Orientalization is an objective offence: answering our objectors

Tags

Asian American, Benedict XVI, Chinglican, cross, cruciformity, epistemology, forgiveness, Hong Kong, Josh McDowell, objective truth, offence, ontology, orientalization, relativism, resurrection, Rick Warren, Saddleback, Theology

Last week, one of the big stories in evangelical news concerned a fairly heated conversation that Asian American and Hong Kong evangelicals have been having about Rick Warren’s Red Guard Facebook photo. Unintentionally, this blog participated in bringing this issue to a wider public. The story was also picked up by the news media, keeping the issue public even while Warren has deleted the photo, issued a response on one of the most visible bloggers’ blog, and apologized conditionally on his public Facebook wall.

The question that some have asked us is: now that there has been an apology, why have we left our blog posts up?

Our answer has been that it is important to maintain the integrity of the public record. But this is not enough for some who object to what we are doing. For our objectors, that sort of answer is a secular one, that to be public is to be ‘worldly’ (as opposed to being ‘churchly’) and that to be on the record is to fail to love Warren; after all, doesn’t St. Paul tell us that ‘love keeps no record of wrongs’ (1 Cor. 13.5 NIV)? Accordingly, their charge against us is that we are not being Christian. Here are some of the more popular ones that I hear:

• Rick Warren has done a lot of good for the kingdom. By leaving the posts up, you are damaging his ministry by tarnishing his reputation. He took down his post and apologized. Shouldn’t you take down your post before you wreck his ministry?
• I’m not offended. I’m sorry if you were. Even so, Rick Warren has apologized because you are part of the group of highly sensitive people that was offended. Shouldn’t you stop focusing on yourself and your pride and refocus on Jesus?
• If you keep the post up, all that the outside, non-Christian world will see is Christians bickering. That is a poor witness, and you are making it worse. How will the world understand us by our love? How will the church be able to reach the world for Jesus when all we do is fight?
• You need to reconcile with Rick Warren. Reconciliation can only happen when you forgive him. Forgiveness means that you have to wipe the slate clean, just like God does with our sin.
• I am not perfect. Rick Warren is not perfect. You are not perfect. Who are you to judge Rick Warren? You would never want to be judged like you judge him. That’s why Jesus says not to judge.

What our objectors want is a theological answer. This is it.

The short answer is: we have left the posts up because we are Christians, and our theology is orthodox.

In the late modern world, Christians who practice orthodox theologies have often felt themselves besieged by a world that no longer believes that truth is objective. Objective truth means that what is true exists outside of one’s subjective experience and remains true despite attempts to subvert it in favour of alternate ideologies, especially powerful political interests. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI called the modern loss of this sensibility the ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ the notion that in a world where truth is merely reduced to one’s individual perspective, then the stories that are told in that society will be co-opted by powerful individuals and institutions with the ability to stamp their version of truth onto the world and call that ‘the truth.’ For those of our critics who are uncomfortable with a Catholic citation, note well that this has also been a common evangelical complaint, one that is often heard in apologetics classes written by Josh McDowell, church-state relations seminars using the work of Charles Colson and Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (oops, I did it again: another Catholic!), taught especially by the neo-Reformed tribe to defend their allegiance to the Gospel’s propositional truths, and generally complained about by culture warriors opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, ideologized public education, and the encroachment of the state onto matters of religious freedom. Although the writers of this particular blog have often felt that the theological divisions between Catholics and evangelicals are becoming increasingly artificial, we grant for the readers of this particular post that they are still separate ecclesial entities. And yet they agree on one core contention: that truth is objective.

Without stating our position on the above culture war issues, we affirm as orthodox Christians that we believe in the objectivity of truth.

From Kathy Khang’s reflection on Warren’s public apology, we know that Khang believes strongly in the objectivity of truth. After all, she meant what she said when she wrote that she ’emailed Rick Warren and there is no “if”.’ She is saying that her being offended by the image is not merely a subjective feeling. Unlike Professor Sam Tsang, neither Khang nor her Korean American family had any connection with the Cultural Revolution. So too, Tsang, who spent the last weekend preaching at a retreat hosted by a pan-Asian American church whose origins are Japanese American, told me (and I quote with his permission), ‘I heard from my Japanese brothers and sisters when I preached this weekend. loud and clear, We’re with you!‘ These non-Chinese Asian Americans had no subjective reason to be offended. But they were. This is because the offence was objective.

What was objective about the offence was its complicity with a process of orientalization.  Orientalization is the process by which ‘orientals’ are made. ‘Orientals’ are a collective image of Asians and Asian Americans as collectively different from persons from the West, a set of images that regards them (as Edward Said famously put it) as static, backward, conservative, kinship-oriented, and immutably exotic. As theologian J. Kameron Carter describes it, orientalizing ideologies have been responsible for the problem of race in modern theology, including (as he fascinatingly makes the argument) the enslavement and subsequent subjectification of African Americans in American life. This is because modern orientalizing ideologies conveniently located those of different coloured skins from ‘white’ Europeans as inferiorly different, which meant that they could be colonized, traded as objects, and subordinated into inferior positions. Indeed, despite recent conflicts in the last twenty years between Asian Americans and African Americans, scholars and activists of race have long recognized that their common experience of racialization should have made it easy to develop solidarities between the two groups. That solidarity is hard to come by is a subject for another discussion.

The point, though is that orientalization was, is, and continues to be a process of continual offence, regardless of how it is received subjectively. This puts to rest the notion that the offensive Facebook photo could not have been offensive because some Asians and Asian Americans–perhaps even a large swath of them–were not subjectively offended by the post.

