27 May 2006

Asian-American collegiate conversion to Christianity

I'm sleepless in San Francisco right now.

I've spent the past hour or so doing a scan of my favorite blogs, and Angry Asian Man - a very good blog I've relied on for months now - has another article worth reading.

It explains the explosion of evangelical Christianity among Asian-American college students, and how their Confucian subservient culture translates right into Christian service (and by extension, reactionary political positions). The Confucian culture does get in the way though, when the students want to devote themselves fulltime to the ministry and the parents won't let them.

I've seen this happen during my college years. The Koreans were the first to go (Korean Christians have always painted themselves as fighters against the Japanese colonial rule of 1910-1945, when in fact they were/still are simply looking for a more Christian colonial ruler, such as a Republican United States), and they dragged the Chinese with them. Korean popular culture has often been used as a tool to make headways into Chinese and other non-Korean ethnicities, and soften their resistance to Christian conversion; as a result, I take a very dim view of the current proliferation of Korean pop culture among various Asian communities.

A fallout from this is that while most immigrants start out liberal and turn conservative with passing generations, and some (like the Cubans and the Vietnamese) start out conservative and turn liberal, the Koreans start out conservative and turn MORE conservative.

This will be the first and last time I'll quote a reactionary Christian publication on this blog, I think.

Christianity Today