Beyond Whiteness: Conservatism and Fascism in Asian American Evangelical and Catholic Communities
Many are wondering how and why religious minorities in the USA adopt conservative - and even fascist - political identities when it seems that the American Right is anti-immigrant and in many cases explicitly racist. Scholars Dr. Jane Hong (Occidental) and Dr. Adrian de Leon (USC/NYU) argue that Asian American (religious) conservatism should be understood not just as an imported phenomenon from outside these communities, but as something structural within the formation of Asian America itself, within white supremacy and other political contexts in the United States.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and I have two first-time guests today who I'm so excited to talk to and just can't wait for this conversation.
So that is Dr. Jane Hong and Dr. Adrienne de Leon.
Thank you, Adrienne and Jane, for joining me today.
They're both giving me a thumbs up.
So you can't see that, but they are happy.
I think they're happy to be here.
That's my hope.
Very, very happy.
All right.
There we go.
All right.
Thank you.
I feel like I'm in class and I'm trying to get, you know, people to talk.
So we're going to talk about something that's really great.
And it's a special issue of the AmerAsia Journal on Conservatisms and fascisms in Asian America.
It's not something I it's not like something I think is a is a like delightful topic, but it's an overwhelming compelling topic because it's something we need to talk about and we'll get into that in a second.
But let me tell you a little bit about them.
So Dr. Adrian DeLeon is a professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California will soon be moving, however, to The other coast to NYU.
Um, and that's incredibly exciting.
Congratulations.
Dr. DeLeon is an award-winning public historian and writer.
Uh, his first book, Bunduk, A Hinterland History of Filipino America, is coming soon from the University of North Carolina Press.
And Dr. Jane Hong is associate professor of history at Occidental College, a historian of U.S.
immigration and engagement with the world with a focus on Asia after World War II.
The author of Opening the Gates to Asia, a Trans-Pacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion, serves on many boards, is an award winner, and also appears in two episodes of the Peabody Award-winning PBS docuseries, Asian Americans and the PBS World Documentary, Far East, Deep South.
So just two amazing people.
Thanks for being here.
And let's jump into this.
So just recently published the AmerAsia Journal, Volume 48, And we have this sort of, I don't know what the right adjective is, but important topic, uh, thinking about conservatism and fascisms in Asian America, especially as they relate to religion.
And, and I know that that's something that both of you are interested in.
Let me start here.
There's a, just a really kind of striking quote that begins your coauthored introduction to this journal.
And I want to read that for folks and then kind of get your, your reaction.
So you say, if I can pull up my, uh, my note here.
Asian American conservatives are often accused of wanting proximity to whiteness or of being the surrogates of white supremacist politics.
And yet, as contributors in this special issue will argue, Asian American conservatism is not just about claiming whiteness, Even though these alignments are indelibly forged from the politics of white supremacy.
In many ways, these movements are particular to the communities themselves, deeply rooted in the context of the home country and fertilized by the political economy of immigrant life in the United States.
When I read that quote, I was, it just kind of jolted me and it in some ways hit right to the core of things I'd been thinking about.
It also saddened me in some ways, I'll just be honest.
And so let me just ask Jane, you know, as you thought about all of the contributions to this journal issue, as you thought about this body of work and the issues that it covers, why did it seem important to make this distinction that Asian American conservatives, the kind of impulses towards fascism in certain communities, Are not just simply about claiming whiteness or being coming as close to whiteness as possible, but are often forged within the communities themselves.
Yeah, no, that's a great place to start our conversation.
And thanks so much, Brad, for having us.
So I think my interest in this topic really came from both my personal life, my family life, but also my own research.
I'm writing about Asian American evangelicals and kind of their history since the 1970s.
And in interviewing, so half the book is based in oral history interviews, and I'm interviewing folks from all over the political spectrum.
So what I found in writing this book, so it's both about religious communities within Asian America and conservative communities, among others within Asian America.
And there isn't that much written on these communities.
And I think within the field, Adrian and I have had conversations about this for a while, and that's what generated our interest in doing this special issue.
You know, I think as an ethnic studies field, Asian American studies scholars care a lot about radical movements and the field itself comes from a radical past, um, You know, the Asian American studies came from the 1968 Asian American movement, which featured U.S.
born Japanese, Chinese, Filipino Americans in the Bay Area.
