The Fire Next Time

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African American, Asian American, Chinese church, James Baldwin, model minority, Noah's Ark, race, The Fire Next Time

When I was sixteen, I read a book titled The Fire Next Time. I figured that since it’s James Baldwin’s birthday today, I should put something up on the Thing in commemoration of this event. In fact, since I promised in a previous post on the George Zimmerman verdict that I would write about the immense impact that Baldwin’s work has had on my thinking, consider this a promise fulfilled.

When I was in high school, I did not know that the ‘model minority’ stereotype was the archetypal concept against which Asian American studies was positioned. The ‘model minority,’ for those who aren’t in the know, was a concept developed in the 1960s by white sociologists and journalists who observed that–in their view–Asian people responded to racism differently from black people. While black people were hitting the streets in civil rights protests and arming themselves with the Black Panthers, this stereotype considered Asian Americans to be a ‘model’ minority who focused on the integrity of their private spheres–their strict family life, their hard work in the private sector (usually mom-and-pop shops), their emphasis on education–to overcome racial barriers in America. While Asian American studies was formed through Asian Americans joining in solidarity with African American strikers on university campuses soon after ‘model minority’ articles hit issues in U.S. and World Report and Newsweek, the model minority stereotype was also embraced by a good many other Asian Americans, not least S.I. Hayakawa, the Japanese American university president against whom the black and Asian students were striking on the San Francisco State College campus. By the 1980s, Asian American scholars noted that an increasing number of their students were using the ‘model minority’ to construct their own identities, and many complained about the internal psychological contradictions, the apathy for poor Asian Americans, and the disdain for Chicana/o and African American populations that were the concrete consequences of buying into this stereotype. Indeed, one could say that the use of the ‘model minority’ ideological stereotype in the 1960s had succeeded in positioning Asian Americans as a wedge between white America and peoples of colour who were not Asian, often with devastating consequences for Asian Americans in late 1980s and 1990s urban race riots.

Not knowing any better at the time, though, I considered myself part of the model minority. I lived in California at the time, and if you know anything about the University of California system, what you know is that there are things called ‘UC credits’ that the university uses to evaluate whether certain high school courses can be said to prepare one for admission to the UC system. Intent as I was on getting into a UC school–for the record, I was admitted into four of them, but chose to move out of state, and indeed, out of country, for my university education–I decided to drop home economics. ‘Home ec,’ you see, was not a UC-credited course. But Twentieth-Century Literature was. So I replaced ‘home ec’ with ’20th-century lit,’ and ended up taking two English courses during that term, one an honours English course in which we studied American literature, the other this 20th-century lit course. Needless to say, I was very sleep-deprived during that semester.

I did not know that I would actually get much of what I mull over now out of 20th Century Lit. After all, if it weren’t for that course, I would never have read Thomas Mann, Nadine Gordimer, Dorothy Parker, Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, or Flannery O’Connor. As we explored the 1920s, the teacher handed out photocopies of Alain Locke’s The New Negro, and we spent a month combing through the work produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes became a household name. (I didn’t realize this until now, but during that same time, I was taking another course called ‘the Bible as literature,’ and we read Alice Walker’s The Color Purple there.)

It’s in that context that the teacher put a book on our desks quite late into the semester. It was James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

I remember reading it and having no idea what Baldwin was talking about. In the first part of the book, Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew, telling him that generations of black self-hatred should not be blamed on African Americans but on a system of segregation in America in which white America systemically induced a sort of African American subservience that, if undermined, would cause a radical shift in the nation’s constitution itself. As a ‘model minority’ Chinese American, I connected with none of that. After all, we Asian Americans weren’t victims of racism, I thought. We were doing quite well economically. And if we could do it, couldn’t everyone else?

It was to my dismay that the teacher announced soon after this book was assigned that we had to write a poem in response to this book. How was I supposed to write a book about a poem with which I had no connection? I mean, by this point, my father had already been ordained by the African American Progressive Baptist denomination. Unlike other Asian American families, ours was in contact with African Americans working for racial justice in Oakland. I had African American friends in high school who spoke out incessantly against racism in all of its visceral forms, and I actually listened to black gospel music. But I was not black. I was an Asian American, and a damn good model minority one too (I had a 4.39 GPA in high school, if you can wrap your head around that). My African American friends should be the ones writing the poem, I thought, not me.

It was then that I re-read the second part of the book. I must have really fallen asleep on my first time through; either that, or I was just really confused. Baldwin writes his autobiography in the second part, tracing his time as a teenage preacher in an African American Pentecostal church and then his being introduced to Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam. The first time through, I must have been bewildered–given my encounters with black Christianity–that African Americans could be Muslim. I was probably so weirded out that I completely missed what Baldwin was saying.

