"It'll come to the point where Buddhism won't be an Asian thing anymore and Christianity won't be a white thing."

[UPDATE: Scott, a California half-gyopo of Medea Sin fame, adds some interesting observations from his own experiences in a Korean-American church. Check it out in the comments section.]

Ahhhhhh, Tuesday. My first class doesn't start until 1:40. I think I'll do a morning post.

While I was doing some research (man, I love doing research and that's not a joke), I came across this interesting article from the Washington Post that was reprinted in Model Minority and then posted this forun. That second link is followed by some interesting commentary. I recommend it.

It is so interesting I'm going to post the whole thing (The article is almost a year old, so I don't think I'm doing anything bad. Someone who knows about newspaper copywrite law let me know). I'll also add a few thoughts of my own. OK, here we go:

By David Cho
The Washington Post
May 4, 2003
Isaac Chung and Richard Harvell both can trace their young careers to spiritual journeys they made while they were roommates at Yale University.

Chung, who is Korean American, started down a new path when he joined Yale's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. By the time he graduated, he felt that God was calling him to drop his plans to study medicine and instead become a Christian witness in the entertainment industry. Now 24, he is attending film school in Salt Lake City.

Harvell, who is white, sought fulfillment in Buddhism and other religions native to Asia. He had intended to become a physics professor but instead took two years off from college to backpack through Europe and "figure out who I was." He ended up in Switzerland, spending much of his time with a group of Zen Buddhists, and, at 24, he has returned there to teach public school.

In a religious sense, Chung and Harvell traded places, each one embracing the faith of the other's forebears. But neither of them noticed the irony because so many other Asian and white students at Yale were doing the very same thing. Indeed, the 120-member Christian fellowship to which Chung belonged was about 85 percent Asian, while the Buddhist meditation meetings at Yale were almost entirely white.

Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.

At many colleges, the influx of Asian American students has given Christian organizations a much bigger presence on campus. Even at liberal schools such as Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago, better known as vanguards for gay studies and deconstructionism than for evangelical crusades, weekly meetings of Christian fellowships are drawing hundreds of Asian students.

"Even Asians are surprised at how many Asians there are in Christian circles," said Chin-ho Chang, a senior at Columbia University and a leader of its chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, one of several large fellowships on the campus. A dozen years ago, the Columbia chapter drew about 15 students, most of them white. Now it has 130 students who have split into two groups -- a branch that is entirely Korean American and a multiracial branch that is 85 percent Asian, Chang said.

Because of this phenomenon, the professional world soon will be absorbing waves of highly educated Asian Americans who are evangelical and poised to exert influence in their fields, researchers say.

"I think they are going to be very significant," said R. Stephen Warner, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As these Asians become professionals, he added, "they won't necessarily wear their religion on their sleeves. But they will be . . . religiously motivated, although being a racial minority might temper the otherwise conservative implications of their religion."

The white college students who explore Eastern religions are pursuing an activity that is not likely to be as transforming, scholars say. Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia, said he finds that such students want to experience something spiritual but are not interested in making a commitment to a religion or a lot of rituals.

"There is a whole lot of people when they hit that youth age, they will get into exploring Buddhism and New Age," Thurman said. "But one thing I see is that once they sit in my class and learn there's a history and there were conflicts between monks, they resist that. They don't want the history of the religion or the reality of the religion as it is on the ground in Asia."

More than half the 30 students in the Buddhist Community at Stanford are white. "It's kind of seen as being hip to be Buddhist," said David Yin, the group's co-chair. "For white students, you are doing something different."

Both campus trends have roots in the 1950s and '60s. At the time, white college students, mostly those from privileged backgrounds, were becoming disillusioned with Western religion and began to look at Eastern faiths. That interest has since expanded into meditation groups, yoga and other popular New Age trends.

The Asian American students flocking to Christian clubs are mostly the children of immigrants who were able to come to the United States after its immigration laws were relaxed in 1965. Some of those immigrants were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries working in Asia, while others joined vibrant ethnic churches after arriving here. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, their children began reaching college age.

