God's New Whiz Kids?

Korean American Evangelicals on Campus

Rebecca Y. Kim

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780814748619
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología de la religión

In the past twenty years, many traditionally white campus religious groups have become Asian American. Today there are more than fifty evangelical Christian groups at UC Berkeley and UCLA alone, and 80% of their members are Asian American. At Harvard, Asian Americans constitute 70% of the Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, while at Yale, Campus Crusade for Christ is now 90% Asian. Stanford's Intervarsity Christian Fellowship has become almost entirely Asian.

There has been little research, or even acknowledgment, of this striking development.

God’s New Whiz Kids? focuses on second-generation Korean Americans, who make up the majority of Asian American evangelicals, and explores the factors that lead college-bound Korean American evangelicals—from integrated, mixed race neighborhoods—to create racially segregated religious communities on campus. Kim illuminates an emergent “made in the U.S.A.” ethnicity to help explain this trend, and to shed light on a group that may be changing the face of American evangelicalism.

1

Changing the Face of Campus Evangelicalism

Asian American Evangelicals

More than 95 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, a universal spirit, or life force; nearly 80 percent believe in heaven, and about 70 percent are members of a church or synagogue (Gallup and Lindsay 1999; Kristof 2003). Religion is very much alive in America. The histories of America’s founding colleges and universities, however, tell a different story.

Most of the early American colleges and universities were formed to prepare young elite men for the ministry and were linked to Protestant denominations or had some form of Christian patronage (Burtchaell 1998; Hofstadter and Hardy 1952). Since the founding of Harvard in 1636, higher education in the United States was established and functioned within a Christian moral universe where the Christian faith was an essential part of the curriculum, faculty duties, and overall lifestyle (Butler 1989; Hunter 1987). This began to change in the mid-nineteenth century.

Industrialization, urbanization, increasing demand to make education more accessible to the common person, and competition with state-supported schools led many church-affiliated schools to democratize and loosen their ties to religion (McCormick 1987).¹ Pietism, the view that an individual’s personal faith is distinct from social learning, along with a growing emphasis on a scientific worldview, further contributed to this change (Marsden 1994; Sloan 1994).² As James Tunstead Burtchaell recounts in his book The Dying of the Light, on the disengagement of colleges and universities from their christian tradition: “Countless colleges and universities in the history of the United States were founded under some sort of Christian patronage, but many which still survive do not claim any relationship with a church or denomination” (Burtchaell 1998: ix). The disaffiliation of the university from the Protestant church, which began as early as the 1800s, continued into the early 1900s.

Despite the decline and, in some cases, the disappearance of the relationship between the church and the university at the institutional level, the Christian faith survives, primarily through student participation in a variety of voluntary Christian campus organizations.³ In recent years, many of these organizations have witnessed a revival, as increased numbers of ethnic minorities, particularly Asian Americans, have matriculated into colleges and universities.⁴

Christianity on Campus

Voluntary Student Christian Organizations and Church-Sponsored Ministries

The earliest existing reference to a voluntary student Christian organization in America can be traced to a Christian society at Harvard University in 1706. Although the ethos of colonial colleges was replete with religion, students formed their own voluntary student religious organizations. Meeting weekly, these religious societies focused on the study of the Bible, prayer, and mutual support for living a devout life, and students debated topics on faith and the social issues of the time. These organizations were later joined in the early 1800s by student religious organizations that emphasized missionary work to overseas countries. Due to the continuous influx of students and the dynamics of college life, these groups changed their identities and names year to year and only lasted for a short duration. Nevertheless, voluntary student religious groups can still be found on virtually all American college and university campuses.

Another important thread in the heritage of religion on campus is the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). Transplanted from the United Kingdom as an interdenominational Christian organization, the YMCA established programs on college and university campuses of America in 1857 and the YWCA was established in 1886. In contrast to the early student Christian societies that focused on nurturing individuals’ religious devotion, providing opportunities for theological debates, and encouraging missionary activities, the Y also emphasized community service projects and embraced a broad range of programs and activities. By 1900, there were 628 campus Y associations in the United States, which were the primary forms of religion on college campuses (Butler 1989). With changing religious expressions in the twentieth century, however, the numbers of Y centers on college campuses began to dwindle; few campus Y centers remain today.

As the university and the church became institutionally separated and new colleges and universities devoid of denominational ties began to form, denominations responded by establishing churches near college towns. These denominational churches near college campuses ran parallel to Christian associations like the Y but distinguished themselves by being designed for students of a particular denomination. The Unitarians created the first of these churches near several college campuses in 1865, followed by the Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics.

