Korean American Evangelicals: New Models for Civic Life (review)

Reading Korean American Evangelicals, I was struck with how useful it may be for those who are not primarily engaged in the study of Asian-American religions. Its wider relevance to the field reminded me of the opening sentence of Oscar Handlin's The Uprooted: "Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." Handlin wrote those words in the 1950s. Today one could just as easily write: "Once I thought to write a book on the immigrants and the future of American evangelicalism. Then I discovered that the immigrants were the future of American evangelicalism."

One of the pleasures of Korean American Evangelicals is seeing Elaine Howard Ecklund interweave cultural sociology, the literature on new religious immigrants, the new institutionalism in organizational analysis, and the sociology of race and ethnicity, all in an effort to make sense of the civic lives of second-generation Korean American evangelicals. Her careful attention to different levels of analysis (individual, social and collective), helpful use of the sociology of moral boundaries, and convincing account of how individuals draw on cultural schemas, make this a welcome contribution to both cultural sociology and the sociology of religion.

I especially appreciated Ecklund's effort to unravel the connections between cultural models of civic life and actual civic participation. Comparing two Korean-American congregations, she finds that the church with the more individualistic approach to civic life elicits higher levels of volunteerism. By pushing the conversation about religion and civic life beyond social capital theory (and beyond Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone), this book makes a strong contribution to the literature on citizenship and civic engagement.

Despite these obvious strengths, the most valuable aspect of Ecklund's book is its capacity to speak to wider audiences, including some that she may not have intended to address. In particular, sociologists of American Catholicism will notice the parallels (and also the differences) between the story Ecklund tells about Korean evangelicals and the story that has been told about the first wave of Catholic immigrants to America. Like Euro-American Catholics, Korean-American evangelicals are moving beyond the old question, "Can the immigrant keep the faith?" and grappling with a new one, "What does it mean to be a good American?"

Ecklund's book is even more relevant to a conversation that she did set out to influence, namely the conversation about the future of American evangelicalism. Korean American Evangelicals is one of the first studies to turn the causal arrow around. Instead of asking how American evangelicalism is influencing Korean Americans, it examines how Korean Americans are reshaping the racial ideologies of evangelicalism. This is especially evident in Ecklund's treatment of Manna Church, the multiethnic congregation in her study. Describing Manna's frequent use of the rhetoric of multi-ethnicity, she argues that this is something new under the evangelical sun. Like African-American Christians, the Korean Americans at Manna critique the racism of white evangelicalism. Yet, unlike African Americans, Korean-American evangelicals are partially integrated into white evangelical networks. It is this ambiguous position that gives Asian-American Christians the potential to, in Ecklund's words, "reshape the conservative Protestant landscape."

Ecklund is not the first scholar to address the use of the rhetoric of racial reconciliation by Asian-American evangelicals. Although Ecklund cites some of this literature, she seems more hopeful about the capacity of Asian Americans to transform evangelical racial ideologies. If I had one question for the author, it would be this: Given the critical assessments of evangelical race relations by other scholars (people such as Rudy Busto and Antony Alumkal), why is she so optimistic about the possibilities for a multi-racial, multi-ethnic evangelicalism?

In both the introduction and the conclusion, Ecklund provides us with a possible answer, twice noting that non-white Americans will make up more than 50 percent of the population by the year 2050. Imagine a day when...