No, we believe in the objectivity of truth.

Accordingly, we observe that the initial Facebook photo post was offensive because it objectively objectified Asians and Asian Americans. This was an offence because it treated Asians and Asian Americans as objects, not as persons. There is a difference. A person is someone with whom one shares communion. A person has agency to converse, has the ability to either agree or to disagree, is capable of talking back and thinking and walking together with people with whom he or she can relate in the myriad of ways that persons can. An object has no agency. An object cannot be communed with. An object has no agency to converse, has no ability to either agree or disagree, is incapable of talking back and thinking and relating. Orientalization is the process of reducing Asians and Asian Americans from persons to objects.

Whatever one feels about being treated as an object and not as a person, and whatever one intends in even the accidental, ignorant proliferation of images and discourses that perpetuate this objectification, is irrelevant here. The objective truth that treating people like objects and not as persons is a violation of any person’s objective dignity as an imagebearer of God himself. In short, the objective truth that is declared by the Christian faith is that all humans are made in the image and likeness of God and thus have dignity as persons. To objectify another human–that is, to deny a human being his or her personhood and agency by reducing him or her to an object–is to offend against this objective truth. This objectification need not be subjectively intended; in other words, Warren did not need to have any malicious intent in posting the photo of the Red Guard. Neither does this objectification need to be subjectively received as such; the result was that, of course, some Asians and Asian Americans were fine with Warren’s humour. Instead, the process of objectification describes an observable, objective effect: objectively speaking, does the photo with its caption treat Asians and Asian Americans as persons with whom to be communed or convenient objects to be used as the butt of jokes? Was this the image of a person made in the image and likeness of God, or was it the image of an object that could be conveniently used to make a funny point?

Warren’s initial response suggests that the latter is true. That Warren then declared ‘it’s a joke!’ indicates, regardless of whether he was thinking this or not, that it was inconvenient for him that the ‘orientals’–the objects–were talking back as persons. He did not need to think this. Again, we are looking not at his subjective experience, but the objective, observable situation. His message was this: ‘orientals’ should not talk back; ‘orientals’ should be content to be the objects that they are; ‘orientals’ should not be listened to as persons. Those offended were framed as ‘orientals,’ suggesting that the ‘oriental’ image displayed on the photo should not be read as a Red Guard with whom communion can be shared. She was an object–an ‘oriental’ object–whose sole function was to make a funny point.

Our contention is that attempts are now being made to twist this objective truth. Warren’s initial defence achieved an interesting twist on the relationship between persons and objects. Warren then explained that the ‘disciples’ would have understood his humour while the ‘self-righteous’ would not have comprehended it. Perhaps unintentionally at a subjective level and likely without malicious intent, Warren was saying that Asians and Asian Americans are to be regarded by the disciples of Jesus Christ–the church–as the objects of jokes and those who would dispute this use of humour are the ones who are self-righteous, the ones that would in turn crucify the Lord of glory.

Understanding this theological twist is key to comprehending why it is that those who are arguing for the objective, dignified personhood of Asians and Asian Americans have been suddenly framed as the enemies of Christ. Regardless of Warren’s interior motives, the theological effect that has been achieved is that those who are defending the personhood of Asians and Asian Americans are framed theologically as the offensive aggressors, the ones who are now crucifying Warren for his use of humour. In so doing–again, regardless of personal motive–Christian theology has been rewritten. Defenders of personal dignity are framed as aggressors. Those whose actions (regardless of intent) result in the objectification of persons are described as Christ-like martyrs. The irony could not be more striking.

This theological twist is magnified by the attempts to erase and rewrite the public record. To advocate this is (according to our objectors) to advocate forgiveness and grace. From the deletion of comments on Warren’s Facebook wall calling for a public acknowledgement of the objectiveness of orientalizing offence to the vitriolic objections of our objectors pleading for us to delete our posts, attempts are being made to ‘wipe the slate clean.’ It is in this context that Warren’s response on Professor Sam Tsang’s blog and his conditional apology on his public Facebook wall should be read: they are attempts to wipe the slate clean without acknowledging the objective truth that orientalization is an objective offence against the dignity of human persons. As theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in Discipleship, this is ‘the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.’

Although Tsang acknowledged Warren’s first response as an apology, it is better described as a responding comment. In this comment, Warren stated that the photo was ‘instantly removed.’ Whatever one’s subjective interpretation of the passing of two days might be, this is not objectively true. It is objectively true that Warren’s ‘instant’ response was to suggest that those who did not find his joke funny were ‘self-righteous’ whereas those who were giggling were like the ‘disciples.’ Moreover, Warren tells Tsang to contact him ‘directly.’ A better word choice here is ‘privately.’ Attempting to hide the objective truth that this incident began publicly, the response here wipes that slate clean and puts the blame on Tsang for not approaching him through a private channel. Khang then attempted to do exactly as Warren said: she sent an email to Warren ‘directly.’ It was met with a generic, indirect response. This suggests that ‘private’ is indeed a better word.

