The Liberty of “China Wine”

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accountability, Barack Obama, Catholic sex abuse, celebrity, China Wine, Chuck Grassley, church-state, City Harvest Church, Evangelical, Evangelicalism, evangelism, Fortnight for Freedom, HHS mandate, Hong Kong, Kong Hee, Ms K, Obamacare, orientalism, prosperity theology, public, public good, religious freedom, secular, Singapore, Sun Ho, Thomas Jefferson, Timothy Dolan, USCCB, Wyclif Jean

The recent uproar over investigations over the misuse of funds at City Harvest Church in Singapore has taken the media by storm. Not only has it been plastered all over Singaporean media at Channel NewsAsia, the Straits Times, and Yahoo! Singapore, but it has been recently picked up by blogs at Time Magazine and Christianity Today as well.

The reactions have been typical:

• I knew it; this is another prosperity gospel preacher who’s getting his dues like his counterparts in the States.  You know, there’s the whole thing about Creflo Dollar and his alleged domestic abuse, not to mention Senator Chuck Grassley’s probe of the tax wheelings-and-dealings of six prominent televangelists.

• We at City Harvest trust this guy because we donate our funds to God, and our leaders do what they want with it.

• LOOK AT HIS WIFE BEHAVING LIKE A POLE DANCER IN THIS ORIENTALIZING VIDEO! (Notice, of course, that by collaborating with Wyclif Jean, the pastor’s wife has teamed up with “The Preacher’s Son.” That said, I don’t think this is what Vijay Prashad was calling for in terms of Afro-Asian relations in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting.)

To be sure, scandal can whet our appetites, and a scandal like this takes us in all sorts of critical directions: orientalism, prosperity gospel, the need for church transparency and accountability to the public, the place of Christian celebrities, Bill Bright’s “seven mountains” vis-a-vis James Davison Hunter‘s To Change the World, etc.

The problem is, all of that elides what I think is the central issue here: church-state relations.

I think what’s interesting about this case is that it can easily be juxtaposed to something that looks completely irrelevant on the surface: the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Fortnight for Freedom.

The Fortnight, of course, seems to have far less bearing on church scandal, than, say, the 2002 Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic sex abuse scandals and the efforts that followed that made the Church more compliant with public investigation of pedophilia among priests through the June 2002 release of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and its 2011 renewal.

As it is, on the face of it, the Fortnight is irrelevant to Kong Hee because it seems to have more bearing on the passage of universal health care in the United States. But it is relevant, I argue, because the opposition by the bishops to most of Obama’s health care policies is least rhetorically based on what it perceives as the Obama administration’s curbing of religious liberties by removing the right to conscientious objection to abortion, contraception, and welcoming undocumented migrants, all in relation to health care policy. (The evangelical response, it seems to me, is based more on libertarian principles than right-to-life activism.)  Not only were the bishops disappointed in the Roberts Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, but they began the Fortnight for Freedom prior to the ruling to oppose Kathleen Sebelius’s Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate that all employers must provide contraceptives, including allegedly abortifacient ones, to all of their employees.

When the administration compromised by exempting religious organizations, the bishops weren’t satisfied: the exemption only applied to organizations where the membership is Catholic, not to, say, schools, hospitals, and non-profit organizations that are under the jurisdiction of Catholic bishops but mostly serve and employ non-Catholics.

psst…there’s a Canadian one too

The bishops argue that the state has no business telling the Church what is and is not religion.  The Church’s services do not only serve other confessional Catholics; the slogan goes: we don’t serve people because they’re Catholic; we serve because we’re Catholic. Part of the Catholic thing, the bishops argue, is that they should be able to abide by their rule of conscience on right-to-life issues when they run even these “secular” organizations, and for the state to police that is to violate the Church’s freedom of religion.

Let’s bring this back to Kong Hee and Sun Ho.

The allegations at City Harvest Church are that five members of the board misappropriated church funds to finance Sun Ho’s music career and lavish lifestyle in Los Angeles. More technically, it is that the usage of $23 million that were supposed to be for charity were found to be irregular as they were allegedly used for the secular purposes of financing music as non-religious as “China Wine.”

Bear with me, but if you think about it, you could make the same argument for the board members at City Harvest as the American bishops are making during the Fortnight for Freedom.  You could say: what business does the state have in determining what is and is not religious activity? After all, the point of Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is to use secular music to evangelize non-Christians.

