes Hindus from other South Asians, especially Muslims. These websites are also quite critical of academia, Christian evangelists, and the Western media for their disparaging and derogatory portrayal of Hindus and Hindu women. In their view, the prejudice against Hindus fomented and amplified by these Eurocentric and anti-Hindu voices often leads to Hindu-bashing at human rights forums, feminist talks, religious and social science conferences and events. They call for creating a platform for Hindus to speak out—where Hindu women can network, share their experiences, and shape their own stories —instead of accepting views that others have imposed on them. From their perspective, western feminism is potentially dangerous and Hindu women have to define womanhood in their own terms. The modern Hindu woman is not only empowered and liberated but also upholds traditional Hindu values and fulfills her household and familial responsibilities.14 Last, the concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbhkam (one world family), embeds the ideals of women’s chastity and honor in discussion of the harmonious Hindu family.15 However, gendered roles are the primary focus in this paradigm. The data indicate that Hindu student groups ideology—cloaked in the verbal garb of the ideal “traditional” family—stresses distinct male and female spheres and roles. Thus, although universal Hinduism seeks to preserve the chaste, uncorrupted family, in Hindu student group discourse the women have the burden of preserving its sanctity by guarding this unsullied space.

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Overall, the findings of this study indicate that the deployment of “strong woman” imagery by these organizations on their websites needs to be understood as a symbol to assert their superior cultures and challenge US mainstream construction of minorities as traditional, nonmodern, or simply irrelevant to rational, modern complex societies. However, the evidence also indicates that the discussion is also filled with patriarchal notions that privilege women as wives and mothers. Women become the focus of added scrutiny in particular because the groups that are able to rise to power in the new structural circumstances are more patriarchal. Furthermore, the data also indicate the need to break away from the perception that religions are practiced only in churches. We argue that religious ideologies are now being created through web-based social spaces and are capable of reaching geographically dispersed, transnational audiences. Finally, it is also important to consider the relationship between the online and offline spaces where these ideologies are created. Although the ethnographic and interview data with members of Hindu student groups revealed a diversity of opinions, the “positive” representation of Hinduism through the strong women discourse on these websites appealed to a large majority within this organization.

Conclusion and Reflections These data indicate a rising ideology of women’s gendered position within Hinduism evident in the United States. Located as racial minorities in a sociopolitical landscape where their religion is used to racialize them, Hindus often look to assert a theme of superiority of the religion. Unable to practice Hinduism in all its forms, being expected to explain their religion in terms understood by the majority, various Hindu groups have been engaged in asserting a form of homogenized, gendered Hinduism while framing it as “the” tradition of the religion. Women’s roles, as described earlier, are both lauded symbolically to challenge racist constructions of Hinduism and marginalized in practice to maintain patriarchal power within these Hindu communities. However, although these strands of Hinduism are visible, a focus on them exclusively does not tell the story of women in Hinduism. Because India is extremely diverse culturally, religious practices are shaped by the histories of the ethnic groups and thus a variety of ideologies and practices coexist among the immigrant generation. The second generation reflects



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some of this variety; many groups are drawn into the homogenized, sharply bounded rigid forms of Hinduism, whereas others disengage. Yet it would be inaccurate to describe those who disengage as not being Hindu. If Hindu spirituality in all its dimensions is considered the heart of the religion, then the disengagement from the orthodoxies are central to the dynamism of the religion. More egalitarian roles of women are at the heart of these practices. We conclude by reasserting Nandy’s thesis about the change in cultures— religious cultures—as a result of a specific type of modernity. Homogenization, enhanced boundaries, scriptural practice, and clearly delineated male and female roles might appear to be the version prevalent among some groups of Hindus in the United States, but the reality of women’s positions among Hindus is more complex. We end with an incident described to one of us. A woman and her son from India were visiting friends in a suburb of a large city on the East Coast. We call the first young boy Surya. We refer to the friend’s son as Yash. As they sat down to eat lunch, Surya jumped up to help his mother and her friend bring the plates to the table. Yash was surprised and said, “why don’t you sit down with my father and me and say your prayers?” “Prayers?” said Surya, puzzled; he had never had to say prayers before his meals. “Yes,” said Yash, “we say the Gayatri mantra every day.” “But I am supposed to help my mother, as my father does at home,” said Surya, “I am supposed to always show my respect to elders by helping out however I can.” This encounter is between two highly educated middle-class families; Surya and his mother were visiting from India. Yash and his parents had lived in the United States for several decades. The two women had been in high-school together. Their understanding of Hinduism, shaped by their specific social locations, had led them to traverse two, very divergent, paths of Hinduism in India and the US.

Notes 1.  Karen Pechilis, ed., The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Maria-Theresa Charpentier, Female Gurus in Contemporary Hinduism (Abo, FI: Abo Akademi University Press, 2010); and Silicon India, “Top Five Women Spiritual Gurus,” July 29, 2011, http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Top_five_women​_Spiritual_Gurus-nid​ -87433-cid-29.html; Meena Khandelwal, Women in Ochre Robes: Gendering Hindu Renunciation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004); Meena ­Khandelwal,

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Sondra L. Hausner, and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds., Women’s Renunciation in South Asia: Nuns, Yoginis, Saints, and Singers (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Meena Khandelwal, Sondra L. Hausner, and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds., Nuns, Yoginis, Saints and Singers (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2007). 2.  Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 3.  See Vinay Lal, ed., Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 5.  See Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha, eds., Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian-American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009). 6.  Bandana Purkayastha and Anjana Narayan, “Bridges and Chasms: Orientalism and the Making of Asian Indians in New England,” in Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community, ed. Monica Chiu (Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009), 124–149. 7.  Even in temples to Kali, the naked, powerful goddess is covered with garlands so that her body is rarely visible to any casual visitor. 8.  Aparna Rayaprol, Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Shanthi Rao, “Living Hinduism and Striving to Achieve Internal and External Harmony,” in Narayan and Purkayastha, Living Our Religions, 179–194. 9.  Narayan and Purkayastha, Living Our Religions; Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); and Bandana Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asians Traverse a Transnational World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 10.  Now, Facebook and other spaces have become the “private spheres” of these groups. 11.  Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha, “Talking ‘Gender Superiority’ in Virtual Spaces: Web-Based Discourses of Hindu Student Groups in the US and UK,” Journal of South Asian Diasporas 3, no. 1 (2010): 53–69. 12.  Narayan and Purkayastha, Living Our Religions; Narayan and Purkayastha, “Talking ‘Gender Superiority’ ”; Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); and Arvind Rajagopal, “Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations of Political Practice,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 467–496. 13.  As Purkayastha describes elsewhere (2009, 2011), in Hindu mythology,



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Durga is the embodiment of strength and power. According to a legend, when one particular asur (demon) got too strong for the male gods they collectively appealed to Durga to vanquish the demon. They showered her with their most potent weapons and she left to confront the evil force that was overpowering the gods. Kali is the dark naked goddess who is worshipped with a garland of skulls around her neck, standing on a male god, Shiva, associated with the Tantra tradition. Sita is regarded as the daughter of the Earth. She willingly follows Ram into exile, where she is abducted by Ravana. After her rescue, when Ram has misgivings about her virtue, she readily undergoes an agni pariksha (trial by fire) that attests her purity. Although the Ramayana is essentially about the cosmic struggle between good and evil (symbolized by the hero Ram and the demon Ravana), Sita reinforces her husband’s morality with her devotion, intelligence, and strength and symbolizes wifely duty and devotion. 14.  Anjana Narayan and Lise-Helene Smith, “Gender, Religion and Virtual Diasporas,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 17 (2019): 77–85. 15.  The concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbhkam is a Sanskrit phrase meaning that the entire universe is one family.

Bibliography Charpentier, Maria-Theresa. Female Gurus in Contemporary Hinduism. Abo, FI: Abo Akademi University Press, 2010. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Khandelwal, Meena. Women in Ochre Robes: Gendering Hindu Renunciation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Khandelwal, Meena, Sondra L. Hausner, and Ann Grodzins Gold, eds. Nuns, Yoginis, Saints and Singers. New Delhi: Zubaan, 2007. ———. Women’s Renunciation in South Asia: Nuns, Yoginis, Saints, and Singers. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kurien, Prema. A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Lal, Vinay, ed. Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures: The Multiple Selves and Strange Destinations of Ashis Nandy. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nandy, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha, eds. Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian-American Women Narrate Their Experiences. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009.

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Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha. “Talking ‘Gender Superiority’ in Virtual Spaces: Web-Based Discourses of Hindu Student Groups in the US and UK.” Journal of South Asian Diasporas 3, no. 1 (2010): 53–69. Narayan, Anjana, and Lise-Helene Smith. “Gender, Religion and Virtual Diasporas.” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no. 17 (2019): 77–85. Pechilis, Karen, ed. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Purkayastha, Bandana. Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asians Traverse a Transnational World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Purkayastha, Bandana, and Anjana Narayan. “Bridges and Chasms. Orientalism and the Making of Asian Indians in New England.” In Asian Americans in New England: Culture and Community, edited by Monica Chiu, 124–149. Lebanon: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. Rajagopal, Arvind. “Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations of Political Practice.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 467–496. Rao, Shanthi. “Living Hinduism and Striving to Achieve Internal and External Harmony.” In Living Our Religions, edited by Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha, 179–194. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009. Rayaprol, Aparna. Negotiating Identities: Women in the Indian Diaspora. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.

9 Life in the Fishbowl An Asian American Autobiographical Theological Reflection Joseph Cheah

It is no exaggeration to say that I felt—literally and figuratively—as if I were existing and functioning in a fishbowl when I resettled with my parents in the United States in 1966, a time that people of Asian descent made up less than 1 percent of the country’s population. I lived a public life in the sense that my physical appearance was an object to be discussed at times and ogled out of a curiosity both blind and intellectual. Because many Americans at this time had never previously been in contact with Asians or Asian Americans, I either felt apprehensive or derived considerable pleasure from being unique. In retrospect, I see that the public realm appeared to me to lack discretion, credibility, and accountability in the categorization of race. During the years in which I acquiesced and also egressed from being a singular-minded child to a multifarious young adult, I began to notice even more how I was portrayed as a racialized Other. The assumption was that I practiced some form of Asian martial arts as if it were a dark magic that included superhuman strengths to be feared or admired. I also heard racial epithets and ethnic slurs such as “gook” and “chink” from either the dominant group or African American and Latino students; this was inimical and denigrating, not just to me, but also to all Asian Americans who have roots in the era of the civil rights movement, which centers on the African American experience. Today, the Asian American population is 5.6 percent of the total,1 197

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a figure that does not include hundreds of thousands of students from China and other parts of Asia studying in American universities; people of Asian descent can be found in every major city in the United States. Therefore, it seems idiosyncratic that the persistence of racial epithets, ethnic slurs, and other offensive caricatures continue to reinforce the long-standing stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners. Growing up in the inner city, I knew that some neighborhoods were safer than the one where my family lived. But it wasn’t until I was older that I became aware of the effects of institutional racism that shows up in tangible ways, from redlining banks to discrimination at work. It wasn’t until college that I learned about the one-drop rule, perpetual foreigner syndrome, and other ways of classifying American minorities into a subordinate racialethnic group. Hypodescent, or the one-drop rule, a notion derived from the long-discredited belief that each race had its own blood type, was correlated with physical appearance and, more specifically, that a black person is a person with as little as a single drop of “black blood.” My contention is that the question “Where are you from?” or, in particular, “Where are you really from?” when applied to Asian Americans, in many instances, is a hypodescent question. This is particularly the case when the question is posed because the questioner has detected a slightest trace of Asian feature in our appearance or accent in our speech. Due to Anglo conformity and the melting pot ideology, the litmus test of Americanization since the height of nativism in the late-Victorian era has been the acquisition of non-accented English. This test has been applied to Asians and Asian Americans every time we speak English. Some among us pass with flying colors because we were born here. Even for these Asian ethnics, the hypodescent rule applies: “Where did you learn to speak English so well?” Those of us who speak English with a more normative accent compared to a thick “foreign” one have weathered through a unique set of “double” or intensified marginalization that many US-born Americans of all ethnicities take for granted. We are perceived as foreign outsiders not only for our racialized bodies but also because of our accented speech that is further used as a proxy or justification for exclusion from the national community. Americans in general tend to praise people with European, Canadian, or Australian accents for having “a beautiful accent,” or “a lovely Irish brogue.” Those with a discernable Asian accent, however, have historically been considered “inscrutable” and fundamentally alien to US norms. Those of us

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who grew up in North America have been on the receiving end of racial slurs such as “ching-chong” or being teased with sing-song speech patterns that mimic supposed Asian languages. Such inherent cultural biases against Asian accents further marginalized those of us who speak discernably accented English. Although we recognize our responsibility to do our best to communicate in ways that are comprehensible to our listeners, it does not entail eradicating our accent, which may be impossible for those who migrated at an older age. In short, the pedagogical problem is often not our accent per se, but rather limited racial epistemologies that continue to stereotype Asian Americans as perpetual aliens. During my adolescent years, I took the hypodescent question at its face value. I figured they simply wanted to know where I was born. Because I lived in a community where hardly anyone was of Asian heritage, I thought it was the way I looked, or the manner of my speech that gave away of my “foreignness.” Once I became familiar with Asian American literature, however, I learned that the hypodescent question has been directed to Asian Americans of every class and generation. To be sure, the question, “Where are you from?” is often the first question foreign students from Asia would pose to other Asians and Asian Americans. Foreign students and recent immigrants are looking for people with similar culture and background with whom they can connect. They recognize the American-ness of our Asian American identity even as they seek to connect with our Asian-ness. This, however, is not the case with those whose American-ness would never be called into question, but who cannot detect in us the slightest symptom of suffering from what Derald Wing Sue, professor of counseling psychology at Columbia University, called “racial microaggressions,” the “everyday slights, insults, indignities, and denigrating messages sent to people of color by wellintentioned White people who are unaware of the hidden messages being communicated.”2 We will see that the hypodescent question, when posed to Asian Americans, is often a racial microaggression. It is not that we are ashamed of our nativity or our ancestry. Indeed, most recent immigrants and foreign students are elated when someone asks them about their country of origin. However, for those among us whose American lineage goes back two or more generations, or have lived in the United States for many years, we see ourselves as Americans of Asian descent, not foreigners or “aliens ineligible to citizenship.” Because the question “Where are you from?” is generally the first question most people ask of us, we c­ annot

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help but wonder whether our appearance has something to do with the question. It becomes a racial microaggression when the questioner is not satisfied with our answer and counters, “Where are you really from?” This is a loaded question because the word “really” in the question assumes, even if the questioner is not aware of it, that Asian Americans are the Others and that we cannot be “real” Americans. Moreover, the frequency with which the hypodescent question has been directed at me and other Asian Americans seems to indicate that it is a form of exotification, a way of signifying our marginal status, even if the questioner is oblivious to it, rather than a genuine interest in learning about who we really are. Perhaps it is easier to pin us down as either Asian or American rather than acknowledge the liminal space Asian Americans actually occupy. Because of our experience of marginalization, we are neither fully Asian nor fully American, and yet both Asian and American. Although many of us are proud of our hybrid identity, in crosscultural encounters the American-ness of our identity is often overlooked and we find ourselves expelled to Asia. In hindsight, life for me was not always on Cloud Nine. The winds of woes that blew my way were not king-sized—like those encountered by Jung Young Lee in his quintessential autobiographical account of his marginalized experience in America.3 Nevertheless, I do not have the luxury to interpret the medium-sized woes in retrospect as transitory happenings, brief interruptions of an otherwise charmed existence. It is, therefore, not surprising that the woe of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners extends to the religious arena. As a 1.5-generation Asian American priest in the Roman Catholic tradition, I often see myself as unique or sui generis. I am the only Asian American priest in the Servites, the religious order to which I belong, the only Asian American priest at the university in which I teach, and the only Asian American cleric in all the apostolates to which I have been assigned. Part of what it means to live out my priestly vocation as an Asian American is learning to live with hypodescent questions directed at me. When I preside over mass at a new parish, for example, the reactions of the people who see me as I process into the church vary, but invariably some of those in the assembly assume that “he probably can’t speak English well and he’s probably a lousy preacher” and other abilities, qualities, or characteristics regularly attributed to persons of Asian heritage. Before I utter a single word, I have already many stereotypical hurdles over which to jump that my brother priests from the dominant culture do not have to think about. Perhaps some in the congre-

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gation have encountered a priest who fits those assumptions, but that these thoughts creep unsummoned into their consciousness tells us that the image of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners has been deeply etched in their memories. This image is so deeply engraved that they may not even be aware of it. Like a beating of a heart, it is faint enough to conceal its presence but, when agitated, strong enough to make its particularities known. Running through the entire encounter in church or casual exchanges in social gatherings, like underground streams hidden from the eye but functioning nonetheless, are some of the characterizations of the past when Asians in the United States were regarded as unassimilable, sneaky, inscrutable, and other stigmas of foreignness that have rendered us incapable of being American. Historically, these negative characterizations achieved legal status in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Culturally, they have resulted in the hyperfeminization of Asian women and in the emasculation of Asian American men in popular culture. This has prevented them from playing the lead role in American movies and entertainment industry. Psychologically, a hypodescent question directed at Asian Americans is a classic example of racial microaggression. According to Derald Sue, the power of microaggressions lies in their invisibility because “they don’t allow Whites to see that their attitudes and actions may be discriminatory.” Although microaggressions appear to be insignificant slights, they can have detrimental effects on job performance, social life, and mental health of people of color.4 Theologically, the invisibility of racial microaggressions that have harmful consequences on the lives of the marginalized are manifestations of a social sin at a structural and systemic level passed down from one generation to the next. Social sin points to elements within society that are destructive of human dignity. Racial microaggressions and attitudes that exclude another denigrate the self-image of adolescents. And when the self-image of a person is shattered, self-hatred and other negative attitudes and behaviors can be easily internalized. Like sexism and other forms of social sins, we cannot sweep exclusionary or racist attitudes under the carpet. The more we pretend such attitudes do not exist, the more insidious they become. From a Catholic theological perspective, these mocking attitudes toward and negative characterizations of Asian Americans are parts of our condition resulting from some early rupture in our relationship with our fellow human beings and with God. Although we do not inherit our ancestors’ sins, we do inherit the negative environment those sins caused. Before we can eradicate

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it or contain it, we must acknowledge its existence; we must be able to talk about it. In short, these undesirable characterizations of Asian Americans are, willy-nilly, part of our American heritage, however little they seem to influence our conscious lives. All this baggage no doubt can contribute to the critical pangs of inquiry into which a seemingly benign but loaded question coalesced: “Where are you really from?” The hypodescent question is especially annoying to American-born Asian ethnics whose roots in the United States go back generations. They grew up in a society in which American-ness is associated with whiteness to the degree that any desire to reclaim a distinctive element of their Asian tradition was seen at odds with their desire to be recognized as fully American. This sort of experience engendered in many multigenerational Asian Americans an ambivalent feeling about their own Asian tradition. Consequently, it is not surprising that the writings of Asian American cultural nationalists have emphasized the narratives of belonging to the American nation and downplayed their Asian-ness.5 The American-ness of our identity is something that we choose and seek. We can be legally “American” by naturalization or by birth, but the structural and systemic racism inherent in American society has blinded many in the dominant group from recognizing us as authentically American. The Asianness of our identity, however, is given to us. It is not our choice to be Asians. We are born with an Asian ethnicity. Often, the most important aspects of our identity and our relationships are not those we choose, but those with which we are born and have inherited. It is within this context of what is natural born and not chosen by us that we first learn to accept the “strangers” within the Asian American subject—that is, our Asian roots and differences in class, gender, and sexual preference. The presence of people of Asian descent as fettered out and contextualized within the notion of the American fabric is certainly relevant to any story that explicates the national identity of America. People of Asian heritage have a significant story within the tenets and proclivities of the American framework. That said, no legal declaration in terms of our identity has yet to make us “acceptable Americans” or of the same standing of the dominant group. Unless we raise our voices and demand that we be recognized as Americans and be treated as fellow citizens, we will be forever strangers in our own country. The hypodescent question reveals more than a prejudice in the collective consciousness of our nation that has obstinately marked Asian

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Americans as foreigners. Those who pose the question, more often than not, inadvertently contribute to the bigger pot called social sin in that the foreignness trope has been intimately linked with almost every racist crime— from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the murder of Vincent Chin—committed against Asian Americans. The hegemonic linkage of Asian American-ness with foreignness has become part and parcel of our American psyche that it shows up in our Orientalist representation of Asian Americans. This could be expressed in the form of a hypodescent question or it could go viral and catch like wildfire, as in the “Asians in the Library” video.6 All these examples are a reflection of a greater social ill in our society. They tell us that we have preconceived ideas about each other even before we speak. We expect another to earn his or her respect. But we fail to realize that our respect for the dignity of another human being needs no rationale. Respect from another as a human being is a fundamental God-given right. In other words, more than “claiming America” is involved here. From a Christian perspective, to disavow the view of Asian Americans as foreigners is to discover the inherent dignity of Asian Americans as persons in Christ.

