Original Article

Evangelicalism, race and world politics Stuart Croft Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.

Abstract American identities have traditionally been bound up with racial and religious markers – the WASP marker being for many, many decades and that which described the fullest state of American-ness. In the age of an AfricanAmerican President, such conventional wisdoms are clearly challenged; and yet race and religion still describe different degrees of American-ness. This article investigates these identity themes not through the traditional duologue of white and African American, but seeks to understand in different communities how race and religion combine to produce different American-ness. Through an examination of two communities deemed problematic because of the high percentage of unchurched among them – First Peoples and Asian Americans – the article describes different processes at work. First Peoples are often seen in racial rather than national terms. The work of evangelicals ‘among’ such peoples is assessed within the United States and beyond. In contrast, Asian-American identities are often articulated through evangelism, particularly on the campuses of the United States. Together, these case studies show that American-ness is being redefined, to include new racial categories and groups newly empowered by their religious activity. This connects to issues of migration; evangelism is now active in America as well as beyond, as the world comes to live in the United States, traditional boundaries – inside/outside and white/African American – carry different and often less weight than hitherto has been the case. International Politics (2011) 48, 290–307. doi:10.1057/ip.2011.2 Keywords: First Peoples; evangelism; Asian Americans; race; religion

Introduction It is inconceivable that the history and contemporary contours of the evangelical movement in the United States – in both its conservative and liberal forms – can be understood without a focus on race. Just as American politics as a whole has been deeply implicated by racial discourse and practice, so has been American Christianity, and so has evangelicalism. It is a social fact r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748 International Politics www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/

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of life that motivates authors and preachers and, of course there have been, and continue to be, important examinations of evangelicalism and race. In 1964, Milton Myron Gordon introduced his book Assimilation in American Life with the words: ‘This book is concerned, ultimately, with problems of prejudice and discrimination arising out of differences in race, religion and national background among the various groups which make us the American people’. In Jesus and Justice, for example, Peter Goodwin Heltzel (2009) details the record and policies of four evangelical movements in relation to racial justice, and argues for an engaged future in which non-white suffering in the Americas is the context for advocating evangelical engagement with the environment, AIDS and poverty. In so doing, Heltzel shows an important development in such debate. Once, such concerns would have been focussed purely within the United States; now such debates are regional and global. Heltzel shows how the traditional internal/external divide has broken down, and the ways in which American evangelical organisations and churches, heavily implicated by the racial dynamics of America’s past and present, are nevertheless drawn into global debates and practices. That American evangelicalism is still implicated in racial division is clear. There are white churches, and African-American churches. The Pew Research Center shows that among evangelical churches, 81 per cent are white; 7 per cent Hispanic; 6 per cent African American; 2 per cent Asian; and 4 per cent other. In churches that are historically African American, black participation is at 92 per cent (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007a).1 People live and pray in racial enclaves, and conservative and liberal theology is mapped onto that context. In Emerson and Smith’s (2001) Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, the authors examine attitudes among white evangelicals towards race. Through questionnaires and interviews with several thousand practising Christians, they show that white evangelicals hold that individualism and repentance are the most important elements of their world view. Therefore, structural issues – poverty, under representation, under education – that can be significant among non-white groups are not recognised. Or, rather, they are recognised, but not as a matter of race, but as a problem manufactured by government. As they quote one Pentecostal man: ‘I think the majority of your white people would not have a problem with a black man or the black population if it were not for what the government has done in the social programs such as welfare and food stamps and things of that nature. It’s not an incentive anymore to be anything y’ (Emerson and Smith, p. 80). As they quote an Assembly of God woman, ‘It has to be blamed on the government. The government makes it easier for someone to sit at home and collect welfare and have baby after baby’ (Emerson and Smith, p. 104). Such class-based narratives are common in the developed world; those who experience various degrees of affluence legitimise poverty gaps by blaming r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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the poor for their condition. It carries weight therefore in conservative politics; but it also carries weight among those families who have a narrative of progress out of poverty over the generations. As Governor Mike Huckabee put it at the 2009 Republican National Convention, ‘I’m not a Republican because I grew up rich, but because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life poor, waiting for the government to rescue me’. However, what gives particular shape to these debates in the United States is the dimension of race. Such views thrive in ‘racially homogenised’ communities. Of the vast majority of Emerson and Smith’s white interviewees, with a few exceptions, ‘none lived in worlds that were not at least 90 per cent white in their daily experience’ (Emerson and Smith, p. 80). And of course this must reflect and be reflected by the structure of American religion. Emerson and Smith (p. 71) cite the powerful testimony of an African-American Pentecostalist: ‘In this town, the most segregated hour is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning y’ Here, the speaker was evoking directly the message of Martin Luther King, some 40 years after he had used the same description of life in segregated America at the height of the civil rights struggle. It is important to begin this analysis with the central white evangelical/ African-American evangelical relationship and difference, because this has traditionally been at the heart of understanding the relationship between Christianity, race and policy in the United States. As Jim Wallis (1997) wrote, ‘White evangelicalism simply has been wrong on the issue of race for a very long time’. But Wallis was not alone in such recognition; evangelical organisations themselves had started to react to the realisation that they had been wrong. In 1992, in his acceptance speech of the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), Donald Argue (1992) called for change, because the NAE was ‘too old, too male, and too white’. More significantly, the Pentecostals overcame 75 years of racial division in 1994 with the dissolu tion of the white Pentecostal Fellowship of North America (PFNA), in favour of a multi-racial structure. As Bishop Underwood (1994), Chairman of the outgoing PFNA, put it in the speech that marked this change: ‘We still have much to learn about each other. We will have to travel through times of both repentance and forgiveness. But thank God, we have set our faces in the right direction!’ The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) passed a series of resolutions against racism (1988), and in favour of Racial and Ethnic Reconciliation (1993). This was a long-term pattern of change. Southern Baptists had broken from the mainstream in 1845 over their support for slavery; after the Civil War, some Southern Baptists had founded the Ku Klux Klan (KKK); in the 1950s, they had continued their support for segregation (although as Alan Scott Willis(2004, pp. 149–194) shows, this began to change significantly at that time). But in 1978, the SBC condemned racism in a resolution, and in 1982 they condemned the KKK. In 1995, the SBC resolved 292