In solidarity with Black communities, Latinx communities, and Indigenous communities.
And these are celebratory, these are radical histories of solidarity, not just with people of color in the U.S., but also people of color around the world, including folks who were, you know, experiencing U.S.
militarism, basically being killed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam Wars.
And so, you know, that's a lot of what folks write about.
And in fact, I write about this, too, in my book, because a lot of what we now call Asian American Christianity You know, you could argue that there is a particular starting point that you could date back to 1968 and what comes after.
But we also know just from, and Adrienne and I could both speak to this, from our own family histories, from communities that we're in, and just even if you're just watching the news, like how do you explain people like Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley?
How do you explain, if you're in Southern California, How do you explain Republican Congresswomen like Young Kim and Michelle Park Steele, who are actually two of the three first Korean-American women ever elected to Congress?
They're both conservative evangelicals.
They're both Trump supporters.
They're both pro-life.
They kind of fit very much into this conservative evangelical playbook, but they're not easily explained by, I think, these ideas about people wanting to claim whiteness.
Of course, you have to think about whiteness in terms of power structures.
Of course, folks like Nikki Haley, Young Kim, they're aspiring toward the power structures of whiteness, right?
So there is some aspiration there.
But they're not just kind of dupes or carbon copies of white conservative evangelicals and You know, for me personally as well, I think about people in my own family who voted for Donald Trump and, you know, my family were, I'm a second generation Korean American, born in New York City, my family is in New York City, New Jersey, and a bunch of them voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020.
And, you know, they're not just like, to think about my mom, or my uncles, Who are pastors is just kind of wanting to be white.
That doesn't actually explain what's going on.
And it's not just my family, right?
There's a growing number of Asian Americans who are voting for Republican candidates and they become an increasingly important part of kind of the political conversation along with Latinx conservatives and religious communities.
And so we wanted to really dig deep into taking these folks seriously and asking, like, oh, like, what are the transnational kind of factors?
What are the migration stories?
Like, what are the actual things that are shaping the people we love and the communities that we know in this direction?
Because we have seen a conservatizing kind of a right moving move kind of Trend over the past, particularly a few years, but we're historians, so we also know it goes back a long way.
And so these are some questions we really wanted to dig deep into, and this special issue got at a lot of different aspects of that.
It really does, and I encourage people to read every article because it's really a kind of stunning set of contributions.
I won't lie, as I was reading and contemplating over the last bit of time here, I realized how much I want to celebrate the 1968 story you just told, Jane, and how much I like that story.
I live in the Bay Area.
I love going up to Berkeley.
I love driving past San Francisco State and thinking, yes, Uh, this is great.
This is, I'm proud.
I'm inspired.
And yet, the work that y'all are doing is saying, well, there's a lot more to the story.
And I'll just, Adrian, I'll just be honest.
I think for me, there was a certain comfort in thinking, and I'll just put this on my own self and my own history, that To choose conservatism, especially religious conservatism in my case, was in a sense becoming part of a white community, and it was in some sense separating myself from an Asian American community.
There's a way, and this is going to sound weird, that that was a more comfortable story for me than to admit that from within Asian-American communities, as diverse as the Korean-American communities you just talked about, Jane, to the Filipino communities that I know you spend so much time studying, Adrian, that it comes from within them.
And I'm just wondering if that makes sense to you and what this looks like from your perspective as somebody who does study Filipino history and spaces in this country and beyond.
No, I also appreciate you framing the subjectivity around that too.
I wrestle with that, right?
In a lot of ways, my rebellion, even when I was 18 years old, I remember when I told my parents and I was going through the phase of leaving the very right-wing Christian community that I had been raised in, leaving the Catholic Church and things like that.
But I didn't say it as if I was leaving the church.
What I said to them was, I hate being Filipino.
Right.
And for me, I, it was a really heartbreaking moment and I'm writing about right now in like a sort of, um, in a sort of memoristic way, but like one of the things that galvanized, I think that feeling was that in, in, in a place like Canada, outside of the United States,
A lot of Filipinos in Canada, until maybe the 2010s or mid-2000s, 2010s for sure, didn't have the sort of social, artistic, creative, and cultural infrastructures that the community has now for sure.