Notes 1.  World Population Review, “Asian Population 2019,” accessed December 16, 2017, http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/asian-population. 2.  Derald Wing Sue, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” Psychology Today, October 5, 2010, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions​ -in-everyday-life/201010/racial-microaggressions-in-everyday-life. 3.  See Jung Young Lee, Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995). 4.  Sue, “Racial Microaggressions.” 5.  In reference to Asian American cultural nationalists, King-kok Cheung notes that the “desire to be recognized as American has sometimes been achieved at the expense of Asian affiliation. The obsessive desire to claim America has induced a certain cultural amnesia regarding the country of ancestral origin.” See King-Kok Cheung, ed., An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5. 6.  “Asians in the Library” is a YouTube video posted by University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) student Alexandra Wallace on March 13, 2011. In this video, she ranted about the presence of the “hordes of Asian people” that UCLA accepted, the presence of their families on campus on the weekends, and, in particular, their

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use of cell phones and speaking loudly in the campus library. The most offensive part of the video was when she mimicked an Asian speech pattern: “Ohhh. Ching chong ling long ting tong.”

Bibliography Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lee, Jung Young. Marginality: The Key to Multicultural Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995.

10 Learning Hinduism through Comics and Popular Culture Sailaja Krishnamurti

Comics featuring stories and characters from Hindu mythology are familiar to many Hindus who have grown up in North America. From the 1970s through the 1990s, these mythological comics were produced in India and accessed by Hindu American children through temples and community associations, desi food shops, and relatives traveling back and forth from India. They were popular among children and adults as texts that were simultaneously educational, entertaining, and religiously authoritative. In the last two decades, mythological comics have become quickly and easily accessible online and in digital form, making them even more ubiquitous, and new comics creators and publishers are expanding the genre. The most enduring and well loved of these comics is Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Illustrated Stories, or ACK), a series of several hundred comics titles published since the late 1960s. Each title in the series retells a story drawn from Indian mythological, religious, historical, or folkloric sources, mainly associated with Hindu traditions. The artwork draws on traditional South Asian art forms, Hindu iconography, and the conventions of twentieth-­century American comic art. ACK comics have been immensely popular among North American Hindus since immigration from Asia began to increase in the 1970s. The comics are often included as part of religious education for children in Hindu communities, supplementing bal vihar (children’s religion class) curricula and in some cases even becoming required reading. 207

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Karline McLain writes that it is remarkable that much of the information about Hinduism gleaned by Hindu Americans seems to have come from these kinds of texts.1 Indeed, the wide circulation of ACK around the diaspora meant that as emigration out of India increased, the children of middleclass Hindus across linguistic and sectarian lines and around the world were reading the same versions of the same dominant mythic narratives. In 1992, Vasudha Narayanan wrote that the effect of having an entire generation raised on a “controlled diet” of homogenized narratives would have to be considered in the future. Two decades later, ACK has indeed become a subject of interest to researchers; at least three books and several dissertations and articles examine the series’ portrayal of religious and historical themes.2 The first generation of mythological comics readers is now in their thirties and forties and some are raising children of their own. Some, like Sharad Devarajan and Gotham Chopra, are becoming comics creators themselves, and thus a new generation of mythological comics is now emerging. In this chapter, I examine how mythological comics have played an important role in learning about Hindu tradition and mythology and forging religious identities for young diasporic South Asians. These texts have indeed been enormously influential for young Hindus growing up in the US and Canada, but their impact comes not just from their portrayal of powerfully accessible mythic narratives, but also through the collapsing of Hindu myth and religious belonging together with diasporic nostalgia and American and Canadian rhetorics of liberal pluralism. For many diasporic Hindus, these narratives play a complex role: although many of those that I spoke with believe that learning “Hinduism” through these comics can be problematic, they still find that the texts offer a kind of shared vocabulary of faith and identity. This contributes in a powerful way to Hindu American self-fashioning. I trace the impact of these pop cultural religious texts through interviews with diasporic Hindu youth and adults who reflect on their childhood reading experiences. First, I outline how ideas about Hindu myth and belief are constructed and learned in comics, and how such situated knowledge contributes to the formation of Hindu diasporic identities. Drawing on interviews with comics readers, I show how for Asian American readers, mythological comics embody a kind of double diasporic nostalgia: a nostalgia for a mythical ancestral past that is mingled with nostalgia for childhood and complicated by the desire for social acceptance. I then consider how South

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Asian American writers and artists are revisiting the narratives and images of mythological comics, and how some are producing new comics that build on the ACK tradition.

Comics and Religion in Asian America Children’s versions of religious stories and teachings are prevalent in many world traditions and have long been popular among American parents and teachers. Bible stories in comics form were very popular in mid-century America and continue to enjoy popularity today in many Christian communities.3 Part of what gives these texts their power is that adults approve of them as authentic representations of religious tradition, and at the same time children find entertainment and adventure in reading them. Comics can be highly complex texts. The juxtaposition of textual narrative with simple, powerful images lends itself to religious storytelling, but can also produce problems of comprehension and interpretation. Religious comics must necessarily abridge complex texts to fit the medium and the level of readership, and thus usually present simplified views of philosophical and theological ideas while emphasizing characters, plot, and easily comprehended “morals.” Such criticism has been directed toward ACK, though that series has historically marketed itself as a reliable source of knowledge for children.4 The comics are often linked with texts of Indian religion, history, and literature and are sometimes accompanied by footnotes and references. Among Hindu parents, the series has been for decades a trusted resource for teaching and learning about religion. ACK thus plays a unique role among Hindus in that it has acquired its own powerful authority as a reliable textual source. Readers that I spoke with were struck by how ACK versions of myths like the Mahabharata or the Ramayana tended to be the only versions with which they were truly familiar; most had seen film or television versions of these stories, but few had pursued reading other versions of these texts as adults. Because the comics contain multiple images of deities, they in a sense also take on the sacred qualities of other images like the gods depicted in calendar art.5 ACK texts are unusual in this respect among American comics because they have value for collectors, but they also quite literally hold sacred qualities for some readers. Mythological comics like ACK fit within a long South Asian tradition of popular storytelling, circulating tales that, prior to the twentieth century,

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were most often shared through oral retellings and folk art. A critical difference here is that whereas oral narratives historically had great regional variations, contemporary retellings in English and Hindi such as ACK have come to dominate the cultural landscape in India. As I have written elsewhere, pop cultural Hindu texts like Amar Chitra Katha comics are undergirded by a Hindu nationalist, revivalist ideology consistent with the conservative politics of the Indian Hindu Right.6 In dominating the popular religious landscape, these representations effectively sweep away differences of region, language, religion, caste, and custom, and project instead a vision of India in which such differences are flattened into a simplified two-dimensional unity. If this narrative homogenization has dominated India’s popular religious culture, it is also very much at work in the diaspora, where popular culture plays a similar role with different stakes. It is critical to understand the role popular culture and mythic narrativization play in the process of identity making. For South Asian Americans interacting with pop cultural religious texts, the projection of a “Hindu nation” can be part of the drive for a Hindu nationalist political agenda.7 But even among South Asian Americans who might resist Hindutva-style nationalism, the effacement of regional and sectarian differences in the comics has other effects: it can create among Hindus a sense of a shared historical and cultural past that helps them forge a diasporic community identity and carve out a sense of belonging as South Asian Americans. They use ACK as a means to teach and perpetuate the mytho-historical stories and traditions of what Prema Kurien calls “official Hinduism,”8 producing a shared discourse of religious, cultural, and national identity. Across the political spectrum, ACK is a direct link to an authentic Hindu culture and thus becomes both an object of religious value and the cathexis of the desire to belong. Recent ethnographies of Hindu and South Asian Americans help illuminate the complex relationship between religious identity and belonging.9 For the young people interviewed in these studies, struggles within families about values and social norms are a major preoccupation. The pressure to “uphold tradition” is particularly strong on young girls, who are often told that they must represent family honor and to represent a feminine “purity.”10 Many of these issues are bound up with the construction of what it means to be traditional, a notion closely affiliated with national or religious identity. Religion and religious practices are often associated with culture and identity, even if the youth are not interested in actively participating.11 Bandana

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Purkayastha points out that many second-generation Hindu youth choose not to worship in traditional temples, though they might feel connected with Hindu identity.12 Some feel that that they have never experienced overt racism, but others talk frankly about being called “Paki” or the “N word” by whites and experiencing verbal and physical harassment.13 Others describe ways in which they sought to differentiate or align themselves from those of other ethnicities in an attempt to fit in and find a sense of community.14 Throughout the United States, as in Canada, South Asians cultivate a reputation as the most affluent and successful of immigrants—a model minority—and this is often connected with a desire to distinguish South Asian Hindus from Sikhs and Muslims. Organizations such as the Hindu American Foundation are advocating for greater public awareness and sensitivity toward Hindus and Hinduism. As the Hindu South Asian American middle class flourishes, its concerns about the popular representation of nation and religion in e­ ducation—find a response in popular texts such as ACK, which positions itself as a wholesome, traditional, and empowering medium for diasporic people. Young people continue to organize around Hindu identity, even if for them it is more a cultural rather than a religious category. Sunaina Maira, for example, interviews two female members of the Hindu Students’ Council who prefer the identity category of Hindu as an inclusive category that represents a variety of beliefs, though they feel less comfortable organizing around the idea of India.15 Social practices of religion, such as temple attendance, prayers, and storytelling, are often understood by young people as “traditional” rather than as spiritual activities. In contrast, dating, partying, and youthful rebellion are understood by many South Asian youth as simultaneously expressions of independence and acts against a traditional Hindu moral code. Immigrant parents, meanwhile, struggle with raising children with Hindu values and often emphasize teaching children about religion at home as an important part of their acculturation.16 Some youth seem to understand their own diasporic lives as dynamic, fusing the present realities of the everyday with a traditional past. That past is constructed variously through the recollections of parents and other family members, relations from “back home,” peers, and the pursuit of study. Although South Asian American youth growing up in the in 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s found that they learned little about South Asia in public schools, some chose to pursue an interest in studying or reading on their own,

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t­ raveling, or developing language skills as a way to connect to a national, religious, or ethnic identity.17 I situate the engagement of South Asian diasporic youth with Hindu mythological comics in this context, as texts that represent tradition but can also function as part of their own identity-making projects. As Stuart Hall writes, cultural identity “has its histories—and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects . . . [i]t is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.”18 The ACK texts are the material expressions of these narratives. In some ways, the material experience of the texts themselves is as important to this notion of tradition and history as their content.19 For Asian American Hindus living in diaspora, mythological comics offer a kind of double nostalgia connected both to childhood and the desire for an authentic religious and cultural identity. Faced with experiences of racism, alienation, and difference, it is not surprising that many diasporic youth feel a desire to “return” to an idyllic mythical past: “ ‘Home’ becomes a magic installation, a multimedia production, and we, both creators and creatures of that production, run through a hall of mirrors projecting and losing a fatuous authenticity, proclaiming an ascribed difference.”20 If this experience is complex and confusing for the first generation of diasporic people, it is even more acutely so for their children. Maira writes that among second-generation South Asian youth is a yearning to return to the homeland of their parents: There is indeed a collective memory, but it is a recreated popular memory based on a myth of pure origins—a yearning to recover a presumed missing link—that is historical, cultural, and personal. What this language of return indicates is that cultural recovery is most charged at moments when the naturalized basis of ethnicity or tradition is in perceived doubt, when the trope of return expresses a sort of collective mourning for a seemingly lost culture . . . 21

But as Maira’s words here imply, this longing is not only spatial but also temporal: the wish is to return not only to the ancestral home, but also to the past in which it exists. ACK provides an entry into that past not only as an educational text, but, putting this yearning into spiritual terms, also as a text of mythic fantasy.

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Nostalgia and Religious Identity In my research on Hindu mythological comics, I interviewed thirty-three readers around the world who read Amar Chitra Katha as children. Of these, eleven were 1.5- or second-generation immigrants to the US and Canada, what Khyati Joshi would call “Generation A.”22 One, arriving as a teen, described herself as a first-generation immigrant.23 Their reflections on reading ACK as children and as adults demonstrate that the comics were a significant feature of the popular cultural landscape visible to them as diasporic people, and shaped or defined their notions of Hinduism and Hindu American identity in critical ways. These twelve participants are largely well-educated middle-class professionals. Sameer and Hema are American academics based on the East and West Coasts, respectively. Sameer was born in an American city; Hema spent much of her childhood in India and emigrated as a teen. Abhineet, Renu, and Swapna are young professionals in large Canadian cities close to the US border. Swapna was the only participant who described her upbringing as working class; both parents worked shifts in factories to support their family after emigrating in the 1970s. Pramod is a college teacher raised in a major urban center, and his parents were deeply involved in local Indian community organizing. Chandraksekhar is a Manhattan investment banker who grew up in the northeastern United States. Shankara was a New Jersey–based entrepreneur. Deepa and Vidya were students at a large midwestern university. Karan is a practicing lawyer in a southern US city. At forty-two, Manu was the oldest participant and worked as a translator of European languages. Dhruv was the youngest participant; at the time of the interview, he was attending an American high school in Indonesia where he lived with his ex-pat family. The participants’ family connections with India were diverse, ranging from Assam and Punjab to Kerala and Tamil Nadu. When I asked them to describe the extent to which they identify with a religious group or participate in religious activities, all twelve described themselves as Hindu. Five qualified the statement, calling themselves “sort of ” or “nominally” Hindu. Most were raised in mainstream Vaishnava Hinduism. Only one, Deepa, identified with a specific sectarian tradition as a Shaivite. Chandrasekhar described himself as a Vaishnava committed to Advaita Vedanta. Abhineet, whose parents married interfaith, was raised “more Sikh than Hindu” and described attending both gurdwara and temple as a child. Most were raised

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with mainstream Vaishnava Hinduism. Caste was a vague category of identity for the participants. Several told me that they did not know what caste they belonged to, or that their parents had been reluctant to discuss caste with them. Three participants indicated, with some pride, that they were Brahmins. Two others from upper-caste families were critical of caste prejudice in their extended families. Participants reflected on their experiences of reading and collecting Amar Chitra Katha comics mainly from about ages five through fourteen, though several participants continued to return to them and read them as adults. Many expressed an abiding fondness, even if they hadn’t actively read the comics for many years. More than half told me that their parents had carefully preserved their childhood collections. Chandrasekhar told me that his collection held a place of pride in his larger comics library, even more valuable to him than his American superhero comics. Although their memories of the comics’ content were sometimes fuzzy, most participants had clear memories about the comics as material objects with religious and emotional value. Readers either collected the comics themselves or had access to a friend’s or relative’s collection, but all of the people I spoke with remembered the comics as valuable childhood objects to be collected. Hema remembered being an avid reader: “I collected them religiously; it was the closest thing in my life to an addiction; my parents really encouraged reading but the comic books were so popular for all the children that I never really thought about it; everyone I knew had the comic books.” For the rest of the participants growing up in North America, comics were frequently associated with trips to India or with interactions with relations from there. Renu remembered purchasing comics at Indian train stations as a child. She and several other participants recalled receiving them from relatives in the mail while in the US, an experience I shared as a child growing up in western Canada. Sameer recalled, “my grandfather bought me the first one, then my mother gave me some as presents on special occasions. Later, I saved my allowance money and bought some myself. Finally, I bought a bunch of them later on when I returned to India as a teen and as young adult.” Abhineet’s Hindu mother is from Fiji, and though he therefore did not receive the comics from a source in India, he noted that “many of the Hindu-themed comics in our collection came from my mother’s trip to Fiji and were purchased from a Fijian bookstore.” In all these cases, participants associated ACK as a material object to experiences of travel and connectedness with “home.”

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Even parents and children who did not have regular contact with India seemed to have little trouble accessing the comics in diasporic locations through religious organizations. Jagdish recalls that his mother purchased the comics at the mandir (temple). Sameer remembered using them as part of Bengali language lessons in the local temple run by the Vishva Hindu Parishad (a militant right-wing organization). In this way, the comics were connected to India and also associated with religious learning. In this way, ACK acquired a kind of textual power that is generally not ascribed to other kinds of comics: it became an approved, authentic source of religious and cultural knowledge. Renu pointed out that her training in classical dance gave her an environment beyond the temple in which she could make sense of what she learned in the comics. She felt that ACK deepened her knowledge and experience of Hinduism and her learning of South Asian arts: And I really appreciate it because of the kind of strength it’s given me in my life. . . . I know a lot about Hinduism which I learned through my Mom and my Dad, definitely . . . also because I’m a dancer, and just because of the form of dance, like when you do Odissi, or folk dance, there are so many religious figures . . . you always tell a story, and a lot of these are from Hindu mythology . . . and I also took classical singing.

