• Latest
  • Trending
man wears mask

Possessed by Legion: Anti-Asian Hate and Christian Nationalism

January 29, 2021
Twitter user posted image of Jesus sitting next to Donald Trump in court

Trump Shares Fake Courtroom Sketch of Himself and White Jesus; Users Respond With ‘Fixed’ Versions of Satan, Black Jesus

October 3, 2023
iraq wedding fire

Wedding Fire That Killed More Than 100 in Iraqi Christian Community Prompts Letter From Pope

October 2, 2023
Pastor Albert Tate has been placed on a leave of absence by his church board for inappropriate text messages and questionable comments

Fellowship Monrovia Church Puts Pastor Albert Tate on Leave Over ‘Inappropriate’ Text Messages

October 2, 2023
Marla Frederick

Religion Scholar Marla Frederick Is First Black Woman to Lead Harvard Divinity School in 200 Years

September 30, 2023
faith leaders

‘God Will Work a Miracle’ — Thousands of Foreign-Born Faith Leaders Could Be Forced to Leave US

September 30, 2023
teacher classroom students

What Black Teachers Face Today Isn’t Much Different From What They Faced During Segregation

September 29, 2023
woman on mic

Professor Charrise Barron Talks Teaching Protest Music’s Evolution From Gospel to Hip-Hop

September 28, 2023
Julie Chen Moonves

‘Big Brother’ Host Julie Chen Moonves Tells How She ‘Found Jesus’

September 27, 2023
Asian Americans

Fear of Ridicule, Desire to Fit In Prompt Some Asian Americans to Partly Hide Heritage

September 27, 2023
laptop

Evangelical Organization Launches ‘Racial Justice Assessment’ Tool

September 27, 2023
megachurches

Are New Jersey’s Megachurches the Answer to the Crisis of Christianity?

September 27, 2023
Christian rapper Dee-1

Rapper Dee-1 Starts Artist/Scholar Residency at Tufts University After Nabbing Nasir Jones Fellowship at Harvard

September 26, 2023
Faithfully Magazine
  • Members
    • Log In
    • Member Home
    • See All Members
    • What’s New
    • Start or Join a Group
    • Your Freebies
Subscribe
No Result
View All Result
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Contact Us
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • NJ News
  • Listen & Watch
  • Shop
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • Clothing
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • Newsletter
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Contact Us
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Exclusives
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • NJ News
  • Listen & Watch
  • Shop
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • Clothing
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • Newsletter
No Result
View All Result
Faithfully Magazine
Home Uncategorized

Possessed by Legion: Anti-Asian Hate and Christian Nationalism

FM Editors by FM Editors
January 29, 2021
in Uncategorized
Reading Time: 7 mins read
0
man wears mask

Thousands of hate crimes against Asian Americans have been recorded since the COVID-19 outbreak began in the U.S. (Photo: Daniel Arauz, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

131
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

By Lucas Kwong and Russell Jeung

“We don’t want Chinese bullsh*t,” a woman declared as a fellow rioter ripped a scroll down from Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley’s Capitol office wall.

Among the scenes of insurrectionists bearing crosses and Confederate flags as they shouted racial epithets and profanities such as the one above, Asian American Christians like ourselves noticed another awkward, embarrassing, and paradoxical truth.

Supporters of White Christian Nationalism were not all White.

RelatedArticles

Hyepin Im, founder and president of Faith and Community Empowerment

Hyepin Im, Gabriel Salguero, and Al Sharpton Tapped to Advise on Faith-Based Threats

October 5, 2022
anti war protest

Dying in Combat ‘Washes Away Sins,’ Russian Orthodox Leader Says

October 1, 2022

While those who might list “Anglo Saxon” or “Nordic” in their Parler profiles formed the majority, the mob included hoisters of Korean, South Vietnamese and Khmer flags, not to mention the iconic walis tambo Filipino broom. Fascists, it seems, have their own version of Asian representation.

Twice as many Asian Americans favored Biden as favored Trump, while their Georgia election turnout helped swing the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. Still, we cannot ignore the fact that Asian Americans of both older and younger generations have cast their lot with Christian nationalism.

Asian American Christians, in particular, are vulnerable to the combination of biblical interpretations, anti-Communist propaganda, and “family values” motivating Christian nationalists. For those Vietnamese, Khmer, Korean, and Filipino Trumpists who marched on January 6, the scroll destroyers were likely the lesser of two evils, if not positively good. Meanwhile, in interviews with pro-Trump Asian American pastors, less violent supporters of Christian nationalism cite abortion, Israel, and national sovereignty as justification for their Trumpism.

As we have written elsewhere, the right today hosts a virulent brand of Christian nationalism—a fervor for America as God’s chosen nation—that at least half of surveyed Americans support. The insistence that America return to traditional hierarchies to reap divinely ordained blessings translates into fear of the other and support for strong boundaries.

Consequently, Christian nationalism is the best predictor for political support of the border wall, ”Blue Lives Matter,” and, most recently, use of terms like “Chinese virus.”

The politicians who incite this hate speech, and the corollary explosion in anti-Asian hate, are all outspoken Christians. Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley cast themselves as holy warriors in an existential conflict with “godless Communist China,” with the passive (sometimes active) support of their churches.