But certainly, you know, our American, especially West Coast U.S.
counterparts, were way ahead of their time.
And so we did a couple things.
Number one, as youth, we actually looked to California.
As a sort of inspiration to think about how to organize Filipino, Canadian, Filipino in Toronto politics, but also we really doubled down on the really scant resources we had.
And one of those was the church.
It was, it was, it was little things like the church, basketball leagues, martial arts communities, but really it was about the church.
And so for me, I equated being Filipina with being part of those like sort of evangelical charismatic Catholic communities.
I've only really started to return to this recently, really, really been inspired by a lot of the work that Jane's been doing around Asian American evangelicalism, which is I've been thinking about the role of state religion and state spirituality in the making of sort of these long histories of Filipino conservatism and fascism and what have you.
And one of the things I've been really thinking about in one project is the sort of entanglement between Christian missionaries during the American colonial period in the Philippines, but also like elite nationalist sponsored organizations that were sort of modeled after Masonic organizations to like teach, you know, working class Filipino migrants about respectability politics and the like and thinking about those spaces
As really central to the creation of an ethno-nationalism that really galvanized throughout World War II and then certainly in the post-war moment.
But I've also been thinking about, like, reproductive anxiety.
And thinking about the place of, you know, Filipino labor export, right?
Especially during the 70s and the 80s.
And what that does, not just to, you know, sustain, you know, global industries like petro-capital and farming and mining and things like that, but what that does to the Filipino community itself, which is A lot of the structure of labor export in the Philippines is deeply, deeply gendered.
Women are exported to care economies, which often sustain financial epicenters like London, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, certainly Toronto, where I'm from, but also men are exported to places like labor compounds in the field.
And so Those that that gender division of labor actually produces these sort of reproductive anxieties.
And it is no coincidence that the rise of labor export in the Philippines also coincides with the rise of a Christian nationalist far right in the Philippines in the 1980s.
This is also the same, you know, set of years where organizations like and this will be familiar to some folks like El Shaddai, for example, which is a sort of charismatic Catholic organization that was founded by a real estate mogul in the Philippines takes off.
This is what Couples for Christ, right, which is a sort of humanitarian organization, a transnational humanitarian organization.
This really takes off.
And so, you know, like in in we often like them the way we framed the 1960s and 70s, you know, radical histories of Asian America.
As you know, the fundamental moment of our contemporary politics, in Filipino diaspora studies, we framed the 86, which is the people power revolution, as that foundational moment.
But actually, what gets replaced by 1986, when the Philippines overthrows what the Marcos is, is a Christian nationalist movement.
There's a Christian nationalist presidency, right?
And so What is it about not just like religion, but religious entanglements with things like property ownership, right?
And fascist aesthetics and things like that, that really are at the heart and center of how we need to understand Asian American lives.
Yeah, there's so much there.
And I want to come back to so many of those themes related to transnational networks, related to the Filipino diaspora.
But what you just said leads me to a next question, which I think is really important.
You point out that Asian Americans who have a religious identity seem to play an outsized role in some of the kind of conservative and even proto-fascist trends that we're talking about.
So Jane, I'm wondering, you know, why do I know you're a historian, you're not a, you know, you're not a sociologist, perhaps you're not a social scientist, you're not something.
But, and I know historians sometimes gets, you know, nervous about these kinds of questions, but from the historical perspective, why do religious identities correlate to anything from Asian American conservatism to unfortunately something like fascism?
So before I get to the kind of why, like, so in terms of how religious identities play into Asian American conservatism.
So here I'll lean on the work of political scientist Janelle Wong, who's done extensive research, particularly on the 2016 presidential election.
And I think it's really, it's Janelle Wong who, who wrote about and wrote an entire book actually about evangelicals, immigration and voting patterns.
And she did this for Asian Americans, Latinx voters, white and black voters as well.
So basically across the board.
And she found that of all Asian American religious groups, Asian American evangelicals were the most likely to vote for Republican candidates.
And in fact, more, I think half, about half of them voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
Which was really notable because the majority of Asian-American voters today actually lean Democratic.