Abhineet told me that as a child, he thought of the comics as “religious texts,” elaborating that “they were texts about religious figures, and hence as a kid I thought whatever was written about them should be respected and believed.” The idea of having reverence for the comics as religious texts was frequently raised by the readers I spoke with. As Karline McLain, Deepa Sreenivas, and others note, Hindus around the world even today continue to refer to the comics as authoritative sources on Hindu religious topics.24 The texts are accessible and easy to read and understand, and thus far more accessible to lay Hindus than formalized sacred texts in Sanskrit or vernacular languages. It is no doubt for this reason that families enthusiastically assisted children in building their collections. All the interviewees had at least twenty-five comics in their collections, and several had between fifty and two hundred titles. Like many children who grew up reading ACK in India, Hema’s family turned her comics into bound books to protect them from the elements: “I still have all my bound collections which I think my parents are keeping

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for their grandchildren.” Sameer told me that when he was a child, the comics “always felt very ephemeral to me. I held on to them but it was like, oh, these are comics, they are just going to go away.” But his mother now guards his collection carefully at the family home; he too surmised that she might be preserving them for a future generation of readers. As family relics, the comics move beyond simply being children’s texts; as material objects with both religious power and high emotional value, they became in a sense sacred objects in the household. Among those who did remember the comics vividly, or who continue to revisit them as adults, many indicated that the comics were an important component in their experiences of learning about Hindu religion. Dhruv said that his mother taught him about Hindu traditions at home, but recalls the comics as an important source of knowledge, suggesting that the medium made the content more attractive: I really enjoyed all those stories and I liked the way that they were presented, and most of all they were comics, which interested me the most. But, yeah, I learned a lot more about Indian tradition, like with the Mahabharata and Ramayana ones, I learned a lot more about the myths from those [comics] than from what my mom told me . . . my mom used to tell us Ramayana and Mahabharata but I think this engrained them in my brain much more. . . . I don’t think I would have read normal books [on these topics].

Dhruv’s comment points to the slippage between what constitutes knowledge of Indian history or tradition, and what constitutes knowledge of Hinduism as “the” Indian religion. Many readers expressed a greater fondness for mythological and religious stories than for historical ones, and it is the former that most people seem to remember vividly. Of these, the most popular comics were those associated with the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata and, secondarily, those with Puranic gods such as Shiva and Krishna. The visual and narrative continuity between mythological and historical comics, particularly in regard to the epics, is sufficiently strong that it caused confusion for some readers. Sameer said that he felt that he did not see historical and mythological narratives “as being separate, . . . [but] as part of the same big story.” Sameer and other diasporic readers were encountering ACK in a context in which little other ways of encountering images of India or Hindu religion

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were available—other than, of course, the popular Bollywood films circulating in the 1980s on VHS tapes and then later on DVDs. Indian children in the 1980s and 1990s were seeing ACK as a supplement to their formal education and community-based learning in religion. But for diasporic children, ACK was often the primary source of ideas and images. For Chandrasekhar, reading ACK made him imagine that India was a mythical, magical place: “the centre of the world!” Jagdish’s recollection of ACK’s India was similar, though in his view, it only appeared as a frame for stories about religion: “Since India was only the backdrop to religious stories I remember it depicted as ancient, pastoral, and idyllic. And always sunny!” For diasporic Hindus, this mythical past is not only the ancient past of the Puranas; it is also, at some level, the mythic past of their parents’ home.

New Iterations and Explorations For diasporic readers, mythological comics played a complicated role in how their childhood selves negotiated ethnic and religious difference. Renu told me this story of an early initiation into the paradoxes of multiculturalist pluralism: I remember that my Grade One teacher requested that people bring in different books, so I brought in the Ramayana, the ACK version of the Ramayana. And we had to sit in a circle and I gave it to her because she was reviewing all the books, and she looked at it and flipped through it, and closed it, and said this is really nice book, but I can’t read it out loud, because the word God is here . . . In Grade Two, I brought a sari to class to show the class how to tie a sari and that was my show and tell and everyone was excited about that. So that was acceptable but my comic book wasn’t.

Renu also remembers wondering where she fit into the world of ACK because it represented caste and skin color to her. Renu describes herself as being the most dark-skinned person in her family: I used to wonder, because I’m so dark [complexioned], why are all the Rakshasas dark and all the gods are white? I used to wonder, does that mean I’m a Rakshasa? . . . so I would be like hello, this is not right. . . . My

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mom is a horrible shadist and I was always her ugliest child because I was so dark, and she would always say if only I were more fair, so like even just growing up looking at that image, like what do the Rakshasas represent? Like the evil ones, who wanted to destroy [things] were always dark, but the good ones, like Maya who built the three cities, or like Vibhishan, Ravana’s brother, they were all fair too. So it was like this good and evil white and dark thing, so that confused me a lot.

Renu struggled to reconcile her experiences as a racialized outsider in North America, with both her mother’s projection of fair-skin desire and ACK’s mythical world of good and evil. The visual spectrum of ACK perpetuated her anxieties about her skin color, reinforcing the antiblack racism of American and Canadian culture alongside the racism of the Indian context. Swapna’s recollections of caste in the comics also points toward this contextual difference. She was one of the few people I spoke with in India and in the diaspora who had strong memories of reading and learning about caste through Amar Chitra Katha. Swapna, whose family is from an upper-caste group in northwest India, recalls being outraged by the depiction of caste oppression in Tiruppan and Kanakadasa (v.186), a comic telling the stories of two Bhakti saints: The idea that someone could not have access to a place [a caste Hindu temple in each case] because of their birth was deeply traumatizing. I’m sure that something of the racism I experienced in Canada might have contributed to that. At that time, there was a lot of tension because racism was more overt; physical or verbal violence was always a possibility. Those are really sad comics.

Swapna’s understanding of caste here is read through her experience of racism in North America rather than through a contextual experience of castebased oppression in India; she explained that this informed some of her criticisms of what she learned of Hindu religion through the comics. For this reason, she, like other readers, emphasized that though she loved and valued the comics, she felt that it was important for children to read them with some sort of supervision. For similar reasons, Pramod felt that he had been fortunate to have access to other sources of information. His parents were actively involved in

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his city’s Indian American arts organization, and he recalled his childhood home frequently filling with visiting musicians and artists from India. The comics for him were part of a bigger picture: In our parents’ case, they would give these things to us but it was never the case that you could learn about Indian culture only through these things. They were never my sole source of acculturation. They were always being juxtaposed or contrasted with what my parents told me, what I saw elsewhere, in the different communities that we circulated through, and in the larger world.

Abhineet, in contrast, felt that the comics carried a kind of authority that could not be challenged by a child and had fewer other sources of information or guidance. Abhineet and Pramod present different experiences with the comics in relation to the accumulation of “cultural capital” and the development of a greater critical context. Other participants have also found ways to develop and interrogate the kinds of knowledge that they have acquired from reading ACK, taking university courses in religion, doing further reading on their own, or engaging in South Asian American community activism. For some readers, the visual and narrative vocabulary of ACK can become a legacy that inspires new and sometimes subversive appropriations. Artists such as Chitra Ganesh and David Dasarath Kalal have found ways of exploring the remnants of these images in the imaginations of second-generation South Asians. McLain writes that Chitra Ganesh’s well-documented manipulations and rearrangements of the comics are “raising queer issues, feminist critiques, and making more subtle commentaries upon life in the diaspora.”25 Another lovely example of the subversion of ACK’s visual vocabulary can be found in an image on a 2002 flyer for a queer South Asian-Indo Caribbean DJ night in Toronto. The image reorganizes frames from Malavika (v. 103/569) to produce a new narrative that suggests a polyamorous sexual relationship. The use of the ACK images on the flyer was intended to play on the memory of these comics in the minds of potential partygoers. The DJ, who is a gay man and the son of an Indo Caribbean Hindu priest, told me that he had grown up with and loved these comics as a child. Here, the moral codes of the comics are subverted in favor of a radically different reimagination of India as a queer diasporic space in which, to evoke Gayatri Gopinath, it is possible to “recuperate those desires, practices and subjectivities that are rendered

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impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries.”26 In this way, the comics can be redeployed as part of an arsenal of subversion for second-generation South Asians who are challenging the religious conservatism of the Hindu diasporic community. Amar Chitra Katha seems to have been at the height of its impact in the decades before the spread of satellite television and cheap Bollywood DVDs. But the comics remain popular in India and throughout the diaspora. The images and ideas have endured in the minds of many Hindu Americans, and because the tangible material of the printed comics remains a presence in many households, adults often revisit the texts. After changing hands a few times in recent years, the series continues to produce new titles and to look for new modes of circulation.27 The comics are glossier now, and printed on better quality paper, but old titles continue to be reprinted, and the content has remained the same. Recently, ACK has enjoyed a revival through digital comics and animated series. New comics producers have been creating new versions of Hindu mythological stories melded with a more explicitly modern style of comics art and featuring futurist and superheroic aesthetics. These comics are finding a market among Hindu Americans who were raised on ACK as well as on American comics. The makers of these new comics often refer to Amar Chitra Katha as an inspiration, but also articulate through their work the desire to create a new aesthetic and critical perspective. Vimanika Comics, a new India-based series, has been gaining a great deal of attention in the comics world for dramatic comic art narrativizations of the Hindu epics. Holy Cow Comics’ The Skull Rosary tells short stories about Shiva drawn from less well-known Shaivite texts, and Campfire Comics’ Ravanan series makes the Ramayana’s putative villain its protagonist, drawing in part on the diverse Ramayana traditions of South India and Sri Lanka. Such comics are intervening in interesting ways in the homogenized landscape of mythological comics after Amar Chitra Katha. Graphic India is a publishing house founded by South Asian Americans Sharad Devarajan and Gotham Chopra, son of self-help guru Deepak Chopra. Their 18 Days, a highly stylized retelling of the Mahabharata written by acclaimed American comics author Grant Morrison and illustrated by Indian artist Mukesh Singh, has achieved critical acclaim in the mainstream comics world. Another well-regarded title by Graphic India, Ramayana

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3392 AD series puts the epic story of Rama’s battle with Ravan into a distant future world. Like the ACK comics, these comics tell stories of mythic Hindu characters, superhuman powers, and deep conflicts between good and evil. Here, though, these elements are framed through visual and textual vocabularies that pull together American comics style with Hindu narrative themes. These comics are quite different from ACK in every respect; rather than claiming to be explicitly educational, they aim to entice young readers with highly entertaining stories and graphic images. Reader interest stems from an initial familiarity with the characters, and then builds these into a fantastical hybrid world. Graphic India’s founders Devarajan and Chopra were both raised in the US and read Amar Chitra Katha as children. In an interview with an Indian news site, Devarajan says of ACK, They have managed to tell a compelling, more traditional version of the classic Indian myth that every child continues to read to understand and learn from. However, our goal at Liquid Comics [the previous name of the company] is to go to the original source material and create new epics that would be inspired by the originals but are definitely not a literal retelling.28

Although Graphic India does not explicitly position its comics as religious, the connection between mythology and spirituality is present. Self-help guru Deepak Chopra is listed as an author or consultant on several works, including two volumes on Myths of India and one on the life of the Buddha. In the introduction to the book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Deepak Chopra writes, Later, as the kids grew up, when I traveled back from my ancestral homeland in India, I’d bring them suitcases full of native comics that retold the great epics of our Indian heritage. This of course further stimulated their imaginations, since the great stories of countless of gods and goddesses, emperors and conquerors were so vividly depicted in the pages of those comics . . . I encouraged [Gotham’s] collegiate explorations in the subjects of comparative religions, literature, and film. Upon graduation, he and his friend Sharad Devarajan conceived the idea of reimagining

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some of the India stories chronicled in those old comic books and bringing them to the world.29

Although Chopra never mentions Amar Chitra Katha by name, the ubiquity of that series makes it likely that those are the comics he mentions. In the same book, Gotham Chopra’s foreword reiterates this family lore: The first comic [I was given by my father] was actually a story about Lord Krishna, one of India’s most beloved gods. I. Loved. It. Through the years, I’d amass more old Indian comics every time my family traveled to our ancestral homeland in India to visit my grandparents who lived there. There were hundreds of those comics that chronicled all the great stories of Indian gods and goddesses, kings and queens, invaders and liberators, warriors and sages, and my cousins and I collected them all.30

In this textual interaction between father and son, several of the experiences and observations of my interview participants are reiterated. India is a faraway mythical place of nostalgia, simultaneously occupied by grandparents, ancestors, and ancient gods and goddesses. “Indianness” and Hindu images and ideas appear interchangeable, and both are described as important to Gotham Chopra’s fashioning of himself as a spiritual and creative young adult. The book, after all, is a collaboration between the two Chopras, bringing together the elder’s interest in the mythic-spiritual with the younger’s in the mythic-superheroic. The book’s project, as described in these preliminaries, is to tie these two kinds of myth together through an intergenerational diasporic history of reading comics.

Conclusion The comments of the readers I have interviewed show a range of experiences and feelings about ACK and about the value and importance of ACK in constructing a Hindu self in the diaspora. Not all readers had access to multiple sources of knowledge about India, and so ACK was frequently their primary source of information. The diasporic context of reading also had a bearing on

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the experience and interpretation of the texts and their depictions of Hindu religious and social life. The ability to visualize and claim knowledge about India was important to their sense of being Indian, even if India was not explicitly identified as a homeland. In this way, religion, culture, and identity become complexly intermingled with each other, and categories of Indian and Hindu are emptied of their inner plurality. The myths that continued to resonate for readers into adulthood were commingled with deep nostalgia for childhood and for religious and cultural belonging. In all these ways, the visual and textual vocabulary of Hindu deities, narratives, and concepts produced by mythological comics has had a strong and enduring impact on Hindu American identities.

Notes 1.  Karline McLain, India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 2.  Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007 (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008); McLain, Immortal Comic Books; and Deepa Sreenivas, Sculpting the Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2010). Chapters by Frances Pritchett and John Stratton Hawley in Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, edited by Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) were among the first academic studies of ACK. 3.  A. David Lewis, and Christine Hoff Kraemer, eds., Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books & Graphic Novels (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). 4. Sreenivas, Sculpting the Middle Class. 5.  Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2007). 6.  Sailaja Krishnamurti, “The Route to Your Roots”: History, Hindu Nationalism, and Comics in India and South Asian Diasporas (Dissertation, York University, 2008). 7.  Biju Mathew and Vijay Prashad, “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 516–534; and Deepa Reddy, “Hindutva as Praxis,” Religion Compass 5, no. 8 (2011): 412–426. 8.  Prema Kurien, “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism,” Social Problems 51, no. 3 (2004): 362–385, 363. 9.  Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and

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Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Bandana Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Anjana Narayan and Bandana Purkayastha, eds. Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009). 10.  Sunaina Maira, Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press), 2002, 171; and Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, 101. 11. Joshi, New Roots, 64–65. 12. Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, 98. 13. Joshi, New Roots, 114–115; and Purkayastha, Negotiating Ethnicity, 29. 14. Maira, Desis in the House, 65. 15. Maira, Desis in the House, 141. Hindu Students’ Council is an international organization; it is the student arm of the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the World Hindu Organization. 16.  Hemalatha Ganapathy-Coleman, “ ‘He Thinks Krishna Is His Friend’: Domestic Space and Temple Sociality in the Socialisation Beliefs of Immigrant Indian Hindu Parents,” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (2014): 118–146. 17. Joshi, New Roots, 49; Maira, Desis in the House, 145. 18.  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, ­Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990),  226. 19.  Similar observations have been made by cultural studies theorists in regard to fan cultures, subcultures and collecting practices. 20.  Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-Racism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995), 185. 21. Maira, Desis in the House, 113. 22. Joshi, New Roots, 6. 23.  The rest of the interview subjects reside in India or elsewhere in the South Asian diaspora. Interviews were conducted between 2004 and 2015. Participants for this study were recruited because they expressed interest in mythological comics, but were not selected by religious affiliation. 24. McLain, Immortal Comic Books; and Sreenivas, Sculpting the Middle Class. 25. McLain, Immortal Comic Books, 209. 26.  Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 11. 27.  The series was published for many years by India Book House and is now part of a publishing conglomerate called ACK-Media Pvt.

Krishnamurti 225 28.  DailyBhaskar.com, “Sharad Devarajan to DailyBhaskar: India will get its own ‘Amazing Spiderman,’ ” June 30, 2012, http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/GUJ​-AHD​ -sharad-devarajan-to-dailybhaskar-india-will-get-its-own-amazing​-­spiderman​ -3465213.html. 29.  Deepak Chopra, Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes: Harnessing Our Power to Change the World (New York: Random House, 2011), 2–3. 30.  Ibid., v.

Bibliography Bannerji, Himani. Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism, and Anti-­ Racism. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1995. Chandra, Nandini. The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007. New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008. Chopra, Deepak. Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes: Harnessing Our Power to Change the World. New York: Random House, 2011. Ganapathy-Coleman, Hemalatha. “ ‘He Thinks Krishna Is His Friend’: Domestic Space and Temple Sociality in the Socialisation Beliefs of Immigrant Indian Hindu Parents.” Culture and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15, no. 1 (2014): 118–146. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Hawley, John Stratton. “The Saints Subdued: Domestic Virtue and National Integration in Amar Chitra Katha.” In Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, edited by Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley, 107–134. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Jain, Kajri. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2007. Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Krishnamurti, Sailaja. “ ‘The Route to your Roots’: History, Hindu Nationalism, and Comics in India and South Asian Diasporas.” PhD diss., York University, 2008. Kurien, Prema. “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Development of an American Hinduism.” Social Problems 51, no. 3 (2004): 362–385. Lewis, A. David, and Christine Hoff Kraemer, eds. Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books & Graphic Novels. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.

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Maira, Sunaina. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002. Maira, Sunaina, and Rajini Srikanth, eds. Contours of the heart: South Asians map North America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996. Mathew, Biju, and Vijay Prashad. “The Protean Forms of Yankee Hindutva.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 516–534. McLain, Karline. India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha, eds. Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009. Pritchett, Frances W. “The World of Amar Chitra Katha.” In Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, edited by Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley, 76–106. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Purkayastha, Bandana. Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-Generation South Asian Americans Traverse a Transnational World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Reddy, Deepa. “Hindutva as Praxis.” Religion Compass 5, no 8. (2011): 412–426. Sreenivas, Deepa. Sculpting the Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha. New Delhi: Routledge India, 2010.

