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

7. Conclusion

159 Chapter 7 Conclusion The ethnic church has been, from the first wave of Korean immigration to the United States, the central institution in the Korean American community.Today, there are more than 3,000 Korean American Protestant churches nationwide, and nearly 80 percent of Korean Americans are affiliated with them (Lien and Carnes 2004;Yoo and Chung 2008). Korean Americans—past and present—have been deeply influenced by the dominance of the Protestant church within their ethnic communities. However, today, as the children of post-1965 immigrants come of age, they are exerting new pressures and challenges to the existing immigrant religious organizations. No longer content with their parents’ churches, which they feel cater to the needs of the first generation, second-generation Korean Americans, with an unparalleled entrepreneurial fervor, are carving out new institutional niches to accommodate the intersection of race, generation, and ethnicity in the context of their Christian faith.The manner in which second-generation Korean Americans have constructed their own hybrid religious institutions reflects the complex and contradictory set of challenges and tensions that the group faces in the United States as a racial minority and as children of immigrants. Since the enactment of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which abolished the country-by-country quotas that had made it difficult for non-Europeans to immigrate, over 21 million immigrants entered the United States. In numerical volume, this rivals the great flood of European immigrants of the early 1900s (Zhou 2004). Recent studies have compared and contrasted the adaptation patterns of today’s second generation with those of the children of those who immigrated at the turn of the last century (Portes and Zhou 1993; Warner 1998). The adaptation patterns are significantly different today because the new immigrants 160 A F a i t h o f O u r O w n themselves are different, and the society into which they are adapting is markedly different from what awaited the European immigrants at the turn of the century. It is important to acknowledge the crucial impact of the historical and situational context that would differentiate the experiences of each immigrant group. First and perhaps most significant,the majority of the new immigrants who come from Latin American and Asian countries are racially different from the mainstream.At the turn of the past century, the majority of immigrants, like the native born, came largely from European nations. In contrast, the majority of the immigrants today come from Latin America and Asia, and together, immigrants and their children account for more than 60 million, or a fifth of all U.S. residents (Jacoby 2004). Furthermore , census estimates tell us that, in large part because of recent immigration, by the middle of this century Asian and Latino Americans will make up close to 35 percent of the U.S. population (Jacoby 2004). Because post-1965 immigrants are largely nonwhite, the current study of second-generation Korean Americans provides important insights into how the distinctive category of “race” figures into immigrant adaptation. Second-generation Korean Americans seem to defy established ways of thinking about racial inequality; their rates of education, income, and residential mobility suggest that that they have successfully integrated into mainstream society. However, regardless of their socioeconomic achievements, they are racially marginalized and not fully included as legitimate members within mainstream society’s primary associations (Kibria 2003). No matter how much they may try to conceal their ethnic identities in order to blend into the mainstream, race continues to set them apart as different and not genuinely American. In short, race is an important context in which second-generation Korean Americans form their understandings of what it means to be an American.Their choice to establish and attend second-generation Korean American churches is shaped, in part, by feelings of racial marginalization and the perception held by the mainstream that they are not authentically American (Tuan 1998). Undoubtedly, race is an important variable in understanding why second-generation Korean Americans, unlike the second generation of white ethnic groups, attend ethnic churches. The new immigrants also entered an American society that has been radically reshaped by the civil rights movement of the sixties.The civil Conclusion 161 rights movement dramatically challenged and altered the traditional paradigms of minority identification and incorporation into mainstream society. Blending or melting into the mainstream often meant that immigrants would renounce their...