Asian American Shinto and Christianities

Shinto shrines often form a component of the nation and its extension; consequently research surrounding Shinto is primarily undertaken within the borders of Japan. This paper challenges the traditional view of Shinto as geographically bound to the empire in the early 20th century through an examination of the American Daijingu (grand shrine), established in Los Angeles in 1909. Discussion of the American Daijingu considers religion in public, troubles the categories of religion and the secular, and, in a larger frame, invites challenges to the transnational historiography of religion in the United States and Japan. How and why the erasure of the American shrine after World War II happened in historical accounts engages Eiichiro Azuma’s transnational history of Japanese Americans and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s theory of power and archival silence. This paper suggests that the absence of shrines in the material world delimits Shinto scholarship’s understanding of the tradition in transnational spaces.

Following historical analyses comparing the relation between the Hmong messianic figure and the Hmong political state broker and their positionality to the state, this paper considers the dialectic of these two figures as a single site of examination for interpreting Hmong diasporic and Hmong American history. This paper contends that the political state broker’s assassination of the messianic figure reveals their competing leadership along the porousness of political and religious Hmong American identity. Subsequently, the paradigm of the political state broker continues to discipline the transnational political and religious imaginations of contemporary Hmong Americans. How this takes form domestically across various religious Hmong American communities will be the site of future research.     

Indian American Christianity is at a crossroads in the current socio-political order. One in five Indian Americans identifies as a Christian, and most embrace American evangelicalism. During the 2021 Capitol Hill riot, an Indian American waved the tricolor flag in support of Donald Trump. Although being a catholic, he identified himself as an evangelical in his faith and beliefs. Indian American Christianity had formed a tryst with white American evangelicalism post-1960 immigration reforms. In 1974, K.P Yohannan, one of the pioneers in Indian American Christianity, was appointed as the international POC pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas under the invitation of W. A Criswell, popular for his segregationist and divisive policies.  In this context, the paper examines racist and casteist imagination idealized through capitalism, racism, and xenophobia. This paper also interrogates ratifications of white working-class economic anxieties, misogyny, anti-black prejudice, fear of Islamic terrorism, and xenophobia in Indian American communities.

This paper explores the discursive consciousness of Korean women who became picture brides in early twentieth century America, an area which has often been overlooked in scholarship of religion and race in a transpacific migratory context. Engaging with Korean women’s writings that began to appear in late nineteenth-century print media in Korea and Korean picture brides’ oral interviews, the paper suggests that Korean women reshaped the concept of ideal womanhood that was promoted to them by American women missionaries. Through reinterpreting a theological understanding of gender equality, Korean women utilized the picture marriage system to achieve goals for education and political empowerment in America. Although the picture marriage system was considered backward in American society, Korean women’s use of this system challenges the Western ownership of the New Woman label.