What Happens When Asian American Christians Start Asking Questions?

Growing up in the San Gabriel Valley (SGV) outside Los Angeles, Giaae Kwon occupied a large part of her life through church. Her parents were very involved in their local Korean American Presbyterian church, and Kwon enjoyed the easy friendships she formed with the youth there. 

“I was deep in it,” Kwon recalls. “For me, church was my primary social circle.” 

Kwon isn’t alone. While religious affiliation varies by ethnic group, the latest Pew Research Center survey in 2022-2023 found that 34 percent of all Asian Americans identify as Christian, ranging from 15 percent of Indian Americans to 74 percent of Filipino Americans. Christianity thereby exerts a considerable influence on the lives of Asian Americans who grow up in church spaces, influencing communal norms, ethical values, and worldviews. However, those numbers are down from just 10 years ago, when 42 percent of Asian Americans identified as Christian. 

The reasons for this decline are multifactorial. Some Asian Americans note the disconnect between the Western-normative Christianity that has been passed down to them and their own ethnic and racial identities. Others question literal interpretations of the Bible, among other qualms — though not all have completely broken off from the faith.

Confronting the Roadblock of Dissonance

Cindy S. Lee, a spiritual care practitioner and professor, recalls reaching a “crisis moment” after completing her Ph.D. in Christian Spirituality and attending a conference where her academic colleagues spoke about spirituality in such unnecessarily convoluted ways that she couldn’t understand them. She realized that the Western way of interacting with spirituality was to “put it in our heads rather than in our bodies.” Due to the Enlightenment and industrialization, Western Christians had taken “the spiritual element out of spirituality.” 

Kwon notes a similar pattern of a skewed Western-only thought trickling down to her Korean American congregation. Even though Korean immigrants founded Kwon’s church, the theology preached from its pulpit sounded identical to that proclaimed in the large white evangelical churches that populated the surrounding SGV.

“We all wanted to read the same white men,” Kwon says. “John Piper, John Stott, John MacArthur, it was your usual range. We only studied Western-based theology. We’ve all been shaped by this one thing, and we’ve never stopped to think about it.”

She felt like her church was “copying and pasting conservative theology with Asian patriarchy,” a combination that troubled her, but thanks to an open-minded youth pastor who encouraged honest wrestling with the church and politics, Kwon found a place to belong — at least for a time.

Pastor Ken Fong, who led a large Asian American church in the SGV for close to 40 years, confirms that participating in an Asian immigrant church does not necessarily insulate churchgoers from a Western-dominant Christianity, because most pastors in those spaces were trained in white seminaries and read theological texts written by white authors. Many Christian materials and ministries contain a subtle message that their own Western lens is acultural and universal, whereas Asian American identity needs to be discarded because “it’s all pagan, idol worship, and viewed with suspicion,” Fong notes.

When leaders of American Christianity assert that it represents the one true and singular Christian tradition, they negate the rich and diverse history of global Christianity, which includes ancient Oriental Orthodox churches such as those in Armenia, Ethiopia, and Syria, as well as the Mar Thoma Church in southern India. This erasure contributes to claims that Western methods of reading scripture, making theological arguments, or experiencing God are the only correct approaches to faith. However, this constricts Christianity to a narrow interpretive lens and can contribute to intellectual and cultural dissonance.

Meanwhile, because Western missionaries and church leaders have historically viewed Asian cultures with suspicion, many diasporic Asian Christians have been taught to devalue their own heritage, since most come to faith in Western contexts. 

Lee notes, “It has been really harmful for non-Western people who have converted to Christianity. In that conversion, they lost their culture. More than losing, they’ve been given this Western missionary gaze with which to look at their own cultures, which has led to labeling their own cultures and bodies as evil and sinful. It’s more than a loss, it’s a harm.”

Filipino scholar Joyce del Rosario writes that the entwinement of Western missions with colonialism led to a “colonized mentality” that left colonial subjects valuing Western identity and Western Christian theology over anything inherent to their own bodies and lives. While this facilitated the colonizing forces’ ability to elicit obedience from their subjects, it contributed to a decimation of self-worth and of cultural dignity. 

As more Asian American theologians, pastors, and ordinary Christians push back against the idea that our cultures are inherently evil, they are making space for more expansive ways to encounter God and develop a healthy spirituality. For some, this has led to a reintegration of our cultural and racial identities with our faith, or in breaking up with a narrow theology. In still other cases, it has meant leaving faith altogether.  