The poetry assignment forced me to re-read part 2. Of course, I re-read part 1 too, but that was short–like 10ish pages. Part 2 is this monster of like 100 pages.

And then, just as Baldwin titles the first part, ‘my dungeon shook.’

Re-reading part 2, I began to see parallels to the Chinese churches in which I had grown up in both Baldwin’s account of his Pentecostal preaching and in his ambivalent relationship with the Nation of Islam. Writing of his preaching, Baldwin pretty much says that he was giving his congregation a Marxian ‘opiate of the masses,’ encouraging them as black people to embrace their subservient conditions while looking forward to life in the world to come, to not care about their material conditions and focus on the ephemerally spiritual. In the second part of the book, though, Baldwin issues a different warning about Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin writes of how he admires that the Nation of Islam wants to construct a sort of black nationalism that views ‘black as beautiful.’ However, this comes at one expense: Elijah Muhammad just keeps on throwing out epithets about ‘white devils,’ demonizing white people as the other just as they demonized black people. Baldwin says that that kind of thing insidiously reinforces segregation–keeping the white and black parts of America hating each other and thus dwelling in separate communities–and he says that if those forces of mutual hatred are not dealt with, there will be a racial apocalypse, a judgment on America in which the races will try to kill each other. That judgment, as he quotes the spiritual, evokes a visceral biblical image: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the fire next time.’

In many ways, this paralleled my experience of Chinese churches. In private circles not too unlike Baldwin’s dinner meeting with Elijah Muhammad, anyone who was not Chinese was called a ‘ghost’ and a ‘barbarian,’ be they white, Chicana/o, or black. In fact, I heard some even speak of non-Chinese Asians as somehow inferior to the Chinese, be it the Japanese (for the events of the Second World War) or the Filipina/os (for their otherness to Chinese, probably starting with skin colour and then descending into all manners of stereotypes that I cannot bear to repeat on this blog). Hell, even the Chinese from the People’s Republic of China were demonized for being Communists. And yet, unlike the Nation of Islam’s focus on material conditions, our Chinese churches focused on becoming ‘truly spiritual,’ casting off worldliness for the life of the spirit. This had an ironic effect, of course, for our affluent congregations. In church, the focus was on being spiritual, but in the world, we had to get ahead: we had to have 4.5 GPA (mine was considered low, compared to some of my peers), we had to get a 1600 on the SAT I (in those days, there were only verbal and math scores), and we had to aim for economic success in practical careers. I found out later that there was theological justification for this sacred-secular divide: the longtime pastor at our Chinese church regularly declared from the pulpit, ‘Where Christianity is, there is prosperity!’ Focus on God and being spiritual, the ideology went, and you would become economically prosperous with God’s blessing. Opiate of the masses?

As I saw these parallels, I wrote a poem called ‘A Chinese Church’ that eventually became the first thing I ever published (I put it in the literary magazine I founded at the high school; yes, I founded it). I imagined that in the midst of all of this, I might be dating a white girl, and I called her ‘Abbey.’ I even posited that she was a missionary’s kid who spoke Chinese; I never imagined that I’d actually meet white women who could speak Chinese better than I (e.g. Not a Dinner Party), and for the record, I am happily married now to a Chinese woman who is a free-church evangelical. But anyway, for the sake of responding to The Fire Next Time, I imagined bringing Abbey to a Chinese church. She would get all kinds of strange glances as a ‘ghost,’ weird stares as a ‘barbarian,’ and a stream of people telling her, ‘This is a Chinese church; how can I help you?’ I ended the poem with a zinger: having left the church, gotten married, and gotten Abbey pregnant with a half-white, half-Chinese child, the speaker (well, that is, me) declared, ‘They were a Chinese church; could they help us?’

The poem was a hit. As I said, I got it published in the literary magazine (well, I was the founding editor, so it had to go in there, but it got some good responses). It was also awarded 100% as its grade, which helped my 20th Century Lit overall score and my 4.39 GPA.

But I never imagined that ten years later working on a PhD on Chinese Christians, I’d still be mulling over The Fire Next Time or that my poem, which was written with fairly instrumentalist motivations, would still be lingering in the back of my head. Of course, a lot has happened since then, my thinking on the Chinese church has (hopefully) matured, and I (thankfully) did not end up marrying a white missionary girl named Abbey.