That’s a pretty religious motivation for a non-religious activity. It could even be construed as charitable if your theology is that evangelizing non-Christians at all costs is the most loving service you can do for your neighbour. Just as the Catholic bishops would argue that schools, hospitals, and non-profits that serve non-Catholics still remain Catholic because they serve out of a Catholic spirit, so Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the leadership at City Harvest could maintain that Sun Ho’s Crossover Project is religious, if not charitable, activity not because it is targeted to Christians but because the intention remains Christian evangelism.

Of course, especially on blogs like A Christian Thing, we could open discussion on whether we agree with this theology or not. We could talk about the fundamental theological differences between Catholic bishops and prosperity gospel preachers, and we certainly could do a series on how to write about Christian scandals that are exploding left, right, and centre at the moment, from Kong Hee to Creflo Dollar to Korean property tax scandals regarding church cafes to allegations of sexual harassment by a Ms K in Hong Kong when she went on a short-term missions trip to Taiwan with a Pastor/Mr. X. The Asian American in me also wants to rant about how orientalizing “China Wine” is. We could–and should–talk about all those things, and yes, of course, bring on the critique.

But like it or not, we cannot deny that Kong Hee, Sun Ho, and the board at City Harvest Church in Singapore have a theology. Much as some progressive Catholics think the bishops have gone too far, they can’t deny them their theological reasoning either. Critique, yes, but a full critique of these things would have to be a theological critique.

However, to acknowledge such theologies as theologies in their own right would also change the conversation from scandal to a more intricate theological question: what is the power of the state to regulate what constitutes theological activity in a religious organization?

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Vincent Chin and the “International Man of Fu Manchu Mystery”

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African American, African American theology, Ahab, Alexandra Wallace, Anglican, Arden Cho, Asian American, Asian American Christian, Asian American theology, Buddhist-Christian relations, Dalai Lama, David Suzuki, Francis Chan, Fu Manchu, interfaith, interreligious, Jane Iwamura, Jeremy Lin, Jesus Movement, Jezebel, Josh Harris, MacLean's, Mark Driscoll, Naboth, Oden Fong, oriental monk, orientalization, Pew Research Center, race, racism, Rodney King, Rowan Williams, Thich Nhat Hanh, Vincent Chin, virtual orientalism, Zen Buddhist

The last thing I expected to find in Detroit was an Asian American mandate that would compel the scattered groups across the nation into a broad-based pan-Asian movement. I was in for a big surprise. (Helen Zia, Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, 57)

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin. It’s a good day to talk about the imperative of Asian American Christian studies (see The Detroit News, the Star Tribune, the Asia Pacific Legal Center, the New York Times, Angry Asian Man, the recent UCLA Association of Chinese Americans’s annual event, and KoreAm). It also helps that so many things related to Asian American history have been happening recently, including the death of Rodney King, the House’s apology for the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the release of the first Pew survey of Asian Americans.

A quick recap for those who don’t know: Vincent Chin was murdered in 1982 in Detroit on the night of his bachelor party. The context for the whole thing was the mass layoffs that had happened at Chrysler due to the late 1970s oil crisis and the rise of Japanese imported cars into the United States. Framing the layoffs in the popular press and in everyday discourse was a Japanese “invasion” that was going to take over the American economy. (Tom Clancy would have been proud.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that while the Vietnamese Chinese American, Vincent Chin, was enjoying the favours of strippers being paid highly by his groomsmen at the Fancy Pants in Detroit, Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz–both of whom had been recently laid off by Chrysler–were annoyed, thought Vincent Chin was Japanese because (why, of course) all Asians looked the same to them, and muttered something to the effect that it was “because of motherf*ckers like you that we’re out of work.” A scuffle ensued, all parties were thrown out, and then the unthinkable happened: Ebens and Nitz hunted Chin down outside and clubbed him to death with a baseball bat while onlookers, including two off-duty cops, stood by, just letting it happen. Vincent Chin’s wedding guests arrived instead for his funeral.

psst…I think they got the date wrong…unless they’re referring to the date Vincent Chin actually died…

In a judicial twist as outrageous as the murder of Naboth the Jezreelite by Ahab and Jezebel in today’s mass readings, the trial drama that followed spiraled into a racist nightmare. Nine months after the murder, Ebens and Nitz merely got probation because, as the judge said, “These aren’t the kind of men you send to jail. You fit the punishment to the criminal, not the crime.” As one local restauranteur commented, “You go to jail for killing a dog.” Vincent Chin’s life, it seemed, was worth less than that of a dog.