Once on campus, the children searched for what was familiar to them. And in Christian fellowships, they found affirmation for their religion and ethnic identity, said Peter Cha, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

But the faith they have developed in college sometimes conflicts with the expectations of their parents, who immigrated to this country hoping their children would obtain a top-notch education and a prestigious career.

Rachel Lei of Falls Church said she has always been a high achiever, from her years at Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology to her biology studies at Johns Hopkins University. But after becoming heavily involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, she is strongly considering going to seminary.

She says that although her family has accepted her career direction, "my parents have had some questions about whether InterVarsity is a good place for me."

Even Asian Christians whose career plans did not change say their religious experiences in college have profoundly influenced them.

Liza Ching, who lives in Arlington and works for the State Department, said her involvement in a 100-member Asian fellowship at Harvard helped her understand God's call on her life. Now training to be a Foreign Service officer, she hopes to make an "impact for Christ" in her field.

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of several national evangelical groups, has chapters at 560 colleges. In the last two decades, the number of Asian Americans in the group has increased by nearly 500 percent, from 693 to 4,101.

At colleges in the Washington-Baltimore region, hundreds of Asian students belong to campus evangelical organizations, usually to new Asian-sponsored groups rather than long-established national fellowships.

Grace Life Church at Johns Hopkins, for instance, began in 1997 with about 20 Asian students and now has about 75 members. For most members, Grace Life is the major activity outside of classes, as they spend nearly all their free time in Sunday services, prayer sessions, small-group Bible studies, weekly organizational meetings and, at times, evangelical campaigns on the campus.

Some white college chaplains say Asian Americans in campus Christian groups tend to be more intense in their faith than their white counterparts.

A recent Friday night gathering of Grace Life Church lasted four hours, ending just before midnight. It began with 40 minutes of singing led by Janet Lee, an Asian American who graduated from Johns Hopkins two years ago. With a microphone set strapped on her head and both arms raised high, Lee belted out: "Blessed be the name of the Lord. . . ." Two backup singers, three guitars, a synthesizer and a six-piece drum set accompanied her, filling the small lecture room with rock.

Many students wandered in late in sweats and T-shirts, bowing under the weight of enormous backpacks. They quickly became caught up in the music, singing along and clapping at first, then lifting their hands in worship.

Some Asian American religious activists say other students often mock or frown upon their evangelical outreach. Tony Tran, a senior at Johns Hopkins who belongs to Grace Life and converted last year from Buddhism to Christianity, said classmates have criticized him for joining such an intense movement.

Their comments "really hurt a lot," Tran said. But being among so many other Asians provides some comfort, he added. "They affirm my identity," he said.

Asian students who have broken away from multiracial Christian organizations to form their own groups say they did so to address issues special to Asian Americans, such as the pressure of living under the high academic expectations of immigrant parents. Some also say that their overwhelming majority in nationally sponsored Christian clubs was making white members uncomfortable.

Buddhist meditation groups, which tend to be much smaller, rarely stir controversy on campuses, and many require little from their members other than to gather a few times each semester in a room and, literally, sit still for about 30 minutes.

Matthew Lammens, a senior at Columbia who leads biweekly meditation sessions there and describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, says most of the dozen or so students who attend the meetings would not formally identify themselves as Buddhist.

Both white and Asian students are breaking long-held stereotypes about race and religion, says Warner, the sociology professor. "It'll come to the point where Buddhism won't be an Asian thing anymore and Christianity won't be a white thing," he said. "You will look at somebody and you won't be able to tell what religion they belong to."

The phenomenon talked about in that article is evident in my own life.

The future Mrs Yangban was raised Buddhist. She used to go on summer retreats at a local temple near her hometown. Despite that she was one of the 'nominal' Buddhists who seem to be the majority of Buddhists in Korea. She converted to Christianity at about the same time we started dating. I assume that I was some influence in that conversion (I was one of those people who prayed but didn't go to church). But now her faith (in the church, if not God) is stronger than mine.

My best friend in Korea is a white American who converted to Buddhism not long after I arrived here. His spiritual journey started in the Roman Catholic church and went through Islam before his final embrace of Buddhism.

There are a couple of things in the article I want to expand on:

Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.