One of the distinctive developments of denominationally supported campus ministries is the “Bible chair”—a religious teaching program that the church established at or near a college or university. These Bible chairs provided the teaching of religion at state-supported institutions by particular faith traditions and sought to provide high-quality religious instruction to students. In 1893, the Baptists and Disciples of Christ first established separate Bible chairs at the University of Michigan, and other denominations soon began similar projects on other university campuses (Butler 1989; Shockley 1989). Although denominations and other local churches continue to reach out to college students through campus ministries, the Bible chair pattern of both teaching and ministry ended in the 1960s.⁵

As the Y and the Bible chair movement waned, a new wave of independent campus Christian organizations emerged amid the religious revival that followed World War II.

New Independent Campus Christian Organizations

The post–World War II baby boom, suburban migration, public unease over Communism, and the psychological state of Americans coming out of the Depression and a grief-filled war helped to spur a religious revival. Church attendance and contributions to religious organizations soared. Postage stamps and folded money began to include the phrase “In God We Trust.” Americans likewise incorporated the phrase “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, and even the popular media adopted Christian themes (Johnstone 2001). Accordingly, virtually all Protestant denominations grew in membership in the 1950s and 1960s.

From 1965 to the present, membership in liberal denominations has declined, but traditionally Evangelical denominations continue to flourish. Since 1965, membership in Evangelical denominations increased at an average five-year rate of 8 percent, and Evangelicalism is one of the fastest growing religious movements in the United States (Hunter 1987: 6). Between 39 and 46 percent of Americans describe themselves as Evangelical or born-again Christians (Gallup and Lindsay 1999).⁶

Coinciding with these changes, many of the growing campus para-churches of today are Evangelical Christian campus organizations. Among others, they include Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), Navigators, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and Jews for Jesus. Evangelical campus organizations have little association with churches and tend to be nondenominational or interdenominational (Butler 1989), but they share several theological principles characteristic of other Evangelical Protestants. They include the belief in (1) the complete reliability and authority of the Bible alone; (2) the divinity of Christ and the efficacy of his life, death, and physical resurrection for the salvation of the human soul; (3) the importance of conversion or being “born again”; (4) having personal faith and “relationship” with Jesus; and (5) sharing their faith with and proselytizing to nonbelievers (Bramadat 2000; Hunter 1983; Marsden 1994; Quebe-deaux 1974).

As part of the larger Evangelical movement, campus Evangelical organizations are found on both public and private campuses. They tend to have a chief executive officer or president, who is often also the founder of the organization, along with regional directors and local staff members. The staff members who run the parachurch chapters at the local level are often young, are likely to have been former members of the campus ministry as undergraduates, and tend not to have professional training in ministry. They also raise their own salaries and stress recruiting and mentoring potential new leaders in their campus ministry (Butler 1989; Cherry et al. 2001).

Along with their similarities, there are differences. Each campus Evangelical organization has its own separate programs, national gatherings, and structures of accountability. For example, CCC is known for aggressive evangelism, while IVCF is known more for their “fellowship” and small-group Bible studies. Meanwhile, the Navigators are known for their intensive Bible studies, scripture memorization, and training to build disciples.

With increased matriculation of ethnic minority students, specifically Asian Americans, these and other campus Evangelical organizations have witnessed a change.⁷ The face of Christianity at Ivy League and other prestigious college and university campuses has changed from Caucasian to Asian. Traditionally white campus ministries have grown with the surge of Asian American Evangelicals, especially Chinese and Korean Americans, while others have shifted altogether, to become predominately Asian American campus fellowships. Asian Americans are also creating their own ethnic and pan-ethnic campus ministries and have heightened interest in racial reconciliation and multiethnic ministries.⁸

Asian American College Students

In the early 1900s, Asian students in American colleges and universities consisted mostly of foreign-born students along with a small number of U.S.-born Asian students. Although foreign-born Asian students attended a number of colleges and universities across the country, the bulk of the U.S.-born Asians enrolled in the universities along the Pacific Coast (Chan 1991). This pattern changed in the 1960s and 1970s as renewed immigration and an influx of better-educated and higher-income Asian immigrants began to send their children to the top schools in the United States.⁹

The previously invisible and slow-growing population of second-generation Asian American communities began to reverse itself after the late 1960s (Lee and Zhou 2004). The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 abolished the national origins quota system, aiming at a humanitarian goal of family reunification and an economic goal of meeting the demand for skilled labor, and setting an equal 20,000 per-country limit. This enactment, along with global economic restructuring and development in Asia and the failed Vietnam War, signified the beginning of the contemporary Asian American community. Nearly 7 million immigrants from Asia were legally admitted to the United States as permanent residents between 1970 and 2000.