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to ‘y unwaveringly denounce racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin y’ and to view ‘every human life as sacred y of equal and immeasurable worth, made in God’s image, regardless of race or ethnicity’ (Kummer, 2008). However, as with the breakdown of the internal/external distinction, this is another area in which the traditionally constructed boundaries are breaking down. Evangelicalism and race is no longer purely about white and AfricanAmerican churches, organisations and experiences. There have, for example, been significant developments in the growth of Asian-American evangelicalism, as Alumkal (2003) has shown. In examining the work of the Chinese Community Church and the Korean Presbyterian Church in metropolitan New York, Alumkal shows the widening reach of evangelical faith into ethnic groups beyond those traditionally involved in the ‘race-faith’ debate. A potent example of the way in which race and evangelicalism are being renegotiated is given by the Reverend Dr Brenda Salter McNeil (2008, pp. 70–71). An African-American woman, she spoke at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Conference in Urbana in 2000 on faith and the problems of racial division, focussing on the murder of African-American Ricky Byrdsong by a white supremacist. After the speech, she was made aware that many Asian Americans in the audience were very unhappy; she had neglected to mention a Korean student Won-Joon Yoon who while on his way to church was murdered by the same white supremacist. Ricky Byrdsong was a celebrity, the coach of Northwestern University’s basketball team, Won-Joon Yoon a graduate student. Feeling that she had committed an injustice, the next day, McNeil returned to the podium to apologise for ignoring Won-Joon Yoon, but did so with highly symbolic, racial, language, saying ‘I now understand what it feels like to be white – to try so hard to get it right but feel like you always get it wrong’ (McNeil, 2008, p. 71). Korean Americans felt that one of their own had been slighted, some felt that McNeil had focussed on Byrdsong as a fellow African American, and the resolution was to evoke efforts of white Americans to recognise racial division. The incident was a perfect metaphor for both the racialised nature of American Christianity and for its increasing complexity beyond the white/AfricanAmerican binary. Alumkal’s focus on Asian-American communities could as easily have included Indian-American communities that are increasingly the focus of organisations such as Campus Crusade for Christ. The collapse of the internal/ external division, and also of exclusivity the white/African-American evangelical dynamic, is laid bare by Rajendra Pillai (2003a): ‘North America has always been a land of immigrants, but now we have a new wave of people coming from countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East adding to the growing religious diversity in North America. We don’t have to go overseas to meet someone from another culture. Each one of us can now be a missionary r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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in our own communities’. Pillai, a Christian evangelist who focuses particularly on conversions from Hinduism, has made much of this theme, notably in his book, Reaching the World in Our Own Backyard: A Guide to Building Relationships with People of Other Faiths and Cultures (Pillai, 2003b). The theme of the Great Commission at home is a strong one. The Church PlantingVillage (n.d.) initiative is based on the principles that The population of North America is 323 million, and growing daily. It is estimated that approximately 226 million are lost and unreached y It is easy to assume that North Americans are over-churched. But, in reality, North America is a mission field so populous that it cannot be reached for Christ without starting large numbers of new churches y Six million French Canadians make up the largest unreached people group in North America (1 in 200 is Christian) y North America is the only continent where Christianity is not growing. Again, the themes are clear; the internal/external divide has collapsed, evangelicalism must focus on the other in our midst, and therefore in particular, the call to work with not just ‘Canadians’, but in particular, the more distant other of ‘French Canadians’. Pillai is a spokesperson for the new social reality of evangelicalism, faith and world politics; he is a leitmotif for this article, which will now turn to the ways in which these dynamics impact upon particular communities. Evangelicalism, race and world politics are mutually implicated in three ways: the inside/outside the United States distinction has collapsed, and world politics takes place across a variety of spaces involving evangelicalism; second, that the binary of white/African-American Christianity, while not having broken down, is overlaid with other racialised and ethnicised identities; and third, these relationships speak to the contemporary (re)definition of American identity itself. These themes will be explored through sections examining the debates over evangelicalism and world politics focusing on two racialised and ethnicised groups – First Peoples and Asian Americans.