As Khang eloquently states, the effect of this maneuver (whatever its intent) was that she was ‘silenced.’ Indeed, that initial response generated three tactics by which the objectively existing public record has been fudged. In particular, the tactic that has been used is to turn the objective offence of orientalization into a subjective experience. First, Warren himself touted his credentials as someone who initially wanted to plant a church in Japan and then the doors were closed. Second, immediately after this comment, L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang (himself a member of Saddleback Church) then commented on each of the bloggers’ walls (including this one) reiterating, ‘That post was removed immediately and personally by Pastor Rick as soon when he learned how the photo was offensive.’ Third, Asians and Asian Americans themselves–likely without any prompting from Warren or Saddleback–began to accuse the bloggers of failing to represent the universal experience of Asians and Asian Americans, for many proclaimed themselves that they did not feel offended, that is, that they did not subjectively process the objective offence of orientalization as a subjective offence.

Note: though these photos are from the public conditional apology and have a later date than those described in these present paragraphs, they illustrate the types of comments that have occurred. As Khang notes, earlier comments that would have been available were deleted along with the original photo.

In so doing, the record–the objectively existing public conversation that exists outside of Saddleback’s private control–has been fudged. Warren declares his solidarity with all Asians by touting his missionary credentials. An Asian American himself comes to Warren’s defence on each of the blogs. Asians and Asian Americans unhappy with the bloggers declare that they are not subjectively offended. The problem is that none of these responses got at the heart of the objective offence of orientalization. To be missionary minded toward Asians does not erase an act of orientalization. To have a prominent Asian American evangelical come to one’s defence does not lessen the objectivity of this offence. To have Asians and Asian Americans declare that they did not subjectively receive the offence as an offence does not mean that it was not an offence. Orientalization is an objective offence. But this process of damage control has subverted the perception of orientalization as objective. It is now subjective simply because people now say it is.

And the result is that those who protest the objective offence of orientalization are silenced. Khang tells us that she ‘felt silenced.’ No, Kathy, you do not only feel silenced. You were objectively silenced.

Following the publication of a Religion News Service article, though, Warren then issued a public conditional apology on his Facebook wall. The apology was conditioned by an if: if we were offended, then the apology applies to us. What this amounts to, however, is the further subjectification of an objective offence. It suggests that the offensiveness of orientalizing objectification is conditioned by how it is subjectively received. It means that if someone is not offended, then an image that strips human persons of dignity by turning them into objects is not offensive for some people. Kathy Khang is right to object to the conditionality here: ‘Words matter,’ she says. Or to quote her in full:

There is no “if.”  I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed, not just because “an” image was posted, but that Warren posted the image of a Red Guard soldier as a joke, because people pointed out the disconcerting nature of posting such an image — and then Warren told us to get over it, alluded to how the self-righteous didn’t get Jesus’ jokes but Jesus’ disciples did, and then erased any proof of his public missteps and his followers’ mean-spirited comments that appeared to go unmoderated.

I am hurt, upset, offended, and distressed when fellow Christians are quick to use Matthew 18 publicly to admonish me (and others) to take this issue up privately without recognizing the irony of their actions, when fellow Christians accuse me of playing the race card without trying to understand the race card they can pretend doesn’t exist but still benefit from, when fellow Christians accuse me of having nothing better to do than attack a man of God who has done great things for the Kingdom.

Khang is objecting to the process of objectification being framed as just another subjective experience. It is not subjective. It is an objective offence. There is therefore no ‘if.’

To resist this silencing, our objectors say, is to fail to forgive. In so doing, we are accused of being the ‘self-righteous’ who are crucifying Warren, tarnishing his reputation, and bringing shame to the church by continuing our bickering. To cease to be objects of orientalization, to assert ourselves with the personal dignity that is objectively ours by virtue of our creation, is to sin, according to our objectors. Our actions are described as prideful; our assertions are characterized as divisive; our call for Asian and Asian American agency is judged as judgmental. Our objectors seem, in short, to be able to wield the power to define what is good and what is evil. On the other hand, we as orthodox Christians committed to the objective truth of the person are not only incapable of wielding such strange sovereignty; we refuse to do so because we understand this seizure of truth to be eating from the very tree of the knowledge of good and evil for which our ancestors were cast out of paradise. And yet for not capitulating to our objectors’ theological rationality, we are labeled as the ones who should be cast out of the church. Indeed, this has already happened to at least one of us this week: Professor Sam Tsang has been asked repeatedly by our objectors whether or not he is a ‘born again Christian.’ Our objectors are powerful. They have, it seems, the power even to excommunicate.

In other words, the situation in which we find ourselves has degenerated precisely to the point where it could be called a ‘dictatorship of relativism,’ a scenario in which what is true is dictated by might and not by an objectively existing truth that cannot be bent by the powerful to their own interests. By calling this present situation a dictatorship of relativism, we in no way imply that Rick Warren is a dictator. We are saying instead that our communion with our brother, Rick Warren, has been co-opted by a relativist ideology. This is a sad state of affairs because relativist notions of truth hold no possibility for objective forgiveness and reconciliation.

They preclude it.

The objective of this practice of relativism is to return this present situation to a certain status quo, a situation in which Asians and Asian Americans are not in active conversation with Warren, the state of affairs that existed prior to Monday morning. In this status quo, however, Asians and Asian Americans will not have been reconciled to Warren as persons. We will still be objects, ‘orientals’ who cannot and should not speak back. But this ‘peace’–this constructed harmony in which there will be no more visible contestation–does not return us to the objective truth declared by the Christian faith that all humans are created as persons in the image and likeness of God. It leaves us with a situation in which the objectified are still objects and the persons are not reconciled.

