In the midst of a packed dining room this past January, many gathered to hear the lecture of Dr. Peter Phan, “Asian Americans: A Blessing to American Christianity?” Dr. Phan, Professor and Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, emigrated to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee in 1975. Since then, Dr. Phan has risen through the ranks as a reputable theologian, not only as the first non-Anglo to hold the Presidency of Catholic Theological Society in America, but for studying and bringing attention to the unique possibilities and perspectives found in both Asian and Asian American theology.
Dr. Phan’s lecture asked: Do Asian American Christians bring any blessing, anything that can renovate, renew and enrich the American Catholic Church? Often misunderstood and overgeneralized, articulating Asian Americans’ contributions to Christianity is a hefty task. Dr. Phan understood the delicate nature of Asian experiences as it related to Christianity, because the kind of Christianity amongst Asian countries was not homogenous, but rather one that holds a multiplicity of expressions, “even within the country itself.”
“Dr. Phan’s lecture asked: Do Asian American Christians bring any blessing, anything that can renovate, renew and enrich the American Catholic Church?”
Dr. Phan argued that Asian Christianity became even more nuanced as it wrestled with Christianity and Catholicism in the United States. Asian immigrants and refugees brought their cuisines, family rituals, traditions, familial relations—and yes—their devotional practices and piety to the United States. This new Asian American Christianity incorporated all of these elements together, producing both a faith and a theological discourse rooted in food, family and tradition.
However, Dr. Phan emphasized that Asian American Christianity was not divorced from the colonial and imperial legacy of Christianity. These new ways of practicing Christianity serve as a response and resistance to the “strange” nature of colonial Christianity—one that reflects the ideals of the colonialists rather than those who have been colonized. But, Dr. Phan noted that such Christianity is renewed when it is rewritten “from the perspective of the people who have been dominated [and] colonized.” A point that is echoed by Eleazar S. Fernandez, a Filipino theologian, who writes that “Against the Christ of the conquerors, the Filipinos…had evolved a Jesus distinct from the Jesus Christ propagated by the patrons of Christianity, an indication that the control of the foreigners and their God was not total.”1
For many Asian Americans, including Dr. Phan, the goal is to find new ways of understanding and re-expressing Christianity “in terms of [our own] culture.” Our faith is rooted in our own stories, built on our ancestors’ lives and experiences. Among Dr. Phan and other Asian American theologians, the task now is maintaining that sense of identity as well as reclaiming it in an increasingly pluralistic world.
1Fernandez, Eleazar S., Toward a Theology of Struggle, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009, p.100.