First Peoples Perhaps the best way to start a consideration of the mutual implication of evangelicalism, race and the global is to begin with the First Peoples of America. It was of course the First Peoples who witnessed immediately and directly the intersection of these elements: the global, in the colonisation of their lands; the evangelical, in the pressure to convert to Christianity (which was of course not only an evangelical mission); and race, in the particular low 294

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social status into which First Peoples were constructed. Through these forces, First Peoples in the contemporary United States often live on reservations, with high levels of unemployment, few opportunities and often among a host of social challenges. And evangelicals often see Christianity – or rather, the way that it was used in the colonising of the West – as implicated in these processes, working to prevent indigenous peoples from benefiting from the Word of God. It is an historical mistake that many evangelicals believe can, and must, be put right. This combination of deprivation and historical narrative provides a classic site for evangelicalism important, as AmeriTribes put it, ‘because the first peoples of the Americas shouldn’t be the last to hear’.2 The evangelists explain that God can achieve wonders for the First Peoples. AmeriTribes recall the story of Aunt Mary, a story to be told in engagements between missionaries and First Peoples: The family sheep were in desperate need of water, with hardly enough strength to hold their heads up. Dust rose with each step as they slowly shuffled through the high desert vegetation that surrounded Mary’s one-room house y The springs in Mary’s region of the Navajo Reservation were dry; water that had been hauled in was gone – the barrels were empty. Mary had lost her sight years before, but now, as a new believer, she could see with eyes of faith y Her baffled relatives confirmed that there were no clouds in the sky. There was no water anywhere until a small stream began trickling down from the mesa, filling the empty gulley right in front of Mary’s house. As the sheep drank deeply of the refreshing water, Mary explained the mystery. She had prayed. God had answered. Why was everyone so surprised? She wasn’t. (AmeriTribes, n.d., a) The power of this narrative is the revelation that practical benefit – not only spiritual contentment – arises from Christianity, that this practical benefit could save lives among poor and underprivileged people. The ‘others’ were surprised; they did not have Mary’s knowledge. And in another twist, Mary was of course the ‘least useful’ member of the family; that is the disablist use of her blindness in the narrative. There are a significant number of organisations – many very small – bringing together groups of committed evangelicals determined to spread the Word to First Peoples. Christ for Native Youth (n.d.), for example, sets itself the ambition of working ‘to see every young person in Native America embrace the life changing message of Jesus Christ’. Native American Ministries (n.d.) ‘was formed in 2006 as the arm of Evangelism Missions Incorporated to reach Native Americans for Christ, the sending of missionaries to Native America, the establishment of Churches on Native r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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American Reservations, and to give special emphasis to the needs among Native Americans’. It is straightforward missionary work: the First Peoples have problems stemming from being unchurched, and it is the responsibility of non-First Peoples to help. Thus, in relation to the work with the Jicarillo Apache in New Mexico, they support Dan Spencer, who is also of Indians for Christ. Spencer declares: ‘We are grateful and blessed to be serving the Lord among the Jicarilla Apaches in New Mexico’ (March 2008); ‘Good News Baptist Church continues striving to be a lighthouse to the Jicarilla Apache Nation as well as other Native American groups’ (December 2007); The prayer needs are therefore ‘Salvation of the Jicarilla Apache people’ (September 2007). Of course, the language is very important. He is ‘among’ the Jicarilla – they are a different people to his own; a people lost, who need a ‘lighthouse’; and a people who, as a whole, need salvation, and the prayers of (true) American believers. The Jicarilla are the other, those who through ‘our’ efforts, ‘we’ can save. And there is a strong belief that the First Peoples are in desperate need of salvation. The North American Mission Board (2004) of the Southern Baptists has a leaflet to support work among the First Peoples, which explains the depth of the crisis that they are seen to face. ‘Of the 5 million Native people in North America today, an estimated 95 per cent (4,750,000) do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior, and have yet to experience the purpose, the joy, and the liberation from the weight of sin that only Jesus Christ can bring’. The concept of First Peoples is of course not restricted to the United States. As the title of the organisation AmeriTribes shows, such First Peoples exist across the Americas. And it is therefore natural, in this discourse, to connect together work with the American ‘other’ with other Americas. AmeriTribes works across the western United States and into Mexico. With, for example, the Tarahumara people in the Sierra Madre mountains, where ‘Because there are fewer than 500 Native believers, the task of reaching the rest of this tribe is considerable’ (AmeriTribes, n.d., b). The unit that AmeriTribes focus on is the ‘tribal peoples of the Americas’ regardless of national boundary (AmeriTribes, n.d., c); the ‘tribes’ are the ones in need of salvation. The ‘American Indian Ministry’ of Pastors Mel and Donna Bond in Wentzville, Missouri expresses this clearly – they work to show that ‘You can be an Indian and be a Christian’ (Native American Ministries Directory, n.d.). In a similar, though far more ambitious, vein Christian Hope Indian Eskimo Fellowship (n.d.), known as CHIEF, seeks to develop Christianity among indigenous peoples across the continents through evangelism and the training of pastors: ‘The mission of CHIEF is to disciple and equip a strong Native American Leadership for the development of the indigenous church throughout North, Central and South America’. First Peoples are the focus, regardless of their geographical location: whether they be on a reservation 296

