Abstract
The recent nationwide debate of American Protestant churches over the ordination and consecration of LGBTQ clergymen and laypeople has been largely divisive and destructive. While a few studies have paid attention to individual efforts of congregations to negotiate the heated conflicts as their contribution to the denominational debate, no studies have recounted how post-1965 immigrants, often deemed as “ethnic enclaves apart from larger American society”, respond to this religious issue. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a first-generation Korean Methodist church in the Tampa Bay area, Florida, this article attempts to fill this gap in the literature. In brief, I argue that the Tampa Korean-American Methodists’ continual exposure to the Methodist Church’s larger denominational homosexuality debate and their personal relationships with gay and lesbian friends in everyday life together work to facilitate their gradual tolerance toward sexual minorities as a sign of their accommodation of individualistic and democratic values of American society.
Highlights
LGBTQ Individuals in Everyday Life.The discourses of homosexuality and LGBTQ individuals in American Protestantism are polarized by the research that enunciates each denomination’s theological stance and conflicts over the case studies of individual sexual minorities’ struggle within their congregations
Protestantism (Becker 1999; Roof and McKinney 1987; Smith 1998) and post-1965 new religious immigrants and their religions (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Warner 2001), I contend that the Tampa Korean-American Methodists’ continual exposure of the escalated denominational debate and of the personal relationships with sexual minorities in everyday life in which they incorporate the individualistic and egalitarian values of American society enables them to alleviate their polarized and intransigent theological positions over homosexuality and LGBTQ individuals
Unlike the vast majority of first-generation Korean-American evangelicals, seen as diasporic entities separate from the mainstream U.S discourse (Kim and Kim 2012; Kim 2015), Tampa’s Korean-American Methodists engage in the national discourses of homosexuality and LGBTQ members through their affiliation with the United Methodist Church that promotes their conversation on the topics at the congregational level
Summary
The discourses of homosexuality and LGBTQ individuals in American Protestantism are polarized by the research that enunciates each denomination’s theological stance and conflicts over the case studies of individual sexual minorities’ struggle within their congregations While some portray their dialogues in both the national and individual levels as greatly divisive and destructive Protestantism (Becker 1999; Roof and McKinney 1987; Smith 1998) and post-1965 new religious immigrants and their religions (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Warner 2001), I contend that the Tampa Korean-American Methodists’ continual exposure of the escalated denominational debate and of the personal relationships with sexual minorities in everyday life in which they incorporate the individualistic and egalitarian values of American society enables them to alleviate their polarized and intransigent theological positions over homosexuality and LGBTQ individuals. My interest is to reveal that their changing religious experience, accommodating the new ethos of white American religious culture (Bellah et al 1985), contributes to the mitigation of the heated, divisive, and destructive nationwide debate over homosexuality and LGBTQ persons at the congregational level (Cadge et al 2007, 2008; Rogers 1999)
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