In praise of Vicky Beeching, evangelical Anglican (Part 2)

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Anglican, Anglican realignment, Evangelical, evangelical Anglican, GAFCON, Jennifer Knapp, Justin Welby, race, Rowan Williams, Scott Lively, sexuality, Vicky Beeching

In the spirit of more ancient texts that Churl will appreciate more than the average reader, I will simply say that I forbid you to read this post before you read Part 1.

In the previous post, I ended with a suggestion that Vicky Beeching’s gift to the church catholic by coming out brings enormous clarity to what is going on in the Anglican Communion, especially around the realignment that happened in the late 1990s and 2000s. For those who need a quick definition of what the realignment is, it’s a euphemism that refers to how Anglican and Episcopal parishes in the United States and Canada pulled out of their home dioceses because of North American Anglican moves to bless same-sex unions, ordain gay clergy, and elect gay bishops. Because they took cover in Anglican provinces mostly in Africa (though some in Asia, Australia, and the Southern Cone also took part), the narrative that took shape suggested that those who were historically the ones being evangelized were now re-evangelizing the evangelizers. This narrative usually flies under the header of Global South Anglicanism. For an academic version of this story, see Phil Jenkins’s The Next Christendom. For a popular version, Thad Barnum’s Never Silent is a fairly engaging account. For those who need all of the sordid details, please read my account of ‘Anne Hathaway Anglicanism.’

The reason I forbid readers to read this post before reading the previous post is because over in the other post, I’ve made all the necessary connections for why Beeching is an Anglican to whom we should pay attention — she’s an evangelical Anglican, her worship music has evangelical Anglican sources, she lived in Nashville and San Diego making contemporary Christian music so that her American evangelical connections are impeccable, and one of the privileged few to whom she had come out privately is the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Unwilling to rehearse of that here, I simply forbid you to read this post until you’ve done your due diligence with the previous post.

Vicky Beeching is an Anglican. This is very significant. That’s because of the person to whom Beeching would most likely be compared: Jennifer Knapp.

Like Vicky Beeching, Jennifer Knapp is also a popular contemporary Christian music personality who very publicly came out as a lesbian. Just as Vicky Beeching was confronted by outspoken anti-gay pastor-activist Scott Lively on live television when she came out, Knapp was also confronted by Pastor Bob Botsford on Larry King Live. Like Lively, Botsford told Knapp that his heart broke for her because she was living a lie that contradicted Scripture. Knapp’s response was that Botsford was not her pastor. If Botsford had been her pastor, Knapp reasoned, then it would have been fair to exercise pastoral jurisdiction over her as a church member. But she wasn’t. She was part of another congregation with other pastors who affirmed her, and her bottom line was that Botsford’s attempt to exercise pastoral authority over her was illegitimate because it violated the boundaries between his congregation and hers.

It would be tempting to compare Beeching to Knapp because almost the exact same thing happened to Beeching on live television. As I said, Beeching was called out almost exactly like Knapp because the more conservative evangelical man standing in for the Christian Right accused Beeching (like Knapp) of living a lie contrary to Scripture.

It’s what follows next that makes everything about Beeching different from Knapp. That’s because Beeching is an Anglican.

Beeching can’t make the congregational autonomy argument that Knapp makes. This is because, as I said, Beeching is an Anglican. Anglicans don’t believe in congregational autonomy; our polities are parishes in dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops that are in communion with each other and who all trace their succession through Canterbury to the apostles. Beeching can’t say to Lively like Knapp says to Botsford, ‘You are not my pastor,’ because congregational autonomy is not going to cut it for Beeching. Lively is thus not in a different ecclesial category for Beeching (as Botsford is for Knapp); he is in the same ecclesial category. He is a pastor, so Beeching merely says to him that it’s people like him who have caused her psychological damage. Observe well, then, the effects of this disagreement. The contention rests on Lively’s repetition that Beeching’s lifestyle is not ‘biblical,’ for Beeching argues that that there are multiple ways of reading Scripture and that the passages that he cites to condemn her sexual orientation have contested meanings.

Yet Beeching does not disown Lively the way that Knapp disowns Botsford. She knows that they’re stuck together in communion, terrible as that may sound, because as much as she may wish that she were ecclesially autonomous from him, the truth of the Anglican charism means that they cannot be sundered at an ontological level. Indeed, this raises the emotional stakes for her contention against Lively: if people like Lively have inflicted psychological damage on her and those whose sexual orientations are non-heteronormative and if they are ontologically stuck together, then it is an imperative for Beeching to demand that Lively stop oppressing her and hear her out on the multiplicity of hermeneutics, a demand that is in fact not unreasonable considering St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, where Augustine allows in the preface for all sorts of biblical interpretations if they are governed by the rule of faith, which is charity.