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or in a city, in the United States or elsewhere in the Americas, their race is that which defines their need. Yet of course, the base that evangelicals have established through work of this sort beyond the borders of the United States has borne fruit in a dramatic fashion. Evangelicalism, and in particular Pentecostalism, has become an enormous phenomenon in Latin America. It has long been a target region for evangelicals; the Billy Graham Centre holds a record of a presentation by Paul E. Finkenbinder at the World Evangelical Congress in 1966, where he said that: A few statistics y may help us see the ripe harvest that Christian missionaries face in these lands of spiritual opportunity. The combined population of Mexico and the Central American countries – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, British Honduras and the Canal Zone – is approximately 50,000,000. But the total evangelical community of these countries registers a mere 500,000 or one believer for every 100 non-evangelicals y Never have I seen these fields so white unto harvest, yet with so few laborers to bring in the sheaves. Evangelicalism, originally embedded in this work with the indigenous peoples of this region, has spread from that base so far in Latin America. And evangelicalism is a powerful new reality in many of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking societies of the Americas. A Pew survey in 2006, for example, suggested that the total number of ‘renewalists’ (Pentecostals and Charismatics) in Brazil was around 49 per cent of the total population; in Guatemala, some 60 per cent (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2006). In a traditionally Catholic part of the world, these statistics are staggering. But this is not simply a case of ‘American evangelism’ spreading to Latin America; this internal/external distinction does not hold. And therefore Latin American evangelists also work in the United States, a good example being Ed Silvoso, an Argentinean now resident in California, who through Harvest Evangelism works to ‘disciple nations’.3 Silvoso is a member of the Honorary Board of the Presidential Prayer Team, the National Day of Prayer Advisory Committee and Mission America; and the evangelist and motivational speaker Zig Ziglar (n.d.) tells us that ‘Ed Silvoso’s clear-cut message could be the catalyst that propels America into a first-century type of revival’. That is, Silvoso is from the outside, working on the inside; but those outside/ inside categories no longer work. From these examples of evangelicalism with and through First Peoples, we can see that the traditional categories – the firm separation of that which happened within and without the state, and the dominating r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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white/African-American duologue – no longer articulates the relationship between evangelicalism, race and world politics. First Peoples are often seen to be an ‘other’ that needs to be saved, not just within the United States, but outside as well. Evangelicalism has not just connected, however, among native peoples in the Americas, but has spread beyond, and through that spread has connected back into the United States itself. The dynamics are complex and multi-levelled, and also play out in the context of a newer form of evangelicalism than that practiced on/with First Peoples.