I see the divorce between religious and ethnic identities as a positive development in American culture. It is a breaking of the ethnic ghettos that multiculturalist academics want to assign us to. It is a basic but often ignored principle that the color of your skin does not dictate the contents of your character. The world's great religions are not ethnically specific.

It is also a potential knock against those who see missionary work as cultural imperialism. After all, it is a little difficult to accuse a missionary in Asia of pursuing the "White Man's Burden" when he is not white.

On the other hand, there are some divisions between Asian and white Christians:

Asian students who have broken away from multiracial Christian organizations to form their own groups say they did so to address issues special to Asian Americans, such as the pressure of living under the high academic expectations of immigrant parents. Some also say that their overwhelming majority in nationally sponsored Christian clubs was making white members uncomfortable.

The amount of integration at my church (Seoul International Baptist [SIBC]is only about 60-70% white) is a little unusual and and I think that its level of integration is mainly due its status as a church (primarily) serving Americans away from their homes (and their home churches). I would hope that more American churches will look like SIBC in the future but I'm not holding my breath.

One more thing (OK, two related things):

The Asian American students flocking to Christian clubs are mostly the children of immigrants who were able to come to the United States after its immigration laws were relaxed in 1965. Some of those immigrants were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries working in Asia, while others joined vibrant ethnic churches after arriving here. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, their children began reaching college age.

The nature of Christian churches make them powerful tools for organizing communities. They help meet the spiritual, social and physical needs of their members. That is especially true for Asian-American churches, which often serve many first and second generation Americans who are outside the safety net of their old cultures' norms and customs. So it is no accident that churches have become so strong among Asian-Americans.

In Korea, it means that Christians have an advantage over Buddhist in gaining new converts. While evangelism isn't exactly alien to Buddhism (how do you think it made it all the way to Korea) they are at an organizational disadvantage. In response, there have been some attempts to reform Buddhism and increase Buddhist evangelism (the second link is to a very interesting article which touches on several issues-a good read).

I have an example of the latter. A Korean Christian friend once told me that a Buddhist friend of his had once ask him for a tape of popular Korean Christian songs. My friend was happy to do so and thought that his friend might be thinking of converting to Christianity. As it turns out, the Buddhist friend rewrote the lyrics of the songs so he could use them to try to gain Buddhist converts from among Christians.

Comments

[scott]

Interesting post, Andy. I've seen this in my own life, so I'll add a (half)Asian-American perspective.

Every Asian person I have ever known who was religious at all was Christian. I also remember a couple non-Asians getting into Buddhism in college - seems like it is popular in Hollywood too.

I have to defend the Corean-American churches as I have first-hand experience with them. They are a great resource for the Corean community, if they choose it. With the work schedules of the average Corean family, it is quite often their only time away from work. It's good for the children and the parents to connect with other Coreans they might not see in otherwise predominantly white communities, being that only 4% of America is Asian. It doesn't segregate them at all - for six and a half days a week, your average Corean is integrated with all races. For those few hours on Sunday, it is a nice reaffirmation of their faith but also a chance to speak Corean, and feel at ease with their shared experiences. For a lot of Asian kids, their only exposure to other Asians is through these churches. Just like how many of the Corea-bloggers take comfort in their shared experiences, these church communities are much the same thing.

But this is not to say the churches discourage non-Asians from attending. Half the people there think I am Jewish for instance and moksahnim is the most accepting and generous man I will probably ever meet.

One of the limitations of the church I go to is that there are very few good English speakers there (they even asked me to teach for a while and I have no experience teaching anything other than hospital medicine). The moksahnim has assured me he has tried to find a fluent English-speaking Corean OR Caucasian pastor who can lecture there for the kids and people like me who cannot quite understand an hour of archaic religiousized Hangul. Not an easy thing for our small church.

In a way, it is almost like a mini-Corean school for the children although the emphasis is on Bible study not Corean history study. Although most Corean churches also teach Hangul (but once a week isn't very helpful, honestly).

And for those Coreans that want to go to a more mixed church (too much gossip is the usual reason), many including my in-laws do just that.

[Christopher]

Great article and write up Yangban...linking....now...

[David Park]

Great article. Definitely will be back to read more...

[Wang Rong]

hello, David, I wonder if you are the one that I met in Kunming China 1994. I'm Linda. Please contact me.