Below is a response by Tat-siong Benny Liew (College of the Holy Cross) to Amerasia Journal’s most recent issue “Asian American Religions in a Globalized World.” These thoughts were delivered at a roundtable about the issue at the recent 2014 Association for Asian American Studies annual conference in San Francisco, CA.
Let me congratulate Sylvia Chan-Malik and Khyati Joshi, first of all, for bringing us this long overdue sequel to 1996’s “Racial Spirits.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton was convinced back at the end of the nineteenth century, just when the U.S. was becoming a world power through its expansion into Asia and thus turned not only imperialistic but also xenophobic towards Asians, that the gender issue was more than a legal problem and could not be dealt with unless and until people were willing to tackle the question of religion as she worked tirelessly on her Woman’s Bible project. Despite, or perhaps because of Cady Stanton’s narrow understanding of religion as Christianity, this collection shows that we also need to talk about religion if we are to deal with the race question of this country adequately. For example, according to the 2012 Pew report, as an essay in this collection notes, up to 42% of Asian Americans surveyed are Christians, but the report of another national survey funded by the Lilly Endowment on the Bible and American Life that was just released last month does not even mention Asian Americans, though it does contain information on African Americans and Hispanics. Given this society’s “Christian normativity” and its tendency to “other” Asian Americans outside of Christianity, Chan-Malik and Joshi are on target to devote a major part of the issue to the theme and goal of “reorienting Christianity.”
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