In short, as an Anglican, Beeching understands what Knapp does not: there is no such thing as total ecclesial autonomy, and the more that one understands that, the more one works to make ecclesial co-existence at least bearable.

Dig deeper, though, and one finds that this ecclesial ontology has implications that drag that construct called ‘Global South Anglicanism’ into the fray. That’s because, as the BBC program itself mentions, Lively is close to the leaders of a nation-state called Uganda. Deny as he may that he had a hand in the draconinan Anti-Homosexuality Bill that threatened to execute queer persons in Uganda, Beeching herself recently shared a link that an American federal judge has ordered Lively to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

This is significant because Lively’s actions in the mid-2000s in Uganda disturbs the larger narrative of the Anglican realignment. Provinces such as Rwanda, Nigeria, Kenya, the Southern Cone, and yes, Uganda, took in some of these ‘realigned’ Anglican churches. As I related in my definition of the Anglican realignment (see above, scroll past the Gandalf GIF), this was the story of how the Global South Anglicans, especially from Africa, were re-evangelizing North America, especially from its capitulation to what might be chalked up to (in Southern Baptist terms) a ‘gay agenda.’ In other words, Anglicans in African nation-states were going to save Anglicans in the West.

The problem is that Lively’s actions suggest that this Global South Anglican narrative may not be as ‘Global South’ as meets the eye. If Lively was moving around Uganda around the same time that the Anglican realignment was going on, how many other Americans were invested in making the realignment happen?

Let’s dig further.

In the lead-up to the Scott Lively confrontation, Beeching recounts that one of the more harrowing experiences in her journey as a gay person was when she had an exorcism performed on her at a British evangelical camp. This also messes up the Global South Anglican narrative. After all, one of the more celebrated stories of the 1998 Lambeth Conference was of an African archbishop attempting an exorcism on a gay rights activist. Certainly, analyses at the time noted that African and Asian primates, bishops, priests, and deacons had mostly attended the same seminaries as their Global North counterparts. Yet according to the narrative of Global South Anglicanism, this phenomenon could also very well be explained via the African archbishop’s Global South conditions, where spirits are real and demons prowl and exorcisms happen regularly because priests have the same status as witchdoctors. Certainly, that’s how Phil Jenkins explains why Southeast Asian primate, Archbishop Moses Tay, attempted to exorcise the City of Vancouver because of the totem poles in its urban park, Stanley Park (The Next Christendom, p. 130).

The question is, how does that exoticized Global South Anglican narrative explain Beeching’s story of British evangelicals trying to exorcise her? Might the explanation that those Global South Anglicans attended the same schools in the Global North and were in collaboration with conservative Anglican, evangelical, and charismatic groups in the Global North hold more water, in light of Beeching’s experience?

Let’s keep digging.

The impression that one gets about the Anglican realignment is that the parishes that broke away were mostly evangelical Anglican. Though this group certainly included charismatic and Anglo-Catholic Anglicans, that the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) was heavily dominated by Sydney Anglicans (who apparently have to debate over whether their archbishop is ‘Reformed’ enough to hold office), as well as African and Asian Anglicans who emphasized the Bebbington Quadrilateral of evangelical distinctives (biblicism, conversionism, activism, and crucicentrism), who held an after-gathering at All Souls’ Church in London seems to confirm this image. Certainly also, some of the charismatics would technically fit into an ‘evangelical Anglican’ stream — ‘evangelical’ here defined in Anglican terms as those in the English church who understand authority as primarily derived from Scripture, not, say, apostolic succession (like the Anglo-Catholics) or scientific progress (like the latitudinarians).

Well, like it or not, Vicky Beeching is an evangelical Anglican. Despite the image of those who push what Beeching calls ‘LGBT theology‘ tends to be from the more liberal wings of Anglicanism — James Pike, Jack Spong, Gene Robinson, Mary Glasspool, Marc Andrus, Patrick Cheng — how much of a shock to the system is it that Beeching continues to identify as an evangelical Anglican who takes the Bible so seriously that her post defending her theological views is based on the Bible?

What’s the point?

The point, then, is that Vicky Beeching embodies what the previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, calls ‘the body’s grace.’ For Williams, the fact of same-sex attraction and even unions are a gift to the church because they help Christians think about how love is expressed corporeally. Certainly, when his successor, Justin Cantuar, expresses that same-sex couples often put opposite-sex married couples to shame in their care for each other, Welby is also referencing Williams.