11 Queer Asian American Theologies Patrick S. Cheng

Since at least the mid-1990s, queer Asian American theologians have written about the interplay of their racial, sexual, and spiritual identities.1 Although many of these theologians have been alienated from both the Asian American community (as a result of queerphobia) as well as the lesbian, gay, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) community (as a result of racism), many of these individuals have also experienced a pathway to the divine as a result of their particular social location. For example, Eric Law, a gay Chinese American Episcopal priest, has written about how his experiences of living “in between two cultures” in “between the gay and straight worlds” have given him a “foretaste of what it felt like to be in between the divine and the human.”2 Similarly, I have written about how the “embattled gay Asian male body” might in fact serve an “atoning purpose” by “decolonizing the racism and homophobia of contemporary Christian theologies.”3 I have also written about how the threefold interplay of race, sexuality, and spirituality in the lives of LGBTIQ Asian Americans can be understood as a reflection of the Trinitarian nature of God.4 This chapter examines key writings from LGBTIQ Asian American theologians. It focuses on three main themes that have emerged in the writings of queer Asian American theologians: Asian and Asian American church exclusion, critiquing LGBTIQ racism, and highlighting transnational perspectives. First, however, let us review a brief history of the LGBTIQ Asian American experience. 227

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Historical Background The history of LGBTIQ Asian Americans is still largely hidden and yet to be written. Although a number of works have been written about the history of same-sex and gender-variant behaviors in Asian cultures (that is, in Asia),5 far less has been written about the history of LGBTIQ Asian Americans. As a threshold matter, a generic “Asian American” history does not exist. That is, the history of Asian Americans depends on the migration stories of the various ethnic groups—that is, the people of Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian, Pacific Islander, Pakistani, Thai, and Vietnamese descent—that together make up the umbrella term “Asian American.”6 Although Asian Americans are often viewed as relatively recent arrivals to the United States, they have in fact lived in North America since the eighteenth century. For example, historical evidence attests to the fact that Filipino sailors reached Louisiana as early as 1765 as part of the Spanish galleon trade and established fishing villages near New Orleans.7 During the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Chinese men migrated to the United States to work in the mining industry and on the railroads. They formed bachelor societies in Chinatowns, which were characterized by the dominant white ruling class as “perverse spaces” that were full of “deviant sexualities” and “peculiar domestic arrangements.”8 In some ways, these were the first queer Asian American spaces in the United States. As Chinese immigrants entered the mining, railroad, manufacturing, and agricultural workforce in greater numbers, a backlash ensued. The Chinese workers were characterized as “nagurs” and described as “heathen, morally inferior, savage, childlike, and lustful.” In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Hall that Chinese witnesses—like blacks or Indigenous people—were not permitted to testify in court either in favor of, or against, white people.9 In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusionary Act, which prohibited Chinese people from entering the country (Chinese women had been effectively banned since 1875) and denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants already in the country.10 Despite this official ban (which was not fully repealed until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965), Asian ­Americans—and queer Asian Americans—continued to live in the United States. For example, Amy Sueyoshi, a professor of race and resistance stud-

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ies and of sexuality studies at San Francisco State University, has published a biography of Yone Noguchi, a bisexual Japanese man who had a passionate same-sex interracial affair during the turn to the twentieth century.11 Queer Asian Americans were even part of the pre-Stonewall homophile rights movement. One of the early gay rights Asian American activists was Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a third-generation Japanese American who was born in an internment camp. Kuromiya took part in one of the first gay rights demonstrations in Philadelphia on July 4, 1965, and continued his activism in the LGBTIQ community, including HIV/AIDS activism, until his death in 2000.12 The queer Asian American community began to organize in earnest in the 1970s and 1980s.13 For example, Asian American lesbian activist Michiyo Cornell addressed the 1979 March on Washington about the formation in October 1979 of the Lesbian and Gay Asian Collective, the first “network of support of, by, and for Asian American lesbians and gay men.”14 This history of LGBTIQ Asian Americans has been documented by a number of anthologies published in the 1990s, including Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience15 and Q & A: Queer in Asian America.16 Today, the LGBTIQ Asian American community continues to thrive.17 The National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association (NQAPIA) is a federation of more than forty LGBTIQ Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander organizations across the country. In July 2012, NQAPIA held a conference in Washington, DC, that included a briefing at the White House on issues of interest to this community.18 In November 2012, Mark Takano, a gay Japanese American man, became the first openly queer person of color to be elected to the United States Congress.19

Genealogy of Queer Asian American Theologies Since the mid-1990s, queer Asian American theologians have written a number of works about the LGBTIQ Asian American experience. These works can be organized into three thematic strands: Asian and Asian American church exclusion; critiquing LGBTIQ racism; and highlighting transnational perspectives.

Asian and Asian American Church Exclusion The first thematic strand in queer Asian American theologies relates to the exclusion of LGBTIQ people from Asian and Asian American churches.

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This has been an important issue in recent years, particularly since many evangelical Asian American churches have actively opposed marriage equality for LGBTIQ people. For example, Chinese American churches played an important role in the passage of California Proposition 8 in 2008.20 (Proposition 8 amended the California state constitution to eliminate the right to same-sex marriage in the state.) One of the main queer Asian American theologians to write on this topic is Leng Lim, a gay Episcopal priest who grew up in Singapore and came to the United States for college and divinity school. Subsequent to his ordination, Lim earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and now divides his time between the United States and Asia. Lim’s writings have focused on the ways in which many Asian and Asian American churches have ostracized LGBTIQ people. In 1996, Lim wrote an essay, “The Gay Erotics of my Stuttering Mother Tongue,” which was one of the earliest published works of queer Asian American theology. In that essay, Lim wrote about growing up with the shame of his homosexuality in Singapore and how his “mother tongue” did not give him the language to express his sexuality adequately. Leng wrote about “struggling with God” while growing up, and also his amazement at the fact that he did not kill himself.21 In 1997, Lim wrote another essay about his growing up gay in Singapore. In that essay, “Webs of Betrayal, Webs of Blessing,” Lim writes about his experiences of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian church in Singapore. In a particularly powerful passage, Lim writes about how his mother had an intensely negative reaction to his coming out and how she accused the devil of infiltrating his mind.22 Lim has also written about the pain that is experienced by many ­LGBTIQ Asian Americans here in the United States. In 2002, Lim published an article, “ ‘The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself ’: The Crisis in Asian American Spiritual Leadership,” in a special issue of the biblical journal Semeia on the Bible in Asian America. In that article, Lim reflects on his ministry as an Episcopal priest and notes how much pain the Bible has caused LGBTIQ Asian Americans. In particular, he tells the story of a gay Asian American UCLA student who believed that being a “good Christian” required “hating himself ” simply because “the Bible tells him to do so.” Lim says that the student “has been told a lie” and that the student’s spiritual teachers “abused him.”23 Finally, Lim has criticized church leaders in Asia for failing to accept LGBTIQ people fully. In 2006, Lim co-authored an essay, “The Mythic-­

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Literalists in the Province of Southeast Asia,” in which he criticizes the Anglican Province of Southeast Asia for its opposition to LGBTIQ people. Lim argues that the province had regressed to a “lower level of faith and consciousness development” as a result of its stance.24 A number of other essays are included in the Other Voices, Other Worlds anthology (in which Lim’s essay appears) about LGBTIQ issues in Anglican churches in Oceana, Hong Kong, India, and Japan.25 In sum, the central theme in Lim’s writings is how LGBTIQ people have been excluded from Asian and Asian American churches. Although more than fifteen years have passed since Lim’s first article was published, the issue is still important for many LGBTIQ Asian Americans today. For example, “Michael Kim”—the pseudonym for a young Asian American gay man who is unable to be fully out about his sexuality—wrote a powerful essay, “Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World,” in the Asian American X anthology about the overwhelming difficulties of coming out in a Korean American Christian community. Kim writes that to come out would be, “quite literally, the ultimate failure—moral, social, and personal all at once. It would nullify everything good that I have done and would stand as the single mark upon me.”26 Accordingly, much still needs to be done with respect to the issue of exclusion by Asian and Asian American churches. Currently, the Asian Pacific Islander Roundtable at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion is an organization that is dedicated to affirming “the dignity and spiritual wholeness of LGBTIQ people of Asian descent through scholarship and other means.”27 Other organizations with similar goals include the Network on Religion and Justice28 and Queer Asian Spirit.29

Critiquing LGBTIQ Racism The second thematic strand in queer Asian American theologies relates to critiquing the racism of the white LGBTIQ community. A number of queer Asian American theologians, including Eric Law and I, have written about this theme. In 1997, Law, a gay Chinese American Episcopal priest, wrote an article, “A Spirituality of Creative Marginality,” which was published in the Que(e)­ rying Religion anthology. In that article, he writes about coming out in college and his experience of profound exclusion from the gay community: “No one talked to me. No one even looked at me. No one invited me to dance. When

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another Asian came in, I felt competitive.” For Law, his experiences of racism in the LGBTIQ community ultimately led him to articulate a spirituality of “creative marginality.” That is, Law affirmed his location of being “in between” both the Asian and the LGBTIQ worlds; like Jesus Christ’s experience of divinity and humanity, Law was “part of both ends but not fully one or the other.”30 In 2004, Law wrote an imaginary dialogue between an LGBTIQ person of color and a white LGBTIQ person in his book The World at the Crossings: Living the Good News in a Multicontextual Community. The dialogue was about the racism that the LGBTIQ person of color had experienced at an ecumenical LGBTIQ-affirming conference for Christians. The LGBTIQ person of color said, “I thought that by coming here and being with all the gay and lesbian Christians, I would feel accepted. But judging from what I see, this so-called welcoming community is the same as any white community.”31 I have also written extensively about racism and the LGBTIQ community. In 2002, I published an article, “Multiplicity and Judges 19: Constructing a Queer Asian Pacific American Biblical Hermeneutic,” in the special issue of Semeia. In it, I argue that the queer Asian American person is a “radical sexual and geographic outsider,” and her or his experience of racism is reflected in the narrative of the unnamed concubine in Judges 19 who is gang raped and dismembered. That is, both the queer Asian American person and the unnamed concubine experience oppression in the form of erasure as well as sexual objectification.32 One theme that I have explored in my scholarship is the need for spiritual healing in light of the racism experienced by LGBTIQ Asian Americans. In my 2006 article “Reclaiming Our Traditions, Rituals, and Spaces: Spirituality and the Queer Asian Pacific American Experience” in the journal Spiritus, I argue that queer Asian Americans experience metaphorical homelessness as well as bodily alienation because of the racism from the LGBTIQ community. To heal this homelessness and alienation, queer Asian Americans have sought to reclaim their own spiritual traditions, rituals, and spaces.33 Another theme that I explore in my scholarship is the need to challenge an unspoken “code of conduct” that the dominant white queer culture imposes on LGBTIQ Asian Americans. That is, white queer culture discourages LGBTIQ Asian Americans from being “too Asian” with respect to language, food, music, and even notions of beauty. In my 2006 commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians in The Queer Bible Commentary, I argue that

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Galatians can be read as freeing LGBTIQ Asian Americans from the “yoke of slavery to the implicit codes of conduct that are imposed by the dominant white queer community.”34 I have also written a number of other articles addressing issues of sexual racism in gay male cyberculture. These include “ ‘I Am Yellow and Beautiful’: Reflections on Queer Asian Spirituality and Gay Male Cyberculture” in the Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion, in which I explore how “gay male cyberculture inhibits the spiritual development of gay Asian men.”35 I discuss similar themes in my 2011 “Gay Asian Masculinities and Christian Theologies” in CrossCurrents, noting that the statement “No Asians” is routinely seen on gay online dating sites and hookup apps.36 Finally, I address the issue of racism in the LGBTIQ community in my books on queer theology. For example, in Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, I argue that the doctrine of sin can be understood as splitting off issues of sexuality from issues of race in theological discourse.37 Similarly, in From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ, I discuss the sin of singularity—that is, the failure of LGBTIQ people to address both racism and homophobia—in my chapter on the Hybrid Christ.38

Highlighting Transnational Perspectives The third and final thematic strand in queer Asian American theologies relates to highlighting transnational perspectives. Given the complex migration and immigration histories of queer Asian American communities, the line between domestic and international theologies is often quite blurred. A number of queer Asian American theologians have crossed international borders in their writings. For example, Michael Sepidoza Campos, a queer Filipino scholar with a doctorate in cultural studies from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, crosses international borders in his essay “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in Filipino Cultural Spaces.”39 Campos writes about the baklâ, or the “effeminate gay man who personifies Filipino popular conceptions of homosexuality.” He argues that the baklâ’s body both affirms and challenges the “two-gendered conceptualization of human sexuality.”40 Campos takes the reader around the globe, moving from Roman Catholic religious processions in the Philippines to a gay Filipino American Holy Cross procession in New York City. Similarly, Lai-shan Yip, a queer Chinese doctoral student from Hong

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Kong at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, engages in transnational border crossings in her essay “Listening to the Passion of Catholic nu-tongzhi: Developing a Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology in Hong Kong.”41 Yip writes about the struggles that Chinese lesbians, or nu-tongzhi, face in coming out and being accepted by their parish communities, about the need to form a “new Church community of liberation.”42 Joseph Goh, a queer Malaysian doctoral student in gender, sexuality, and theology at Monash University, Malaysia, who also studied at the Graduate Theological Union, has published a number of theological works relating to governmental antagonism toward queer Malaysians, including “The Word Was Not Made Flesh” and “Mak Nyah Bodies as Sacred Sites.”43 Goh is also the editor of the Queer Asian Spirit E-Zine, an international online journal of spiritual writings by LGBTIQ Asians and Asian Americans.44 Campos, Yip, and Goh are members of EQARS, the Emerging Queer Asian Religion Scholars, a group of LGBTIQ Asian and Asian American theologians from around the world who meet monthly via Skype to share their work.45 EQARS members have given presentations at professional conferences, such as the American Academy of Religion, and contributed to a special issue of Theology and Sexuality on queer Asian theologies.46 Recent developments in Asia include the publication in 2010 of a special issue on queer theology in Hong Kong in the Asian feminist journal In God’s Image.47 Rose Wu, an ally of the LGBTIQ Asian community in Hong Kong, documents the rise of the tongzhi movement in Hong Kong from an ecclesial perspective in her works, which include Liberating the Church from Fear.48 A closely related theme to transnational perspectives is that of interfaith reflection. Leng Lim has written about his experiences as a “Buddhistraised Christian convert turning into a syncretist.” That is, Lim insists upon drawing upon Asian traditions, “no matter which Christian accuses me of syncretism.”49 Indeed, Lim has proposed that Asian American Christian leaders can counter the dangers of spiritual abuse with the Bible by drawing on the twin Buddhist traditions of nonattachment to the truth and the practice of mindfulness.50 Perhaps future queer Asian theologians might also draw on the research of scholars such as Ann-Marie Hsiung, on same-sex relations in Confucianism and Taoism, and Yu-chen Li, on reconstructing Buddhist perspectives on homosexuality.51 I have also written about how LGBTIQ Asian Americans have reclaimed the spiritual traditions of their ancestors. These practices can take the form

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of interfaith meditation groups, sacred drum rituals, reflection on sacred texts such as the Dao De Jing, as well as other practices.52 I also wrote an essay on how the Buddhist bodhisattva Kuan Yin can be viewed as a queer Asian Christ. That is, Kuan Yin is queer because s/he has transitioned from male to female in moving from India to China. S/he is Asian because she is currently located in China. And s/he is a christological figure (soteriologically speaking) in that s/he refuses to enter Nirvana before bringing others there first.53 By drawing on the spiritual traditions of their ancestors, LGBTIQ Asian Americans—including those who are Christians—can deepen their connections with the divine. In addition to interfaith reflections by Christians, articles also offer nonChristian religious perspectives. For example, Yuenmei Wong, a doctoral student from Malaysia at the University of Maryland, writes about the Pengkid, a “masculine-looking Malaysian lesbian who is outlawed in Malaysia through Islamic discourses.”54 Wong explores how female masculinities are constructed through the Pengkid identity and how this “growing social phenomenon” will continue to “challenge the emerging fundamentalist Islamic interpretations and sanctions.”55 Finally, the contributions of allies to the LGBTIQ Asian American community are also important. One prominent individual is Kwok Pui-lan, the William F. Cole Professor of Christian Theology and Spirituality at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former president of the American Academy of Religion. Kwok has published a number of works relating to LGBTIQ Asian American issues, including one article about LGBTIQ-positive Asian American churches and another article that critiques the silence of white LGBTIQ theologians with respect to issues of race.56 Another prominent ally is Tat-siong Benny Liew, academic dean and a professor of New Testament studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.57 Like Kwok, Liew has written about the intersections of LGBTIQ and Asian American issues, and has critiqued the silence of ­LGBTIQ biblical scholars with respect to issues of race.58

Conclusion In conclusion, quite a number of works have been written on queer Asian theology since the mid-1990s. Articles have addressed a number of key themes, including Asian and Asian American church exclusion, critiquing

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LGBTIQ racism, and highlighting transnational perspectives. Much work remains to be done, however, with respect to queer Asian American theology. For example, few works address Asian American transgender voices.59 Few LGBTIQ voices are heard doing Christian theology from South Asian (that is, Indian), Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander contexts.60 An increasing number of voices, however, are addressing the transnational boundaries that separate queer Asia from queer Asian America,61 and it will be exciting to see how these boundaries become even more fluid in the future.

Notes This chapter appeared in Patrick S. Cheng, Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality, and Spirit (New York: Seabury Books, 2013). It is reprinted here with permission. 1.  In this chapter, I use the term “Asian American” to describe people of Asian descent living in the United States. As I note elsewhere, there are many ways of referring to such people, including “Asian,” “Asian Pacific American,” “Asian Pacific Islander,” and “API.” See Patrick S. Cheng, “Multiplicity and Judges 19: Constructing a Queer Asian Pacific American Biblical Hermeneutic,” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 123. 2.  Eric H.F. Law, “A Spirituality of Creative Marginality,” in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking (New York: Continuum, 1997), 345. 3.  Patrick S. Cheng, “Gay Asian Masculinities and Christian Theologies,” CrossCurrents 61, no. 4 (2011): 540. 4.  See Patrick S. Cheng, “A Three-Part Sinfonia: Queer Asian Reflections on the Trinity,” in New Overtures: Asian North American Theology in the 21st Century, ed. Eleazar S. Fernandez (Upland, CA: Sopher Press, 2012), 173–191. 5.  See, for example, Adrian Carton, “Desire and Same-Sex Intimacies in Asia,” in Gay Life and Culture: A World History, ed. Robert Aldrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 303–331; Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson, Asian Homosexuality (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992); Giti Thadani, Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India (London: Cassell, 1996); Giovanni Vitiello, The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Tsuneo Watanabe and Junichi Iwata, The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality (London: GMP Publishers, 1989). 6.  For a history of Asian Americans, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and rev. ed. (New York: Bay Back Books, 1998).

Cheng 237 7.  See Gary Y. Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 7. 8.  Nayan Shah, “Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity,” in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 121. 9.  Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 188, 189. 10.  Ibid., 189–190. 11.  See Amy Sueyoshi, Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012). 12.  See Liz Highleyman, “Kiyoshi Kuromiya: Integrating the Issues,” in Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, ed. Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009), 17–21. 13.  See, for example, Eric C. Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). 14.  Michiyo Cornell, “Living in Asian America: An Asian American Lesbian’s Address Before the Washington Monument (1979),” in Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Russell Leong (New York: Routledge, 1996), 83. 15. Leong, Asian American Sexualities. 16.  David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q & A: Queer in Asia America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998). 17.  See, for example, J. R. Tungol, “The Most Influential LGBT Asian Icons,” Huffington Post, October 29, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jr-tungol/lgbt​ -asians_b_2026330.html. 18.  See Patrick S. Cheng, “A Unicorn at the White House,” Huffington Post, July 30, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-patrick-s-cheng-phd/a-unicorn-at​ -the-white-house_b_1709754.html. 19.  See Diane Anderson-Minshall, “Mark Takano Becomes First LGBT Person of Color in Congress,” Advocate.com, November 7, 2012, https://www.advocate​ .com/politics/election/2012/11/07/mark-takano-becomes-first-lgbt-person-color​ -congress. 20.  See Cheng, “Gay Asian Masculinities,” 543. 21.  Leng Leroy Lim, “The Gay Erotics of My Stuttering Mother Tongue,” Amerasia 22, no. 1 (1996): 173, 174. 22.  See Leng Leroy Lim, “Webs of Betrayal, Webs of Blessings,” in Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship, ed. Robert E. Goss and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1997), 227–241. 23.  Leng Leroy Lim, “ ‘The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself ’: The Crisis in Asian American Spiritual Leadership,” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 320.