The event galvanized the Asian American movement in the 1980s. It resonated on so many levels. There was the level of justice: Vincent Chin’s mother cried out for justice, and notable figures like the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke out on her behalf. But deeper than a cry for justice for the unnecessary death was the plea for justice over the injustice that Asian Americans could never shake the image of the “perpetual foreigner,” for though Vincent Chin was Vietnamese Chinese American–and really, just a regular guy from Detroit–the fact that he could be mistaken for a “Jap” and openly clubbed to death certainly raised serious alarm among Asian Americans from Detroit to Oakland. The deeper question, as filmmakers Christine Choy and Renee Tajima later asked in a film that continues to haunt introductory Asian American studies courses across university campuses, was: Who Killed Vincent Chin?

Today we commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin, and we remember with horror the orientalized racism that fed into the white supremacy that exploded on the night of June 19, 1982 with all its ensuing fallout.

And yet I fear that Christians may be tempted to write Vincent Chin off as having nothing to do with Christian theology. I mean, didn’t this all happen in a strip club? That doesn’t sound like the most Christian of places. And so, if Vincent Chin wasn’t a Christian, what does he have to do with us? Don’t we have more to celebrate within Asian American Christian circles, such as athletes like Michael Chang and Jeremy Lin, missionaries like Michael Oh, motivational speakers like Christopher Yuan, and YouTube stars like Arden Cho, Clara Chung, and Jayesslee?

Let me suggest that Vincent Chin still matters, not least because the Jeremy Lins and the Arden Chos of the world still face widely talked-about orientalizing forms of racism, say, in news reporting and in Hollywood auditions.

But let me give two examples from within Christian circles, one fairly liberal Protestant, the other fairly conservative evangelical, to illustrate why I think this is particularly relevant to Christians, and not just Asian American ones. See what you make of these.

Last Sunday, at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, a sermon was preached concerning the Parable of the Sower that basically argued that Jesus was a seed-bombing Zen Buddhist master. The metanoia that Jesus proclaims, the preacher explains, refers to “the big mind,” hinting that it’s not really about “repentance” on the one hand while advancing a quasi-Buddhist Jesus who speaks of the immaterial interconnectedness of us all. I have no doubt, of course, that Buddhist-Christian dialogue is an imperative of our day, as witnessed in Archbishop Rowan Williams’s recent efforts as well as the ongoing Catholic work that followed Assisi 1986.

But to make Jesus an Eastern spiritual sage is a bit of a different story–it ends up sounding like, Oh, all Christians should wish they were Asian so that we can all be smart and spiritual and respect our elders (a conservative might add: …and get persecuted for their faith like in Communist China). Indeed, the sermon seems to play out blow-by-blow right into the five Buddha fingers (sorry, couldn’t resist a Journal to the West 西遊記 reference) of Jane Iwamura’s brilliant critique of the “oriental monk” in popular American perceptions of Asian religions in her must-read Virtual Orientalism. Jesus the Zen Buddhist environmental activist sounds so hip, but it’s actually kinda racist.

But lest you think that this is a liberal problem, I often wonder why there hasn’t been more outrage at Mark Driscoll calling Francis Chan an “international man of Fu Manchu mystery” when Chan resigned from his long-time pastorate at Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley.

What’s Next for Francis Chan? A Conversation with Mark Driscoll and Joshua Harris from Ben Peays on Vimeo.

Driscoll is joined by Josh Harris, the same guy who once kissed dating good-bye, met a girl, called for a Puritan version of metanoia that actually meant “repentance” and accepting “not even a hint” of lust, and calls you now to fall in love with a home church while maintaining a “humble orthodoxy.” (If you read I Kissed Dating Good-bye, you will also remember that Harris’s parents were Jesus People and that his mother is Japanese American, which has all sorts of tantalizing implications for Asian American Christianity and its possible intersections with the legacy of the Jesus Movement in the 1960s. I think also, for example, of Oden Fong and his band, Mustard Seed Faith. But I digress.)