An orthodox Christian theology bears witness against this dictatorship of relativism. An orthodox Christian theology insists on the objectivity of truth and insists further that that objective truth is to be found in the person of Jesus Christ. It is from Jesus, not from our objectors, that the cross is truly understood, that the forgiveness of sins is achieved, and that the communion of persons is realized and restored. It is because truth is objective–it exists outside of what anyone says it is–and it is objectively found in Jesus.

‘The light shines in the darkness,’ the Gospel according to St. John (1.5) begins, ‘and the darkness has not overcome it.’ The true light of Jesus Christ’s objective truth subjects this dictatorship of relativism to a crisis. While the discourse has fudged the objectivity of objectification, we recognize in Jesus, the very image and icon of God, that redemption means the restoration of all human dignity from processes of objectification. As St. Irenaeus puts it in his interpretation of the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of one like a son of man coming as the glory of God, ‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive’ (Adversus Haeresus IV.20.7). Confronted with the person of Jesus Christ, the subjectifying logic of orientalization crumbles. ‘The time is fulfilled,’ the Lord declares (Mark 1.15), ‘and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the Gospel.’

From Jesus, we understand that the cross was the last resistance of those who wish to pronounce for themselves what is good and what is evil. By challenging the logic of objectification, Jesus challenged the reduction of persons into objects by the powerful to preserve their own interests. For doing this, Jesus was betrayed, beaten, flogged, and crucified. Jesus was silenced. But in that process, that which was hidden from the foundations of the world was revealed. The challenge to objectification provoked the murder of the Lamb of God. Objectification is revealed as a process of violence, for its perpetrators and defenders must silence, must fudge, and must kill those who object to the reduction of persons into objects. But by killing Jesus, the power of such dark practices is broken, for the illegitimacy of their actions is revealed. As St. Paul says of the cross, ‘He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it’ (Cor. 1.15). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, we then understand forgiveness to be the love that he shows us in his resurrection as an embodied person, seeking not vengeance but communion with those who abandoned him and crucified him. Having rendered the power of sin and death powerless by exposing its illegitimate core, Jesus does not return in vengeance. He rises from the dead to love the very people who abandoned him and killed him. He calls Mary by name. He breathes the Holy Spirit on the followers who abandoned him at the cross. He invites St. Thomas to put his finger in his nail marks and his hands in his side. He reinstates Peter with the words, ‘Feed my sheep.’ He sends the Holy Spirit on the church at Pentecost, from where the people that St. Peter accuses of crucifying Jesus grow into the first Jerusalem church. This is forgiveness: the maintenance of the cross on the public record as a moment when the things hidden from the foundations of the world were revealed and exposed, and yet the unexpected embrace of the crucified one toward those who did not know that they had killed the Son of God. In his resurrection, Jesus forgives, and the cross is transfigured–it is not erased–into an instrument of love. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

From Jesus, then, we understand the church to be a communion of persons, the very Body of Christ that lives out the objective truth at the core of our common existence: that we are made for communion with God and with our brothers and sisters. If orientalization has happened in this Body, it must be confessed, exposed, and forgiven. That it has no place in the church does not mean that it does not happen. When it happens, it must be revealed and not fudged; it must be judged and not excused; it must be confessed and not covered with fig leaves. As St. Peter writes in his first letter (4.17), ‘The time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God.’ The result, as St. Peter emphasizes in his entire letter, is that the church will perfect its communion in visible suffering, with its members clothed with humility. Indeed, the truth that would be manifested in the love that is shown would finally ‘cover over a multitude of sins’ (4.8). The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

And thus, if our critics have only the view that we must participate in their revision of Christian theology, then we must refuse for the sake of our participation in the objective truth manifested in Jesus Christ and handed down by his apostles. As St. John proclaims in his first letter (1.5, 7), God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. We must then walk in the light as he is in the light.

This, then, is what forgiveness entails. It is to call Rick Warren into fellowship with his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters as persons, not as objects. This manifestation of communion must not be hidden from the world; it must be manifested in the full, visible unity between himself and those whom he mistakenly objectified. Warren must thus acknowledge that he, though likely without malicious intent, committed the objective offence of orientalization. He, as well as his followers, must commit themselves to a fuller communion with their Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters. In particular, he might himself accept the invitation to a public conversation about the lingering offence of orientalization in the church, seeking to discern with us all how we might live in the power of the Holy Spirit as ‘the holy catholic church, the communion of saints.’ That catholicity would be the sign that the kingdom of God is among us, that Jesus is present, and that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

It would not be funny if I said that Rick Warren was the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’

Tags

Asian, Asian American, Chinglican, Deadly Vipers, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, Lifeway, Mee Maw, mental illness, orientalism, orientalization, psychology, Rick Warren, Rickshaw Rally, Soong-Chan Rah, Southern Baptist, trauma

UPDATE: The contents of the following post concerned a post by Pastor Rick Warren that has been deleted on the afternoon of 24 September 2013. It also coincided with an apology on Sam Tsang’s blog, Engage the Pews, which Tsang has accepted and on which he has written further reflections. Following the examples of other bloggers such as Sam Tsang, Kathy Khang (More Than Serving Tea) and Wm. Darius Myers (Death Pastor), we will be leaving this post up in order to maintain the integrity of the public record. After all, contrary to the comment by L2 Foundation’s D.J. Chuang that appeared on all of our respective blogs that the post was ‘immediately and personally removed’ by Warren, we acknowledge that while the apology may have been personal and may indeed be encouraging for a catholic way forward, a response following two business days is not ‘immediate.’ Indeed, given this post’s attention to the historical genealogy of these Asian American interventions into the orientalizing practices of prominent American evangelicals, it is an imperative that this post, as well as the others, remain up as a record of this episode so that we can propel further conversation that would lead to a radical de-orientalization of American Protestant practice. As Tsang and Khang have said on their respective blogs, the apology may be accepted, but the conversation is far from over.