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24.  Leng Lim with Kim-Hao Yap and Tuck-Leong Lee, “The Mythic-Literalists in the Province of Southeast Asia,” in Other Voices, Other Worlds: The Global Church Speaks Out on Homosexuality, ed. Terry Brown (New York: Church Publishing, 2006), 59. 25. Brown, Other Voices, Other Worlds. 26.  Michael Kim, “Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World,” in Asian American X: An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices, ed. Arar Han and John Hsu (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 147. For a discussion of Korean immigrant Protestant churches and the issue of homosexuality, see Eunai Shrake, “Homosexuality and Korean Immigrant Protestant Churches,” in Embodying Asian/American Sexualities, ed. Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 145–156. 27.  Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion, “Asian and Pacific Islander Roundtable” (Berkeley: University of California), https://clgs.org/our-work​ /roundtable-projects/asian-and-pacific-islander-roundtable. 28.  Network on Religion and Justice for Asian Pacific Islander Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People, http://netrj.org. 29.  Queer Asian Spirit, http://queerasianspirit.org. 30.  Law, “A Spirituality of Creative Marginality, 344, 345–346. Law is currently the director of the Kaleidoscope Institute, which offers training programs to develop “competent leaders in a diverse, changing world.” 31.  Eric H.F. Law, The Word at the Crossings: Living the Good News in a Multicontextual Community (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004), 87. 32.  Cheng, “Multiplicity and Judges 19,” 125–127. 33.  Patrick S. Cheng, “Reclaiming Our Traditions, Rituals, and Spaces: Spirituality and the Queer Asian Pacific American Experience,” Spiritus 6, no. 2 (2006): 234–240. 34.  Patrick S. Cheng, “Galatians,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest et al. (London: SCM Press, 2006), 629. 35.  Patrick S. Cheng, “ ‘I Am Yellow and Beautiful’: Reflections on Queer Asian Spirituality and Gay Male Cyberculture,” Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion 2, no. 3 (2011): 3. 36.  Cheng, “Gay Asian Masculinities,” 542; see also Indie Harper, “NO Asians, Blacks, Fats, or Femmes,” in For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, ed. Keith Boykin (New York: Magnus Books, 2012), 129–135. 37.  See Patrick S. Cheng, Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology (New York: Seabury Books, 2011), 74–77. 38.  Patrick S. Cheng, From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ (New York: Seabury Books, 2012), 133–145; see also “Rethinking Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today,” in Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection,

Cheng 239 ed. Marvin M. Ellison and Kelly Brown Douglas, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 114–115. 39.  Michael Sepidoza Campos, “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in Filipino Cultural Spaces,” in Queer Religion, vol. 2: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 167–191. 40.  Campos, “The Baklâ,” 167–168. 41.  Lai-shan Yip, “Listening to the Passion of Catholic nu-tongzhi: Developing a Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology in Hong Kong,” in Queer Religion, 63–80. 42.  Yip, “Listening to the Passion,” 76. 43.  Joseph N. Goh, “The Word Was Not Made Flesh: Theological Reflections on the Banning of Seksualiti Merdeka 2011,” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 51, no. 2 (2012): 145–154; and “Mak Nyah Bodies as Sacred Sites: Uncovering the Queer Body-Sacramentality of Malaysian Male-to-Female Transsexuals,” CrossCurrents 62, no. 4 (2012): 512–521. 44.  For the inaugural issue of the journal, see Queer Asian Spirit E-Zine 1 (2012), http://www.queerasianspirit.org/qas-e-zine-volume-1.html. 45.  See Emerging Asian Pacific Islander Queer Religion Scholars, http://www​ .eqars.org. Other members of EQARS include Hugo Córdov Quero, Elizabeth Leung, Miak Siew, and myself. 46.  See Kent L. Brintnall, ed., Theology and Sexuality 17, no. 3 (2011): 233–352. 47.  Rose Wu, ed., “Beyond Right and Wrong: Doing Queer Theology in Hong Kong,” In God’s Image 29, no. 3 (2010). 48.  Rose Wu, Liberating the Church from Fear: The Story of Hong Kong’s Sexual Minorities (Kowloon: Hong Kong Women Christian Council, 2000). 49.  Lim, “Gay Erotics,” 176, 175. 50.  Lim, “The Bible Tells Me,” 321–322. 51.  Ann-Marie Hsiung, “Gender and Same-Sex Relations in Confucianism and Taoism,” in Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, ed. Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plaskow (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 99–134; and Yu-chen Li, “Reconstructing Buddhist Perspectives on Homosexuality: Enlightenment from the Study of the Body,” in Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion, 135–153. 52.  Cheng, “Reclaiming Our Traditions,” 236–237. 53.  Patrick S. Cheng, “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ” (unpublished paper, 2003), http://www.patrickcheng.net/uploads/7/0/3/7/7037096/kuan​ _yin_mirror_of_the_queer_asian_christ.pdf. 54.  Yuenmei Wong, “Islam, Sexuality, and the Marginal Positioning of Pengkids and Their Girlfriends in Malaysia,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 1. 55.  Ibid., 14.

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56.  See Kwok Pui-lan, “Asian and Asian American Churches,” in Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jeffrey S. Siker (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 59–61; “Body and Pleasure in Postcoloniality,” in Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honor of Marcella Althaus-Reid, ed. Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan (London: SCM Press, 2010), 31–43; Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press, 2005); and “Touching the Taboo: On the Sexuality of Jesus,” in Sexuality and the Sacred, 119–134. 57.  Since the original publication of this chapter, Tat-siong Benny Liew has moved to College of the Holy Cross, where he is 1956 Chair in New Testament Studies in the Religious Studies Department. 58.  See Tat-siong Benny Liew, “(Cor)Responding: A Letter to the Editor,” in Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, ed. Ken Stone (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001), 182–192; and “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-­ Examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering World across Different Worlds,” in They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism, ed. Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009), 251–288. 59.  One such work is Two Spirit, One Heart, which tells the story of a Japanese American mother and her transgender son. See Marsha Aizumi with Aiden Aizumi, Two Spirits, One Heart: A Mother, Her Transgender Son, and Their Journey to Love and Acceptance (Arcadia, CA: Peony Press, 2012). For an overview of the challenges faced by many Asian American transgender people, see National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “Injustice at Every Turn: A Look at Asian American, South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander Respondents in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey,” July 19, 2011, https://www.thetaskforce.org/injustice-every-turn-report​ -national-transgender-discrimination-survey. 60.  See Brown, Other Voices, Other Worlds. 61.  See Ramón A. Guitiérrez, ed., “Further Desire: Asian and Asian American Sexualities,” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 2 (2011): i–168; see also Travis S.K. Kong, Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy (London: Routledge, 2011); Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Fran Martin et al., eds., AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

Bibliography Aizumi, Marsha, and Aiden Aizumi. Two Spirits, One Heart: A Mother, Her Transgender Son, and Their Journey to Love and Acceptance. Arcadia, CA: Peony Press, 2012. Brintnall, Kent L., ed. Theology and Sexuality 17, no. 3 (2011): 233–352.

Cheng 241 Campos, Michael Sepidoza. “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in Filipino Cultural Spaces.” In Queer Religion Volume 2: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson, 167–191. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012. Carton, Adrian. “Desire and Same-Sex Intimacies in Asia.” In Gay Life and Culture: A World History, edited by Robert Aldrich. 303–331. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Cheng, Patrick S. From Sin to Amazing Grace: Discovering the Queer Christ. New York: Seabury Books, 2012. ———. “Galatians.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache, 624–629. London: SCM Press, 2006. ———. “Gay Asian Masculinities and Christian Theologies.” CrossCurrents 61, no. 4 (2011): 540–548. ———. “ ‘I Am Yellow and Beautiful’: Reflections on Queer Asian Spirituality and Gay Male Cyberculture.” Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion 2, no. 3 (2011): 1–21. http://techandreligion.com/Resources/Cheng%20JTTR.pdf. ———. “Kuan Yin: Mirror of the Queer Asian Christ.” Unpublished paper, 2003. http://www.patrickcheng.net/uploads/7/0/3/7/7037096/kuan_yin_mirror_of​ _the_queer_asian_christ.pdf. ———. “Multiplicity and Judges 19: Constructing a Queer Asian Pacific American Biblical Hermeneutic.” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 119–133. ———. Radical Love: Introduction to Queer Theology. New York: Seabury Books, 2011. ———. Rainbow Theology: Bridging Race, Sexuality, and Spirit. New York: Seabury Books, 2013. ———. “Reclaiming Our Traditions, Rituals, and Spaces: Spirituality and the Queer Asian Pacific American Experience.” Spiritus 6, no. 2 (2006): 234–240. ———. “Rethinking Sin and Grace for LGBT People Today.” In Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, edited by Marvin M. Ellison and Kelly Brown Douglas, 2nd ed., 105–118. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. ———. “A Three-Part Sinfonia: Queer Asian Reflections on the Trinity.” In New Overtures: Asian North American Theology in the 21st Century, edited by Eleazar S. Fernandez, 173–191. Upland, CA: Sopher Press, 2012. Cornell, Michiyo. “Living in Asian America: An Asian American Lesbian’s Address Before the Washington Monument (1979).” In Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience, edited by Russell Leong, 83–84. New York: Routledge, 1996. Dynes, Wayne R., and Stephen Donaldson. Asian Homosexuality. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

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Eng, David L., and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q & A: Queer in Asia America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1998. Goh, Joseph N. “Mak Nyah Bodies as Sacred Sites: Uncovering the Queer BodySacramentality of Malaysian Male-to-Female Transsexuals.” CrossCurrents 62, no. 4 (2012): 512–521. Goh, Joseph N. “The Word Was Not Made Flesh: Theological Reflections on the Banning of Seksualiti Merdeka 2011.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 51, no. 2 (2012): 145–154. Guitiérrez, Ramón A., ed. “Further Desire: Asian and Asian American Sexualities.” Amerasia Journal 37, no. 2 (2011): i–168. Harper, Indie. “NO Asians, Blacks, Fats, or Femmes.” In For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Still Not Enough, edited by Keith Boykin, 129–135. New York: Magnus Books, 2012. Highleyman, Liz. “Kiyoshi Kuromiya: Integrating the Issues.” In Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, 17–21. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009. Hsiung, Ann-Marie. “Gender and Same-Sex Relations in Confucianism and Taoism.” In Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, edited by Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plaskow, 99–134. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007. Kim, Michael. “Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World.” In Asian American X: An Intersection of Twenty-First Century Asian American Voices, edited by Arar Han and John Hsu, 139–148. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Kong, Travis S.K. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. London: Routledge, 2011. Kwok Pui-lan. “Asian and Asian American Churches.” In Homosexuality and Religion: An Encyclopedia, edited by Jeffrey S. Siker, 59–61. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007. ———. “Body and Pleasure in Postcoloniality.” In Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honor of Marcella Althaus-Reid, edited by Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan, 31–43. London: SCM Press, 2010. ———. Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster Knox Press, 2005. ———. “Touching the Taboo: On the Sexuality of Jesus.” In Sexuality and the Sacred: Sources for Theological Reflection, 2nd ed., edited by Marvin M. Ellison and Kelly Brown Douglas, 119–134. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. Law, Eric H.F. The Word at the Crossings: Living the Good News in a Multicontextual Community. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2004. ———. “A Spirituality of Creative Marginality.” In Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical

Cheng 243 Anthology, edited by Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking, 343–346. New York: Continuum, 1997. Li, Yu-chen. “Reconstructing Buddhist Perspectives on Homosexuality: Enlightenment from the Study of the Body.” In Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, edited by Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plaskow, 135–153. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2007. Liew, Tat-siong Benny. “(Cor)Responding: A Letter to the Editor.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 182–192. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2001. ———. “Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Examining John’s Engendering and Transgendering World Across Different Worlds.” In They Were All Together in One Place? Toward Minority Biblical Criticism, edited by Randall C. Bailey, Tat-siong Benny Liew, and Fernando F. Segovia, 251–288. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009. Lim, Leng Leroy. “ ‘The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself ’: The Crisis in Asian American Spiritual Leadership.” Semeia 90/91 (2002): 315–322. ———. “The Gay Erotics of My Stuttering Mother Tongue.” Amerasia 22, no. 1 (1996): 172–176. ———. “Webs of Betrayal, Webs of Blessings.” In Our Families, Our Values: Snapshots of Queer Kinship, edited by Robert E. Goss and Amy Adams Squire Strongheart, 227–241. Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 1997. Lim, Leng Leroy, with Kim-Hao Yap and Tuck-Leong Lee. “The Mythic-Literalists in the Province of Southeast Asia.” In Other Voices, Other Worlds: The Global Church Speaks Out on Homosexuality, edited by Terry Brown, 58–76. New York: Church Publishing, 2006. Manalansan, Martin F. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Martin, Fran, Peter A. Jackson, Mark McLelland, and Audrey Yue, eds. AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Okihiro, Gary Y. The Columbia Guide to Asian American History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Shah, Nayan. “Perversity, Contamination, and the Dangers of Queer Domesticity.” In Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi, 121–141. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Shrake, Eunai. “Homosexuality and Korean Immigrant Protestant Churches.” In Embodying Asian/American Sexualities, edited by Gina Masequesmay and Sean Metzger, 145–156. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Sueyoshi, Amy. Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012.

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Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown, 1993. ———. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and rev. ed. New York: Bay Back Books, 1998. Vitiello, Giovanni. The Libertine’s Friend: Homosexuality and Masculinity in Late Imperial China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Wat, Eric C. The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. Watanabe, Tsuneo, and Junichi Iwata. The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality. London: GMP Publishers, 1989. Wong, Yuenmei. “Islam, Sexuality, and the Marginal Positioning of Pengkids and Their Girlfriends in Malaysia.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16, no. 4 (2012): 435–448. Wu, Rose. Liberating the Church from Fear: The Story of Hong Kong’s Sexual Minorities. Kowloon: Hong Kong Women Christian Council, 2000. Yip, Lai-shan. “Listening to the Passion of Catholic nu-tongzhi: Developing a Catholic Lesbian Feminist Theology in Hong Kong.” In Queer Religion, vol. 2, LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, edited by Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson, 63–80. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012.

12 The Roots of Chinese American Religious Nones Continuities with the Liyi Tradition Seanan Fong and Russell Jeung

The main element of all religion is the moral code controlling and regulating the relations and acts of individuals towards “God, neighbor, and self ”; and this intelligent “heathenism” was taught thousands of years before Christianity existed or Jewry borrowed it. —Wong Chin Foo, “Why Am I a Heathen?”

Wong Chin Foo, an early Chinese American author writing for the North American Review, exemplifies a view of religion that he inherited. The main element of religion, he asserts, is its moral code in governing practices and relationships, in how religion is lived out. He later argues for the superiority of Chinese “heathenism” over American Christianity by admitting skepticism about God’s predestination for those who are to be saved and by asserting that Chinese families raised their children to be more dutiful and morally responsible than Americans. These two elements of Wong’s “heathenism”—his religious skepticism and his value for filiality—are historical foreshadowings of today’s high rates of Chinese American religious nones. In this chapter, we argue that the reasons why more than half of Chinese Americans (52 percent) do not affiliate 245

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with any religion—the highest rate of any ethnic group in the United States— stem from these elements. Despite strong forces of cultural change, including modernization, migration, and racialization, Chinese Americans continue to be shaped by their transnational roots. Strikingly, Chinese Americans are the most nonreligious ethnic group in the United States. According to the 2012 Pew study on Asian American religiosity, “half of Chinese Americans (52%) describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, including 15% who say they are atheist or agnostic.” For the second generation, the proportion of nonreligious is even higher, at 59 percent. That rate is relative to 26 percent of Asian Americans generally, and just 19 percent of the overall American public.1 This high rate of Chinese American nonreligiousness bucks the trend that religion is typically salient for immigrants, migration tending to reinforce and magnify religiosity among new Americans.2 Immigration as a “theologizing experience” has dominated the study of the religions of American ethnic minorities, including the study of Chinese Americans.3 Nevertheless, nonreligious Chinese Americans tend to differ from other newcomers, who find religion to be more salient in their new homeland. Why do Chinese Americans self-identify as nonreligious? Clearly, sociological factors play a major role in this trend.4 Those from the People’s Republic of China come from a nation where the government is officially atheist. A high percentage of Chinese Americans arrive through selective immigration, which privileges scientists and engineers, who are more likely to be nonreligious. In addition, Chinese Americans have less access to Chinese religious institutions. The United States has far fewer Chinese temples and shrines than China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Asian countries with overseas Chinese do. Finally, the racialization of Chinese popular religion as foreign and superstitious discourages Chinese Americans from identifying with that tradition. Yet underlying these sociological factors are deep historical influences that explain the nonreligiousness of Chinese Americans. Chinese American religiosity, as well as nonreligiousness, must be understood in its transnational and historical context, which reflects the complexity and nuances of Chinese religiosity. This chapter details the three historical strands that account for Chinese American nonreligiousness. First, the ancient Chinese world of thought had a radically different notion of religion, that of ritual and righteous relations (liyi 禮義), in contrast to that of belief and belonging characteristic in



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the West. Exclusive affiliation to one religious tradition was not necessary. Second, this particular religious repertoire allowed a vigorous tradition of religious skepticism to thrive. The skepticism was mainly expressed as part of the Confucian tradition and was characterized by both an agnosticism and a pragmatism toward religious rituals and supernatural beings. Third, the orthodox, premodern notion of Chinese civilizational identity and its emphasis on filiality were deeply in tension with the demands of religious membership. We can see this pattern weaving through Chinese anti-Buddhist and, later, anti-Christian movements. Using the case of Wong Chin Foo, we trace these historical threads in action in the early Chinese American context. We conclude with an examination of contemporary Chinese American familism, which we suggest serves many religious functions for those who claim no religion.

Western Discourses of Secularism and Nonreligiousness In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor devotes himself to answering the question of how, in the West, it became widely possible not to owe one’s allegiance to God. Put more concretely, “why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”5 This kind of question motivates much of the current scholarship on the rise of nonreligiousness and secularism, whether in the West or elsewhere. Here the underlying assumption is that hegemonic religious belonging and belief is the norm, and any deviation from it is the puzzle to be explained. Because American Judeo-Christian faith traditions emphasize belief in religious teachings and in membership to denominations, these paradigmatic assumptions about religious participation have been valid and reliable. The rise of religious nones, then, is thus assumed to relate to nonbelief and nonbelonging. For instance, the title of Joseph Baker and Buster Smith’s article, “None Too Simple: Examining Issues of Religious Nonbelief and Nonbelonging in the United States” reflects this paradigm.6 Even while being contested, the belief and belonging religious paradigm assumes binaries between belief and nonbelief, belonging and nonbelonging. Hence the spiritual but not religious category assumes a bifurcation of two concepts: religion is tied to organized, traditional faith traditions, and spirituality is connected to hybridized, individualistic orientations toward the transcendent.

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Asian American sociologists of religion also use the belief and belonging paradigm, especially when studying Christianity. Fenggang Yang includes four elements in his definition of a religion, which highlights belief: a belief in the supernatural; a set of beliefs regarding life and the world; a set of rituals manifesting the beliefs; and a distinct social organization of moral community of believers and practitioners.7 Carolyn Chen prioritizes belonging, defining religion as “living traditions of meaning grounded in institutionalized communities.”8 Their definitions apply to the traditions they study, including Christianity and Buddhism. Nevertheless, they are not useful in explaining why so many Chinese Americans report being nonreligious.

