Brad speaks with Dr. Lucas Kwong of CUNY about the far-reaching implications of Christian xenophobia. They discuss the explicit White nationalism of AZ Representative Paul Gosar and far-right commentator Nick Fuentes (who was just banned from Twitter for his hateful content). They also touch on the more cunning versions of Christian xenophobia in pastors such as Tim Keller and Ralph Drollinger, the latter of whom taught a weekly Bible study at the White House throughout the Trump presidency, who use the buzz words of "racial reconciliation" to smuggle in a more subtle xenophobic message.
For Kwong, this topic is personal. As an Asian American Christian, he has experienced being a "stranger" and "outsider" in a number of ways. During the COVID pandemic he witnessed his community ravaged by hate and violence due to the racialized slurs leaders used to describe the virus and the blame they placed on China for its spread. In the wake of the Atlanta massacre he wondered how faith, race, and sex played into the unspeakable tragedy of that day. So, he formed the "Open Letter Against Christian Xenophobia" and is now working to bring awareness to this issue. His scholarship, personal history, and Asian American Christian identity come together in his activism against Christian xenophobia and White nationalism.
Find the Open Letter Against Christian Xenophobia here.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, and our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
I'm joined today by Dr. Lucas Kwong, who is faculty in English at the City University of New York.
Dr. Kwong has degrees from Columbia and Yale, and works in a number of areas, including postcolonial theory, has written on Dracula's apologetics as part of his work in Victorian literature, also written about H.P.
Lovecraft and other types of fantastical literature.
But today we're here to talk about Christian xenophobia, and we'll get into that in a minute.
But one of the other things that Dr. Lucas Kuang does is play music.
That's actually part of the story.
So you want to tell us about, well, first of all, thanks for joining me, Lucas.
Thanks for having me.
You want to tell us about playing music?
We need to hear about this.
Yeah, well, that was, but so first, thank you so much for having me, Bradley.
And, you know, it's a real pleasure to be here.
Yeah, well that's sort of in the context of what I want to talk about my own experience growing up in the Asian American church.
You know, I had in some ways a typical experience insofar as I grew up in an immigrant church, you know, wholly composed of immigrants from the Philippines and China.
But it was also unusual because, first of all, I'm actually Asian Canadian American.
So I grew up in British Columbia.
I'm a naturalized US citizen.
And so, you know, even before we get to the Asian part, being Canadian, I think inherently gave me sort of a different read of the relationship between nationality and faith.
You know, and that's why when I came to the States, you know, I'm doing this work on Christian nationalism, sort of stuck out like a sore thumb.
And then when it came to the fact that I was growing up in an immigrant church, I'm sure I'm not saying anything new, but immigrant churches provide such a powerful sense of community, both for the first generation, which comes over, and needs this anchor where people are comfortable speaking their own language.
But also for the second generation who grows up perhaps fluent in English, but still grows up wrestling through a lot of identity issues that are harder to navigate in a majority white church.
So for me, a big part of growing up was learning to play guitar in the band on Sundays and attending Christmas parties.
And it just sort of being this natural extension of my family life.
What made it unusual, however, is that I actually don't speak any other languages than English.
My mother speaks Cantonese and my dad speaks Tagalog and Toysonese dialect.
So...
It wasn't until I grew up much later that I realized how surreal it is because not only that we went to a church whose main language was Fujianese, which is another dialect You know, something a lot of people might not understand about Chinese is that there are many Chinese, you know, which are approximately have the same relationship as, you know, Spanish and Portuguese.
So, you know, we're attending this church, which we were not attending on the basis of a linguistic affinity, but simply on the basis that my parents had many friends there.
There's constant translations.
On top of that, a lot of people spoke Tagalog, Filipino at this church because there were a lot of Filipino Chinese immigrants.
So I'm growing up in this linguistic, you know, Pentecost, so to speak, and my only language is English.
So whereas a lot of my friends, church provided a certain space where they could code switch, right?
For me, I was highly attuned to the fact that I both belonged in this church, but I also kind of didn't.
So that also attuned me to this kind of... I became very sensitive to theologies of estrangement.
The idea of being strangers in the world, the verse, I was a stranger, really, really stood out to me.
And then, you know, with music, it was sort of like this idea, well, at an early age, it was like, I'd rather Spend my time learning piano than learning Chinese because I was frankly terrible at it.
And sort of searching for ways to communicate in a way that transcended that divide.
So, you know, all of which is to say that being Asian, Canadian, American, Christian, monolingual gave me
This kind of perspective over the events of the last year that made me highly attuned to what that meant for being a stranger, being an immigrant, being Asian in America.
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