And that has been changing.
And again, I think this is where the New York Times, you know, they run all these like periodically they run these articles about like, oh, you know, Asian-American voters moving rightward, trending rightward.
And there are similar kinds of stories about Latinx voters, especially since 2016.
I think both of those narratives are true.
And so, you know, I think a lot of pundits are like, what the heck is happening?
They're trying to explain it.
I mean, I think So in terms of Asian American evangelicals, about 30 to 40 percent of them are actually Korean American.
And so there's a reason why Adrian and I took on this topic, because the New York Times ran a story a couple of months ago.
The numbers are a bit wonky, but they were looking at Asian American voters in New York City.
And I think, generally speaking, the most right-leaning Asian-American groups, because, you know, the reality is Asian-Americans is an incredibly diverse, heterogeneous category, dozens of kind of nationality, dozens of linguistic groups, many different religious communities represented.
But among all of those groups, ethnicity-wise, it's Filipino-Americans, Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and I think Chinese-Americans who tend to be Some of the most conservative leaning.
And as Adrian just kind of laid out for Filipino Americans, I mean, U.S.
Empire.
So U.S.
Empire plays a really big role in this history.
And so Adrian and I are both historians of U.S.
Empire.
And again, I think our biographies, I think our personal journeys and biographical, you know, our backgrounds led us to these topics.
Like these are not like rando things that we just get to study.
I think for Korean Americans, South Korea was never formally colonized by the United States, but I don't know how many folks understand the relationship between the U.S.
and South Korean governments.
Really, that began after World War II, or actually during or after World War II.
The United States essentially controls the U.S.-South Korean military for many, many decades, and the South Korean kind of The educational system, so much of life has been shaped by U.S.
institutions, U.S.
educational kind of systems.
And in fact, it is U.S.
missionaries in Korea who set up the first nursing colleges, the first hospitals.
These are Presbyterians and Methodists.
I write a lot, or I think a lot about this.
I don't write as much about it.
But the work of folks like Helen Jin Kim, who looks at kind of how U.S.
and South Korean evangelicalism become mutually constitutive during the Cold War.
Yeah, those kind of, those like words.
But, you know, she looks particularly at parachurch groups like the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, World Vision, and Campus Crusade for Christ Korea.
I mean, South Korea is a huge kind of feature in this longer history.
And if you think about U.S.
evangelicalism, the argument is it's been shaped in a kind of global context.
And so there's a reason why I have so many uncles.
I have two uncles who became Christian through Campus Crusade for Christ Korea.
Before coming to the United States and before becoming pastors in Chicago and New York City.
And there's a reason why, again, more than 30 to 40 percent of, kind of 30 to 40 percent of Korean Americans make up most Asian American evangelicals.
And there's a reason why the majority of Korean Americans have some kind of connection to Protestant Christianity, something between like 60 to 70 percent.
And so even Korean Americans who don't want to think about the Protestant Church can't escape it because oftentimes they grow up in it.
And so The fact that that kind of entanglement exists, that is a product of a much longer history of U.S.
empire in South Korea, which continues in different ways through today.
And I think you can make similar arguments for different parts of Asia.
And so just when you think about kind of Asian American Christians, there is a U.S.-based story, but there is usually a story that begins in Asia with U.S.
involvement, military.
interventions, missionary presence across different parts of Asia that still plays out today.
And this is the kind of stuff I'm investigating in my current book.
Like how do Presbyterian networks in Korea play out in Korean America?
Why is the PCA 10% Korean language?
Why is the PCUSA even, right?
This mainline organization, how are they like so Korean?
And a lot of it dates back to what the US was doing in Asia well before people immigrated.
One of the things I took away from your co-authored piece here and from what you just said, Jane, is that there is, as we talked about, to start this sense of conservatism and in some cases, fascism or proto-fascism coming from within these communities.
But there's also, and we'll get here in a second, just a long story of transnational networks, transnational flows, and of course, American empire.
And so one factor we can't ignore here is that Asian American conservatisms are entangled with conservative Christian America and the kind of missionary efforts you talked about and the ways that those are often kind of exported all over the world, and including to places like Korea and other places.