UPDATE #2: We recognize that Rick Warren has issued a public apology on his public Facebook page. We welcome this. Following the reflections given by Professor Sam Tsang and by Kathy Khang to this apology, we have also decided to maintain the integrity of the public record by leaving this post up.

The recent Facebook photo posted as a joke by Pastor Rick Warren describing the staff at Saddleback Church as members of the Red Guard at the height of the Cultural Revolution is a bit difficult to process. Indeed, its invocation of the Cultural Revolution has troubled many a Facebook friend of mine for what they are now terming ‘cultural insensitivity.’  I should thus post a trigger warning, for I have reproduced it here.

Indeed, that he then used the comments section to lecture this Thing’s good friend Sam Tsang on humour in New Testament exegesis makes the situation even more ironic. I mean, one would have thought that Sam Tsang’s composition of the foreword to the new Chinese translation of N.T. Wright’s New Testament and the People of God would position Tsang as the exegete. To the extent that our friend was then incensed by this reply, he wrote a response lambasting Warren for his culturally insensitive humour.

To defend Rick Warren as ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans (and by this, I include the Asian Canadians who are posting all over my news feed, as i take ‘American’ to be indicative of the ‘Americas,’ not only the nation-state styling itself as all-encompassing American) simply because he is an older white pastor living in Southern California is no defence at all. Indeed, at least as he is cited in geographer Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions, he claims that his own church is largely composed of Asian and Latina/o Americans. In fact, Wilford points out that Saddleback’s whole idea of the ‘small group’ where members meet in homes to discuss Christian spiritual formation is drawn from Korean megachurch pastor David Yonggi Cho’s ‘cell group’ model; whatever one may think of such a model, the point is that Warren is no stranger to Asia-Pacific churches. Moreover, Southern California itself could hardly be described as an Asian American terra incognita; in fact, Metro Los Angeles boasts a high concentration of Asian Americans, and one of its cities in the San Gabriel Valley, Monterey Park, in fact served as the key case study for geographer Wei Li’s doctoral work on Chinese ethnoburbs in North America. Finally, Saddleback has itself planted a church in Hong Kong, which itself is no small feat, for The Purpose-Driven Church calls church plants to research their social surroundings in order to be relevant in their local evangelism. Indeed, Justin Wilford’s Sacred Subdivisions reveals that Saddleback itself is ingenious in its transformation of the postsuburban landscape’s fragmented geographies into purpose-driven sites through which God teaches Saddleback members how to reframe their scattered lives into purpose-driven ones. One would expect no less of its Hong Kong incarnation.

Any question that we ask about this situation, then, should not focus on why Rick Warren is ignorant of the concerns of Asians and Asian Americans. It should instead interrogate why he ignores them.

After all, this is not the first Asian American challenge to orientalization in American evangelicalism. Indeed, in light of previous excursions into evangelical antiracism, one might be able to illustrate how Warren’s declaration that Asian Americans are humorless because of a joke taken at our expense might be understood if Asian Americans were to make a joke at his expense.

That joke is: who would find it funny if Warren were the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’?

That I now have to explain this joke suggests that it is probably not funny. In fact, now that I have likely offended you, I need to explain to you why you have been offended.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Publishers’ ‘Rickshaw Rally’ curriculum was but one of the episodes in contemporary Asian American evangelical challenges to the white privilege that has gone long uncontested in American evangelicalism. Published as the Vacation Bible School (VBS) material in 2004, the theme featured a white girl in a kimono with chopsticks in her hair, a karate-kid key chain, and name tags shaped as Chinese take-out boxes. As Soong-Chan Rah puts it in The Next Evangelicalism, Lifeway ‘caricatured and generalized all Asian cultures with various stereotypical images’ and was met with protests from Asian American pastors, some of whom were themselves Southern Baptist. However, instead of apologizing, Lifeway made a few minor changes and issued the material as its 2004 VBS curriculum all the same, all to the chagrin of those who decried the material both within and without the denomination.

Unsuccessful as the attempt to derail Rickshaw Rally may have seemed, though, it served as the first of several similar challenges that have propelled the conversation about orientalization in American evangelicalism forward. In 2007, Soong-Chan Rah wrote to Zondervan’s Youth Specialties for its book, Skits That Teach, that featured a skit similar to Rickshaw Rally, this one titled ‘Mee Maw.’ which featured a Chinese delivery person with a very demeaning accent as part of a church skit book. As Rah recalls, Zondervan recalled (to its credit) all of the extant copies and did away with them, issuing an apology on its blog. In 2009, Zondervan found itself again in hot water, this time over the publication of a book titled Deadly Vipers, a book for men that portrayed sins that men faced as ninjas sneaking up on them. Leading the charge this time was Seattle pastor Eugene Cho, whose campaign convinced Zondervan to again pull the book, destroy the copies, and have the authors remove their website.

What we should find hard to believe is that Rick Warren has not seemed to have heard of these high-profile cases, one of which affected his own denomination (the Southern Baptist Convention) and his own publisher (Zondervan).