But Beeching takes that one step further. Beeching’s body’s grace is an open sign of contradiction to the Global South Anglican realignment narrative. She is an evangelical Anglican theologian: she cannot afford to endorse congregational autonomy. Her interlocutor is Scott Lively, a person whose physical presence in Uganda also flat out contradicts the Global South Anglican narrative because he casts suspicion on whether homophobic prejudices in fact originated in what might be derisively regarded as the ‘primitive’ cultures of the Global South. Beeching’s exorcism flat-out contradicts the understanding of the Global South as ‘primitive,’ for if exorcism is a sign of prmitiveness, then the Global North evangelicals who tried to exorcise her would also be primitive. Her evangelicalism — rooted in a theological orientation based on Scriptural authority — flat-out contradicts accusations of latitudinarian liberalism.

In short, Beeching reveals where the Anglican Communion fault lines actually lie. The truth, as Beeching reveals it, is that the Global North-Global South imagined geography is a smokescreen. If there is anything that Beeching’s body’s grace illustrates clearly, the realignment has never really ever been about Global South, postcolonial agency, and Anglicans of colour. Postcolonial Anglicans, as Kwok Pui-lan and Ian Douglas have called people like me, have never really been addressed here — we have merely been spoken for and over.

Beeching’s closeness to the Archbishop of Canterbury is thus the ultimate gift. After all, one of Justin Cantuar’s major tasks is to reconcile this fragmented Anglican Communion. With Beeching coming out, the mist has evaporated, and the real fault lines finally have become crystal clear. As an Anglican of colour observing Welby’s talent for deep listening, his knowledge of the actual on-the-ground political realities in Africa, and his almost overflowing glee at welcoming those who regularly disrupt his own evangelical Anglican narrative, I expect great things out of this Archbishop of Canterbury for the Anglican Communion. After all, precisely because of Vicky Beeching’s body’s grace, we might see an Anglican Communion finally ready to tackle the deep-seated corporeal issues of race that have plagued us since the dawn of modernity.

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Chinglican Christianity: Race and the Knowledge of Good and Evil

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Brian Bantum, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Douglas Todd, Hannah Arendt, J. Kameron Carter, Jewish studies, Jewish-Christian relations, Mike Chase, New Testament, psychology, race, Sin, St. Peter's Fireside, Theology, Willie Jennings

The time has come. I wasn’t quite sure when we were going to talk about race and ‘classical Christianity’ in such a way as to upend the tacit assumption that ‘classical Christianity’ was the exclusive domain of white males. But Mike Chase has written quite the evangelical response to Douglas Todd on sin and hypocrisy, and I figure that this is as good a time as any to sketch some out some of the implications of what both Chase and Todd have written.

On the surface, neither Chase nor Todd have written anything to do with race. Todd’s bit is about psychology:

Jesus was a great psychologist. He had antennae for hypocrisy, especially among self-satisfied religious leaders. He challenged people who had a sense of moral superiority with admonitions about not “casting stones” and looking at the “log in one’s own eye.” Liberal Christians appreciate Jesus’ insight into the power of psychological projection, which leads judgmental people to fantasize others carry the bad traits they are denying in themselves. Jesus’ wisdom about hypocrisy relates today to self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist,” “competitive” or “greedy.”

As Todd would remind me, to use this snippet to talk about any kind of ‘unconscious racism‘ might be stretching the capabilities of this paragraph; indeed, in a quiet nod to South China Morning Post‘s Ian Young’s stories about ‘racism’ and Vancouver’s property market, his veiled reference to ‘self-righteous people who are quick to label others as “racist”‘ is directed to Young’s frighteningly competent investigative journalism into how wealthy condo developers use accusations of ‘racism’ in attempts to shut down discussion of offshore money in Vancouver’s property market. From the outset, I’ll write as a disclaimer that I am not calling anyone racist in this piece on the implications of what Todd has written for a conversation about race.

Ian Young in The Province

The same might be true of Chase’s post. On the surface, Chase’s response to Todd has nothing to do with race and everything to do with reinforcing a dialectic between humans and God. Much more than the other two on St. Peter’s Fireside’s staff (whose theologies seem to veer in more Catholic directions), Chase’s theological articulation seems to place a very (Protestant) differentiation between that which happens on a human plane and that which occurs on a divine axis. Within this theological framework, Chase reads those whom Jesus exposes as hypocrites as imputationally sinful in relation to God, that is, while a Jew identifying as a Pharisee (part of a first-century elite Torah-keeping sect) might not be personally an ‘extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector,’ God might see him (to my knowledge, the sect wasn’t gender-inclusive — but I could be wrong!) as an extortioner, unjust, adulterer, and tax-collector on a different ‘frame of reference’ — a spiritual one in which the religious elite were taking advantage of the people of God and selling out to the powers that be. While such assertions might be an exegetical stretch in some places, the framework itself can be pieced together from parts of St. John’s Gospel and St. Paul’s letters, especially through a Calvinist reading in which the knowledge of God is the glorious light and mirror that exposes true human depravity. In other words, I may not agree with Chase’s exegesis in places, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t see where Chase is coming from. In turn, I’m very sure that Chase had no intention to write anything about race, and as a point of clarification, by writing about race in Chase’s theological framework, I am not calling Chase a racist — because he isn’t!