I'm wondering if, Adrian, we can zoom in a little bit on the case of Chinese Christians in the United States and the ways they've been identified by the GOP and Magan Nation as a Christian minority who is, who was persecuted under the ultimate bogeyman.
I mean, the ultimate bogeyman for Uh, the American right is of course communism.
Well, there's a lot of them.
I mean, there's many, but one of them is one of the big ones is communism has been for a long time.
I have several friends I grew up with who grew up in, in Chinese Christian churches.
And you know, when I asked them about them, they're like, we weren't into politics.
Like I didn't go to church and talk politics.
I never heard my parents talking about politics at church.
We weren't super Republican in 1987 or 1994 when I was at church.
However, that seems to be changing and it seems like there's a sense that a community that was maybe reluctant to bring politics into its, uh, its sacred spaces is perhaps now fostering that a little bit more.
And I'm, I'm wondering if you can just maybe help us understand how that works in the last sort of 10 years of American history.
Yeah, I'd love to.
And I think, you know, besides Zooming, and I think I want to answer this by way of some of the methodological stakes we had in the special issue.
The first one is that Jane and I, in our conversations about conservatism, we were really also concerned about what it means to write an Asian American political history.
In the long literature of American political history, we often look at things like political development through the infrastructures of governance.
We look at civil service.
We look at the judiciary.
We look at elections and the legislature.
These really legible things that constitute politics for The American citizenry, but specific for Asian Americans, Chinese American citizens, for example, Filipino Americans, Korean Americans, politics is like, like, we need to understand politics as something that, you know, emerges number one out of the census, number two out of that might take on forms.
Right, including the forums for which to discuss politics that might look different to an electoral system in a liberal democratic society.
And I think one of the things that we've been really focusing on is that churches, religious organizations, are the site through which political, you know, futures, political imaginations, political debates are waged, even if the language is not necessarily, you know, political in the first place.
Right.
And so, you know, thinking about and I'm thinking about the role of of other sort of Chinese diasporic Christian communities.
So there was an anthropologist and one of my closest friends who passed away in 2017.
Her name was Helen Mok, and she studied in the Department of Religion at the University of Toronto.
And she was thinking about really these questions about where does the emergence of a Chinese conservatism In the Canadian context.
She traces it to parking lots.
She traces it to sports games.
She traced it to megachurches.
She traced it to the sort of things that happen along Sundays, like meals together and things like that.
The way that these everyday politics and everyday gatherings foment and sediment these long-term ideologies, I think are really important for us to look at, even if they don't necessarily one-to-one translate to an electoral politic.
The drips are still there.
And also just sort of the second vessel I also wanted to bring in was the question of, you know, communism, right?
And communism as a sort of, not in terms of the practice, but in terms of the boogeyman of American politics, right?
Because especially in the post-World War II moment, a lot of how American racial politics and also geopolitics has been organized, has been, you know, ran into communism and actually pulled up in when we were going through some of the articles, especially the article on fascism and no, no, boy, I pulled up for us the definition of what are the definitions of fascism by a political philosopher from the 1920s and 30s named Walter Benjamin.
Right.
And I just want to read it for you all.
So long story short, right.
Fascism.
He looks at the aestheticization of politics and he says this.
Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.
Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right but instead a chance to express themselves.
The masses have a right to change property relations.
Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.
The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life And thus communism responds by politicizing art.
And one of the things I wanted to think about was that, you know, these mega churches, including the ones that I was raised in, are incredibly spectacular.
It's not a coincidence that so many Chinese-Americans in diaspora associate American Chineseness with those specific church spaces, right?
That myself in the Filipino Toronto community associated being Filipino with those spaces because they were spectacles, not just of Christianity and political life, but of what it means to be part of your racial group.
Yeah.
And so I wonder here too, right?
Like, what does it mean to actually take seriously these spaces that don't look political, might be tacky, that might be flashy, right?
And think about their continuities with other tacky and flashy things, including Trump's, you know, 2016 and 2020 campaigns, right?
And so I think one of the important contributions that was made by our special issue was really getting us into the level of a spectacle and not just a level of the electorate.
The sense of expression there seems so important to me and the sense that obviously religion, religious expression is one thing I think about all the time.