But even more dumbfounding should be Warren’s inability to participate in solidarity with Asian Americans, even while many Asian Americans participated in solidarity with him and his family when they lost their son, Matthew, to a suicide due to mental illness. Contrary to popular perceptions that Asian Americans are unfamiliar with mental illness, the legacy of political and cultural trauma in the Asia-Pacific–including the Cultural Revolution–should itself be a signal that Asians and Asian Americans are all too familiar with mental illness, which is likely why we felt ourselves in such solidarity with the Warrens in the first place. The authoritarian rule of emerging nation-states in the Asia-Pacific were not the natural results of an ‘Asian culture’ that promotes hard work and obedience to authority. They were attempts at state formation whose efforts to dislodge these emerging nation-states from their traumatic pasts of European colonialism exacerbated the cultural trauma and psychological damage that began in the nineteenth century. If it weren’t from the direct trauma of elite state initiatives at nation-building–such as China’s Cultural Revolution, among many other similar projects in other nation-states–then there was the overwhelming sense that these nation-states and their citizens needed to catch up with the modernity of the West, resulting in authoritarian ideologies that framed citizens as patriotic hard workers whose objective was to make the nation modern overnight. While these efforts at subjectification led to some economic successes, one of the prices that was paid was the spread of mental illness; indeed, anthropologist Aihwa Ong argues that the frequency of demon possession reported on the Malaysian shop floor that she studied can be attributed to these efforts at capitalist state subjectification. The same could be said of the Cultural Revolution; in fact, my grandfather, who saw the decimation of his family in Shanghai through the double trauma of the Japanese invasion of China during the Second World War and the Communist takeover of his family’s property (not to mention the news of his surviving family’s treatment through the Mao years right on into the Cultural Revolution), was plagued with manic depression for the remainder of his life. Indeed, the first time that I ever learned as a kid that there were pills that you could take that helped you with your moods was from seeing him take them.

That the rise of early Asian American studies at the San Francisco State College Strike in 1968 was done by Mao-jacket-wearing students from the Third World Liberation Front in solidarity with the Cultural Revolution does not blunt this point. For one thing, they were protesting the trauma of racism that ghettoized their communities in America; as Ling-chi Wang points out, Chinatowns were the result both of racist planning policies that kept Chinese people literally in their place and Chinatown elites who used this ghettoization to maintain their own power. The strikers protested both. However, to post a picture of a woman wearing a Mao jacket cannot be justified even by this fact, for though even members of mainline Protestant churches in Chinatown participated in these protests, migrants who had experienced the Asia-Pacific traumas transformed these churches after the strikes, bringing their trauma to bear on the real life experience of even the most liberal churches in these Chinatowns. By the 1970s and 1980s, then, counseling psychology became a field of great concern among Asian and Asian American Protestants themselves as they dealt with the traumas of colonization, state subjectification, racism, modern ideologies of Asians needing to ‘catch up’ with the West, and the resulting family dysfunction, and it has now become a commonly discussed stereotype that second-generation Asian American evangelicals seem to be disproportionately interested in psychology as a field of study because of how often these traumas are discussed in our churches and parachurch organizations.

In short, we as Asians and Asian Americans know mental illness intimately. That was why we really felt ourselves to be in solidarity with the Warrens when Matthew died.

If what I am saying is true, then, what is needed is not simply ‘cultural intelligence’ or ‘sensitivity training.’ It is an acknowledgement that just as we as Asian and Asian American evangelicals stood in solidarity with the Warrens when they confronted the abyss caused by mental illness in their family, so the Warrens stand in solidarity with us when we confront mental illness and the memory of trauma in ours. Indeed, it would not be funny if I called Rick Warren the ‘Rick’ in ‘Rickshaw Rally’ precisely because of this solidarity that we have with him. By the same token, the trigger for memories of cultural trauma should not be funny if indeed he acknowledges his solidarity with us. That he then complains that we do not find his joke funny is not only a failure of ‘cultural sensitivity.’ It is a failure of catholicity, a denial of his participation with the church catholic that is composed in no small part by Asians and Asian Americans. Indeed, that is what’s at stake in choosing to ignore the protests of Asian Americans who have challenged the orientalization that is latent in much of American evangelicalism: it is to deny that the Spirit is moving the people of God into greater oneness by shattering the ideologies that have long kept us apart. To reduce this to ‘political correctness’ on the one hand while calling for ‘sensitivity training’ on the other would fail to comprehend the movement of God in making his children one, even as he is one, that the world may know that the Father has sent the Son. To fail to understand that such reconciled unity–such ecumenical catholicity!–lies at the heart of the evangelical mission is to miss the purpose for which the church exists, for she is a prophetic witness to a modern world traumatically divided by racializing ideologies (among many others) that Jesus Christ has come to reconcile all into one in his body.

To put it plainly, waving the trigger of our traumatic memories in our faces on Facebook is simply not funny. But even more curious is that Warren is neither a stranger to Asians and Asian Americans, and it is hard to believe that he hasn’t heard of the debacles like Rickshaw Rally, Mee Maw, and Deadly Vipers. The only conclusion that we can draw from this circumstantial evidence is thus that Warren is not ignorant, but is willfully ignoring Asians and Asian Americans in order to make a joke at our expense. And yet, hope against hope, we do not believe that in his heart, Warren is malicious enough to be that much of a schismatic; after all, to fail to have even a flicker of love for his Asian and Asian American brothers and sisters would jeopardize his own place in the church catholic, for he that does not love does not know God, for God is love. It is thus for the sake of the healing of the catholic union and continual solidarity that we share in Jesus Christ that we demand that Rick Warren issue an apology.

