Stanford
American Religions in a Global Context

ARGC Statement on Anti-Asian Racism

The American Religions in a Global Context Initiative at Stanford grieves the murders of eight in Atlanta, including Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Delaina Ashley Yaun, and Paul Andre Michels.

Of the eight victims, six were women of Asian descent. Even as these murders come amidst a wave of anti-Asian violence stoked by the COVID-19 pandemic, they also stand in a long history of anti-Asian laws and violence that combine xenophobia, racism, sexism, and “religionism” into a mutually reinforcing mix. 

People of Asian descent were derided as “heathens” into the twentieth century. Their so-called “heathenism” was connected to a supposed propensity to disease and sexual immorality and used to justify their exclusion from the United States, an exclusion that took legal, social, political, and economic form.

The anti-Asian violence of the present moment resonates with these historical roots. Asians and Asian Americans continue to be scapegoated as diseased and disease-spreading in the age of COVID. And Asian and Asian American women continue to be hypersexualized and then blamed for others’ “sexual addiction.”

While we recognize that scholarship alone does not hold the answer, we amplify and highlight the work of scholars who have done much to illuminate Asian American history in tandem with the study of religion and race, including (but not limited to): 

  • Anne Blankenship, “Asian American Religions from Chinese Exclusion to 1965,” in Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History (Oxford University Press, 2018)
  • Anne Blankenship, Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2016)
  • Melissa Borja, “Follow the New Way”: Hmong Refugee Resettlement and the Practice of American Religious Pluralism, 1976-2000 (forthcoming)
  • Melissa Borja, “Migrations and Modern American Religious Pluralism, in Harvey and Lum, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History
  • Melissa Borja, “Speaking of Spirits: Oral History, Religious Change, and the Seen and Unseen Worlds of Hmong Americans,” Oral History Review 44 no. 1
  • Melissa Borja and Jacob Gibson, “Internationalism with Evangelical Characteristics: The Case of Evangelical Responses to Southeast Asian Refugees,” The Review of Faith & International Affairs Vol. 17 No. 3
  • Wendy Cadge, Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America (University of Chicago Press, 2004)
  • Derek Chang, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) 
  • Carolyn Chen, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton University Press, 2008)
  • Carolyn Chen and Russell Jeung, eds., Sustaining Faith Traditions: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation (New York University Press, 2012)
  • Sue Fawn Chung and Priscilla Wegars, eds., Chinese American Death Rituals: Respecting the Ancestors (AltaMira Press, 2005)
  • Chenxing Han, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021)
  • Jane Naomi Iwamura, Virtual Orientalism: Asian Religions and American Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  • Russell Jeung, At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors (Zondervan, 2016)
  • Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (Rutgers University Press, 2005)
  • Russell Jeung, Seanan Fong, and Helen Jin Kim, Family Sacrifices: The Worldviews and Ethics of Chinese Americans (Oxford University Press, 2019)
  • Khyati Joshi, Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (University of Illinois Press, 2013)
  • Khyati Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (Rutgers University Press, 2006)
  • Helen Jin Kim, “Asian American Women’s History Is American Religious History,” in Kwok Pui-lan, ed., Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020)
  • Helen Jin Kim, Transpacific Piety and Politics: Cold War South Korea and the Rise of Modern American Evangelicalism (forthcoming)
  • Rebecca Kim, The Spirit Moves West: Korean Missionaries in America (Oxford University Press, 2014)
  • Karen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans (Temple University Press, 1992)
  • Kathryn Gin Lum, “The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?” Religion and American Culture, Vol 28 Iss. 1
  • Laurie Maffly-Kipp, “Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry: Viewing Chinese Religions in the American West,” Material Religion, Vol. 1, Iss. 1
  • Adeana McNicholl, “Buddhism and Race,” in Harvey and Lum, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History
  • Pyong Gap Min, Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations (New York University Press, 2010)
  • Gary Okihiro, “Religion and Resistance in America’s Concentration Camps,” Phylon Vol. 45 No. 3
  • Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (University of California Press, 2012)
  • Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (University of California Press, 2004)
  • Jennifer Snow, Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America (Routledge, 2007)
  • Sharon Suh, Being Buddhist in a Christian World: Gender and Community in a Korean American Temple (University of Washington Press, 2004)
  • Sharon Suh, Occupy This Body: A Buddhist Memoir (Sumero Press, 2019)
  • Sharon Suh, Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism in Asian and Western Film (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015)
  • Jolyon Thomas, Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2019)
  • Thomas Tweed and Stephen Prothero, eds., Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  • Duncan Ryūken Williams, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019)
  • Lola Williamson, Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion (NYU Press, 2010)
  • David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2010)
  • David K. Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999)
  • David K. Yoo and Khyati Joshi, eds., Envisioning Religion, Race, and Asian Americans (University of Hawai’i Press, 2020)
  • Grace Yukich, “Religion, Race, and Immigration in Contemporary America,” in Harvey and Lum, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History

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