Born into Belief
Fostering freedom within the second-generation Asian-American Christian identity.
By Karis Ryu, doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University.
Sometimes, I wonder who I would be if I had not grown up religious.
At churches, I have witnessed baby dedications. During these dedications, the parent(s) and/or guardians of the child recite a prepared pledge committing the child to God, and themselves to raising the child in God. I participated as well. When I was a congregant, I spoke in unison with my neighbors while we recited another pledge: to love the child as a church community, to help the parents/guardians raise the child to know the love of God—that the child would know the presence of God as a loving embrace that surrounds them and will not let them go.
When I participated in these dedications as a young adult, I found myself increasingly heavy-hearted. I was moved, joyful even, and simultaneously in deep, deep pain. Anger as well. There is no way to be light about the weight of this promise. Perhaps infant baptisms and baby dedications are, to me, a devastating kind of display. To be pledged, before one can even speak for oneself, to God. And on the other side, to promise to love a child you know you will, many times, fail, in a world of ugliness that will, regardless of our intentions and protections, show the child its unpleasant face, through circumstance, through other people, and through ourselves. And yet, to pray that, despite human failings, the child maybe, just maybe, will come to experience for themselves a God who is good.
During one of our calls this past year, the story of Hannah and Samuel made its way into a conversation between my mother and me. In this story, Hannah, in her longing for a son, promises to dedicate him to God. Hannah’s devotion to the Lord has been cited many times as evidence of her moral character, as a model of piety to be applauded and followed. There’s more to the story, we said. There always is.
On my father’s side of the family, we come from three generations of Korean and Korean American ministers. My mother, too, grew up in church. We have relatives across the globe who are pastors and missionaries. My generation of siblings and cousins on my father’s side are entirely diasporic. We are the children, adolescents, and young adults finding our way through this emergent category we are learning as “Asian American Christianity.” And in this web, now, there is me: the scholar, the writer, of religion.
Sometimes, oftentimes, the words of Psalm 139:7—“Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”—reverberate as a deep cry of exhaustion, even one of dreadful despair, rather than as a comfort.
Sometimes, I wonder who I would be if I had not grown up religious. I wonder what that person would be thinking about. I wonder how that person would be living. Her likes and her dislikes, her joys and her struggles. That person would undoubtedly have her share of anxieties and fears. But I wonder where she would feel free to go, what she would feel free to do, and who she would feel free to be. If, if at all.
From Past to Possibility
Certainly, I would not be asking questions of religion the way I am if I had not grown up religious. I specifically would not be asking questions of the church, and its many cultural iterations, the way I currently do if I had not grown up Christian—the first-born daughter of a Korean American U.S. Army chaplain—in the particular and potent nexus of Christian institutions and spaces that positionality placed me in. This birthing ground of particular and potent Christian cultures are what facilitated the life I experienced: rotating through Korean American churches, predominantly white megachurches, and U.S. military chapels; conversion at a regional Asian American youth retreat; involvement in campus ministry as an undergraduate. This background, in tension with burgeoning critiques and questions about colonialism, injustice, and change, brought me to pursue graduate studies in religion.
I learned early on in my childhood that I am a deeply autobiographical writer. My stories flow out the most cathartically when they are inspired by experiences in my own life. I wrote fiction, nonfiction, and poetry largely in secret until I graduated from college, and once I began to write more publicly, I embarked on an ongoing journey of trial-and-error, navigating how to write of oneself in ways that are not overimposing—as I heard the poet Jen Hadfield once say, “I really want to escape my own intention in my writing”—and how to write from real life in ways that care for the people in it. I negotiate this too in my scholarship. Whenever I write of “I” or “my,” there are many, many others enmeshed in and with it, with their own lives: likes and dislikes, joys and struggles. I am continuously, refreshingly, reminded to keep this in mind.
In my faith journey, I have learned that a question-asking, boundary-pushing, imaginative approach is my way of getting closer to God. As this pushes me to write creatively and academically, I think about how my intellectual, cultural, and religious education prepared, or did not prepare, me for the kind of life that excites and delights me, even and especially in its challenges. As I keep exploring and expanding my questions, I find more and more that the stakes are high, for others and for myself. It is one thing to research the past and talk through the present; it is another to imagine the future. The future of the church, the future of community, and the future of the homes, spaces, and institutions that are used to raise children and young adults into religious personhood.
Can Christian discipleship be imagined and practiced in ways that behold and embrace creativity—and all the unknowns that signifies?
Encouraging Creativity
What might it look, sound, and feel like to practice a form of faith-pedagogy that is not about keeping things “in line?” Perhaps it is the luxury of the layperson, and of the artist, to ask this question of and to ministers and institutional administrators. But, it is precisely the vantage point of the creative that enables me to pose this question and demand its necessity.
How might a conversation like the ones I received and gave as a mentee and a mentor in youth groups and college fellowships sound like through a lens of encouragement and expansion, and not control and management? Through a framework that understands love not as a force to be regulated, but to be shared through grace? An orientation that encourages people to feel sent out to live and dwell in spaces of unresolved conflict, not to proselytize out of mandate but to live freely by the gift of Christian love? An orientation modeled through material practice, not just discursive rhetoric?
I pose these questions as someone who will always be figuring them out. My calling as I understand it, my vocation to write, has brought me to academic, political, and artistic spaces outside of the church structures I grew up in that I did not feel prepared for. I am learning, too, to seek them out for the affinities, solidarities, and joyful connections they can actually bear. In some of these moments, I wonder what life might have been like if a personality like mine had not grown up in the church—though I know I would have, regardless, been ensconced in something else.
I know too that if it were not for my background, its goodness and its pains, I would not know and engage with religion the way I do—and I would not know and love God the way I do. I think the same can be said, in different ways, for many of us. No structuring of communal living will ever fully eliminate the harms humans commit against one another, and the tragedies of the world. Yet it is through understanding that Christian love is weathered love, this love that has and will see much pain and sadness, that I know something different can exist.
When I write, I think of children. The children in and beyond my communities, the children we once were, and the child I once was. The future is unknown, but we are still here, in odd, unexpected, visible, quiet places. I am still here, somehow: learning gentleness, mercy, and love.
Karis Ryu is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. Her work investigates race, religion, militarism, and power, especially how they shape subjectivities, worldbuilding, fantasy, and reality in American and global imaginations. Her current project traces the construction of Korean American Christian subjecthood as a cultural and racial imaginary. She writes fiction, essays, and poetry alongside her scholarship, and is working on a novel. After growing up as a U.S. military dependent, she earned an A.B. in History and East Asian Studies from Brown University and an M.A.R. in the History of Christianity from Yale Divinity School. Find her perusing a used bookstore, reenacting a scene from her favorite musical, or at karisryu.com.