Chinese Liyi Religious Discourse and Religious Skepticism Chinese and Chinese American nonreligiousness should not be conflated with Western secularism: the Chinese religious life is vastly different from the kind of spiritual terrain that gave rise to Western secularism. Specifically, Chinese society has historically lacked the kind of demand for particular religious belief or belonging that Christianity wielded in the West.9 Instead, its religious traditions emphasized the right practice of rituals and righteousness in one’s relationships, which we term liyi (禮義 ritual and righteous relations) religious discourse.10 The Chinese do not believe in religion as much as they do religion.11 The word li (禮) can be translated as rites, etiquette, or ritual. Chinese regularly performed them, such as ancestor veneration or wedding practices, both to fulfill moral obligations and to instill normative values such as filiality.12 Likewise, yi (義) involves righteous and responsible conduct, especially in relationships. It relates to actions that are the right and moral thing to do.13 Both Confucianism and Chinese popular religion reflect this orientation towards orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Thus, this liyi orientation enabled Chinese to practice religion with no requirement to hold particular beliefs about the entities posited by their use. For example, when questioned about what they actually believed in practicing certain rituals, a Cantonese villager balked at the suggestion that beliefs were in any way relevant, saying, “We just do the rites in the proper way and we don’t worry about what any of that stuff means. I doubt the ancestors care either.”14 Further, Chinese religious life was marked instead by what scholars have



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tried through the decades to capture as “henotheism,” “syncretism,” “hybridity,” “pluralism,” or recently, the “Chinese religious repertoire.”15 Thus, Chinese drew freely from Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and popular religious practices in their own lives—these traditions did not demand exclusivity of their adherents. Instead, they added sets of beliefs and practices to the repertoire of religious “tools” available to society. The repertoire approach to religiosity helps explain the 52 percent figure of religious nonaffiliation of Chinese Americans today: given the Chinese historical background, it would simply not make sense to affiliate religiously and belong to one tradition or denomination in the way that Westerners do. This phenomenon, of course, is consistent with findings among Chinese in other societies.16 Thus, whereas in Taylor’s Christian West it was a marvel that people would start identifying as religiously unaffiliated, to do so for Chinese Americans is no deviation from the historical pattern of Chinese religiosity. Within this milieu deemphasizing belief, Chinese society harbored another key difference from Taylor’s Christian West, a robust tradition of religious skepticism.

The Chinese Skeptical Tradition When asked about serving the spirits of the dead, Confucius (孔子, 551–479 BCE) replied, “While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits? . . . While you do not know life, how can you know about death?”17 Confucius’ response to this inquiry about the afterlife captures the two key aspects of the Chinese skeptical tradition: an overriding pragmatic concern for the right thing to do, supported by an agnostic attitude toward knowledge of the supernatural. Such skeptical discourses were not confined to the elite in classical China, but the agnostic attitude toward the supernatural and, in particular, toward religious ritual was promulgated as orthodoxy across all social strata. Most notably, the Song dynasty scholar Zhu Xi (朱熹, 1130–1200 CE), known as the greatest Neo-Confucian thinker, sought to standardize ritual practice for both elites and commoners in his liturgical guidebook Family Rituals (家禮 Jia Li). This work enabled the skeptical understanding of ritual to become even more highly accessible and pervasive in Chinese society. In addressing the role of ritual, Zhu Xi and his interlocutors “did not debate what ancestors were or how they were affected by offerings of food or drink.” Instead, they

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analyzed ancestral rites in terms of their symbolism, especially the ways they symbolized the hierarchy of society.18 Participation in these rituals reaffirmed the proper roles and relationships that constituted normative Chinese society. Books such as Family Rituals were widely circulated and widely influential. Arguably, a kind of skeptical orthodoxy was established, promoting and promoted by the pluralist repertoire approach to religious belief in Chinese society. Through subsequent dynasties, the Confucian establishment’s “commitment to secular principles remained intact,” surviving dynastic change and foreign invasion. This skeptical tradition is a precursor to today’s Chinese American nonreligiousness.

Moralized Chineseness and Its Tensions with Buddhism and Christianity Along with religious skepticism, the traditional conception of Chinese civilizational identity was itself deeply in tension with religious belonging and belief, at least with regard to Buddhism and Christianity. Chinese identity, in the Confucian sense, was grounded in cultural norms marked foremost by rightness in human relationships. Under this formulation, then, “Chineseness” was at its core a moral identity. Furthermore, anything that interfered with the centrality of human relationships undercut that moral identity. Because movements like Buddhism, and later Christianity, challenged this relationship-centered morality, they were critically at odds with Chineseness itself.

Moralized Chinese Identity The view of Han Yu (韓愈, 768–824 CE, Tang) represents the moralized conception of Chinese civilizational identity. “One of the most important figures in the history of Confucianism,” Han Yu wrote the summative work Essentials of the Moral Way (原道 Yuandao). “Nothing less than an attempt to define the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese civilization,” the Essentials was striking in how it brought together key classical resources to answer the burning questions of his time.19 Within the context of the cosmopolitan, multinational Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), in which the Chinese (華 Hua) intermingled with the “barbarians” (胡 Hu), those questions included “Who are we?,” “What makes us Chinese?,” and “What sets us apart?” In this setting, Han Yu’s Essentials crystallized the traditional self-understanding of moralized Chineseness.



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This moralized notion of Chineseness turned on two key steps. The first was to base Chineseness not on a tribal or racial definition, but instead a cultural one. That is, to be Chinese was to adopt Chinese culture. In support of this approach, the Essentials refers to Confucius’s own example. In deciding how to compile the histories of the Chinese “central states” (中國 zhongguo) Han Yu would count those who behaved in a “civilized” way as Chinese, and those who behaved in an “uncivilized” way as “barbarian.” Thus, those who adopted Chinese cultural standards were to be considered Chinese. The second step established these Chinese cultural standards. It canonized the “teachings of the former kings,” the Confucian classics that depicted an idealized ancient culture. The essence of that morality was the observance and practice of proper social relations (人倫 renlun). These relations were later sanctified by the seminal Confucian thinker Mencius (孟子, 372–289 BCE): “Between parent and child, there should be affection; between lord and subject, righteousness; between husband and wife, attention to their separate functions; between old and young, a proper order; and between friends, fidelity.”20 Under this vision of proper civilization, these relationships formed the foundation of life; thus, the correct maintenance of these human relationships determined both how moral and how truly Chinese one was. Because they involved concrete human relations, the emphasis was on the actual practice of morality (and Chineseness) in the tangible world. Among these relationships defining moralized Chineseness, the parentchild relationship, encapsulated in the notion of filiality (孝 xiao), was crucial. Under standard classical interpretations, this relationship was the foundation for all the others. Specifically, it is where empathy is first understood and cultivated, making possible the right approach to all other relationships. This argument is first advanced in the Analects: The philosopher You said, “They are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors. There have been none, who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion. . . . Filiality and fraternity—are they not the root of all benevolent actions?”21

Another classical text, the Classic of Filiality (孝經 Xiaojing), expands the argument that “for teaching the people to be affectionate and loving, there

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is nothing better than filiality.”22 It lays out how filiality is the root of moral conduct for every class of society, from the emperor himself, to the commoner, even to the way of Heaven and Earth. Filiality was thus the moral core of what it meant to be Chinese. This moralized Chineseness later would clash with foreign “religion,” exemplified by its tense relationship with Buddhism and, later, Christianity.

Moralized Chineseness at Odds with Buddhism Under the moralized notion of Chineseness, anything that interfered with the rightness of relationships according to Chinese standards was a clear threat to morals and Chineseness. Buddhism, with its call to otherworldly concerns, improper rituals, celibacy, and monastic life away from the family, fell squarely into that category. Indeed, one tradition of anti-Buddhist rhetoric (among many) based its objections on the specific ways that Buddhism demanded un-Chinese conduct. For example, commentators in this tradition called attention to how Buddhism violated the proper Chinese relation between parent and child. From the first introduction of Buddhism to China in the Han Dynasty, the upending of the child’s obligation to demonstrate filiality was a primary concern to Chinese. Concerns based on filiality were clearly reflected in the Mouzi (‌牟 子), an early Buddhist apologetic, in which the author’s interlocutor asks why Buddhist monks do “injury” to their bodies by cutting their hair, and “injury” to the lineage by not marrying and having progeny. Both of these represented grievous instances of unfiliality (不孝 buxiao): by doing injury to one’s body, one is disrespecting what one’s parents have given life to, and by failing to have progeny, one commits the grave sin of depriving one’s parents of descendants to serve them as ancestors.23 Further, Gong Chong (Han), although a Taoist, also essentially used the Confucian charge of unfiliality against Buddhism. Not only did Buddhism encourage celibacy, it also encouraged the neglect of the entire family—parents, spouses, and children—in the practice of leaving the home to join the monastery (出家 chujia).24 Similarly, Buddhism violated the right Chinese relationship between subject and superior. According to the Confucian tradition, every subject in the realm—including monks—owed loyalty (忠 zhong) demonstrated through obedience to their ruler. Yet the behavior of Buddhist monastics as “sojourners beyond the limits” implied that monks were “not to be bound by Confu-



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cian doctrines of propriety, to whom the moral imperatives governing lord and subject are irrelevant.”25 This conflict erupted in court debates in which Confucians insisted that Buddhist monks prostrate themselves before the emperor as every other subject did. One Confucian, Xun Ji (Liang), claimed that common Buddhist practices, such as calling temples by the term “palace,” were in fact “reducing the Confucian code of social relationships to confusion” by inverting the subject-to-lord relationship.26 Interestingly, the arrival of Buddhism itself catalyzed the formation and self-awareness of this moralized Chinese identity. Indeed, Han Yu had Buddhism specifically in mind in a crucial passage in the Essentials that brings out the centrality of human relationships: Yet today those who would rectify their minds do so by rejecting the empire and state and by abrogating the natural principles of human relations: although they are sons, they do not regard their fathers as fathers. Although ministers, they do not regard their ruler as ruler. Although subjects, they do not attend to their duties. . . . Yet today we elevate barbarian practices and place them above the teachings of our former kings. How long will it be before we ourselves have all become barbarians?27

By crystallizing and making explicit the moralized notion of Chineseness in the Essentials, as well as elevating this standard through his influence, Han Yu set the very identity of Chineseness in opposition to Buddhism for subsequent eras. This identity would apply to any other practice, belief, or institution that would likewise fit that mold, including Christianity a few centuries later.

Moralized Chineseness at Odds with Christianity Arguments very similar to anti-Buddhist polemics, and often even more strident and salacious, were deployed against Christianity from the seventeenth century onward, during the late Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644– 1912) dynasties. Once again, filiality came to the fore. The official Yang Guangxian (1597– 1669, Qing) wrote passionately against Christianity because of its conflicts with the proper relationships between parent and child, as well as between

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inferior and superior. In the work I Could Not Do Otherwise (不得已 Budeyi), he writes, How much the more do we Confucians base our teachings on these natural relationships [between parent and child]? But the Lord of Heaven, Jesus, was nailed to death because He broke His country’s laws. This was no case of recognizing the relationship between ruler and subject. Jesus’ mother, Mary, had a husband called Joseph. But they say that Jesus was not begotten by His father. Moreover, the people who take refuge in their religion are not permitted to present offerings to the ancestral tablets. This is no recognition of the relationship between father and son.28

A Record of Facts to Ward of Heterodoxy (辟邪紀實 Bixiejishi) was one particularly salacious anti-Christian tract, first produced in 1861 by “the most heartbroken man in the world.” Even though much of the tract makes lewd characterizations of Christians, in some places it similarly appeals to the implicit notion of a moralized Chineseness. One section responds line by line to a fictionalized missionary “John’s” claim that Chinese are depraved because they are nonbelievers: Let me ask: this evidence of human depravity, this sinfulness of the Chinese, does it consist in the moral obligations which we uphold, the Confucian teachings? Fortunate it is that the believers are few and the nonbelievers many! If [the Christians] were to get their way in China and draw us all into their evil fold, there would no longer be any place for our posterity.29

Indeed, as this and other works showed, Christianity faced fervent opposition because it was seen to threaten the foundations of public morality and Chinese civilization itself. Moralized Chineseness thus set up a natural opposition to “religiosity” as exemplified by Buddhism and Christianity. Even as this understanding of Chineseness faced significant challenges in the modern era and, for Chinese Americans, in the process of migration to the United States, nevertheless a distilled, familized Chineseness would duplicate and continue the tension between “religiousness” and human relationships. An early Chinese American example was Wong Chin Foo.



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Wong Chin Foo: A Late Nineteenth-Century Chinese American Example Although separated from America by centuries and continents, the three historical threads discussed are highly relevant to the Chinese American context, as is made bountifully evident in a piece by Wong Chin Foo (王清福, 1847–1898) titled “Why Am I a Heathen?” The first Chinese American to use the term “Chinese American,” Wong was a fierce advocate for the early Chinese American community, in some ways a progenitor of the Asian American movement decades after his time. Having spent his education and his career in America, and being one of the first to adopt American citizenship, he was through and through a Chinese American. In “Why Am I a Heathen?,” published in 1887 in the North American Review, Wong defends why he is not a Christian, explicitly using his Chinese identity to explain his choice. As a representative of one early, fully Chinese American experience, this piece gives clear expression to the historical roots described in dialogue with its American context. That expression lends strength to the claim that those historical roots are indeed relevant to the Chinese American experience. Although most of the piece is more of an attack on Christianity—as he knew it—than a defense of so-called heathenism, the lens through which he attacks is indicative of the Chinese historical threads described, as well as the liyi religious repertoire employed by Chinese. For example, the disconnect between the demands of religious membership in the Western cultural context versus the repertoire approach in the Chinese context is evident in one section in which he derides Christian evangelism: “Unlike Christianity, ‘our’ Church is not eager for converts; but, like Free Masonry, we think our religious doctrine strong enough to attract the seekers after light and truth to offer themselves without urging, or proselytizing efforts.”30 Wong thus finds it distasteful to seek out newcomers to “join” one’s faith; instead, he sees that the emphasis should rather be on the rational individual to find and practice the “light and truth” on their own. Wong also reflects the skeptical tradition—in particular the worldly emphasis encouraged by the early Confucian thinkers—in defending his so-called heathenism: None of [the religions of China, that is, Taoism and Buddhism] were rational enough to become the abiding faith of an intelligent people;

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but when we began to reason we succeeded in making society better and its government more protective and our great Reasoner, Confucius, reduced our various social and religious ideas into book form and so perpetuated them.31

Finally, in criticizing Christianity, he hearkens to the moralized Chineseness (“us”), and particularly the importance of human relationships, especially between parent and child: On the whole, the Christian way strikes us as decidedly an unnatural one; it is everyone for himself—parents and children even. Imagine my feelings, if my own son, whom I loved better than my own life, for whom I had sacrificed all my comforts and luxury, should, through some selfish motive, go to law with me. . . . Is this a rare Christian case? Can it be charged against heathenism?32

It is clear that the historical threads described survived at least one trip across the Pacific, namely, Wong’s. Obviously, Wong’s story is not the story of every Chinese American—in fact, the same journal featured a rebuttal to Wong’s piece just one month later by another Chinese American, titled “Why I Am Not a Heathen.” Nevertheless, Wong’s piece demonstrates how these historical roots played very obviously into what it meant to be a nonreligious Chinese American. Further, as a forebear to contemporary Chinese American-ness, Wong’s identity makes the piece an important part of the story of Chinese American nonreligiousness on its own.

Early Twenty-First Century Nonreligious Chinese Americans: Continuities with the Liyi Skeptical Tradition We suggest that the Western conceptualization of religion along the dimensions of belief and belonging are less than adequate in understanding either Chinese religious history or the contemporary religious experiences of Chinese in the United States today. Instead, we argue that an East Asian liyi spiritual discourse, which emphasizes moral rituals (li) and right relationships (yi), is a more appropriate framework to discuss and analyze the spirituality of Chinese Americans. Even for the second, third, and fourth generations of



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these groups who are self-identified as nonreligious, an emphasis on rituals and relationships better accounts for their spiritual realities. In examining the moral rituals of Chinese young adults, as well as their understanding of virtuous relationships, we better distinguish and capture their religious sensibilities and values. Categorization as religious nones does them a disservice; they do lead devout lives of devotion and c­ ommitment— even the atheists. Data from the Pew Research study “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” as well as from forty in-depth interviews of second-­ generation, nonreligious Chinese Americans, demonstrate how Chinese Americans may be characterized with a hybridized “familism” that shapes their ultimate aims and ethics.33 In exploring the ultimate values of nonreligious Chinese Americans, Russell Jeung argues that Chinese Americans have developed a “unique, hybridized sensibility” called Chinese American familism. Distilled from Confucian and Chinese popular religious values and practice, this orientation employs the discourse of family sacrifice and responsibility, as exemplified by immigrant parents giving up their desires for their children’s sake. It then becomes the central narrative on which second-generation Chinese Americans draw when identifying their deepest and most meaningful life activities.34 For example, Jeung shared the story of one interviewee who was single and in his twenties but already saving for his future child’s college. When queried about the possibility of his never having his own family, he said that he would give those savings to his cousin’s child; his cousin was like a brother to him. Such strength of family ties was not uncommon. As a form of broader, moralized Chineseness, this familism, too, has retained some tensions with religious belonging. Indeed, Chinese American religious nones critique Christianity for being too exclusive, hypocritical, and judgmental relative to their family’s moral standards. They particularly resisted prioritizing religious demands over family ties.35 These tensions help explain the Chinese American nonreligiousness we see today. Undoubtedly, major changes have disrupted each history we have described here. Modernization and secularization have challenged the five key relationships of Confucianism and their underpinnings.36 Communist policies critiqued feudal practices and instead institutionalized atheism as the state religion.37 Through the migration process, Chinese immigrants have become unmoored from the cultural and institutional supports for Chinese popular religion and family structures.38 Indeed, the aspects of Chinese

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e­ thnicity that become distilled, maintained, and recreated in the United States are those suited for its post-industrial economy; what remains are the Chinese value of education, which acts as cultural capital and the maintenance of strong, family ties, which in turn serve as social capital.39 Nevertheless, today’s Chinese American familism has flourished with its roots in the three historical strands we have introduced. First, the Chinese liyi religious repertoire, which focuses on rituals and righteous relations, privileges the ethical dimensions of religion, that of doing religion rather than believing in religion. Consequently, Chinese Americans today do not necessarily affiliate with specific religious traditions but still practice many spiritual activities. For instance, 24 percent of young adult Chinese Americans who are atheists and 12 percent of those who are “nothing in particular” maintain home shrines.40 Among our forty respondents, all celebrated Lunar New Year festivities, which included religious taboos, eating of special foods, and temple visits. Most said they would continue to honor this family practice with their own children to highlight family unity. The taboos and special foods, however, were seen as cultural customs that are easily abandoned because they are seen as superstitious. Second, Confucian skepticism, made up of both an agnosticism toward the supernatural and a pragmatism in religious ritual, is at odds with exclusive religious traditions such as Christianity. Subsequently, Chinese Americans tend to maintain a similar approach toward religious affiliation in that they are open to doing what works. That pragmatism explains why some 33 percent of young adult Chinese Americans who are atheists and 44 percent of those who are “nothing in particular” can state they believe in ancestral spirits.41 One of our respondents, Erica Tsang, a woman in her late twenties from Boston, explained why she continues the practice of lighting incense in honor of her deceased father: I’ll do [ancestor veneration for her parents] on my own. I do believe it. For some time, I actually thought [my father who passed away] was still around. Right now I don’t think he’s around. But I still do it. It was for comfort. I feel like someone is watching out for me. It doesn’t hurt; it’s more of the type of thinking that I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket so I do traditional rituals. I don’t think my dad’s going to bring my future husband to fall in my lap, and meet on the T. But I think, it doesn’t hurt.



