Historical Reckoning and Asian American Political Theology

By Ilsup Ahn

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n May 15, 2022, at Geneva Presbyterian Church in Laguna Woods, California, a deadly shooting incident occurred. Sixty-eight-year-old David Chou opened fire inside the church, leaving one person dead and five injured. Chou was born in the early 1950s in Taiwan to parents who fled mainland China following the 1949 Communist revolution. While he and his parents settled in Taiwan as part of the waishengren community (outside province people), they regarded themselves as “mainlanders,” hoping that one day Taiwan would become one country with China.

Even after he emigrated to the US in 1980, Chou held on to his nationalist vision of one China, which eventually led him to commit the mass shooting. Although this kind of incident was rare in Asian American communities, the rising anti-Asian attacks during the pandemic and other mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, meant that Chou’s shooting incident not only galvanized Taiwanese and Chinese communities but also deepened social fears and racial anxieties within Asian American communities across all ethnic lines.

About a month after the tragic event, several Asian American pastors and community leaders in Chinese and Taiwanese churches gathered via Zoom for a webinar session to discuss how they have been responding as the church or community leaders. It was apparent that all participants were well aware of the potentially divisive political aspect of the incident among the mixed congregations of both Taiwanese and Chinese members. It was not difficult to understand their pastoral conundrum, given that most of their congregants were not ready to openly talk about politics and religion in their churches.

There is nothing unique or eccentric about Taiwanese and Chinese churches’ reluctance to engage in politics; across all ethnic differences among Asian American communities, most Asian American Christians are hesitant to engage in politics in their churches. Why is this so? Why are so many Asian American Christians reluctant to talk about politics within their churches? Are there any historical or ideological reasons that render Asian American churches reticent when it comes to religion and politics? If so, what are they, and what can be done to buck the trend?

There are at least two background factors that critically influenced the Asian American church’s positioning on religion and politics: the model minority myth and the postcolonial legacy of the Western church’s colonial complicity. First, what does the model minority myth have to do with the Asian American church’s stance on religion and politics? In short, the myth plays out in such a way as to prevent them from developing a critical stance on politics. If you are a good American citizen (as a model minority), you have to follow the rules of society, and since the US Constitution upholds the separation of church and state, Asian Americans should abstain from any engagement in politics when they are in the church. You may talk about politics in your private space, but you are not supposed to voice political matters in the church.

Dismantling the model minority myth is thus necessary for Asian American churches to be more responsible regarding various social justice issues in our society. Asian American church leaders should realize how the shady ideology of the model minority can negatively impact Asian American communities beyond an individual’s psyche.

We should also note that there is a much deeper and thicker historical background that critically affected the Asian American church’s approach to religion and politics. Well before the US Constitution was created, Western Empires had already begun to disrupt the entire world by deploying their dreadful colonial war machines. This violent global project changed the historical trajectory of our world by entailing an unprecedented amount of human and environmental suffering in virtually all parts of the world.

What did the Western church do during those 500 years of Western colonialism? What was the relationship between the church and the empire during that time? According to Edward Said, Christianity was essential to Western colonialism. In his 1978 Orientalism, he writes that during the colonial period, the European church served the “interests” of European colonialism, which he identifies as “the expansion of Europe.” More recently, in his 2010 The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, Willie James Jennings argues that the European church was from the beginning a partner in the state effort to colonize the entire world. In his own words, “The church entered with the conquistadors, establishing camp in and with the conquering camps of the Spanish. The ordering of Indian worlds was born of Christian formation itself. Though the church may not have been in control, it was also not marginal.”

What does the Western church’s colonial legacy have to do with the Asian American church, especially its political theology? Given that many Asian American churches in the US were established by different immigrants from Asia, we need to trace back their religious and ecclesial origins. Back in Asia, many of these immigrants were raised in their local churches, which had different denominational backgrounds. If we go further into the historical genealogy of these churches, we discover that they were largely from the mission churches established by Western missionaries during the colonial period.

Of course, there were other indigenous churches or sects established by Asian Christians who organized their own churches independent of Western churches. However, one cannot deny the fact that the early Asian churches were deeply influenced by the Western church and its operational theologies, which had never seriously reckoned with their historical sin of colonial complicity. The Western church might have delivered the Gospel to the colonized world, but they largely failed to demonstrate what it means for the church to be the church as it is called to be especially when facing structural injustice. Instead, they concocted a morbid ecclesial DNA and disseminated it into the colonized world by failing to reckon with the sin of colonial complicity.