Correction update: the original version of this post read that the woman in the posted photo was from the People’s Liberation Army. This was an error because she was part of the Red Guard. We thank the readers of A Christian Thing for their vigilance. I am also thankful for the presence of Not a Dinner Party on this Thing, for she is a China scholar and a truly competent one at that. See for yourself.

We Remember

Tags

Arab Spring, biopolitics, Catholic, Catholic social teaching, Centessimus annus, China, Chinese, dissent, geopolitics, human dignity, ideology, indigenous, John Paul II, Liu Xiaobo, orientalism, orientalization, redress, state, Tiananmen

June 4 is a day for remembering. This year is no different, for it is now the twenty-fourth anniversary of the Tiananmen Incident, the event in which students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for over a month were brutally suppressed–the official term of protest from its observers is massacred–as they demonstrated for a new democratic regime in China.

It is thus a day to remember.

We remember that the fight for redress is not yet over. When a state uses military force against its own citizens and then attempts to paste over these events by denying their historical validity and diverting focus from them onto market reform, it is incumbent on all of us to remember that justice has not yet been served, that the state’s murder of people within its own borders is never just wherever it happens, whether in China in 1989, in the present in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Israel/Palestine, Syria, or Turkey, or even in the history of the Americas in American and Canadian treatment of indigenous peoples. We remember because we are calling for the state to acknowledge its own crimes and to bring to justice those who maneuvered the state to commit these crimes.

But we remember also that our memory can be corrupted.  We also remember that the remembrance that these atrocities happened have also been used in the service of othering exclusion. We must remember then that when memory becomes corrupted, it can be used for the service of greater evil.

And thus we must also remember that China is not a geographical foil for the politics of life. We have heard over and over of the issues of life in various sites in China–a little girl run over by a truck, the countless road accidents, the melamine lacing of baby powder, the unethical production of under-regulated automobile parts, the human rights abuses against ethnic minorities. Recently, we heard of a baby boy flushed down a toilet by a desperate mother, and we heard of school principals sexually preying on their own students in collusion with government officials. As we hear of these issues, we are tempted to frame China as the space of the other, a space where life is devalued, a space inhabited by barbarians and country bumpkins and industrial crooks and political Fu Manchu masterminds, a space where everything should point to the events of Tiananmen being just business as usual.

Even as we remember for the sake of Tiananmen redress, we also remember that we must not give in to the temptation to see China as a unified geopolitical bloc. We remember instead that China is vast, that its political system is complex, and that its vastness and complexity belies many avenues of dissent. We remember that dissent is not always on the side of justice simply because it is dissent, that people we hold up as democracy heroes like Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo supported the Bush Administration’s Iraq War with the anti-democratic, neoconservative rationale of pre-emptive warfare in the hope of forcibly enacting democracy in the Middle East for American imperialist interests. We remember that China is not the unitary other, that people and politics as complex as our own go on there as well, and that our pleas for redress are coupled with the complexities of human sociality.

We thus do not remember in order to frame China as the geopolitical other. We remember instead that history is littered with spectacles of violence as various individuals, parties, regimes, and imperial rulers have attempted to exert their sovereign power to make the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ uniform. We remember that these efforts at racial, ethnic, and national subjectification are themselves born of unjust impulses. For what, after all, was the point of the crackdown at Tiananmen, if not to exert the sovereign power of the state to make an international example of those who dared to dissent against an ideology of Chineseness?

So yes, we protest as we remember. But how we protest can never be done with the methods of exclusion. As John Paul II reminded us in Centesimus annus, our protest is not waged by deploying alternate ideologies as foils to injustice. Instead, a constant focus on the dignity of the human person is a protest against ideology itself, grounding our critique in the reality that we are not primarily cogs in a state or market regime, but embodied persons who live and eat and sleep and feel and play and work and laugh and weep and love. Yes, we remember, but our memory grapples with the will to power inherent in something as banal as saying that all ‘Chinese’ people should be a certain way. Those of us who are Christians who join in this protest are thus uninterested in developing a new ideology of what it means to be Chinese. We are looking forward instead to the day when our human community will be constituted by the recognition that we are all made in the image of God.

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?

If it hadn’t been for the “Linsane” god, then “Linsanity” wouldn’t have happened…?

Tags

Arminian, Asian American, Calvinist, Chinese Christian, deism, fatalism, Jeremy Lin, Linsanity, ministry, orientalization, racism, Russell Jeung, sovereignty, Taiwanese, theism

My post follows on the heels of Asian American sociologist of religion Russell Jeung’s observation that the current Asian American obsession with Jeremy Lin is, well, weak because it seems to inspire emasculated Asian American males (EAAMs) to greater heights of athletic masculinity (implying heteronormatively that Asian American males are girly and weak) and idolatrous because its celebration of professional success doesn’t quite square with Jesus’ preferential option for the poor (implying that God is on the side of the rich).

I want to take a crack, though, at something even more theologically serious: Lin’s understanding of the sovereignty of God. But instead of going a more evangelical route and trying to probe whether Lin is best understood in Calvinist (“God does everything”) or Arminian (“Well, I have a part too”) terms, I’m gonna go Christological (“so what does this have to do with Jesus?”).