Asian American Evangelicalism One of the key ethnic dimensions of change to faith in the United States has been the successive waves of migration from Latin America, which it has been though conventionally would continue to increase the proportion of Catholics in the United States. Around 68 per cent of Hispanics in the United States are Catholic, but as seen above, there is a significant element of Protestantism among this community, currently around 20 per cent; 75 per cent of whom are evangelical (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2007b). However, there is another community that is growing, and who are worthy of a focus. Asian Americans comprise at most approximately 5 per cent of the American population, significantly more than the First Peoples in the United States, who comprise less than 2 per cent. And ‘The Asian-American population is expected to increase from 15.5 million to 40.6 million, or from 5.1 percent to 9.2 percent of the population’.4 Whereas First Peoples are among the poorest in the United States, the Asian American population is, by ethnicity, the richest, on average US$12 000 per household richer per annum than the next wealthiest group (Caucasians).5 Tony Carnes (2002) notes in Christianity Today that ‘Between 1991 and 2000, the Barna Poll reports a 440 percent increase in the number of Asian Americans who acknowledge a personal commitment to Jesus Christ’. There are two aspects of Asian-American evangelicalism that make this group particularly interesting analytically (for a detailed study of the history and contemporary scale of Asian-American Christianity, see Timothy Tseng et al, 2005). First, the phenomenon of ‘new’ ethnic evangelicalism challenges conventional wisdoms, in the construction of a new faith group, and given the willingness of some within that group to experiment with moving from ethnic to multi-ethnic worship. Second, it is a community particularly active on college campuses; that is, despite the low proportion of the population involved, there has been a much higher impact upon the educated next generation. 298

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At one level, ethnic evangelicalism among these groups is that which we would probably expect. Given the racialised and ethnicised nature of worship in the United States, the null hypothesis would be that Korean-American evangelicals would worship together, separate from Chinese-American evangelicals, and both would certainly stay clear of the white mainstream, and of both African-American and Hispanic churches. And indeed, there is extensive evidence of this, as Alumkal shows in the analysis of, for example, the Chinese Community Church in metropolitan New York. Indeed, there are many Chinese Community Churches (that is, churches with exactly that name) in the United States: in New York, Sacramento, San Diego, Westchester and so on. In the Washington DC Chinese Community Church (n.d.) – ‘an evangelical church committed to knowing Christ and making Christ known’ – services are held in Cantonese and Mandarin as well as English. This represents different waves of migration: on Sundays, the 09:30 service in Cantonese is for now elderly, mostly pre-World War II migrants; a 10:45 service in Mandarin for newer immigrants; and at 11:00, the largest service, in English, for second and third generations. Some 350 people worship on an average Sunday according to Jacqueline Salmon (2009). Alumkal’s (2003) careful ethnographic study of a Chinese Community Church was contextualised by the comparative study of the Korean Presbyterian Church, also in metropolitan New York, a church affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). This is significant; their membership is of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which has four nongeographical presbyteries for Korean Americans, rather than the Korean Presbyterian Church in America, which is an offshoot of the Korean-based Presbyterian Church of Korea. That is, in their organisation, these American Korean Presbyterians emphasise the ‘American’ over the ‘Korean’. There are, of course, many Asian-American churches organised for the worship of particular racial and ethnic groups in different cities and states in America. The Seattle Chinese Church Alliance, for example, or the Vietnamese Christian Community Church in the same city. Yet to simply suggest that these communities have simply created their own, racially/ethnically separated space for their faith would be too simplistic. It is clear that many Asian-American churches see a real need to conduct some of their services in languages other than English, to recognise in practice the changing nature of their ethnic communities. But there are also efforts to create multi-ethnic spaces. This has been examined in some depth by Kathleen Garces-Foley (2007) in her study of Evergreen Baptist Church in Los Angeles. This evangelical church committed itself to racial reconciliation in practice; from 1997, its congregation changed from 98 per cent Asian American to 75 per cent; and in addition to including members from 17 different Asian and Pacific Rim heritages, attracted white, Hispanic and African-American worshippers. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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One of the key features of the move towards racially integrated worship has come in the creation of pan-Asian worship. As Jeanette Yep, vice president of the Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship put it, Being multiethnic is more meaningful than just being bicultural. It is also more difficult. It involves interacting with people of many different cultures. There are many expressions of Latino/Hispanic, Black/African American, and Asian American cultures, as well as many variations of white/European culture. You may be able to understand and embrace one culture that’s different from your own. But embracing multiethnicity, although it is much harder, is also more reflective of the Kingdom. (Yep, 2004) As Russell Jeung and Robert Bellah (2004, p. 166) put it, such initiatives have ‘brought together Chinese and Japanese American Christians, along with other Asian groups, despite their traditional enmity and their American acculturation’. We can see this not only in the Evergreen Baptist Church, but also in the development of the Asian American Christian Fellowship (n.d.), which began as the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society in 1972. Whereas Alumkal studied the Korean Presbyterian Church in metropolitan New York with anthropological vigour, we could similarly focus on the Korean Presbyterian Church in metropolitan Detroit, which has a ‘European American’ pastor. A church that began to minister to the Korean-American community in the city still has two services on a Sunday in the Korean language (at 08:30 and 11:30), but has introduced an English-language service at 10:00. As the Reverend Samuel Lasswell, the Associate Pastor in the church with self-proclaimed European American ancestry, puts it, ‘Among those you will find in our “all English” worship service on any particular Sunday are people whose heritage not only originated here in the United States of America, but also in Africa, China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, among others’ (Lasswell, n.d.). Such endeavours are, for Garces-Foley and Jeung (n.d.), part of the discourse of Asian-American evangelicalism. They categorise white evangelical discourse as ‘conservative individualism’; African-American evangelical discourse as ‘political liberalism’; but Asian-American evangelical discourse as ‘racialised multiculturalism’. All this echoes the theoretical propositions of Kwang Chung Kim and Won Moo Hurh; that assimilation and ethnic preservation are not dichotomies, but rather two forces that lead to a synthesis of a new, adhesive community. As Fenggang Yang (1999, p. 17) puts it in the context of examining the Chinese-American Christian communities (including the Washington DC Chinese Community Church discussed above), ‘Instead of choosing either American or ethnic identities, immigrants may construct adhesive identities that integrate both together’. 300