But on this commemoration of James Baldwin’s birthday, I want to thank James Baldwin for shaking my ‘model minority’ dungeon.

Indeed, shortly after writing this poem, we were assigned in AP US History to do a project on a topic of interest to us. Having done some research and discovered a film by Justin Lin called Better Luck Tomorrow, I decided to research the ‘model minority,’ and that was the first time that Asian American academic names like Ronald Takaki, Sucheng Chan, and Roger Daniels came onto my radar screen. But I don’t think I actually got it until my doctoral work when I embarked into a sustained reflection on Asian American studies and its protest of orientalizing racialization throughout American history.

It was then that I discovered that the way that most people who criticize Chinese churches often misses the mark. Critiqued as bulwarks against racial integration and strongholds of conservative patriarchal ideologies, it has simply never occurred to most people that Baldwin’s analysis of both the black church and the Nation of Islam might have any application to Chinese Christianity. It does.

And here’s the application.

It is that ‘Asianness’–and ‘Chineseness’ in particular–has to be continually constructed within Chinese churches to preserve their place as the model minority within a black-white racial hierarchy. ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness’ don’t imprison Chinese churches; Chinese Christians themselves actively construct a unitary ideology of what these things are in order to hang on to their wedge position as the ‘model minority.’ This is not just confined to America. A recent example of this is the attempt in Hong Kong by some Chinese Christians uninterested in making these constructs to hold others who are interested in these power dynamics accountable for their claims about trying to find Noah’s Ark in Turkey. For those who aren’t in the know, an organization in Hong Kong has solicited funds from Chinese churches over a decade in an effort to find Noah’s Ark as a silver bullet for convincing the world of the inerrancy of Scripture, which they claim will result in a major proselytizing harvest. In the process, dubious actions have been committed, especially the exaggeration of results from their Turkey expeditions (on which no credible archaeologists went). While my friends like Sam Tsang have been pressing for truth in this matter, the response tends to be that the dissenters calling for accountability will shatter the construct of a universal Chinese Christianity that needs to speak with one voice for evangelistic effectiveness. In other words, there’s too much riding on some Chinese Christians wielding the power to construct ‘Asianness’ and ‘Chineseness,’ so much that dissent is suppressed. Allow the dissent, and shatter the community.

Baldwin warns us precisely of this kind of thing. He reminds those of us Asian Americans who buy into the ‘model minority’ stereotype that, by corollary, this construct that from its very inception was meant to situate Asian Americans as a wedge between black and white America is designed to feed segregation and hatred, whether those of us who used it for our identity construction know it or not. In other words, buying into ‘model minority’ constructs may not be accompanied by known malicious intentions, but the structural social consequences of buying into it result in hateful polarization. The horror is not simple theological and organizational breakdown within Chinese churches and among Chinese Christian networks. It’s that they will feed the racializing processes that keep the races segregated from each other in mutual fear and hatred, a problem that, as we saw in the Trayvon Martin case, is just as insidious today as it was when Baldwin was writing. It’s those constructs that must be the target of any prophetic critique. Those of us making this critique love the Chinese church. We grew up in it. We were spiritual formed by it. Our closest friends and family are part of it. But we criticize not because we either hate the church and not because we are simply trying to save a structure that we, and no one else, care about. We speak because we pray that Chinese Christians would be shaken from our complicity with racial segregation and realize that the ‘Christian’ thing calls us to contribute our very selves to the church catholic’s ministry of reconciliation.

Indeed, as Baldwin concludes The Fire Next Time, reconciliation can only happen when the demonization stops and the power of love conquers the consolidation of segregated communities. To posit a heterodox reading of The Fire Next Time via a radically orthodox Christian lens, the fire next time can only be avoided by the Cursillo prayer: ‘Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people and kindle in them the fire of your love.’ James Baldwin has spoken to us, and his words are prophetic. We are called to repentance; we are summoned to examine our contribution to the impending racial apocalypse; we are beckoned to follow the way of love over against structures that feed hatred and division. Though James Baldwin left the pulpit early on in his ministry and thought that he left the Body of Christ, Baldwin calls us to follow the way of Christ, a way that shattered my dungeon and has moved me in a vocational direction that I never imagined I would take when I was sixteen. All I can say is that I am grateful to Baldwin for writing his book, and I hope that my work does his legacy justice.

We as a People Will Get to the Promised Land

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African American, African American theology, George Zimmerman, James Baldwin, James Cone, lynching, Martin Luther King, mountaintop, Promised Land, The Fire Next Time, Trayvon Martin

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!!