For Asian Americans, and in particular, Asian American Christians, Lin’s story seems to be about how someone who’s a pretty normal Asian American breaks out against the odds by being in the right places at the right time and ends up playing in the NBA scoring “miraculous” points for the Knicks. As Lin’s testimony makes clear (as also does this blog), “if it hadn’t been for ____, then _____ would not have happened,” and thus, we can surmise the fingerprints of God behind the whole thing. Accordingly, Lin’s story actually landed Chinese American Christians a favourable spot in The New York Times; indeed, the last time we were in there, the story was also about River of Life Christian Center and Taiwanese Christians, but it wasn’t so good because the story was about Proposition 8 (which, to set the story straight, River of Life did not take a stand on). It has also spawned a debate about if there’s any implied racism behind Lin’s story because Lin’s story of busting out of the Asian American stereotypes seems so significant precisely because there are stereotypes.

Lin feels called to pastoral ministry post-NBA career to help other kids figure out what God has called them to do. So in the spirit of Christian love, I’d like to do a bit of inception with the following thought: what is particularly Christian about Lin’s understanding of the sovereignty of God?

The thing about the whole “if this didn’t happen, then how could this have happened?” line of thought is that while it does suggest that there is an Unmoved Mover behind the cosmos, it doesn’t tell us a whole lot about who it is that’s doing the moving. You get a “god” in a generic theistic sense. But you can’t make the jump from there to Jesus because you haven’t the slightest clue who this god is.

The thing is, though, growing up Chinglican, I used to hear a ton about “miracles” just like the story of Jeremy Lin. There would be pastors who’d say things like, “If it hadn’t been for this, then this wouldn’t have happened” to justify how they saw themselves walking in the will of God. There’d be uncles and aunties sharing about their life journeys–really, they were doing theology because they’d say things like, “You know, looking back, I had to have done this first, because God wanted me to do this next.” God has a great and wonderful plan for your life, they’d say, quoting Bill Bright’s immortal tract, The Four Spiritual Laws, and what you need to do is to find God’s will for your life and walk in it. You find God’s will, God will open doors, miracles will happen, and you’ll find fulfillment.

Much as I’d like to trust in the God factor to see me through life smoothly, I’m having increasing trouble reconciling what I learned from Asian American Christians about God’s sovereignty to make my personal life smooth sailing and the Jesus I find revealed in the Gospels. Yes, of course, Jesus was led by the Spirit, and in the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit closes plenty of doors for Paul. But instead of giving his disciples career success, Jesus calls them to throw down their nets, give up their tax collecting booths, and follow him. Instead of guaranteeing security in terms of having a home, the Son of Man has no place to lay his head while reconstituting the family and the nation around his proclamation of the kingdom. Instead of fulfilling the nation’s hopes and dreams of a conquering Messiah, Jesus is crucified and calls you and I to follow him to the cross.

Here’s where the “sovereignty of God” debate over whether God did all the work for Jeremy or Jeremy had to do something to cooperate with God completely misses the Christian point: they don’t talk about who that god is. Jeremy Lin claims to be no mere theist. He is a Christian. I’m just wondering if in light of that, the theological reflection around Jeremy Lin could be more Christian, narrating his story through the narrative of Jesus Christ. As a Christian, Jeremy is implying that the god who’s been leading him is Jesus. But if Jesus calls us to die with him and to live lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience with him, wouldn’t the story be much messier than a straight-line miraculous assent from high school basketball to the NBA? Oh, sure, Lin speaks of racial taunts on the court, being marginalized in the profession because of his ethnicity, and spiritually struggling with “over-confidence” in an effort to posture himself humbly before his God and neighbour. But the God of Jesus is also the God of Job. Humiliating experiences of the cross aren’t as neat and tidy as simply, “My life sucked, but God vindicated me and restored my career.” They are, in a word, humiliating and when the story is heard, it should make people go, “Now that really sucks,” not, “Oh, but God makes it all work out!” As Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar points out, we like to move way too fast from Good Friday to Easter because we don’t like the discomforting feeling of Holy Saturday’s “God is dead.” I’d like Jeremy Lin to invite us to go through his Holy Saturdays with him.

In fact, maybe this is a challenge for Asian American Christian theology. The trouble is that we don’t talk about this as an issue in Asian American Christian theological reflection. It’s probably not just an Asian American thing–Bill Bright sure wasn’t one. But it seems like enough Asian American Christians have a common experience with this “if it weren’t for this, then this wouldn’t have happened” take on the sovereignty of God. I wish to God that someone would help us all with a bit more theological reflection.

Then again, I might just be labeled as “very intellectual,” “thinking too much,” and “not trusting God enough.” I’ll reply in good evangelical fashion: Jesus is a person, and you have to get to know him on his terms. The vague god is great, partly because we can make him/her/it say whatever we want and do whatever we want for us. But to call ourselves Christian–oh, now we’ve introduced a very specific deity into the conversation, and in terms of the Jeremy Lin story, this Jesus is very good at busting our stereotypes of who God is.

I don’t deny that the God revealed in Jesus Christ has been leading Jeremy Lin throughout his career, which is a story that hasn’t ended and may be a story that blossoms into pastoral ministry. But if he goes the pastoral ministry route, I’d really like him to think deeper about some of these things, to reflect in the story of Jesus much more about the racial taunts, getting cut from teams, and the interior struggles with pride. You have to believe in more than the existence of a sovereign god to be a Christian. You actually have to participate in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, in the life of the Triune God whose crucified love calls us to the narrow path of returning blessings for racist curses, tearfully loving resistances to being orientalized and marginalized in the profession, and solidarity with the poor and the weak as penance for pride. If you tell your story like that, I will bet that there won’t be much smooth-sailing involved–actually, there might be a lot of failures in the mix–but then again, as I’ve heard it, the story of Jeremy Lin has never been very smooth, which is precisely what makes it Christian.