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Within this context, Elaine Howard Ecklund’s Korean American Evangelicals (2007) makes an important point. If part of being a non-white American is to be constructed in terms of the hyphenated identity, what does this mean in terms of religious loyalties? Korean Americans are constructed as such, and then within the evangelical movement, many seek to exploit that identity in majoritarian ways. But does that mean mimicking the attitudes and structures of white evangelicalism? In Ecklund’s careful analysis, it does not. White evangelicals are often seen as highly political – most often in terms of the actions of the Christian Right, but also in liberal politics, whereas the conventional wisdom is that Asian-American evangelicals focus on faith to the exclusion of politics. That is, they do not mimic white evangelicals; the play the role of an ‘other’ within evangelicalism to that politicised identity. Ecklund found, in a detailed anthropological study, that Korean Americans ‘y draw on evangelicalism selectively, in ways that take into consideration identities as Christians, as immigrants, and as nonwhite Americans’ (Ecklund, 2007, p. 122). This is echoed by Sharon Kim, in a discussion of second generation evangelical movements: ‘y second generation churches are not mirror copies of mainstream churches. Rather, pastors of these new churches are quick to reject certain aspects of mainstream evangelical Christianity, which they feel are not consistent with their God-given mission’ (Kim, 2008, p. 160). Thus, the ‘adhesive identities’ discussed by Yang have direct implications for the nature of evangelical faith. And those implications include attempts to intellectualise the nature of Asian-American theology, as is illustrated by D.J. Chuang and Timothy Tseng’s edited collection Conversations: Asian American Evangelical Theologies in Formation (2006). This recent development may not lead far, but it is a significant change from the discourses found by analysts earlier, who argued that Asian Americans were not interested in examining the theological foundations of their faith. It is important in this context to note that Conversations was not published by a commercial organisation, but rather by the L2 Foundation, whose ‘y mission is to develop the leadership and legacy of Asian Americans by providing support and resources. L2 Foundation serves ministry and professional leaders, empowering them to fulfil God’s calling’.6 The discussion of Korean-American evangelical faith provides a gateway into the second aspect of this commentary on Asian-American groups, the role of such faith groups in campus life in the United States. Although there is evidence of a commitment towards pan Asian faith structures, there is also a counter-trend, examined most full by Rebecca Kim in God’s New Whiz Kids (Kim, 2006). Kim examines the ways in which second generation American-Korean students have begun to work in ethnically defined evangelical communities, and how that has helped energise still further an Asian Americanisation of evangelicalism on American campuses. Kim’s r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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statistics are striking; she claims that although comprising some 4 per cent of the total American population, Asian Americans form some 15 per cent of the enrolments at Ivy League universities. And in that context, Asian Americans are exceptionally dominant in some Christian structures: 80 per cent of those involved in evangelical Christian groups (of which there are over 50) at Berkeley and UCLA are Asian Americans; that 70 per cent of the members of the Harvard Radcliffe Christian Fellowship are Asian Americans; that 90 per cent of those involved in Campus Crusade for Christ at Yale are Asian Americans (Kim, 2004). But what is particularly significant in Kim’s work is the analysis of the core phenomenon: the move of large numbers of second generation Korean Americans who mostly come from white, middle-class neighbourhoods, who appear to be assimilated into ethnic-specific religious organisations at college. And her explanation is profound, it is a product of the nature of American identity. American Koreans seek their own evangelical organisations partly out of homophily (the desire to be with the like) as articulated by an ethnically constructed American whole, but also out of a desire to be understood in that racialised and ethnicised construction (that is, the Korean-American identity being presupposed intersubjectively). That allows a collective to be formed and recognised – Korean American, in this case – which can be mobilised to create majority control (that is, Korean-American domination over other identity constructions) in faith-based structures and organisations. That is, it was only in an explicitly multi-racial/ethnic framework that Korean Americans discovered the Koreaness of their American identity as something that could be shared, enjoyed collectively and used to empower. If multiculturalism means a multiple of cultures in a democratic frame, the culture that can organise to majority status benefits. The role of Asian Americans in campus Christianity has begun to be noticed and commented upon in the Christian media. Tim Stafford’s piece in Christianity Today in 2006 noted that ‘At Berkeley, California’s premier public university, “evangelical Christian” and “Asian American” are almost interchangeable descriptions’. In 2007, Lillian Kwon wrote that ‘On many of the nation’s elite university campuses, Asian-American evangelicals have increasingly become exemplars of evangelical piety’. This is a key trope; that Asian-American Christians are the model of faith, hard work and commitment, an issue that is discussed in Kim’s God’s New Whiz Kids. There is some contrast here with concerns about reaching a wider range of second generation youth. Angela Lee (2006, p. 9) wrote: ‘A pressing need of the Asian churches in North America is to reach the growing population of second generation Asian Americans’. Indeed, Russell Jeung (2008) notes that Asian Americans profess twice as many secularists (11 per cent) as the American populations as a whole (6 per cent), with particularly 302