Different Paths to Spiritual Wholeness

After questioning how her academic training had taught her to separate the spiritual from the bodily, Lee wrote “Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation” as a guide for others seeking to reconnect with Asian spiritual practices and embrace a multicultural God. She suggests re-engaging our sensory systems to remember the sounds, smells, tastes, and movements we’ve experienced in our families that haven’t been labeled sacred but that very well could be. Staying curious about how our elders and others in our homelands interact with the divine can open up new possibilities.

“We all need something to ground ourselves in,” Lee says. “Western spirituality and sciences have us always looking to what’s new and what’s in the future, versus Asian cultures and past-oriented cultures that have us looking back at what’s already been given to you. The things we experience in our political and social contexts are not new; our ancestors have learned from them already. That’s a spiritual connection, to learn from our ancestors.”

Meanwhile, Fong realized early during his time at seminary that he could no longer keep his intellect compartmentalized from his faith. Although his church had taught him Young Earth creationism (which interprets the book of Genesis literally, thus claiming that God created the world in six days anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 years ago), he had also been a Life Sciences major at Berkeley. The tension became unbearable. 

“It was this journey internally to try to be congruent,” he states. “My Christian faith system says the truth sets people free, not just the truth about atonement and salvation, but truth. I don’t find a scientific basis for a lot of the things we are saying are true due to the Bible. So after a while, I just had to chuck it.”

Through that process, Fong learned it was detrimental to read ancient scripture as a science or history textbook. Rather, by approaching the Bible as “a sacred text to teach us about the existence of God and who we are to God,” he freed himself from literal interpretations of scripture, which he found both “unnecessary and burdensome” to a life of faith.

Besides the intellectual liberation that Fong sought during seminary, he also resisted Western models of preaching. He was dissatisfied with the heady, academic, “I’m the smartest guy” in the room style of preaching, instead finding inspiration in Black preaching that was still grounded in biblical scholarship but had a narrative flow. He started finding his groove as he noted that Asian American stories, unlike Western stories, don’t always end in a conclusion that’s wrapped up with a neat bow. 

“There’s a tension that’s unresolved like music: the Asian chord,” Fong muses. He started imbuing all his sermons with a story arc, but letting the ending remain unresolved.

That ending is still open for Kwon, who left the church in 2016 during a time in her life that was exceptionally hard. The way Christians around her perceived God’s posture toward suffering felt cruel, and she had to let go of faith. She misses some aspects of faith, such as the groundedness and reassurance that it can bring. While she’s eschewed church attendance in the years since, she’s participated in Bible studies with her parents, crediting them with being respectful of their differences. She doesn’t currently have plans to rejoin the church. “I wouldn’t say I’m never going back,” she states. “I miss church community a lot. It’s not perfect, it’s got issues, but I have yet to find a secular community that shows up for people in the way church community does.”

The Possibilities Ahead

In efforts to broaden the conversation surrounding Christianity, scholars and non-academics alike are turning an Asian American lens to the interpretation of scripture and to theological meaning-making. They channel their experiences of migration, exile, and racial otherness to illuminate new aspects of the Bible and insights about God, as exemplified in books like Daniel D. Lee’s “Doing Asian American Theology,” Tasha Jun’s “Tell Me the Dream Again,” Mihee Kim-Kort’s “Making Paper Cranes,” Grace Ji-Sun Kim’s “Invisible,” and Joash P. Thomas’s “The Justice of Jesus.” Moreover, leading seminaries like Princeton and Fuller now have centers for Asian American theological scholarship. 

For centuries, the Western church’s dominance has conveyed a sense to many Asian American Christians that their racial identities and cultures are a liability to Christian faith — or at the very least, irrelevant. Ordinary people and spiritual leaders are carving out a different way of faith, affirming that not only are our ethnicity and heritage an essential part of who we are as spiritual beings, but also that the American church needs distinctly Asian American voices to enrich the conversation about God, community, and belonging.

Regardless of where diasporic Asians are in their spiritual journeys, introspection about their roots and formative faith spaces can help ensure healthy paths forward. Fong states, “There’s a lot of Asian American self-hatred in our becoming Christians that we won’t really discover until we take that journey of decolonizing our faith.”