Together, they ask the peripatetic Francis Chan whether his efforts to live the Christian life among the poor around the world isn’t just an irresponsible act of abandonment toward his church. You know, if only he wouldn’t subscribe to his sage-like, oriental monkish qualities, he could actually be a stable, dudely pastor-dad with a pastor-job caring for his church-family; he could even [gasp!] become just like Mark Driscoll, not the crazy guy trying to plant 586 churches in the square mile of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district with San Francisco City Impact.

What gets me about the Driscoll-Harris-Chan interview is its repeated insinuations that Francis Chan is a wandering evangelical oriental monk-sage.  I often wonder if it were more widely seen by Asian Americans whether the reaction would be the same as the one toward Alexandra Wallace calling “Asians in the library” loud or MacLean’s complaining that the University of British Columbia is “too Asian.”

Of course, one could argue: but no one got killed in these examples. Vincent Chin got killed. Francis Chan, on the other hand, seems far from dead, especially at the ignorant hands of Mark Driscoll.

But that isn’t the point of the Vincent Chin story.

The point of Vincent Chin is that much of what killed Vincent Chin was the popular notion that all Asians are the same mysterious breed.

On a good day, the religious ones are all nice Buddhist monks dispensing pearls of wisdom like David Suzuki, gems of thought like the Dalai Lama, and meditative riddles that sound awfully peaceful like Thich Naht Hanh.

On a bad day, they’re Fu Manchu and Doctor No with their sinister plots to take over the world.

On all days, they’re these mysterious oriental monks who are moving with ninja stealth into your hearts, minds, and lives.

The commemoration of Vincent Chin is a call to renew the Asian American Christian theological imperative to respond prophetically to such orientalization in our own midst. It isn’t a liberal versus conservative, mainline versus evangelical, spiritual-but-not-religious versus institutional, interfaith versus neo-Calvinist, heterodox versus orthodox issue. Orientalized racism seems to have woven itself into the fabric of Protestant Christianity, period, and if that’s the case, doesn’t denying this reality make us continually complicit in the murder of Vincent Chin? (One also wonders about the contrast of the Roman Catholic Church, which seems to be acknowledging the need for Asian American theologies, as the bishops seem to have done good for themselves in a report on Asian and Pacific Islander presence in the American Church, and even Francis Cardinal George acknowledges this. Of course, I’ve also written about Driscoll being quasi-Catholic, but I digress again.)

I leave it to you to think and pray about how to get the imperative done. I wonder, for example, if it could happen through…

• institutionally promoting Asian American Christian studies through something like the Institute for the Study of Asian American Christianity (ISAAC)
• writing more explicitly about this stuff and getting it published in outlets that people will actually read
• getting people to read the stuff that’s already published, like Asian American Christianity: A Reader, as well as books and articles already written by folks as diverse and divergent as Sang Hyun Lee, Andrew Sung Park, Russell Jeung, Tim Tseng, James Chuck, Grace Hsiao, Russell Yee, Young Lee Hertig, Helen Lee, Ken Fong, Dave Gibbons, Ken Shigematsu, Roy Sano, Paul Nagano, Peter Phan, Fumitaka Matsuoka, Kwok Pui Lan, Patrick Cheng, Rita Nakashima Brock, Jonathan Tan, Rachel Bundang, Jonathan Tran, Samuel Ling, Peter Cha, Jeanette Yep, Paul Tokunaga, Soong-Chan Rah, Jerry Park, Amos Yong, Esther Chung-Kim, Grace Kao, Frank Yamada, Benny Liew, Rudy Busto, Sharon Suh, Jane Iwamura, Janelle Wong, David Kyuman Kim, Henry Yu, etc. (if you’re overwhelmed or if you know this stuff and think that these people all have very divergent views and shouldn’t all be in the same list, my point is simply that there’s a ton of stuff out there already)
• putting out more stuff on blogs, social media, and YouTube/Vimeo
• teaching directly about the intersections of race, ethnicity, and theology at the seminary level
• inserting into the typical Christian education/Sunday school thing in churches an explicit curriculum on Asian American Christianity
• pastors and lay leaders preaching and praying while taking this stuff seriously

But if I can be blunt, it really is important not to write all this off as just another Christian fad. It is actually an imperative. After all, calling Francis Chan an “international man of Fu Manchu mystery” is really not OK when you pair it with the question of who killed Vincent Chin?