And just the idea that you would have a venue for that expression, but that that venue would be contoured in ways that sometimes are subtle and implicit towards a political conservatism or toward a certain kind of political aesthetics.
And that's just a really fascinating to think about.
I have one friend who is Chinese American and she's told me about Going from a kind of small, what felt like mom and pop shop of a Chinese church to like a mega church and being like, we hit the big time.
Like we got to the cool kids.
There's like lasers and shit.
Like this is crazy.
And it really, it really hit on what you just said of like, we have hit the big time now.
Can I actually say something on that too?
Sure, of course.
That's really fascinating, which is like, this is also not to say, right, and this is something I've been working through, that, you know, the sort of energy and the erotics and the sort of, you know, spectacle, but also that sort of libidinal economy, which is what the writer Gina Apostol calls it, of being in those religious spaces, right?
They don't have to tend To these conservative and fascist movements, right?
Like, I'm thinking about some of the possibilities that James Baldwin, for example, saw, right, in embodied worship.
But I also think about, like, these earlier histories in the Philippines, which is one of the, like, we often trace liberation theology to the Cold War, right, into Latin America.
One of the earliest modern articulations of liberation theology was, in a lot of ways, the first, you know, indigenous Christian church in Southeast Asia, which was called the Iglesia Filipina Independiente.
And it was founded by these like Marxist priests, right?
Native Marxist priests who wanted to use those, you know, who saw these possibilities in religious life and sort of evangelical life to stoke ideas of revolution.
And those churches are still incredibly popular today.
I think where the problem comes in Yes.
is when religion gets grafted to the nation state.
Yes.
Right.
And when when when X, when when that energy then gets melded into what, you know, political theorists might call the archipolitical space of liberal the census, that that that religious energy and political energy becomes contained right within that.
That then serves the propagation of the nation-state rather than actually get us thinking beyond its forms.
This is, I think, where, you know, we can see on a theoretical level, one of the ways that the energy, the real energy that we have, that I myself really enjoyed growing up in a Christian community, that's one of the ways that we can think about how those communities tend without naturally, you know, naturalizing the fact that they all tend that way.
I wanted to add to just, you know, thinking about Chinese Christians and Trumpism.
So that piece, I think it was Yu Cheng Bai, who's a graduate student at Duke.
But that piece actually really helped me understand some of the folks that I was interviewing, that I have been interviewing, from my book, particularly the last chapter about the same-sex marriage campaigns in California in the late 90s, early 2000s.
I look at how Chinese and Korean American evangelicals basically begin to enter kind of conservative culture wars politics through the issue of same-sex marriage and they become this kind of very prominent and visible group that's basically fighting against same-sex marriage, joining with the Family Research Council, joining with these kind of very well-known white evangelical right organizations in the kind of
Maybe 2007, 2008 in the lead up to Proposition 8 in California, which was when California voters, they actually supported a ban on same sex marriage.
So it never went into effect because there were court cases out the wazoo.
In a lot of that coverage in California, you know, there was a man named Bill Tam, who's a Chinese American from the Bay Area.
He becomes one of the defendants in the actual court case against Proposition 8.
And he's actually played by George Takei in this play version of the trial that kind of plays out.
It's like, I think Brad Pitt's in this play.
George Clooney's in this play.
So it becomes this kind of big spectacle and Bill Tam.
So, I mean, first of all, people are just like, what is this Chinese American doing in this campaign?
Like, why would they even care to begin with?
But I think that piece, so like thinking about why Chinese Christians even care about these issues.
One of the arguments that Bai makes is, you know, it's really about, again, this kind of persecution mentality, right?
So Chinese Christians in China.
And he really historicizes it.
Chinese Christians in China, they really are persecuted.
The house church is really persecuted leading up to maybe the 1970s and they continue to be persecuted.
And so there's a particular generation of Chinese pastors who bring this mentality with them to the U.S.
And back in China, it was like it was the atheistic communist state that was the big kind of, again, the bogeyman, the oppressive force.
And so they kind of kind of transpose or transfer those ideas to the democratic liberal establishment, right, which looks very atheistic compared to what you might now call the evangelical right.
In this generation they're reading like Francis Schaeffer, like they also have memories of like Tiananmen Square.
