The End of Japanese Ethnic Churches?

Abstract

As Japanese Christians left the camps, white church leaders instructed them to join established churches and prevented them from re-forming their prewar ethnic congregations. This final chapter analyzes attempts to mend the nation’s racial divisions by ending the segregation of white and Japanese Protestant worship. Efforts to drastically restructure the racial divisions within American Protestantism incited extensive debate about the role of racial minorities within the church. Like the decision to form ecumenical churches, leaders thought the long term benefits of fewer divisions in the church outweighed the temporary challenges to the subjects of their experiment. Most Japanese Americans formed ethnic fellowship groups or left the church rather than join predominantly white churches. The results of this experiment revealed the limited extent to which American Christians were interested in, capable of, and willing to reform definitions of race in order to unite the Christian church.