So if neither Todd nor Chase have written anything about race, then why write about race?

Easy. Because it’s hidden in plain sight.

When Todd and Chase write about Jesus’ exposure of the religious elite in first century Palestine, that establishment was Jewish. To be sure, I have read enough of philosopher Hannah Arendt to avoid the anachronistic stupidity of calling ‘the Jews’ a ‘race’ in first-century Palestine, especially when Arendt does such a brilliant analysis of how Jewishness became a ‘race’ in nineteenth-century Europe in The Origins of Totalitarianism (I am, of course, also keenly aware of Arendt’s contested status in Jewish studies because of her New Yorker articles, Eichmann in Jerusalem). But all things being equal with Arendt’s analysis, this doesn’t stop anyone from saying that the Jews and the Romans existed in — shall we say? — a colonial situation in first-century Palestine.

And that’s where a lot of the mess around anti-semitism in the modern West originated.

However one qualifies the notion that it was the religio-political establishment complex of first-century Palestine and not the Jews who killed Jesus (Benedict XVI is especially careful about this in his second installment in the Jesus of Nazareth series), the structuring power of the Roman occupation on the various political factions in first-century Palestine has to be taken into account. This is where my point about ‘race’ — or more properly, racialization, i.e. the process by which racial consciousness is formed — comes into play. As a diverse chorus of New Testament scholars observe, ‘Jewishness’ was a contested category in Jesus’ world, in large part because the Roman occupation produced a variety of political stances as to how the occupied people — the ‘Jews’ — should relate to this pagan empire. Should they cooperate with the occupation? Should they resist it? Should they resist violently? And how should they as a people be defined? Talk about psychology. Talk about the designs of the human heart. Yes, talk about it all because this context takes the framing outside of merely individual agency, personal corruption, and spiritual elitism to an entire colonial structure and its political fragmentation that structures personal agency.

By most accounts, that’s also the context in which Jesus was crucified. When Jesus proclaimed the ‘kingdom of God’ with the full implications of Hebrew Scripture, you could say that Jesus was wading into the political fray. As Todd and Chase would both affirm, one way to put it was that Jesus was killed because he exposed the powers that vied for political control over Palestine as just that: powers, often with a bent toward some kind of violence and exclusion. As each of the Gospel accounts detail in their own particular ways, these powers — including the Roman occupiers — while all in competition against each other — agree on one thing — kill that Galilean prophet. As St. Paul later writes in a letter to the Colossian church, this epic collusion to put Jesus on the cross unmasked the hidden violence of all of these powers, both colonizer and colonized.

And yet, as accounts of Jesus’ death were circulated through Jesus’ followers and as Jesus’ followers themselves refused to join in the increasingly hostile Jewish resistances against the Roman occupation, the fact that Jesus had himself waded into the Jewish debate as a Jewish rabbi became transformed into how Jesus had been killed by these people called ‘the Jews.’ As Christianity became the official Roman state religion, the category of ‘Christian’ became distinct from that of the ‘Jews’ — not that they had always been together, but Christianity was an inconvenient ‘Jewish sect’ because it was uncategorizable and thus unmanageable prior to Constantine — and as this happens, the ‘Jews’ become a problem. Where Christians were once the uncategorizable and unmanageable distinct people, this onus now fell to the Jews, who became victims of persecution often perpetrated by Christians in power. Fast-forwarding centuries and millennia of Jewish history, and this baggage adds up to the Jews becoming considered a distinct ‘race’ in Europe (see Arendt’s Origins for the brutal blow-by-blow details), leading fatefully to the events of anti-semitic fascist nation-building in Europe in which governments like Nazi Germany embarked on an increasingly violent campaign to exterminate the Jews.

I’m serious. You’ve got to read this book.

Given our post-Shoah context, that’s why it’s superlatively important to not carelessly use the word ‘Pharisee’ or ‘Sadducee’ as convenient ideal types for ‘religious elites’ — that’s because, given the baggage of Christian history, they’re racially charged. In fact, this is the current that runs through theologian J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. Although many have misread Jonathan Tran to say that Carter and his colleagues are proposing a ‘new black theology’ (while they are all African American, their work is more properly a ‘theology of race’ that transcends black experiences), Carter draws on Denise Kimber Buell’s work on ‘race’ in early Christianity. What happened, Carter and Buell both point out, is that the classical understanding of Jesus as embodied within a Jewish body fell victim to elitist heresies that proposed that secret spiritual practices could lead to the rise of a new, elite ‘race’ of humans. In other words, the rise of such race-thinking and anti-semitism is in fact an elitist betrayal of classical Christian teachings. For Carter, that kind of race-thinking that grew out of ancient heresies became planted in turn in modern European Christian consciousness, leading (as Carter’s colleague Willie Jennings outlines in The Christian Imagination) to the justification of the slave trade, the occupation of indigenous lands, and the orientalism-driven colonization of the ‘inferior’ races.