So like this generation is really shaped by these experiences and in my work I trace like specific actors like Thomas Wang, right, who is actually really active in the same-sex marriage campaigns in the Bay Area.
Thomas Wang is not some like random guy.
He actually is a is a pretty high up leader in the international Lausanne movement, the international kind of evangelical movement in the 1980s.
You can find his papers at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.
And so you have these kind of like high profile Chinese Christian pastors who are able just they just have incredible influence over large parts of the Chinese diaspora, both in the U.S.
and also like in in Canada and across right kind of the Pacific Rim, as some folks might call it.
And like, you know, this script really buys into a lot of these ideas, the US is a Christian nation, etc, etc.
But the kind of big piece that I found really telling is that people like Bill Tam and Thomas Wang, they were not being recruited by the Family Research Council or the Christian Coalition, were not being recruited.
In the 90s and early 2000s, they were actually the ones reaching out to white evangelical groups to get support because they somehow had found out about these campaigns.
And these campaigns really resonated.
This idea of like traditional family and marriage really resonated with them.
And so they did the initial reaching out.
So nowadays, I think it's kind of more reversed.
In the last few years, I think there have been more concerted systematic efforts by the Republican Party.
To reach out to these Asian American evangelicals, these Christians, and just Asian Americans generally.
I think the GOP opened up something called community centers.
They opened up an APA community center in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, Westminster, specifically to target Vietnamese and Korean American voters in that area.
And that's, you know, this is like Young Kim and Michelle Park's Steel Land.
So again, that pattern has changed in the sense that now the GOP is doing outreach, but up until a few years ago, that was really not part of the story.
I think in large part because many parties, members didn't really, they dismissed Asian American voters as not really important.
And so that also, the numbers are also beginning to change.
But it raises a lot of questions about kind of what Chinese American Christian voters, what Asian American Christian voters, kind of what their patterns and kind of what their communities are going to look like going forward now that there is this concerted outreach.
There's so much there.
I mean, I just think back to what we started with the beginning about the ideas of conservatism coming from within the house.
You know, the call is coming from within the house.
And as you outlined there, Jane, you know, there's a reason, there are historical reasons that many pastors and leaders within the Chinese Christian communities would find themselves gravitating toward a kind of for lack of a better word, a Christian nationalism that is conservative, that emphasizes family in the wake of certain lived experiences.
And then to zoom out and see how it...
I mean, we could spend the next 45 minutes talking about Westminster and Garden Grove and conservatism in Vietnamese American communities in those places.
We are just about out of time.
I promise to take up only a certain amount of your day.
I'm not going to lie, I have like 366 more questions that I want to ask, including about an essay in the journal on John Okada's No No Boy, which is a novel that I will always love and I will always see as So problematic and flawed and full of just many, many, many issues, but a book that I can, I have, I've read many times and, uh, and, and we'll always have a special place in my heart, but alas, I'm going to save those for another time because I don't want to take up your entire day.
So I will stop here and I will just say, thank you so much for just giving us the very tip, like the very tip of the iceberg on these issues as they relate to Asian American conservatism and fascism.
And especially as they relate to religious communities within Yeah, I'm on Twitter.
domain that is Asian America.
So thank you to both of you.
Let me ask you, Jane, where are places folks might link up with you if they'd like to follow along with your work and hopefully expect and wait with bated breath for your second book to come out very soon?
Yeah, I'm on Twitter.
You could follow me at Jane Hong PhD.
And Adrienne, where's the best place for you?
Likewise, on Twitter, which is also how Jay and I met.
It'll be at AA DeLeon.
The screen name is Swagopino Studies.
So go, go shoot me a message there.
I like how you're both in LA and you met on Twitter, so there's nothing more, uh, pandemic time.
All right.
That's a good excuse.
That's a good excuse.
All right.
Fair enough.
All right, y'all.
Well, I will link the special issue in the show notes.
You should check it out.
You may be thinking, I don't know anything about Asian American studies or Asian American religious studies or Asian America in general.
And I'm just going to say this is a great place to start.
You may be somebody who knows a lot about those things, and I guarantee you're going to learn a lot if you read this work.
We will be back later this week with the weekly roundup with It's In The Code.
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