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In this case, she is skeptical of the efficacy of her religious practice, but it functions to offer solace and to maintain her great affection for her father. She continues to do the practice because of her utilitarian orientation: she does not want to put all her eggs of belief and nonbelief in one basket and it does not hurt to ask her father for assistance. Finally, Chinese relational rightness—especially filiality—has continued even though Chinese American families now tend to center around the nuclear family. The narratives of family sacrifice and obligation continue to be the central themes on which Chinese Americans base their lives. In fact, 57 percent of young Chinese American atheists and 49 percent of the “nothing in particulars” state that their top goal in life is to be “good parents,” higher than being a good spouse or having a successful career. This value is remarkable in that many Chinese Americans at this age are not even married, yet they already value having a close family.42 Being family, it may be said, is the religion of Chinese Americans, although it is not considered such in Western sociological concepts of religion. For example, Michael Chen, a male respondent in his thirties from San Francisco, takes care of his father and lives with him. He does so even though the father abandoned the family when Michael was twelve, gambled away their family assets, and secretly took out a second mortgage on the family home even after the family received him back. This filial piety was not out of great love for the father but out of respect for his mother’s wishes. Although this anecdote is notable for its extreme devotion, such stories of family loyalty were not uncommon among our sample, who stated that they would give up careers in order to take care of their parents.

Conclusion As Wong Chin Foo wrote more than a century ago, “We bring up our children to be our second selves in every sense of the word. . . . It is our motto that if we cannot bring up our children to think and do for us when we are old as we did for them when they were young, it is better not to rear them at all.”43 This moral code of family responsibility remains the main element of the ethical tradition of the Chinese American religious nones and reflects their liyi heritage. This liyi religious tradition, which helps explain the religious roots and the contemporary worldview of Chinese Americans, is pertinent not only for

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those of this ethnic group in the past, but also for Americans of this generation. Americans now grow up in a religious context that does not privilege belief of doctrines or belonging to religious institutions. Rather, in the midst of a plurality of religions and a postmodern skepticism, the rising “spiritual but not religious” grouping seeks to define their own ethical spirituality.44 What constitutes meaningful and virtuous living, as well as what characterizes right relationships, are the primary spiritual questions framed by both the spiritual and the nonreligious.

Notes Epigraph. Wong Chin Foo, “Why Am I a Heathen?,” North American Review 145, no. 369 (1887): 169–179. 1.  Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths” (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life, July 19, 2012), http://www​ .pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview. Thanks to Dr. Jerry Park for a breakdown of these statistics. 2.  Stephen R. Warner, “Religion and New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles Drawn from Field Research,” American Studies 41, no. 2/3 (2000): 267–286. 3.  See Carolyn Chen, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); and Fenggang Yang, Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 4.  Russell Jeung, “Second-Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Non-Religious,” in Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, ed. Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 197–221. 5.  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2007), 26. 6.  Joseph O’Brian Baker and Buster Smith, “None Too Simple: Examining Issues of Religious Nonbelief and Nonbelonging in the United States,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 4 (2009): 719–733. 7.  Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 8. Chen, Getting Saved in America, 42. 9.  Anna Sun, “Theorizing the Plurality of Chinese Religious Life: The Search for New Paradigms in the Study of Chinese Religions,” in Area Studies and Religion: History and Practice, ed. Kiri Paramore (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 51–72. 10.  Russell Jeung, Brett Esaki, and Alice Liu, “Redefining Religious Nones: Les-



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sons from Chinese and Japanese American Young Adults,” Religions 6, no. 3 (2015): 891–911. 11.  Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 12.  Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing about Rites (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 13.  Kim-chong Chong, Early Confucian Ethics: Concepts and Arguments (Chicago: Open Court, 2007). 14.  James L. Watson, “Orthopraxy Revisited,” Modern China 33, no. 1 (2007): 154–158. 15.  Sun, “Theorizing the Plurality.” 16.  Anna Sun, Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 17.  James Legge, trans., Confucius, “Xian Jin” (Book 11), verse 12, in The Analects, reprinted in Donald Sturgeon, ed., Chinese Text Project (2011), accessed November 26, 2019, http://ctext.org. 18. Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals, 66. 19.  William Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 568. 20.  Legge, trans., Mencius, Mengzi, “Teng Wen Gong I” (Book IIIA), chapter 4, in Chinese Text Project. 21.  Ibid., Confucius, Analects, “Xue Er” (Book 1), verse 2, in Chinese Text Project. 22.  Legge, trans., Xiao Jing (Classic of Filiality), section 12, in Chinese Text Project. 23.  De Bary et al., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 423. 24.  Zenryū Tsukamoto, A History of Early Chinese Buddhism: From Its Introduction to the Death of Hui-yüan, trans. Leon Hurvitz (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 69. 25. Tsukamoto, A History of Early Chinese Buddhism, 827. 26.  Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China, a Historical Survey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 75, 142–144. 27.  Han Yu, Essentials of the Moral Way, quoted in translation in de Bary et al., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 572. 28.  Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 26. 29.  Ibid., 54. 30.  Wong, “Why Am I a Heathen?,” 172. 31.  Ibid., 174. 32.  Ibid., 178.

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33.  Pew Research Center, “Asian Americans.” The forty in-depth interviews are part of the Non-Religious Chinese American (NRCA) Project, research led by the authors. 34.  Jeung, “Second-Generation Chinese Americans,” 199. 35.  Seanan Fong, Russell Jeung, and Helen Kim, “Ask an Expert: Why Young Chinese Americans Don’t Go to Church,” Studying Congregations (blog), July 28, 2014. 36.  Anxi Xu and Yan Xia, “The Changes in Mainland Chinese Families During the Social Transition: A Critical Analysis,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 45, no. 1 (2014): 31–53. 37. Yang, Religion in China. 38. Chen, Getting Saved in America, 89. 39.  Nazli Kibria, Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 40.  Jeung, Esaki, and Liu, “Ask an Expert,” 898. 41. Ibid. 42.  Ibid., 900. 43.  Wong, “Why Am I a Heathen?,” 175–176, 178. 44.  Nancy Ammerman, “Spiritual but Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no. 2 (2013): 258–278.

Bibliography Ammerman, Nancy. “Spiritual but Not Religious? Beyond Binary Choices in the Study of Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52 (2013): 258–278. Baker, Joseph O’Brian, and Buster Smith. “None Too Simple: Examining Issues of Religious Nonbelief and Nonbelonging in the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48, no. 4 (2009): 719–733. Chau, Adam Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Chen, Carolyn. Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Ch’en, Kenneth. Buddhism in China: a Historical Survey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964. Chong, Kim-chong. Early Confucian Ethics: Concepts and Arguments. Chicago: Open Court, 2007. Cohen, Paul A. China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963.



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de Bary, William Theodore, and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing About Rites. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Jeung, Russell. “Second-Generation Chinese Americans: The Familism of the Nonreligious.” In Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, edited by Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, 197–221. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Jeung, Russell, Brett Esaki, and Alice Liu. “Redefining Religious Nones: Lessons From Chinese and Japanese American Young Adults.” Religions 6 (2015): 891–911. Kibria, Nazli. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Legge, James, ed., trans. Sacred Books of the East, vol. 3, 1861. Reprinted in Donald Sturgeon, ed., Chinese Text Project, 2011. Accessed November 26, 2019. http://ctext.org/xiao-jing. Pew Research Center. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths.” Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, Religion & Public Life, July 19, 2012. http://www.pewforum​ .org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview. Sun, Anna. Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. ———. “Theorizing the Plurality of Chinese Religious Life: The Search for New Paradigms in the Study of Chinese Religions.” In Area Studies and Religion: History and Practice, edited by Kiri Paramore, 51–72. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press, 2007. Tsukamoto, Zenryū. A History of Early Chinese Buddhism: From Its Introduction to the Death of Hui-yüan. Translated by Leon Hurvitz. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985. Xu, Anxi, and Yan Xia. “The Changes in Mainland Chinese Families During the Social Transition: A Critical Analysis.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 45, no. 1 (2014): 31–53. Warner, Stephen R. “Religion and New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles Drawn from Field Research.” American Studies 41, no. 2/3 (2000): 267–286. Watson, James L. “Orthopraxy Revisited.” Modern China 33, no. 1 (2007): 154–158. Wong, Foo Chin. “Why Am I a Heathen?” North American Review 145, no. 369 (1887): 169–179. Yang, Fenggang. Chinese Christians in America: Conversion, Assimilation, and Adhesive Identities. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. ———. Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Contributors

Arshad Imtiaz Ali is assistant professor of educational research at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at The George Washington University. An interdisciplinary scholar who studies youth culture, race and identity, and political engagement in the lives of young people, Ali has published widely in academic journals on topics including Muslim youth politics and identities, policing, and surveillance. Ali is coeditor (with Tracy Buenavista) of Education at War: The Fight for Students of Color in America’s Public Schools. Rudy Busto is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara. His areas of interest include American religion, race and religion, and religion and science fiction. Busto is author of King Tiger: The Religious Vision of Reies López. Joseph Cheah is professor of religious studies and theology at the University of Saint Joseph and chair of the Department of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies. He is a series coeditor with Grace Ji-Sun Kim of the Palgrave Macmillan’s Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Patrick S. Cheng is an Episcopal priest and holds a PhD in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.  He is the author of Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology, which has been published in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.   Seanan Fong holds an MDiv from Harvard University and is fellowshipped as a Unitarian Universalist minister. Russell Jeung is chair and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and the author of books and articles on race and religion. His latest book, cowritten with Seanan Fong and Helen Kim, is Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans (Oxford University Press, 2019). His spiritual memoir, At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors (Zondervan, 2016), details his family’s six generations in California and his life with refugee communities 265

266 contributors Khyati Y. Joshi is a professor of education at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She is a scholar and thought leader on the intersecting issues of race, religion and immigration in the United States. Her most recent publications include: White Christian Privilege: The Illusion of Religious Equality in America (New York University Press, 2020), and Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (Routeldge, 2016), for which she was coeditor. Mimi Khúc is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell, and the 2019–2020 Scholar/Artist/Activist in Residence in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the managing editor of the Asian American Literary Review and guest editor of Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health, an arts and humanities intervention that works to rethink and decolonize Asian American un/ wellness. She is currently working on several book projects, including a manifesto on contingency in Asian American studies and essays on mental health, the arts, and the university. Helen Jin Kim is assistant professor of American religious history at Emory University. She studies American history and religion with a focus on the Pacific and Asian Americans. She received her PhD in the study of religion at Harvard University and her BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity at Stanford University. Sailaja Krishnamurti is an associate professor of Religious Studies and Women & Gender Studies at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. Her research and teaching explore religion, race, gender, and migration in the South Asian diaspora, the Black diaspora, and in global popular culture. Tat-siong Benny Liew is Class of 1956 Professor in New Testament studies at the College of the Holy Cross. He is also executive editor of the journal, Biblical Interpretation, and series editor of T&T Clark’s Study Guides to the New Testament. Anjana Narayan is an associate professor of sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Coauthor of Living our Religions: Hindu and Muslim Asian American Women Narrate their Experiences (2009) and coeditor of Research Beyond the Borders: Interdisciplinary Reflections (2012), she is currently associated with an international and interdisciplinary collaborative research network to advance the study of lived religions and gender in relation to Hinduism and Islam. Jerry Z. Park is an associate professor of sociology at Baylor University, and associate editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His research areas focus on religious and racial minority group identities, perceptions, and engagement. Bandana Purkayastha, professor of sociology and Asian American studies, has published more than fifty articles, books, and chapters on transnationalism, migration, violence and peace and human rights. Recognized for her teaching, research, and



contributors 267

leadership and recipient of several university, state, and professional awards, she has served in leadership positions in American Sociological Association, International Sociological Association, and Sociologists for Women in Society as well as on state, national, and international expert committees. Purkayastha is currently involved in an international collaboration developing methodologies for studying everyday living of Islam and Hinduism. Jaideep Singh is an independent scholar and activist whose work examines the intersections of white and Christian supremacy in contemporary society. He held the Sabharwal Chair in Sikh and Punjabi Studies at CSU East Bay (2009–2012), and in 1996, cofounded the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation’s first Sikh American mediawatch and civil rights advocacy organization. Singh has also written extensively about the Sikh American community’s intense encounters with domestic terrorism in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how religious identity has become racialized as a consequence. He is working on a history of Sikh Americans. David K. Yoo is vice provost, Institute of American Cultures, and professor of Asian American Studies and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is coeditor with Eiichiro Azuma of the Oxford Handbook of Asian American History (2016). He also serves as a senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, a peer-reviewed, online project of Oxford University Press.

Index

AAWOL (Asian American Women on Leadership), 16–17 ACK (Amar Chitra Katha), 207–223, 224n27 Adachi, Dean, 30 African Americans, 23–24, 30n1, 75, 197 African Muslims in Brazil, 77 Alumkal, Antony, 26–27 Amar Chitra Katha. See ACK (Amar Chitra Katha) Amerasia Journal, 5, 16, 28, 149 The American Encounter with Buddhism (Tweed), 19 American Muslim Women (Karim), 23–24 Analects (Confucius), 251 ANARCS (Asian North American Religions, Culture, and Society), 16 ancestral veneration, 246, 248, 249–250. See also filiality animism, 29 Anti-Defamation League, 102 APARRI (Asian Pacific American Religions and Research Initiative), 15–16 “apparently Muslim,” as classification, 109 Arab Americans, 23, 73, 108, 109. See also Asian American Muslims; Muslim Americans and Islam Asian American, as term, 4, 13, 14, 31n5, 228, 236n1 Asian American Buddhism: in American religious history, 19, 21, 24–25; on homosexuality, 234; moralized Chinese identity and, 250–254; population statistics on, 31n3; survey research on, 46,

47–53, 65n12; in Vietnamese American communities, 124 Asian American Catholicism, 7, 46, 55–60, 124, 201–202 Asian American Christianity: academic course on, 145–147, 151–152; captivity theme in, 158–159, 173–175; church exclusion, 229–231; evangelical and ethnic identity within, 149–151; kernel and husk analogy, 154–155, 157, 160, 163n19, 171; moralized Chinese identity and, 252–254; origins of, 7, 145–146; population statistics on, 31n3, 43; racism against, 2; regeneration of, 159–161; religious hybridity of, 155–157, 160; in San Francisco, 30, 151–153; scholarship on, 13–14, 21–22, 25–28; survey research on, 46, 55–60, 66n21, 66n23. See also Asian American religious history; Christian Americans and Christianity Asian American Christian Reader (Tseng), 149 Asian American Hinduism: in comic books and popular culture, 7–8, 207–223; population statistics on, 31n3; survey research on, 43, 46, 53–55, 65n17, 66n25. See also Hindu Americans and Hinduism Asian American Jains, 66n25 Asian American Muslims: population statistics on, 31n3; research methodology on, 79–80; self-identification of, 6, 23–24, 71–74; survey research on, 46,

269

270 index 47, 66n25, 72. See also Muslim Americans and Islam Asian American Pentecostalism, 55–60, 66n21, 66n23. See also Asian American Christianity Asian American Protestants, 55–60. See also Asian American Christianity Asian American Religions: Building Faith Communities (Min and Kim), 16 “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World” (Amerasia Journal), 5, 28 Asian American religious groups: group statistics of, 31n3; PAAS survey on, 41–42. See also Asian American religious history; names of specific religious groups Asian American religious history: as a field of study, 16–17, 145–147; future of scholarship on, 28–30; intellectual foundations of, 17–19; scholarship on, 5, 21–25; theology and writings on, 14–16. See also names of specific religions Asian American Sexualities (anthology), 229 Asian American Sikhism, 2, 23, 31n3, 66n25. See also Sikh Americans and Sikhism Asian American studies programs, 14, 31n5, 32n6 Asian American X (anthology), 231 Asiatic Exclusion League, 78 assimilation, 26–29, 73, 150–151, 157, 180n28. See also hybrid identity formation authenticity, 25, 175–176 Baker, Joseph, 247 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 178n7 “The Baklâ: Gendered Religious Performance in Filipino Cultural Spaces” (Campos), 233 balut, 146 Bangladeshi Americans, 21, 71–72 belief and belonging paradigm, 247–248 Bemis, Polly, 147, 180n28

Bentley, Robert, 102 Bhakti movement, 187, 218 “The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself ” (Lim), 230 Boggs, Grace Lee, 89 Borja, Melissa, 29 Braude, Ann, 19 Brock, Rita Nakashima, 154–155 Buddha, 153, 163n16, 221 Buddhism. See Asian American Buddhism Bundang, Rachel, 146 Bush, George W., 104 Busto, Rudy, 146, 149, 170–173 Butler, Judith, 77 Butt, Kambiz, 113–115 California Proposition 8 (2008), 230 Cambodian Americans, 44 Campfire Comics, 220 Campos, Michael Sepidoza, 233 Cao Dai, 124 caste system, 213–214, 218 Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry (Pacific School of Religion), 231 Cervantes-Rodriguez, Anna Margarita, 76–77 Cha, Peter, 164n28 Cha’n Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Chang, Derek, 30 Chen, Carolyn, 24, 150, 248 Chen, Michael, 259 Cheng, Patrick, 155 Chin, Frank, 175 Chin, Vincent, 203 Chinese Americans: authenticity and, 175– 176; Christian Mission and Madonna and child figures, 151–153; early queer communities of, 228; exclusion legislation against, 2, 201, 203, 228; legal rights of, 228; LGBTIQ exclusion by churches of, 230, 234; moral identity of, 250–254; nonreligiousity of, 29, 245–247; religious skeptical tradition of, 245–246,

248–250, 256–260; religious statistics on, 31n3, 43, 44, 246 Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 2, 201, 203, 228 Choi, Roy, 157, 164n29 Chopra, Deepak, 220, 221–222 Chopra, Gotham, 208, 220, 221, 222 Choudhary, Omer, 113–115 Christian Americans and Christianity: hegemonic hostility of, 97–106; intersection of racial and religious bigotry of, 106–109; racialized history of, 1–2, 21–22, 76–77, 80, 92n42; “two-party” Protestant paradigm, 148–150, 170–171; violence by, 107. See also Asian American Christianity The Christian Tradition (Kitagawa), 158–159 Chua, Christopher, 30 Citizens of a Christian Nation (Chang), 30 Classic of Filiality, 251–252 clothing, as marker for discrimination and violence, 22–23, 109, 112, 217 collective identity formation, 23–24 colorism, 4–5, 217–218. See also racial discrimination Columbus, Christopher, 20, 76 comic books on Hindu mythology, 7–8, 207–223 Confucianism, 18, 176, 234, 247, 249 Contentious Spirits (Yoo), 30 Cornell, Michiyo, 229 Council on American–Islamic Relations, 104–105 CrossCurrents (journal), 233 cultural biases in survey research, 45–47, 64n6 cultural racism, as construct, 75, 80–81, 92nn42–43 Cvetkovich, Ann, 135 Daggers, Jenny, 160 Daoism: Chinese morality and, 249, 252, 255; principles in, 155, 156, 161, 178n7;

index 271 sacred text of, 235; on same-sex relations, 234 Daulatzai, Sohail, 77–78 depression, 135 Devarajan, Sharad, 208, 220, 221 “DisOrienting Subjects” (Busto), 17–18 Diwali, 186 Dream of the Red Chamber (Chinese classic), 176 Durga (goddess), 190, 191, 194n13 18 Days (Morrison), 220 EQARS (Emerging Queer Asian Religion Scholars), 234, 239n45 Equiano, Olaudah, 181n28 Esaki, Brett, 29 Espiritu, Yến Lê, 136n3 Essentials of the Moral Way (Han Yu), 250–251, 253 Executive Order 9066 (1942), 2 Faithful Generations (Jeung), 149 Family Rituals (Confucius), 249–250 Fanon, Frantz, 81, 89, 93n48 Fazaga v. FBI, 74 FBI surveillance and harassment, 24, 74, 78, 118 Fernandez, Eleazar, 157 The Fifth Book of Peace (Kingston), 177 filiality, 245, 248, 251–254, 259. See also ancestral veneration Filipino Americans, 31n3, 44, 146, 228, 233 “The First Missions to India” (Moffett), 146 Following Jesus without Dishonoring Your Parents (Yep, Cha, and Tokunaga), 17 Fong, Seanan, 29 From Sin to Amazing Grace (Cheng), 233 Ganesh, Chitra, 219 “Gay Asian Masculinities and Christian Theologies” (Cheng), 233 gay community. See LGBTIQ Asian American community “The Gay Erotics of My Stuttering Mother Tongue” (Lim), 230