Read this book.

That brings us to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Whether one thinks his ‘religionless Christianity in a world come of age’ should be classified as ‘liberal’ (as Harvey Cox does) or ‘classical’ (as Stanley Hauerwas does), at the overlooked heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology is a brilliant analysis of ‘sin’ and ‘ethics’ that is classically rooted in the story of the Fall. From Sanctorum Communio to Creation and Fall to Discipleship to Life Together to Ethics to Letters and Papers from Prison, the beating heart of Bonhoeffer’s theology revolves around a meditation on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For Bonhoeffer, a Christian ethics that takes its beginning by defining what is good and evil has forgotten the real beginning, in which God exists in relation to his people and his people have a social life based on communion with the other. One of the concrete levels where Bonhoeffer saw this play out was in Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, where Bonhoeffer witnessed how American attempts to define the color line led to segregation and all kinds of economic injustices and psychological damage. In other words, the very structuring categories of race and their everyday effects are themselves evidence of the fact that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil have been eaten. As theologian of race Brian Bantum argues, Bonhoeffer calls us back again to a classically Christian understanding of sin and discipleship, for ‘sin’ is simply having followed these invented definitions of good and evil while Christian discipleship is about returning to the beginning sociality based on relationality.

What I’m saying is that race is a window into understanding Jesus as both a psychologist and a physician for the human heart. That’s because there are the concrete political effects of sin — i.e. eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil by engaging in the politics of sovereign definition — are all on display. And as Todd and Chase would both agree, the church should examine her own hypocrisy and corruption. I’m just saying that when that examination takes place, this is likely a lot of what will be found. And when that church hears the voice of Jesus afresh, it will not simply be as a psychologist or a physician for the human heart, but as having spoken through the anti-racist prophets that the time has come, the kingdom of God is at hand, and that all things, including and especially the racializing structures of modernity, are about to be made new.

Having talked much about the rise of the state and tendencies toward political corruption, we look forward with great anticipation to an engagement with the question of whether governments are a force for good in the world.

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.

Wong Fu For Life

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Asian American, Chinese American, Chinese church, Chinglican, Chris Dinh, Christine Chen, English ministry, ethnic, everyday, Kaba Modern, Korean American, life, love, nice girl, Nice Girls Crew, nice guy, Philip Wang, race, relationships, rigidity, romance, second generation, silent exodus, stereotype, Ted Fu, timelines, Wesley Chan, Wong Fu Productions, yellow fever, Yuri Tag

In a move that will likely annoy Churl to no end, I would like to take a short break from the Chinglican posts on Anglicanism (Part 3 is almost done, actually) and write something a bit more fun. When I first began blogging on A Christian Thing, I saw myself as a sort of Asian American voice on the blog, and it was my original intention to highlight how portions of contemporary Asian American and Asian Canadian arts and culture reflected the theological constitution of the world without the Asian American and Asian Canadian artists even knowing it. It was to that end that my first two posts on the blog were about Lynn Chen and Lisa Lee’s Tumblr blog, Thick Dumpling Skin, as well as on the Linsanity phenomenon in early 2012. At that time, Chinglican wasn’t going to write much about the practice of Anglicanism and about how certain major evangelical players were more ‘catholic’ than they made out to be. If you look carefully at how those posts originated, they were often provoked by some of Churl’s musings, say, about how Churl wished that Mark Driscoll were indeed Roman Catholic (to which I replied that Driscoll was more Irish Catholic than anyone has ever discussed him) while the more recent Anglican series is a reply of sorts to Churl’s desire to jump ship to Rome. I never intended to provide my analysis of the Anglican Communion, never wanted to address the neo-Reformed crew, and never thought that I would be speaking in my own Asian American voice to contest orientalizing voices within American evangelicalism at present. Indeed, I never thought that as Parts 3, 4, and 5 come out of the Anglicanism series, that I’d actually be doing Anglican (or better, ‘Chinglican’) theology on this blog. I suppose I had my own thoughts on these matters that I had personally worked out, but I never thought I’d be writing about them so publicly.

Three nice girls who have nothing to do with Wong Fu, at least not apparently. But they are (from left to right) Michelle Krusiec, Lynn Chen, and Sheetal Sheth. You should watch their stuff too.

