By Steven Zhang, VI Form

Snowballing Towards Anti-Ethnic Homogeneity

Editor’s Note: This project was made possible with the support of the Class of 1968 V Form Fellowship. At their 25th reunion, the Class of 1968 created a fund to provide grants to V Form students for independent study during the school year or, more commonly, during the summer between V and VI Forms. Their intent in establishing this fund was to reward independent thinking, ingenuity, and planning and to encourage the student in exploring non-traditional fields of inquiry or using non-traditional methods of investigation.

Student-Submitted Note: Over my Junior year, I embarked on an ambitious research project rooted in personal experience. Eight years ago, I left my town’s Asian church, noticing over time that older friends were departing too. What prompted so many people with similar backgrounds to collectively leave? I dove into academic research. I exhausted every accessible paper, emailing professors for copies when articles weren’t free. I spent months interviewing and writing, dedicating 2-3 weekday hours and 4-8 weekend hours. It was incredibly hard to conduct research all by myself. I submitted an abstract summarizing my findings to UC Berkeley’s conference on Asian Pacific American religions, and was accepted based on my paper and my paper’s abstract.

Abstract

Despite recent attention on second-generation Asian American Christians, many racialization and ethnicization theorists often neglect the migration of second-generations from mono-ethnic churches to multi-ethnic churches. Through an analysis of the oral histories of nine East Coast, American-born, East Asian college students, my paper argues how race and cultural factors in ethnic, predominantly white, and multi-ethnic churches influence second generation students’ desire for diverse congregations. This study contends that due to family pressure on youth and overbearing cultural values in an ethnic church, second generations avoid Asian-homogenous religious environments and their parents’ ethnically bounded faith. Leaving instead for predominantly white churches, they find that cultural awareness on issues of marginalization is lacking. In both churches, second generations grow averse to homogeneous environments as minorities with unique cultural differences. In college, they resolve the desire for heterogeneous religious environments through the diverse college campus that offers religious autonomy and a religious buffet of ministries. Among the various options, the multi-ethnic ministry especially appeals to second generations by creating a minority-focused space infused with different perspectives. My paper uncovers a pattern of religious attendance among second-generation Asian Americans, analyzing how, when, and why religious diversity in congregations is vital.

Paper presentation

Introduction

My paper focuses on second-generation Asian Americans who attend multi-ethnic churches and explores their motivations for desiring and attending diverse congregations.

I employ a snowball metaphor to demonstrate how different factors combine to create a desire for diversity. The “compounding factors” to the snowball of anti-homogeneity are family pressure that creates desires for separation and independence, overbearing cultural values that create a dislike for homogeneous environments, reduced marginalization that creates a desire for a diversity of members, and a desire for diverse theology. This snowball of anti-homogeneity stops rolling after entering college, where the accumulation is resolved through the diverse college campus that offers religious autonomy, a religious buffet of ministries, and more diverse perspectives.

My methodology was emailing and networking. I emailed nine East Coast, East Asian, college students on college campuses and college graduates from nearby multi-ethnic churches to ask them these questions.

Before I go into my findings, I would like to provide a literature review.

As many researchers have noted, second generations embark on the silent exodus, a mass migration away from their mother churches. They leave because of cultural differences between generations and intergenerational leadership difficulties. The question of where they go has been answered by numerous authors who argue that second generations stay in ethnic and racial enclaves. They either head to Asian American ministries, return to their ethnic churches, or pave a new pan-Asian path, which although different from their parents, often carries mono-ethnic notions.