272 index gay male cyberculture, 233 gay rights movement, 229 gender: Hindu ideologies and practices on, 184–193; migration and, 2, 7, 86, 139n16, 186; religious historical perspective through, 19; wartime violence and, 128–129. See also LGBTIQ Asian American community Ghaffar-Kucher, Ameena, 73 Gheith, Ayman, 113–115 Goh, Joseph, 234 Gohmert, Louie, 101 Gong Chong, 252 Gopinath, Gayatri, 219 “The Gospel According to the Model Minority?” (Busto), 149, 170 Graduate Theological Union, 15 Graham, Billy, 104 Graham, Franklin, 104 Graphic India, 220–221 Grosfoguel, Ramon, 76–77 Growing Healthy Asian American Churches (Cha, Kang, and Lee, eds.), 17, 164n28 gurdwaras, 22, 24, 99, 213 Gypsies, 76 Han Yu, 250–251, 253 Harnack, Adolf von, 154, 157, 163n19, 171 Hart-Cellar Act. See Immigration and Nationality Act (1965) hate speech and violence, 23, 99, 101, 102– 108, 203. See also racial discrimination; racial profiling Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 19–20 headdress, as marker for discrimination and violence, 22–23, 109, 112 heathenism, 255–256 Hedva, Johanna, 135 Hertig, Young Lee, 156, 173, 178n7 hijab, as marker for discrimination and violence, 87, 109 “Hindoos,” as term, 83 Hindu American Foundation, 211 Hindu Americans and Hinduism: in American religious history, 19, 21, 22,

25; gendered ideologies and practices in, 184–193; infringements on religious freedom of, 100–101; mythological comics on, 7–8, 207–223; personal upbringing experiences of, 213–214; religious violence against, 108; temple organization in, 187–188. See also Asian American Hinduism Hindu Students’ Council, 211, 224n15 A History of Christianity in Asia (Moffett), 145 Hmong Americans, 29 Holy Cow Comics, 220 Hooper, Ibrahim, 104–105 Hsiung, Ann-Marie, 234 hybrid identity formation, 23–24, 27, 53, 65n18. See also assimilation hypodescent, 198–199, 202–203 “I Am Yellow and Beautiful” (Cheng), 233 Ichioka, Yuji, 4 I Could Not Do Otherwise (Yang), 253– 254 Immigration Act (1924), 2 Immigration Act (1965), 31n3, 98 Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), 3, 228 inculturation, 153, 154, 171, 173 India, 187, 207, 210. See also ACK (Amar Chitra Katha) Indian Americans, 21; discrimination against, 22–23, 78, 83, 211; religious statistics on, 31n3. See also Hindu Americans and Hinduism; Muslim Americans and Islam indigeneity: Christian containment of, 26, 153, 154, 171, 173; racial categories on, 76; religious traditions and, 19, 28, 124 Indonesian Americans, 44 In God’s Image (Wu), 234 Institute for Leadership Development and Study of Pacific and Asian North American Religion (PANA Institute), 15–16 Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC), 17

intersex community. See LGBTIQ Asian American community InterVarsity Press, 17 ISAAC (Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity), 17 ISKCON, 65n17 Islam. See Muslim Americans and Islam Islamic Society of Basking Ridge, 99 Iwamura, Jane, 61, 146 Japanese Americans, 2, 25, 43, 110, 229 Jeung, Russell, 29, 63, 149, 150 Jewish Americans and Judaism, 21, 76, 172 Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Jordanian Americans, 73 Joshi, Khyati, 21, 22–23, 64n6, 213 Journal of Technology, Theology, and Religion, 233 Journey from the Fall (film by Tran), 126– 134, 138nn13–16, 139n17, 139n20. See also Tran, Ham Journey to the West (Chinese classic), 175, 176 Judaism. See Jewish Americans and Judaism Kalal, David Dasarath, 219 Kali (goddess), 190, 191, 195n13 Karim, Jamillah, 23–24, 73 Kaur, Valarie, 116–117 kernel and husk analogy, 154–155, 157, 160, 163n19, 171. See also rice Khúc, Mimi, 29 Kim, Chigon, 44 Kim, David Kyuman, 157 Kim, Helen Jin, 29 Kim, Michael (pseudonym), 231 Kim, Sharon, 27, 162n14 King, Peter, 74 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 175–177, 179n15, 180n24 Kitagawa, Joseph, 158–159, 173 Korean Americans, 24, 27, 31n3, 44, 231 Koyama, Kosuke, 155

index 273 Krishna (god), 216 Kuan Yin, 153, 155, 235 Kuromiya, Kiyoshi, 229 Kwok Pui-lan, 235 Kyung, Chung Hyun, 155 Lan, Kwok-Pui, 15 language: racial discrimination and, 198– 199; translations and survey research, 43, 44, 47, 65n10 Laotian Americans, 44 Latin@s, 3, 107, 111, 150–151, 160 Law, Eric, 227, 231–232 Lebanese Americans, 73 Lee, James Kyung-Jin, 135 Lee, Jung Young, 200 Lee, Shelley, 18 Leninism, 14 Lerner, Michael, 137n8 Lesbian and Gay Asian Collective, 229 lesbian community. See LGBTIQ Asian American community LGBTIQ Asian American community, 3–4, 227–236 Li, Yu-chen, 234 Liberating the Church from Fear (Wu), 234 Liew, Tat-siong Benny, 28, 235 “Life-Cycle of Ethnic Churches in Sociological Perspective” (Mullins), 150 Lim, Leng, 230–231, 234 “Listening to the Passion of Catholic nutongzhi” (Yip), 234 liyi skeptical tradition, 245–246, 248–250, 256–260. See also Chinese Americans Louisiana, 228 Lowe, Lisa, 176 Lynn, Barry W., 100 Madonna and Child at St. Mary’s Chapel (St. Mary’s Chinese Mission), 151–153 Maffly-Kipp, Laurie, 19, 20 Mahabharata, 216 Mahayana Buddhism, 48–52–52, 124. See also Asian American Buddhism Maira, Sunaina, 73, 211, 212

274 index “Mak Nyah Bodies as Sacred Sites” (Goh), 234 Malavika (ACK), 219 mandir, 99 Mann, Gurinder Singh, 22 Maoism, 14, 15 marriage equality, 230 Marxism, 14, 15, 20 Matsuoka, Fumitaka, 15, 157, 160, 172 McCunn, Ruthanne Lum, 147 McLain, Karline, 208, 215, 219 meaning-making: politics of meaning, as term, 125, 137n8; through religion, 75, 125, 137nn7–8, 138nn9–10; war and, 125, 127, 133–135, 136n3 media and promotion of racism, 2, 25, 74, 106–107, 111, 115, 191 Mencius, 251 migration: gender and, 2, 7, 86, 139n16, 186; of religious groups, 2–3, 22, 24, 86, 134, 186. See also names of specific legislative acts; Vietnamese Americans Min, Pyong Gap, 44 Miyama, Kanichi, 30 Moffett, Samuel Hugh, 145, 146, 147, 161 Monteilh, Craig, 74 Moore, Roy, 103 MOP (men of profile), 116. See also racial profiling moralized Chinese identity, 250–254 More Than Serving Tea (Toyama), 16, 17 Morrison, Grant, 220 motherhood, 129, 139n19, 190 Mouzi (Buddhist text), 252 Mullins, Mark, 150 “Multiplicity and Judges 19” (Cheng), 232 Muslim Americans and Islam: 9/11 attacks and racialized effects on, 3, 87–88, 104; in American religious history, 21, 22, 23–24, 25; “apparently Muslim” as racist classification for, 109; history of racialization of, 6, 75, 77–79; infringements of religious freedom of, 99–100, 101–102; intersection of racial and religious bias against, 106–109; police surveillance

of, 74–75; race, as construct, and, 75, 80–81; racialization of, 109–118; selfidentification of, 81–89, 93n46, 93n48; survey research on, 99–100. See also Asian American Muslims Muslim American Survey (Pew Research Group, 2011), 47 “Muslim International,” 77–78 Muslims (Moors), 75–78 “The Mythic-Literalists in the Province of Southeast Asia” (Lim), 230–231 mythological comics, 7–8, 207–223 Naber, Nadine, 73 Nandy, Ashis, 184, 193 Nathoy, Lalu, 147 National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association (NQAPIA), 229 Nation of Islam, 77, 78, 84 Nepali Americans, 21 Network on Religion and Justice, 231 New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground (Joshi), 22 New Spiritual Homes (Yoo, ed.), 16 New York Times, 103, 111 The Next Evangelicalism (Rah), 159 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, 127 Nigut, Bill, 102 9/11 attacks, 3, 23–24, 87–88, 104, 109 Noguchi, Yone, 229 “None Too Simple” (Baker and Smith), 247 North American Review (journal), 245, 255 NQAPIA (National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Association), 229 Nuxoll, Sheryl, 101 Off the Menu (PANAAWTM), 16 Okihiro, Gary, 20 Omi, Michael, 26 one-drop rule, 198 “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs” (Brock), 154–155 Operation Save America, 100 Orientalism, 18, 19–21, 25, 146 Other Voices, Other Worlds (anthology), 231

“Out and About: Coming of Age in a Straight White World” (Kim), 231 oversampling, 42. See also survey research PAAS. See survey research Pacific Asian American Center for Theology and Strategies (PACTS), 15 Pacific Asian North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM), 15, 16 Pacific School of Religion, 231 Page Act (1875), 2 Pakistani Americans, 21, 73; self-identification of, 6, 81–83; survey research on, 44 Palestinian Americans, 73 PANA Institute, 15–16 Park, Andrew, 155 Park, Robert, 26 Pengkid, 235 Pentecostalism. See Asian American Pentecostalism People v. Hall, 228 Persia, 172 Pew Asian American Survey (PAAS). See survey research Phan, Peter, 173–174, 176 police surveillance, 24, 74–75, 118. See also racial profiling; religious profiling politics of meaning, as term, 125, 137n8. See also meaning-making population statistics, 31n3, 41, 43. See also survey research Presbyterian Church, 30 Protestant Christianity, 1–2, 148–150, 170–171. See also Christian Americans and Christianity puja, 188 Purkayastha, Bandana, 21–22, 210–211 Q & A: Queer in Asian America (anthology), 229 Queer Asian Spirit, 231 Queer Asian Spirit E-Zine, 234 The Queer Bible Commentary (Cheng), 232–233

index 275 queer community. See LGBTIQ Asian American community queer theology, 3, 233–234. See also LGBTIQ Asian American community Que(e)rying Religion (anthology), 231 race, as construct, 75, 80–81, 92nn42–43 racial discrimination: Cheah’s experiences of, 197–203; of Indian Americans, 22–23, 211; in LGBTIQ community, 231–233; media portrayals and, 2, 25, 74, 106–107, 111, 115, 191; of Muslims, 6, 75–79. See also colorism; police surveillance racial interpellation, 93n46, 93n48 racialization of religious identity, 109–117, 217–218 racial profiling, 111–118. See also police surveillance “Racial Spirits” (Amerasia Journal), 5, 16, 28 Radical Love (Cheng), 233 Rah, Soong-Chan, 159, 173 Ramayana, 195n13, 216, 220–221 Ramayana 3392 AD (Graphic India), 220–221 Ravanan (Campfire Comics), 220 “Reclaiming Our Traditions, Rituals, and Spaces” (Cheng), 232 A Record of Facts to Ward of Heterodoxy, 254 refugee resettlement groups. See Hmong Americans; Vietnamese Americans religion, as construct, 75, 125, 137nn7–8, 138nn9–10 religious groups: hate crimes and violence against, 23, 99, 101, 102–108; immigration restrictions against, 2–3; infringements on freedoms of, 98–102; internal diversity of, 5–6, 31n3; mass immigration of, 3; narrow focus of scholarship on, 137n6; racialization of identity and, 109–117; tax exemptions for, 105. See also Asian American religious history; names of specific religious groups religious nones, 3, 6, 245–247; Chinese

276 index religious skeptical tradition, 245–246, 249–250, 256–260; moralized Chinese identity and, 252–254; survey research on, 60–63; Wong on, 245, 254–256 religious profiling, 111–118. See also police surveillance representativeness in survey research, 42–45, 64n2 Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Iwamura and Spickard), 16 revolutionary movements, 14–15 rice, 145, 157, 164n29, 171. See also kernel and husk analogy “rice Christians,” as term, 177, 180n28. See also Asian American Christianity Russell, Letty, 15 sacred texts and survey research, 45–46 Said, Edward, 18, 28, 100, 146 San Francisco State University, 14 Sano, Roy, 15 A Secular Age (Taylor), 247 Semeia (journal), 230, 232 September 11, 2001 attacks, 1, 3 The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes (Graphic India), 221–222 sexuality, marginalization of, 3–4, 229–236 Shaivite, 53–55, 213, 220. See also Asian American Hinduism Shakti, 65n17, 190–191. See also Asian American Hinduism Shiva (god), 216, 220 Sikh Americans and Sikhism: in American religious history, 19, 21–23, 25; gurdwaras, 22, 24, 99, 213; religious violence against, 108, 109–112. See also Asian American Sikhism silence, 133 Silver Screen Buddha (Suh), 25 Singapore, 230 Singh, Jaideep, 22 Singh, Mukesh, 220 Sita (goddess), 191, 195n13 skeptical tradition, 245–246, 249–250 The Skull Rosary (Holy Cow Comics), 220

slavery, 1, 76–78, 104, 175, 179n13 Smith, Buster, 247 Sodhi, Balbir Singh, 23 Soka Gokkai Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Somali Americans, 6, 83–84 Son Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Song, C. S., 155 Southern Baptist Convention, 103–104 Spanish Inquisition, 76 “A Spirituality of Creative Marginality” (Law), 231–232 Spiritus (journal), 232 Sreenivas, Deepa, 215 St. Mary’s Chinese Mission (San Francisco), 151–153, 163n15 Stone, Eunice, 113–114 Sue, Derald Wing, 199, 201 Sueyoshi, Amy, 228 Sugirtharajah, R. S., 155, 179n9 Suh, Sharon, 24, 25 surnames and survey research, 42, 44–45 survey research, 41–42, 63–64; on Asian American Buddhism, 46, 47–53, 65n12; on Asian American Christianity, 46, 55–60, 66n21; on Asian American Hinduism(s), 43, 46, 53–55, 65n17, 66n25; on Asian American Muslims, 46, 47, 66n25, 72, 106–107; on Asian American Protestants, 55–60; cultural biases in, 45–47, 64n6, 106–107; on religiously unaffiliated, 60–63; representativeness in, 42–45, 64n2. See also population statistics Sustaining Faith Traditions (eds. Chen and Jeung), 150 syncretism, 153, 155, 234 Syrian Americans, 73 Syro-Malabar Catholics, 28 Taiwanese Americans, 24 Takano, Mark, 229 Tan, Jonathan, 156 Taoism. See Daoism

Taylor, Charles, 247 temple organization, 187–188 Ten Commandments monument (Alabama), 103 Thai Americans, 44 Thangaraj, Thomas, 155 Theology and Sexuality (journal), 234 Theravada Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Thind, Bhagat Singh, 83 The Three Kingdoms (Chinese classic), 176, 177 Tibetan Buddhism. See Vajrayana Buddhism Times Record, 117 Tiruppan and Kanakadasa, 218 torture, 110 Tran, Ham, 123, 132. See also Journey from the Fall (film by Tran) transgender community. See LGBTIQ Asian American community transnational perspectives in LGBTIQ community, 233–235 Transplanting Religions Traditions (Fenton), 22 Tripmaster Monkey (Kingston), 175–177, 179n15, 180n24 Trump, Donald, 1, 3, 105, 107 Tsang, Erica, 258–259 Tse, Justin, 29 Tseng, Timothy, 149 turbans, as marker for discrimination and violence, 22–23, 109, 112 Tweed, Thomas, 19 “two-party” Protestant paradigm, 148– 150, 170–172. See also kernel and husk analogy unaffiliated religious category. See religious nones Vaishnava, 53–55, 213–214. See also Asian American Hinduism Vajrayana Buddhism, 48–52, 65n12. See also Asian American Buddhism

index 277 Vasudhaiva Kutumbhkam, 191, 195n15 Vedanta, 65n17. See also Asian American Hinduism Vick, Steve, 101 Vietnamese Americans: interpretation of lives of, 123–126, 139n16; meaningmaking by, 6, 29, 133–135, 136n3; scholarship on, 124–125, 134, 135, 136n5; Tran’s film on, 126–134 Vietnam War: memorialization of, 29, 123–124, 126, 136n3; resistance movements against, 14. See also Journey from the Fall (film by Tran) Vimanika Comics, 220 Vines, Jerry, 104 Vipassana Buddhism, 48–52, 65n12. See also Asian American Buddhism Virtual Orientalism (Iwamura), 24–25 Vishva Hindu Parishad, 215, 224n15 (in)visibility, as concept, 3–4 Wake, Lloyd, 15 Wallace, Alexandra, 203n6 Walton, Jonathan, 27 Wander, Gurdeep Singh, 111–112 war and meaning-making, 125, 127, 133– 135, 136n3 Washington Post, 112 Water Margin (Chinese classic), 176, 177 “Webs of Betrayal, Webs of Blessing” (Lim), 230 “Why am I a Heathen?” (Wong), 245, 255 Wimbush, Vincent, 181n28 Winant, Howard, 26 Woman Warrior (Kingston), 176 women, 2, 128–129, 139n19, 184–193 “Women’s History is Religious History” (Braude), 19 Wong, Jade Snow, 145 Wong, Yuenmei, 235 Wong Chin Foo, 245, 247, 254–256, 259 “The Word Was Not Made Flesh” (Goh), 234 The World at the Crossings (Law), 232

278 index Wu, Rose, 234 Xun Ji, 253 Yang, Fenggang, 248 Yang Guangxian, 253–254 yin/yang principle, 156, 178n7. See also Daoism Yip, Lai-shan, 233–234

Yong, Amos, 156 Yoshii, Michael, 155 Zed, Rajan, 100–101 Zen Buddhism, 48–52. See also Asian American Buddhism Zhu Xi, 249 Zoroastrianism, 172