Book Review: Pyong Gap Min: Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America

Abstract

This important book is animated by the author’s suspicion that Protestant religion may not function for Korean Americans the way the literature claims Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism did for past waves of immigrants from Europe, namely to preserve their ethnicity. The chief reason is that Protestantism is alien, not indigenous, to Korean culture. Min resourcefully puts this intuition to empirical test by contrasting the ethnic consciousness of Korean Protestant and Indian Hindu immigrants in New York across both the first and second generations, under the very reasonable premise that Hinduism is thoroughly indigenous to India. This ambitious research plan entailed questionnaire surveys, personal interviews and site visits enlisting the talents of many Korean and Indian students at Queens College and the City University of New York. The methods and findings are documented in sufficient detail that the book should be considered required reading for researchers in religion race, ethnicity and immigration in the U.S. But first it is necessary to dispose of the issue of what the literature claims. As indicated by his title, Min is under the impression that religion in the U.S. has been supposed to preserve ethnicity. That is not what I interpret one of Min’s touchstone texts, namely Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew, to say, nor, as a contributor to the literature, what I have myself proposed. As implied by his ‘‘triple melting pot’’ thesis, Herberg claimed that ethnicity over time ‘‘transmuted’’ into religion, so that by the third European American generation, the primary residue of immigrants’ culture that would be available to their grandchildren to embrace would, in fact, be their religion. In my own work, I have proposed that religion in the U.S. is uniquely situated for the expression of post-1965 immigrants’ home country culture but that their children typically have much less interest in home country ways and often more interest in religion, which they may perceive as a less parochial, more universalistic identity. So, if it turns out that second generation Korean Protestants