We should not dismiss the fact that many Christian churches in Asia began to follow the complicitous organizational behavior of the Western church once colonialism finally began to recede. For instance, although the Korean church significantly grew in numbers and size during the autocratic regimes between the 60s and 80s, many Korean churches maintained a similar complicitous approach to the rampant structural injustices as seen in the Western church during the colonial period. This deplorable trend has been reiterated as the authoritarian regime was transformed into a neoliberal regime in past decades in many parts of Asia as well as in Korea.

From a critical-historical point of view, then, it is not enough for the Asian American church to address the Western church’s historical lack of reckoning with its social sin of colonial complicity. To become the church as it is called to be, the Asian American church should also engage in a historical reckoning of its own complicitous legacies, such as authoritarian and neoliberal complicity. If the Asian American church honestly acknowledges that there is a historical and genealogical linkage between its original root in Asia and its present status in the US, it can begin to see more clearly what it should do to create and develop its distinctive political theology.

There are at least two essential tasks the Asian American church and its leaders must address as they construct Asian American political theology both as a deconstructive and reconstructive project. First, a critical reckoning with its own historical and cultural roots. Asian American churches are to carefully recollect many untold stories of those who were victimized by the structural injustice of this world yet turned away by their churches. Some victims were directly affected by their churches. The purpose of this intentional recollection is to reckon with the church’s own historical sin of complicity or social sin by Asian American churches.

It is always challenging for anyone to begin a new endeavor, not to mention for entire groups such as the Asian American church. The work of reckoning is far from ideal or romantic. It could be messy, troublesome, or even painful. Without a willingness to hear untold stories as well as the courage to face unwanted realities, there will not be any growth or change for an individual or a group. What did the church do back in Asia during the authoritarian and neoliberal regimes? What was the church’s involvement with those who were socially victimized by the structural injustices of those regimes? How do such untold stories and historical realities back in Asia impact the new stories and different realities of the Asian American church today? These are some of the questions the Asian American church should ask regarding the first task.

Second, while the Asian American church continues to engage in historical or cultural reckoning, it should also critically develop its own political-theological model, which differs from that of the traditional Western church. Serious reckoning entails a significant behavioral, organizational, or ideological change. In the church context, this change includes not only liturgical aspects but also theological content. The Western church’s historical sin of colonial complicity demonstrates clearly that its traditional political-theological framework—the church and state relation—may not work anymore in a postcolonial and neoliberal world.

We should note that when Augustine laid the ground for the Western political theological paradigm in his City of God (413-426 CE), he seriously minded the historical event of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths (410 CE). Opposite Augustine’s time, during Western colonialism, European empires attacked and sacked what they deemed “pagans,” “heathens,” or “savages” on a global scale. The Western colonial church began to lose its way by failing to take this significant contextual shift into its theological reflections, which eventually led it to colonial complicity. The Western church should have asked itself this question: What should the church do when the state turns into an empire?

Unlike Asian churches, Asian American churches are in the Western world geographically, culturally, and historically. The Asian American church’s participation in reckoning with the Western church’s historical sin of colonial complicity, thus, should be an important aspect of its political-theological task. From the perspective of those who were once regarded as “pagans,” “heathens,” or “savages” by colonial empires and their partnering churches, Asian American Christians may come up with a new framework in doing political theology, which focuses more on the relationship between the church and the structural injustice, rather than that of the church and the state. The focus of Asian American political theology lies in dismantling structural injustice and addressing social suffering rather than balancing the church and the state.

Photo by Nagesh Badu on Unsplash

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Ilsup Ahn is Carl I. Lindberg Professor of Philosophy at North Park University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the area of social and religious ethics. He is the author of several books: Position and Responsibility (Pickwick Publications, 2009), Religious Ethics and Migration: Doing Justice to Undocumented Workers (Routledge, 2013), Asian American Christian Ethics: Voices, Issues, Methods (Baylor University, 2015: co-edited with Grace Y. Kao), Just Debt: Theology, Ethics, and Neoliberalism (Baylor University, 2017), and The Church in the Public: A Politics of Engagement for a Cruel and Indifferent Age (Fortress Press, 2022).

He has also published various articles related to the social ethics on immigration justice and environmental ethics in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Journal of Religious Ethics, Journal of Global Ethics, Journal of Church and State, CrossCurrents, and others. His research and publications have focused on such areas as religion and politics, immigration justice, religious environmental ethics, global debt crisis, and Asian American studies.

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