Instead, I was supposed to be the happy voice on this Thing, still ridiculous to be sure, but happily ridiculous, blissfully looking at the most secular of Asian American arts and culture and finding good theological things to celebrate there. It was to that end that I wrote about how Thick Dumpling Skin’s address of body issues might appear overly individualistic, but Lisa Lee’s presumably Christian background (she says that her eating disorders hearken back to church potlucks) and Lynn Chen’s Catholic upbringing make them way too theologically thoughtful to end on an individualist note, even if they claim to be secular right now. On the same token, I also complained that while Jeremy Lin has been celebrated as the person to finally shine the spotlight on Asian American evangelicalism in the public eye, his theological assumptions have not been adequately interrogated, and we would be well-served as the church catholic if Lin were to tell us the painful story of how he was marginalized as an Asian American basketball professional as a theological reflection. For both, I wanted to celebrate the fact that we English-speaking younger generation Asian North American Christians (or at least, those with Christian backgrounds) aren’t simply making an alternative arts scene. We are actually doing theology, and doing an fantastically creative job at it.

It’s in that light that I’d like to celebrate Wong Fu Productions today. Wong Fu Productions is a small start-up film company started by three college friends who attended UC San Diego together, Philip Wang, Wesley Chan, and Ted Fu (they have also since added Chris Dinh). Currently based in Los Angeles, they have over one million subscribers on their YouTube channel and a successful business that sells T-shirts and plush toys, while they make film shorts (and aspire to make feature-length films) on YouTube. Over the last weekend, two of the co-founders of Wong Fu, Phil and Wes, visited Vancouver, along with Kaba Modern dance alumna Yuri Tag. Last week (June 8) was also the tenth anniversary of Wong Fu Productions. Because they’ve arrived on my home turf and because it’s time for me to appreciate them anyway, it’s time for an appreciation. (If you want to know what Wong Fu has to do with Yuri Tag, watch the entire series, ‘When It Counts.’ I’ve put the first episode down below.)

The appreciation that took place here in Vancouver treated Phil, Wes, and Yuri a bit like celebrities. Kept at a distance from the fans, the local Asian Canadian YouTube artists who hosted the festivities resorted to tactics that made the event seem quite needlessly formal, complete with raffle ticket draws, very formal and stiff interviews, and games through which the audience would purportedly get to know the Southern Californians. It wasn’t until near the end of the show that Phil broke the ice and reached out to fans, upon which he realized what the crowd control strategies were for, as someone shouted, ‘Will you father my children?’

It wasn’t always like this, though, and this is definitely not how I remember Wong Fu in the past, nor how I feel about them in the present. The Wong Fu guys are a bit older than me, probably by some two or three years. I know that that’s not much now that we’re all adults (but none the more mature, probably!), but in pre-university terms, that’s quite a bit. Not only would they have been seniors when I was a freshman in high school (thinking like that makes them feel old indeed), but in the Chinese church, we would have had to call them gege 哥哥 (older brother) and jiejie 姐姐 (older sister) simply because they were older. I mean, I’m sure that Phil 哥哥, Wes 哥哥, and Ted 哥哥 would chafe under their titles, but in a way, the fact that they have been able to carve out a path in Asian American arts and culture to the point that they’re taken seriously makes the attribution of older sibling ironically appropriate.

Like many, the first short I ever saw of theirs was called ‘Yellow Fever.’ Do yourself a favour and watch it below if you haven’t. The central premise of the short is that while white guys can get Asian girls, Asian guys can’t get white girls. Created prior to YouTube, the short became a hit, downloaded by many of my friends and shown to me at many a party at someone else’s house. We got the sense that these guys were big; they had struck a nerve with all of us relationally challenged, younger, single Asian Americans because they were able to articulate our relational frustrations without actually naming the cause. Instead, they made it funny without explaining anything.

But what really caught my attention was ‘Just A Nice Guy.’ (I’ve put it down below for you.) Again, Wong Fu pinned the relationship challenges of Asian Americans to a particularly corny answer that many Asian American (and arguably non-Asian American) guys give for the reason for the one that got away: ‘I’m just a nice guy.’ (This is why you have to watch ‘When It Counts’ above: Yuri Tag is a ‘nice girl.’ What a spin.) Again, the explanation is just ludicrous to be unbelievable as a non-explanation. Phil plays a ‘nice guy’ seeking the affections of a girl in his study group, but because he is a nice guy, he always gets ‘friend zoned’ by the women to whom he is attracted. It never occurs to him till the end to actually say something about his attractions and affections, which only goes to show that the ‘nice guy’ category is something in which he put himself in the first place. It’s not because he’s Asian that he’s a ‘nice guy.’ It’s not because he’s shy that he’s a nice guy. He’s a nice guy because he said so himself, and that’s what’s keeping him from pursuing relationships.

