Jeremy Lin and the Problem of Suburban Chinese Churches

One of the problems with learning too much theology is that you become more attuned to cultural biases.  Theology, fundamentally, colors our view of culture.  I remember my freshman year of Wheaton College when we had to take a class called "Theology of Culture".  Unfortunately, it is not a theology of culture class, but an "introduction to evangelical theology and why we should be proud of it" class.  My professor, fortunately, had the wisdom of including some aspects of cultural criticism in the class. But nothing opens you to noticing the cultural biases (or ignorance) we hold unless you experienced it.

Consider one time when I was at the Office of Christian Outreach.  I worked for a year typing in the address labels that the Student Missionary Project would send fundraising materials to SMP alumni with.  One day, as I was typing away, I overheard a bizarre (to say the least) conversation from the president of SMP.  Note, by the way, that SMP sponsors many international missions trips during the summer for College students.  The president was considering adding a trip to Japan, to which she asked, "Is Japan a developed country?"  What was so utterly ironic was that another Christian organization on campus was publicizing a campaign to increase awareness of cultural/social/etc. differences on campus, with a Hollywood-sign-esque letters spelling "IDENTIFY" showing up on random parts of the campus during the month.  Even within a student organization sponsoring missions trips all over the world, it is possible to be culturally ignorant of the countries we are sending people to!  

(By the way, my roommate, the great Rev. David M. Faulkner, had singularly the best response to the story: She must be an alumni kid.)

Consider the strange case of Jeremy Lin.  Lin is like many Chinese (okay, and Asian).  His major is one of the typical Asian majors (economics).  It's possible his parents had really high expectations.  He is a conservative evangelical Christian, like perhaps about 80% of Chinese-American Christians (I read this statistic from somewhere...).  Like many Americans, Lin probably has a favorite football team, which the NY Giants sat on as they made their way to the Superbowl playoffs this year.  Like most Harvard-educated Americans, he's intelligent.  And like the few Americans who have the talent to land a spot on an NBA team, he's athletic and blessed with the mental and physical faculties needed to play a sport like basketball.  So far, so good.

In fact, when I first heard of Jeremy Lin and found out he was a conservative evangelical Christian, I thought, "Oh no... another Tebow."  But unlike Tim Tebow, Lin - all praise be to God above! - does not parade his Christianity!  No "Tebowing" or any sort of stuff like that.  No sermons on what God taught him through basketball.  No flailing his faith in public.  Just good basketball and good temperament on the basketball court.  Sometimes, what one does not say is more powerful than what one says.  That Lin left his faith unpublicized better reflects what Christianity is fundamentally all about - being a certain people informed by the life and witness of Jesus Christ rather than publicly doing what the Bible says.  I'd love to say that Harvard is the kind of institution that trains such people.  Unfortunately, I am always reminded that George W. Bush did graduate from Harvard with an MBA...

Some of you may disapprove, wondering why someone can't display their faith in public.  I suggest that you are assuming that the public will interpret a publicized faith the same way as you are hoping it will be interpreted.  This is RARELY the case.  What we don't need is someone parading their faith and unintentionally conveying the message that it is because of Jesus that I can play good football/basketball.  Of course, nobody wants to convey that message, but unless you are some deranged dictator, you can't control how people perceive your public displays of faith.  Perhaps there is some practical wisdom in Jesus' admonition to his disciples to not let their acts of piety be done in prominently public spaces.  At least by fasting quietly and praying within the privacy of your own home, you truly make it a communion between just you and God.  But in the public sphere, you open that communion to public interpretation.  And what did the public do to Tebow?  They mimicked his act of faith as if it were a joke!  Kneeling down in prayer conjures up images not of humility and penitence, but of "Tebowing."  Thus, while Tebow is certainly free  by law to exercise his faith publicly, I maintain that such public displays of faith do a grievous disservice to the mission of the Church and diminishes the utter transcendence and immanence of God.  Such a violation of the Second Commandment is something that I, as a Scripture-centric Christian, cannot stand for.  

But back to the point...