-The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mason Temple, Memphis, TN, 3 April 1968

The day after Martin King uttered these words, he was shot dead.

The acquittal of George Zimmerman by a jury of his peers for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida has brought to the fore a divisiveness over race and secular law that has driven us to the edge of civility, and indeed, sometimes into utter fear and madness. Even as protesters calling for justice for Trayvon Martin took to the streets in generally peaceful protests across major American cities, slanderous videos and photos were circulated online alleging that violent riots were breaking out, until some of those videos were exposed to be from Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riots in 2011 and that reports of the Oakland police car burning had exaggerated the extent of the violence in Oakland and failed to report that across the San Francisco Bay in San Francisco itself, the protest had ended peacefully.

Even so, Zimmerman’s defenders went on the defensive. They told those of us troubled by the events, the trial, and the verdict that what happened in the courtroom was the result of a fair legal process that we were arrogant to judge. They said that by bringing up racial profiling and our objections to Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws, we were the ones being divisive. They told us that by calling Zimmerman white, we were ignorant because he is in fact part-Latino. They argued that we ignored the trial proceedings, that it was obvious that Martin had started the fight, that Martin was on top of Zimmerman when he fired, and that what we called the systematic character assassination of Trayvon Martin was a key plank in the case because his character flaws meant that he had a propensity to violence, that he had a tendency to use things like concrete as weapons, and that Zimmerman was well-justified to defend himself against this sort of hooded, thug-like teenager pummeling his head into the sidewalk. They contended that if we did not respect the jury’s verdict, then it was we who were the vigilantes advocating for mob rule.

We are divided. And yet, King prophesied that ‘we as a people will get to the Promised Land.’

Who are ‘we’?

It is tempting to write off King’s final speech by saying that ‘we’ are not being addressed by Martin King. Many of ‘us,’ for example, do not attend African American churches–what King would have called the ‘beloved community’–and even if I lay claim to my father as the only Chinese American to be ordained at Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church (a pillar in beloved communities in America), the fact is that my position in an African American ‘beloved community’ may be seen by many as ambivalent. For those of ‘us’ living outside of the United States, ‘we’ may be tempted even to write this off as an American problem, to pretend smugly that what happens down there–especially in the deep American South–is nothing more than the systemic sin of racism in America with which ‘we’ share no complicity. It is tempting to say that ‘we’ are not King’s beloved community.

It is there that we are wrong. Earlier in the speech, Martin King declares:

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannseburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, George; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee–the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’

Write that off, if you will, as an imposition of American freedom beyond its borders, even though King opposed the building of the American empire during the Vietnam War on the backs of African American soldiers sent to die by white politicians. But if there is and must be, as King says, a ‘human rights revolution…to bring the coloured peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect,’ then being neither African American nor American does not free us from complicity.

The ‘us’ for King is us. All of us.

He says that ‘we’–all of us now–‘as a people will get to the Promised Land.’ If we as a people must get to the Promised Land, then we as a people are not at present in the Promised Land. If we as a people are not yet in the Promised Land, then we as a people are still in exile. If we as a people are still in exile, then we as a people are still in the bondage of slavery. And that is what King says in this speech:

It means that we’ve got to stay together. We’ve got to stay together and maintain unity. You know, whenever Pharaoh wanted to prolong the period of slavery in Egypt, he had a favorite, favorite formula for doing it. What was that? He kept the slaves fighting among themselves. But whenever the slaves get together, something happens in Pharaoh’s court, and he cannot hold the slaves in slavery. When the slaves get together, that’s the beginning of getting out of slavery. Now let us maintain unity.

If we are still slaves getting together for liberation in Pharaoh’s court, then we are still colonized. This is not American freedom from taxation without representation. This is not African American emancipation from plantation owners. This is a declaration that we–all of us–are not free because we–all of us–remain colonized.

By what are we colonized?

African American theologian James Cone asks this question in a different way: why is it that there is virtually no reflection on lynching in American theology and religious studies? For Cone, the experience of African Americans as they fear a justice system that systematically criminalizes them just for the blackness of their skin makes them Christ-figures in America. This is not because African Americans teach us to be masochists redeeming suffering for personal growth. It is because the lynching tree reveals precisely how America is constituted, especially along racial lines, revealing the things hidden from the founding of the nation: that people of colour, especially black people, are scapegoated for the cohesion of white America.

