Korean American Evangelicals

Abstract

Abstract In an age of what many call a declining civil society, it is crucial to ask how changes in the racial, ethnic, and religious composition of the United States will influence how we live together as American citizens. Religious communities are among the primary places Americans form civic identities. This book explores how Korean Americans, a growing segment of American evangelicals, use religion to negotiate civic responsibility. It compares Korean Americans in second-generation and multiethnic churches, the most common types of evangelical churches in which Korean Americans participate. The book is based on in-depth interviews with 100 Korean Americans across the country, nine months of ethnography, and a survey of both a second-generation Korean congregation and a multiethnic church with Korean American participants. It is shown that these church types provide Korean Americans with different cultural schema for ethnic identity and civic responsibility. From their congregations, Korean Americans gain different ways of negotiating the image of Asian Americans as “model minorities”. Although scholars stress the conflict inherent in Asian American and African American race relations, some of the Korean Americans in multi-ethnic churches used a religious justification to identify with African Americans as fellow minorities, and thus become more politically active. For scholars, the book reveals the conditions under which organizations constrained by the same institution, in this case American Evangelicalism, provide room for diverse identity constructs among the individuals in these organizations. For everyone else, it argues that the children of non-white immigrants will change the relationship between religion and American civic life.