What the Chinese (and maybe Asian) fascination with Jeremy Lin betrays is that even we are sometimes ignorant of our own identities.  Why are we making such a big deal about Jeremy Lin's Chinese-ness?  I understand that it is rare for Asians to make it on an NBA team, but aren't we forgetting that he is also American?  Yao Ming, of course, is unique in that he is Chinese (not Chinese-American).  I don't know many NBA all-stars who are not Americans.  But Lin is American!  In that sense, he is not particularly unique among other basketball players.  But perhaps he is unique because we have, in our minds, the notion that Chinese people can't be good at basketball (at least at the NBA level) because we're not supposed to be athletic.  Sure, we have our basketball fellowships, and our occasional Turkey Bowls, but those are just for fun; really, we're supposed to get A's in school, go to Harvard, major in some lucrative major, get married, have 3 kids who all go to Harvard too, etc.

And the best place to see this is NOT in Chinatowns across the country, but at any suburban Chinese church everywhere in these United States of America!  Where else can you go to look for super-high-achieving Chinese people (and other Asians) in their own 5.0-GPA-cliques, aspiring (sometimes against their own wishes) to attain employment in the industrial Holy Trinity of Law, Medicine, and Engineering?  And so when we have someone who breaks this stereotype, that person becomes suddenly very unique.  Of course, we rightly criticize other ethnicities for stereotyping Chinese people, but don't we help reinforce that stereotype?  Don't we do that with books like that Tiger Mom book?  Don't we do that by self-reinforcing that stereotypes in our churches?

Let me ask you, what do we in suburban Chinese churches do for those who don't get A's at school, who are not Math Team members, who aren't going to the Holy Trinity of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?  What do we do for those who don't major in those lucrative majors?  What do we do for those who don't live their lives to the high expectations we set for ourselves?  What about the single, those who can't have children?  What do we do with them?   Really, we don't know what to do with them.  And because we don't know what to do with them, their presence becomes a source of innate fear.  What's wrong with them?  Why are they still at our church?  Thus, we become a source of discrimination and, concurrently, give legitimacy to others outside our community to adopt such discriminatory views.

As a Chinese-American, I don't like it when I hear stories of Chinese-Americans being discriminated.  It was terrible that a few months ago, a Chinese-American soldier was bullied to death in Afghanistan fighting for his own country.  It was terrible that in Chicago, my adopted hometown, a Chinese student was savagely beaten by several children.  And even in Chinatown, NY, Chinese people are often the target of robberies and theft because the idea is that they won't tell the police anyways.  Yes - we are discriminated against, my dear friends, and you may not see it from that nice cushy place called Suburbia where you can watch Jeremy Lin play good basketball on cable TV.

Which raises one final important question: how can the Chinese church be a place where the stereotypes that feed a wider discrimination against Chinese-Americans are put down in favor of the redeeming love of Jesus Christ?  Some of you might think, the redeeming love of Jesus Christ puts down discrimination automatically because Christ loves all people!  Yes - but in practice, we dumb it down by heaping on the Gospel our own cultural presuppositions, whether we know it or not.  If Christ loves all people, why are there black churches or Chinese churches?  Or, even more ridiculously, Mandarin churches!  I suspect that really, we preach the love of Jesus Christ, but are incapable of living up to that love.  That is my problem with Francis Chan's Crazy Love.  The problem is that it is not crazy enough!  It only captures the imagination if you didn't have much love to begin with!  Crazy love allows us to do something really crazy, like embracing a sex offender who wishes to know Jesus.  Try that at your local suburban Chinese church!

I know I'm harsh, and I know I come from many local suburban Chinese churches.  But if I'm not harsh, that means I really don't give a flying care about it.  I do care!  What I think we really need is to "out-crazy" Francis Chan, in a sense (and I think he would approve!).  Instead of Francis Chan presenting something that many Chinese churches gawk at and think is so groundbreaking, we need to relegate Chan to a role of being a historian, to document the great things happening at Chinese churches across America (again, I think he would approve!).  Only then, can dividing walls come down, and the church becomes a place of unity and peace, rather than discrimination and pain.

But... then again... that may be too much to ask.  Perhaps that's why it is easier being a lawyer, doctor, or engineer.