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high proportions among Chinese Americans (39 per cent) and Japanese Americans (26 per cent). Asian-American evangelicalism is a dramatic new development in the way in which religion and identity is constituted in the United States. The fashioning of adhesive identities has led to the concentration of religious groups into particular ethnic collectives; efforts to produce a multi-ethnic community of worship; and initial thoughts as to ways in which Asian Americans, by virtue of their Asian American-ness, might begin a process of re-intellectualising evangelical theology. One point is apparent. The ability of First Peoples to develop agency is and has been very low in comparison with the agency of Asian Americans. And that agency is likely to be still stronger in the future, not only as Asian Americans increase in number, but more significantly as numbers of highly educated and skilled Asian-American evangelicals leave the Ivy League universities in pursuit of their working lives.

Conclusion This article began with the work of Rajendra Pillai, who instructs evangelicals on how to evangelise in their own communities; and in so doing, he recognises how the world is now inside America. The practice is of course to focus on nonChristian religions; but to hold a non-Christian religion is not just a matter of theology, it is a matter of identity. And the non-Christian cannot be fully American. For all the phraseology of Indian Americans and so on, Pillai shows that Indian Americans are less than full Americans in that which he writes. Note, for example, his advice to would-be evangelists among American Hindu communities: ‘As is the case with people from most other countries, avoid discussions on politics’ (Pillai, 2003a). Their religion keeps them conceived of as foreign, despite any formal citizenship rights. This article has sought to investigate the ways in which race and evangelicalism speaks to the constructions of American-ness in the contemporary United States. It was a very deliberate decision not to focus upon the white/ African American duologue, but examine the way in which the marginalised First Peoples are engaged by evangelicalism, not to focus on Hispanics, but on Asian Americans. Economically and socially, First Peoples and Asian Americans are as distinct a pair of communities as might exist in the United States. But in another sense, they share something important. They are the most unchurched communities. As the earlier example showed, evangelicals see First Peoples as 95 per cent unchurched; 63 per cent of Asian Americans are unchurched, according to a Barna poll (The Barna Group, 2007). The churched, and the efforts of evangelists, are thereby thrown into higher relief in those communities that are least integrated into America’s Christian faith communities. r 2011 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1384-5748

