An Asian American Political Theology: Introduction (1)

I've been ambivalent in discussing political theology for quite some time.  Part of it stemmed from my experiences as an intern at a political consulting firm in Washington, DC a few years ago.  Since then, (1) I've had greater respect for people with the patience, temerity, and chutzpah to try and bring certain agendas to fruition through the convoluted political bureaucratic process that is the American government, but (2) I've become disillusioned by the possibility of getting any "biblical political position" a foothold in the political system.  Frankly speaking, unless it bolsters the American economy and world prestige, it will not merit much attention, if any, in our government.  Welcome to the real world.

I've thought naïvely that this was political theology: what political positions should we hold, and practically speaking, how do we get it across?  Well, fortunately, I was wrong.  That said, though, the political positions we hold and how these translate to actionable political policy are important, at least for deeper reflection.  Yet, these are what I consider second-, even third-, order applications of a political theology.  Political theology, in my definition, is a theological reflection on the organization of human societies.  There are two approaches.  The first assumes the primacy of theology and so, seeks to bring the theological arts and sciences to bear upon human organization.  This is a traditional approach, and has a list of distinguished (and also famously controversial) practitioners including the great St. Augustine of Hippo.  The second approach is the opposite; to assert the primacy of other philosophical inquiries (philosophy broadly defined) to bear upon theology.  Assumptive in this approach is the inadequacy of existing theologies to address the challenges of the present.  Now, the line between these two approaches are not strict and distinct; to renew a traditional articulation of theology is asserting the primacy of practicality and modernism upon the theological sciences.

And so I move to utilize the second approach in articulating the possibility of an Asian American political theology.  I cannot articulate an Asian American political theology directly, for sure not in this post.  I can only muse at the ways forward.  And I can only muse from my own context as someone with "flexible citizenship" (Aihwa Ong's terminology) between America and... East Asia, but also as someone with that same flexibility within America.  I have lived in the Midwest, and I now divide my time between East and West coasts.  I have the privilege of siding with one of three football teams, depending on how well they do!  (Chicago Bears, NY Giants, and SF 49'ers)  No telling what'd happen if these three do equally well.  I am not a democrat in the sense that I see a democratic polity as a norm, and neither to I see republicanism as norm-al either.  Certain polities work with different cultures at different times amidst different circumstances.  There are few absolutes in politics.

But what does an "Asian American political theology" address?  I elect to follow Mark Lewis Taylor's initial layout of his theology (in The Theological and the Political) by asking two questions.  First, how do Asian Americans historically, presently, and interrelatedly, experience the "weight of the world," the immonde of human existence?  Second, how does this "weighted-ness" lead to an ordered theological articulation of social organization in general?

Historically, there is very little debate about the marginalization of Asian American ethnicities, and various historical interpretations are available that document that (see Takaki's Strangers From a Different Shore, and Sucheng Chan's Asian Americans).  These historical experiences are important; they offer bases from which future instances of immond-ality create refrains.  But what I'd like to shift my attention to are more recent developments.  First, Asian American identity is so-very fluid.  I consider myself Asian American, but I've only spent half my life in the United States.  I loved everywhere I lived, even in Chicago with the blistering windchills.  I was not even born in the U.S.  But I grew up in Singapore; I didn't come into the country not knowing a word of English.  (English is the language of instruction, and of professional communication, in Singapore.)

But even American-born Chinese (and other Asian ethnicities, I think we can safely assume) are not that cut-off from "Asia."  When I served at a suburban Chinese church youth group in Chicago, I remember summer retreats as being extremely difficult to plan because easily three-quarters of the youth group would be gone to Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, or Singapore to visit family.  I suppose, then, that Asian American identity has taken on this trans-pacific aspect to it.

The other recent developments come in the form of the model minority stereotype, but I'd like to think more carefully about this.  The question is: model minority... where?  I went to Wheaton College in IL, where during our first semester, the freshman class had to watch a video about interracial dialogue and racism.  In the discussion that followed, one Euro-American student shared his resentment at the video.  He went to a suburban SoCal high school where Asian-Americans were the majority, and growing up, he was regularly called chink, whitey, and other racial epithets.  In fact, if you want a more public example, we have Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld's The Triple Package: Why Groups Rise and Fall in America.  All this to say, "model minority" requires some care in deployment now, particularly since not all Asian Americans realize that they're not White.

So in the next few posts, I wish to reflect on the "immondality" of Asian American existence.  In what ways are we suffering from the "weight of the world"?  Are we indeed suffering from this "weight"?  What I want to propose is that Chua/Rubenfeld are right in one finding: insecurity as a key to Chinese (and Asian) American existence historically, but even so today.  But instead of following Chua/Rubenfeld's tack and seeing it as a "necessary shibboleth," I propose to embrace this "holy insecurity," and allow it not to propel ourselves forward in material success, but to propel ourselves towards each other.  This provides a foundational seed that reorganizes how we arrange ourselves, and how our churches are structured.