Cone’s revelation reveals in turn that King’s suggestion that the ‘we’ who are in exile are not just the African Americans who live in perpetual fear of being lynched in America. The colonized are those who have systematically been made unable to even ask the question about lynching even when it is happening before their very eyes. It is those who uncritically buy into the systems of power that perpetuate political and economic injustice against people of colour. It is those who see a mass of people protesting against the unjust conditions that strip them of their human dignity and see only troublemakers rioting in the streets.

This is why King’s references to a global human rights revolution is so significant. The lynching tree may reveal the systems that perpetuate injustice against people of colour in America as ones that exercise illegitimate colonial power, but the references beyond America reveal that this experience is not limited to America. It was also apartheid in South Africa. It is also the treatment of the First Nations in Canada. It is also the cry of the subjugated in Tahrir Square. It is also the protest of those at Occupy Central in Hong Kong. It is that when the oppressed are given voice, the structures of power propped up by the colonized themselves are revealed even as the protesters are scapegoated for wrecking the coherence of the system.

It is in this declaration that the oppressed have the rights of human dignity that King declares, ‘I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land.’ In the face of human rights protests, King declares that he knows where we the colonized are going as a people. We are leaving our exile and going to the Promised Land.

It’s the Promised Land of which James Baldwin speaks in the classic civil rights text, The Fire Next Time. I will talk another day about how reading The Fire Next Time in high school literally catapulted me into research and storytelling about Chinese churches and shaped me into a Chinglican. But here I will emphasize that Baldwin says exactly what Cone says in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, asserts precisely what Martin King declares in the ‘Mountaintop’ speech: we are colonized, and those who refuse to ask the lynching question while uncritically and unintentionally propping up structures of white privilege are to be pitied above all. Writing to his nephew about the pent-up blues of African Americans as they have been systematically taught to hate themselves by white people who don’t know that this is what they are teaching, Baldwin tells his nephew that as much as he is taught that survival in American society is premised on him integrating into white society and being accepted by white folk, this is a lie:

The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it…In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity. Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. (The Fire Next Time, p. 8-9)

Following this letter, Baldwin gives us an extensive autobiography exploring why the Promised Land must be founded on this kind of radical charity. He tells us that the church in his experience of African American communities is no better than the brothel, that many pastors are no better than pimps, asking like a pimp, ‘Who’s little boy are you?’ to which he answers, ‘Why, yours’ (p. 29). He recalls his early days as an African American Pentecostal preacher who swayed the churches with the opiate of the masses, blinding them to their colonized state and the economic injustice with which they were subjugated by white America. And yet, as he transitions into a discussion of the Nation of Islam, he realizes from encounters with Elijah Muhammad and the early Malcolm X that the solution is not to assume that all white people are ‘white devils,’ for this too perpetuates the colonized separation of whites and blacks in America premised on racial hatred.

No, Baldwin says, the revelation that the cohesion of white America is founded on the lynching of African Americans must lead us to love. This Promised Land must be love, Baldwin says, unless the fullest conclusion of racial colonization is realized in the apocalyptic bloodbath that will destroy us all in judgment; referencing Noah’s flood, Baldwin quotes the old spiritual that says of this judgment, ‘No more water, the fire next time!’

This is what is so poignant about Trayvon Martin’s mother’s tweet immediately after the ‘not guilty’ verdict was read:

Lord during my darkest hour I lean on you. You are all that I have. At the end of the day, GOD is still in in control. Thank you all for your prayers and support. I will love you forever Trayvon!!! In the name of Jesus!!!

— Sybrina Fulton (@SybrinaFulton) July 14, 2013

Sybrina Fulton is saying the same thing as Dr. King: ‘But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!’

This blog is titled A Christian Thing. It recognizes that above all things, the church of Jesus Christ as the beloved community is called in its actions to herald the good news that we as a people are leaving our exile to go to the Promised Land. Seeing the face of Jesus in the lynched and the scapegoated, the beloved community calls attention to the ways in which we are all too content to be colonized and declares that the kingdom of God is near. It does so in love, not repeating the scapegoating by calling for the lynching of George Zimmerman in return, but by protesting a system that justifies lynching for the sake of social cohesion, the ‘rule of law,’ and the ‘rights of self-defence.’ Martin King has been up to the mountaintop. He has seen the Promised Land. He declared to us as a people that we will get there, and thus, to attain the love not founded on the violent myth that harmony can only be achieved by burying the murders that undergird it, we must rise as the church in protest against systemic forms of racialization that only end in death.

In that protest and in that lament, we join Martin King as he declares that he is happy tonight, he’s not worried about anything, he’s not fearing any man, because as we head toward the Promised Land, we can say with Martin King and all the saints and angels that our eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

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?