Increased numbers of Asian immigrants and second-generation Asian Americans coincide with the growth in the numbers of Asian American college students, but disproportionately. The number of Asian American undergraduates on college campuses almost tripled between 1976 and 1986 from 150,000 to 488,000 (Hsia and Hirano-Nakanishi 1989). Then, “Between 1984 and 1995, the numbers of Asian Pacific Americans enrolled in higher education institutions rose 104.5%, with comparable figures of 5.1% for whites, 37% for African Americans, and 104.4% for Hispanics” (Siden 1994: 42). Asian Americans account for roughly 4 percent of the U.S. population. But they make-up more than 15 percent of the student enrollment at Ivy League colleges like Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, and more than 20 percent of the student enrollment at Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the California Institute of Technology. The numbers are even higher in some of the public universities in California. Over 40 percent of the student enrollment at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Irvine are Asian Americans (Hong 2000; Zhou and Gatewood 2000).¹⁰

Asian American Student Movements and Multiculturalism

The changes brought on by the civil rights and the ethnic student movements of the 1960s and 1980s helped lay the groundwork that changed colleges and universities to be more multicultural, sensitive to ethnic diversity, and, in certain respects, racially segmented. These developments, along with the continuing rise in ethnic minority student enrollment, have made American higher education more supportive of expressions of ethnic identities and accepting of ethnically-based student groups.

The 1968 San Francisco State College strike spearheaded the ethnic student movement and gave birth to ethnic studies as a regular program offered at various college and university campuses across America. Anti-imperialist wars raging in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; the revolutionary works of Communism; the ideology of international colonialism; racism; and American minorities’ lack of political power and agency—all were factors that motivated the strike. The strike was also a direct response to the Master Plan for Higher Education in California in the 1960s, which restricted the admission of minorities and centralized decision-making in the hands of businesses and political figures. The strike articulated ethnic minority students’ desire for self-determination—the right to shape their own history and curriculum, as well as to hire their own faculty. As African American, Asian American, Latin American, and Native American students faced resistance to these requests for self-determination, a campus-wide movement, which was to go down in history as the largest student strike in America, was born.

The strike led to the establishment of the nation’s first School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State College and marked the birth of the Asian American movement. It set the agenda for articulating Asian Americans’ identity, promoting diversity, and challenging white hegemony in higher education. Ethnic student movements and the development of ethnic studies for Asian Americans, as well as for other ethnic groups, countered the cultural domination of the Euro-American knowledge base in American colleges. Ethnic student movements democratized higher education, gave minority students empowerment and self-determination, and helped to create a more multicultural campus setting (Hune 1989).

College campuses have thus become an important arena for broader societal debates on questions of racial equality and justice, and issues of race have been at the center of controversies over curriculum, course content, student admission policies, and faculty hiring (Hune 1989; Kibria 2002; Lee and Zhou 2004). The pull of white assimilation declined. The Western European knowledge base of American higher education was challenged, and multiculturalism, a tolerance of ethnic racial diversity, became more accepted.

Major public universities and the Ivy League schools now offer courses in ethnic history, language, literature, arts, and culture; some have ethnic studies programs for both undergraduate and graduate students. Several university campuses even promote themselves as centers of diversity and multiculturalism. Universities like UCLA state in their general school catalogue that “one of the University’s highest priorities is to advance the ethnic diversity of its students, faculty, staff and administrators.” At other universities like UC Berkeley, multiculturalism is built into the school’s curriculum; incoming students are required to take courses on multiculturalism and diversity. Faculty members of many college and university campuses are also changing, albeit slowly, to reflect an increasingly diverse student body. Today’s college and university campuses thus provide students greater opportunities to learn more about their ethnic cultural backgrounds and empower themselves as ethnic groups.

These developments mean that the new generation of Asian American students can experience a cultural awakening (Chan 1991; Hune 1989). Instead of choosing between an “Asian” heritage versus an “American” heritage, the new generation of Asian American students can choose to construct an identity of their own that combines their past history and contemporary circumstances.

Multiculturalism and diversity, however, do not necessarily imply ethnic harmony. A quick glance around the cafeteria and local hangouts on campuses reveal black students sitting separately with other black students, white students clustered with white students, Asian students socializing with other Asian students, and so on. There is more racial segregation than integration. As a student comments: “Just because it is diverse does not mean that everyone is getting along.” In fact, precisely because there is greater ethnic awareness and diversity, there may be greater ethnic and racial segmentation on campus.

With these dynamics in mind, we can conclude that the pressure to conform to a presumably unified white majority has declined in many colleges and universities. Matriculating into the major institutions of higher education is not the key marker of assimilation as it once was; instead, it can lead to greater ethnic awareness and mobilization.

Asian American Theology

For the most part, Asian American Evangelicals have adopted the Evangelical theology of their white counterparts. In his ethnographic study of second-generation Chinese American and Korean American Evangelicals, Antony Alumkal finds that Asian American Evangelicals are largely unaware of the Anglo-American roots of Evangelical hermeneutics and treat such beliefs as essential characteristics of Christianity. He writes: “Many second-gener...