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The adhesive identities thesis is important in understanding the impact of faith on national identity. The calculation has changed over time. Once it was necessary to be a white protestant to be an American, or at least a core American. Catholics, African Americans, still more so, First Peoples were all accorded a lesser status in that identity construction. With segregation, this was expressively so; African Americans were accorded different roles – and different churches – precisely because they were of a lesser status in identity terms. But from the civil rights movement, through to the empowerment of blue-collar Americans in the late twentieth century, whiteness as a core of American-ness has declined, in relation to the mutual constitution of Christianity and American-ness, which brings us back to Pillai. His work is a micro example of these macro trends. He secures his American-ness, despite his South Asian appearance, through his evangelical work. And that work offers deliverance to other American citizens of South Asian ancestry; through conversion they, too, can become truly American. And therefore a converted Bengali American is placed as pastor of a planted church in Waltham, Massachusetts to evangelise, and thus Americanise, his former and now again co-nationals. Paul Biswas’ task is to reach the Bengalis of Boston, a very worthy group: ‘It’s hard to reach the Bengali immigrants because they work so hard – seven days a week. We have one group that meets at midnight because that’s when the people come home from work. At midnight or 1 a.m. they have their Bible study meeting, eat together, go home by 3 a.m., sleep a few hours, and then get up and go to work again’ (Biswas, 2009). Hardworking immigrants will, by the grace of Christ, become the new model Americans. So what does this analysis tell us about Americanism and world politics? It tells us first, predictably, that for American evangelicals, the ‘American’ and the ‘evangelical’ (or at least, ‘Christian’) are mutually constituted. It is difficult to think of non-faith citizens as Americans. We see that with attitudes towards First Peoples, what counts is not their status as Americans, but their vulnerability without faith, irrespective of whether that is vulnerability shared in the United States or elsewhere on the continent. We see that in Pillai’s strategies concerning Hindu Americans in the home city. That is, forms of faith are still embedded in notions of national identity, to be explored, valued and expanded as appropriate; there is a naturalness about the national and the faith-based that is still often startling to, for example, Europeans. And in this mutual constitution, the American can be found globally; by sharing the values of the evangelical, anyone can be part of this newly developing community, whether they hail from Argentina, Austria or Afghanistan. American evangelicals see their own identity in co-religionists, regardless of nationality. And on the contrary, other faiths can seem threatening to the American identity, regardless of whether it is held by American citizens or not. 304

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Evangelising Muslims in particular is seen by many to be important, whether at home or abroad; and as one evangelical Christian teacher at ‘an all-day seminar on how to woo Muslims away from Islam’ expressed the essential American-ness at the heart of the work, ‘Do bring them [individual potential Muslim converts] chocolate chip cookies’ (Goodstein, 2003). The hard-and-fast boundary at the edges of the United States no longer acts as a barrier to identity construction and reconstruction (if it ever really did). Evangelicalism in the United States is making new Americans on a local basis, and is finding them on a global basis.

About the Author Stuart Croft is Professor of International Security at the University of Warwick. His work is in the field of security studies, including ‘Culture, Crisis and America’s War on Terror’ (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and ‘Securitizing Islam (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). A former Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s New Security Challenges programmes, he is currently President of the British International Studies Association.

Notes 1 Note on Sources: all websites cited in this article were live as of October 2009. Mainline churches are even more white, at 91 per cent. 2 It is their strap line: see www.ameritribes.org/. 3 The Harvest Evangelism website is www.harvestevan.org/paradigms-and-principles.html. Silvoso is also an author: see his Transformation: Change the Marketplace and You Change the World (Regal Books, 2004) – and in particular, chapter four, ‘Altitude and Attitude’ (pp. 37–53) on ‘discipling nations’. 4 US Census Bureau projections, reported at ‘Minorities expected to be majority in 2050’ CNN.com, 13 August 2008, edition.cnn.com/2008/US/08/13/census.minorities/index.html. 5 See ‘2007 Median Income by Race’, interTrend, www.intertrend.com/tidbits/issue34.htm. 6 L2 Foundation, ‘Welcome to our website’, l2foundation.org/. Chuang is the executive director of the foundation.

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