A Faith Of Our Own: Second-Generation Spirituality in Korean American Churches

4. Spiritual Laboratories

83 Chapter 4 Spiritual Laboratories Second-generation churches, as they emerge within congregational spaces, draw from a variety of cultural and spiritual resources. In their quest to invent an independent second-generation spirituality, the leaders of these new churches aim to adopt what they perceive to be essential beliefs, symbols, and practices from Korean Protestantism and various expressions of American evangelicalism, and to anchor them in their newly formed organizations. The dominance of a Western, Euro-American Protestantism in the United States has meant that racial minorities and their religious institutions have had to operate from the borders. However, in the minds of second-generation pastors, existing on the borders or being a “marginal man” is viewed as an asset rather than a liability. Milton Gordon defines the marginal man as a person who “stands on the borders or margins of two cultural worlds but is fully a member of neither”(1964:64).In a similar vein, according to Sang Hyun Lee, Korean immigrants are not only “in between” or “on the boundary” but also “outside,” or at the periphery of American society (2001). However, for second-generation Korean Americans, this position affords them a special vantage point from which they can view and incorporate what they perceive as positive aspects of diverse cultural expressions of Christianity. In multicultural Los Angeles, where communities are largely drawn along ethnic lines, second-generation Korean Americans do not see themselves or their ethnic institutions as inside or outside of American society. Rather, they are carving out and inhabiting a rapidly expanding hybrid third space. “In-between spaces,” H. K. Bhaba argues, are where hybrid identities are created, because they “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity and innovative sites of collaboration” (1994: 1–2). The second-generation Korean American 84 A F a i t h o f O u r O w n churches provide an excellent case study of how religion and religious institutions that exist on the borders serve as important vehicles for cultural and spiritual innovation. Contemporary scholars of religion have suggested that the second generation, in their quest to differentiate and distance themselves from their parents’ religion, have rushed into the arms of mainstream evangelicalism . In her study of second-generation Indian Christians, Prema Kurien (2004) found that the younger Indians continually compared their parent’s ethnic church unfavorably with the mainstream American churches that they had attended. Other scholars have pointed to the manner in which second-generation Korean American college students , when afforded independence from their parents, are constructing campus groups that reproduce the values and practices of mainstream evangelicalism (R. Kim 2006; S. Park 2004).These studies depict secondgeneration churches and ministries as replicas of white evangelical institutions , albeit with a nonwhite membership. In contrast, the members of churches in my study are much more cautious and deliberate in choosing which elements of mainstream evangelicalism they want to embrace.The majority of the churches do not want to be carbon copies of successful white evangelical churches. Rather, they want to carve out a hybrid third space, distinct from both mainstream evangelicalism and Korean immigrant Protestantism. Second-generation churches are not identical to one another.There are marked differences as well as similarities in their philosophies, styles, and approaches. For example, there is a range of views on how much ethnicity should express itself in the churches. Several ministers desire to practice a religion that is heavily flavored by their ethnic culture. In contrast, other ministers argue that churches should primarily be in the business of sharing the gospel and helping people grow in their faith. In response, the pastors who want to preserve ethnicity argue that mainstream Protestantism is not, in the words of one minister,“a-ethnic,” but is very much flavored by European ethnic culture. Not to see it as such is another example of white privilege. They desire a higher degree of reciprocity wherein their hybrid spirituality, flavored by their ethnic culture , can take its place in the landscape of mainstream Protestantism. At the current stage of development, the second-generation churches exist largely in isolation from one another, and there is very little if any Spiritual Laboratories 85 dialogue among the pastors about second-generation Korean American spirituality. But although there is no intentionally unified movement in defining second-generation spirituality, I found numerous points of...