Since ‘Nice Guy,’ Wong Fu has been making fun of the categories we conservative Asian Americans from the suburbs have set up for ourselves. I say ‘conservative’ and ‘suburban’ as qualifiers because obviously, Asian Americans range the political and geographical spectrum. If you look at the shorts, though, there are a disproportionate amount of suburban scenes (for a new hilarious one, watch ‘Meet the Kayak‘), and the rigidity of stereotypes suggests that while Wong Fu itself is no conservative organization, they may have had fairly socially conservative backgrounds (and they are seeking to transcend it, which means that it’s nice that they got to meet with Barack Obama at the White House). What this means is that Wong Fu doesn’t speak for Asian Americans; how could they? (They certainly don’t represent any of the Asian Americans in poverty or who aren’t privileged enough to get higher education because of fears that they might be deported.) But for those of us suburban Asian Americans who grew up socially conservative (for a great complaint about us, see Glenn Omatsu’s ‘The Four Prisons’ paper), many of us grew up imbibing stereotypes of who we should be as a model minority focused on our own education and careers, and we proceeded to execute that prescription for our lives with rigid timelines and entrenched categories for how our lives should be. As we executed our lives with the instrumental rationality that we lived ever since we learned that we should be a model minority, we applied those same tactics to our personal relationships, leaving emotional carnage in our wake.

Wong Fu is a look in the mirror. One particularly poignant short is ‘Strangers, again’ (see below). If ‘Nice Guy’ is about the hard-and-fast categories in which we place ourselves as conservative suburban Asian Americans, then ‘Strangers, again’ is about the rigid timelines we set for ourselves. On a cursory view of the video–which, unfortunately, is how most viewers saw it–the film seems to be almost hyper-Calvinist in its stripping away of agency from people in a relationship. It’s almost predestined that every relationship will start with some form of excitement, degenerate into apathy, and then disintegrate into a fighting match that ends in two people, once in love, becoming strangers again. But this is not the way that even Wong Fu sees it. Spoiler alert: the final scene has the guy in the relationship (Phil) thinking about if he were to do it again, he’d apologize to his girlfriend (played by the fantastic Cathy Nguyen) halfway into the relationship, cutting off the ‘stages’ right in the middle. Relationships are not predetermined, the film is saying. You can do something about them. (If you want a view of relationships where these stages are but a dream, check out Wes’s Cannes selection, ‘At Musing’s End.’)

Wong Fu also has a variety of comedy sketches that take apart these stereotypes. The ‘Technology Ruins Romance‘ series takes apart the ‘nineteenth century’ notion of long lost love, showing how predetermined conclusions about hopeless romance are simply unrealistic in contemporary everyday lives. There’s also ‘Rick’s Man Tutorials,‘ a parody of Asian American men who attempt to show off their jock sides and look insensitive while falling apart emotionally on the inside. ‘Funemployed‘ delivers a blow to the idea that unemployment is simply failure, while also delivering to us in the midst of the unemployment story a classically creative Wong Fu music hit, the purposefully inane and vapid ‘Dance to This Song‘ that is a parody of every other club song to which to dance.

Put succinctly, Wong Fu Productions demonstrates time and again that the hand-wringing over what constitutes Asian American identity is so painfully silly that it should be laughed at. Instead, life should be lived. This is why they have also produced a variety of music videos for fellow Asian American YouTubers, a task that has culminated in them filming a music video for multiplatinum Taiwanese American artist, Leehom Wang. The music is where you can’t make the stuff up about life and love, where it’s impossible to put everything into a categorical grid or a rigid timeline, where artists must deal with mystery. That’s why Wong Fu now sponsors the International Secret Agents concert series that brings Asian American artists (many of whom are practicing Christians) to the stage to sing not about Asian American love, but their personal experience of love.

In other words, the notion of Asian American identity seems only to be a secondary concern for Wong Fu. If there’s anything to be said about Asian American identity, it’s that if we tell the truth about life and love, we find ourselves constituted not by some category we’ve imposed on ourselves. Instead, we are constituted by the ‘other,’ in that special word in younger Asian American circles called ‘relationships.’ Many of Wong Fu’s videos explore dating relationships in particular, but what’s increasingly striking is the way that their relationships are not merely sexual in nature (some, say, ‘The Last‘ and ‘To Those Nights‘ have slight hints that something subtly sexual might be going on). The overarching framework is not sex, though. It’s friendship.

The sort of friendship that Wong Fu portrays is a desire for deeper knowledge of the other for the other’s sake, to the point of critiquing one’s obsession with one’s own identity. When this is fulfilled–when that longing to know and to be known, to love and to be loved is fulfilled–then that’s what Wong Fu calls ‘home.’ Home is not only a place: it is a place if it’s filled with memories of relationships and times gone by, but it’s not just some physical space devoid of meaning. Home is not only one’s family by blood: it’s not the old stereotypical Asian American argument for traditional family values where the only people you should trust are those with whom you’re related by blood. Home is not even a place where everyone is of the same race; it’s not that Wong Fu is colour-blind (far from it), but race is not a relationship, and there’s no obsession with Asian American identity to make race a deciding factor for social relations. No, home is where your friends are, where the imposed categories and rigid timelines are stripped away and you can simply be with your friends. It’s in this context that we finally find what the Wong Fu holy grail of a dating and marriage relationship is: it’s one where one is loved because one is known and one knows the other. (For Wong Fu’s radical experiment with how far this idea can go, see their short-lived attempt at a television series, Home Is Where the Hans Are.)

Somehow, somewhere, there has to be something theological here.

It’s here that it’s easy to be stumped. After all, what’s so theological about all this? To be honest, there’s nothing really at the surface, although there’s plenty underneath. I mean, I could pin it to my sighting of a cross in an engagement video that Wong Fu did for a couple whose relationship spanned Los Angeles and Taipei, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have mutual friends with Wong Fu who are card-carrying Asian American evangelicals, some of whom were in their very early videos when they were students at UC San Diego. I also happen to remember that on an early version of Phil’s biography on the Wong Fu site, he said that his mom was a deacon in his church in Walnut Creek.

But I won’t go there because the films don’t go there.

You could say that there’s hardly anything worth our theological notice in Wong Fu aside from the occasional YouTuber that Wong Fu works with mentioning ‘God’ (say, Yuri Tag). Other than that, the Wong Fu shorts have really nothing to say about God.

But that’s where you’re wrong.

You see, if we can move this whole discussion to Asian American churches struggling with the ‘silent exodus‘ of their second generation to greener pastures, these shorts are an amazing resource for Asian American English ministries struggling to put their finger on what it is that their people struggle with in their everyday lives. I’m sure this could be said about a variety of non-profits and sundry dedicated to Asian American services. But English-speaking ministries in Asian American churches are notorious for trying to name what it is about Asian Americans in an effort to define their people and then move in to solve their problems in the name of Jesus. You have parents who tell you to be over-achievers. You are over-achievers. You are too much of a good Asian. You need Jesus. Note well: those are already the good ones. Some, of course, are worse, and may be downright racist: We are Asians, and we are superior to white people because we work harder and have stronger family values. So we are better Christians too.

It’s these stereotypes that are currently the plague of Asian American evangelical theology, and Wong Fu shows us another way. Perhaps ‘naming’ something that’s already there is not a defining action.

Maybe it’s a comic action.

It’s comic because once you bring up the categories with which Asian Americans have been defined and have set out to define themselves, they are funny because they sound so ideological that they’re just ludicrous. Why is it really that Asian guys can’t get white girls while white guys get Asian girls? Is there anything more to a ‘nice guy’ and a ‘nice girl’ that makes them so relationally hapless? Does anyone actually go into a relationship looking to become ‘strangers again’? Well, no, and the people who do should be given a sympathetic look in the mirror. This is what you’re doing to yourself, the Wong Fu shorts say. Get over yourself, and live for a change. There is so much more to life than your tidy categories, pressing timelines, and lame excuses for why you’re relationally challenged. Get out there. Live. (And if there are racist people in the way, tell them to get with the program and do something good for a change, like get to know someone personally.)

That’s a remarkable theological service done for Asian American English ministries. In answer to what exactly defines an Asian American that they can be targeted for ministry, Wong Fu wants us to know that we are not merely Asian American. Let’s get our theology right. God is not out to define us because we are not categories. We are not simply made of timelines. We do not exist to be defined for your next pet ministry project, and those of us who fit all of the stereotypes in the shorts are very funny people indeed. We are people, and we have everyday lives, and those lives are worth making fun of and turning into dramas. In fact, even if we defy the notion that our lives are stories lived comically before God, even if we insist that the categories define us and the timelines rule us, even if we purport to be a model minority because we have something about being Asian American to prove (of course, to the chagrin of progressive Asian Americanists), people like Wong Fu can still tell our stories as comedies, sometimes even at our expense. After all, the entire tradition in which we find ourselves is in fact a story, and it is a comic one, one that ends with us coming home to a place we did not expect with friends who have forgiven us for our instrumental rationality, even as we have forgiven them and have been forgiven by God himself.

And so, I’m just going to say it: Wong Fu for Life. Thank you, Phil, Wes, Ted, Chris, and Christine, and everyone else who works at Wong Fu. Your videos really do make my day better. Thanks.

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?