Why are so many Asian American Christians willing to not just tolerate sanctified Sinophobia, but actively propagate the Christian nationalism underpinning it?

When in doubt, Evangelicals turn to the Bible. In that spirit, the fifth chapter of Mark’s Gospel offers a way for us to interpret Asian American support for Christian nationalism. Mark 5 details Jesus’ encounter with a demonized man in the Gerasenes, a region of the Greek league of cities known as the Decapolis. Chained “among the tombs,” where he cuts himself and frequently breaks loose from his shackles, the Gerasene man is shunned as one cursed with an incurable spiritual affliction.

The townspeople’s ostracism of the demonized tomb dweller, in other words, accords with the racial profiling of Asian American bodies during COVID-19. In an incident that a warehouse retailer reported to Stop AAPI Hate, a Chinese American said:

“When I was shopping, a group of [W]hite males in their 30s started giving me dirty looks and following me around the store. They started shouting abuse at me saying things like ‘Get out of this store now, you filthy, slant-eyed chinky!’ [One] threw a tin of potatoes at my head with quite a lot of force and shouted, ‘If I ever see you around again—you diseased creature—I will personally shoot you with my AR-15!”

Viewed as subhuman, diseased, and cursed like the man in the Gerasenes, Asian Americans are to be excluded, not only from American stores but also from our borders. They threaten and defile America’s purity and health.

Despite his marginal status, the Gerasene man is consumed by violent power, habitually breaking out of the chains to which he always returns. This spirit ultimately drives him to self-destructive behavior, such that even his superhuman virility cannot liberate him from literal and figurative imprisonment. What kind of spirit is this, that strips the man of social power while offering the temptation of material strength?

The famous answer comes in verse 9, when Jesus forces the man to declare, “My name is Legion; for we are many.”

Legion, we suggest, is a spirit of empire. Like those held captive in Babylon or colonized by Rome, many of us are possessed with an idolatry of American wealth and power, that is, an obsession with the (Asian) American Dream.

Asian American Christian nationalists—often having fled chaotic, war-torn states—seek law-and-order regimes where our ambitions can be achieved through meritocratic effort and our safety be secured through military and police power. We hold to the Bible as the scriptural authority in our spiritual lives, and we hold to the American empire to protect our material well-being.

Thus, we can then be the model minority, both in our rigorous, pietistic Christianity and in our White-adjacent position in a land of privilege.

As we contemplate Asian American complicity with Christian nationalism, we might press this interpretation of Legion possession further. The Legion commanders, like other servants of the Roman establishment, carried the sign of a bundle of rods, wrapped around an axe. This sign was called the fasces, the root term of “fascism” and “Christofascism,” Christian nationalists’ ultimate endpoint.

It might be ahistorical to say that Mark 5 documents Jesus exorcising the spirit of fascism. However, we can say that this demonized man—who was likely Greek, if not a Greek Jew—was possessed by the spirit of the fasces, the animating force behind his Roman conquerors.

What is this demon if not the same spirit that fuels Asian American Christian nationalists, a movement that infuses its followers with deceptive feelings of strength, inspires self-destructive enthusiasm for one’s own colonizers and exploiters, and fearfully calls on Jesus for self-preservation? Indeed, the Gerasene man even calls Jesus “Son of the Most High God,” not out of reverence, but out of fear that the spirit of strength and Pax Romana will be dislodged.

The Gerasene demoniac reminds us that Sanctified Sinophobia not only incites physical harm to our communities through anti-Asian violence, but also threatens to “infect” our psychology with internalized racism and a devaluing of justice. We are captive to the empire: adopting its educational system, eating its rich foods, and even changing our names to fit in. Those of us who have succeeded in the empire look down on those who haven’t done as well, blaming them for their own poverty and misfortunes.

The Gerasene demoniac’s self-injury and flagrant violence merely shows us the extremes of this psychological infection. Conversely, Jesus’ politically charged exorcism shows us the lengths to which we must be prepared to go to undo it.

In that light, we are calling for Christians to support our open letter condemning the nexus of far right politics, institutional American Christianity, and anti-Asian racism today. While it is intended to be signed by allies of any background, it is written in the voice of Asian followers of Christ in America.

We side with Jesus the exorcist because we reject not only the spirit of Legion, but also the other collective spirit in Mark 5: that of the “respectable” townspeople who beg Jesus to leave their region. Surveying the damage done to their economy and comfort, the townspeople considered a reprisal of the demoniac’s liberation too costly to tolerate. In a way, they were the “model minorities” of their own time, emphasizing orderly self-policing under Rome’s watchful eye.

We Asian Americans have come too far to settle for the Gerasene townspeople’s example. Instead, let us joyfully model ourselves after the liberated man himself, who subsequently risks further ostracization by becoming what N.T. Wright calls “the first apostle to the Gentiles.” Just as he built bridges between his Greek neighbors and the Palestinian Jew they sent away, we must also proclaim the good news that can demolish the border walls between out-group and in-group, Jew and Greek, Asian and American.


Dr. Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, and assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology. He’s written at eschatontwist.substack.com, The Institute for Christian Socialism’s Bias Magazine, Inheritance Magazine, Public Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Victorian Literature and Culture. He is also assistant editor for New American Notes Online. He and his wife are diehard New Yorkers.

Dr. Russell Jeung is author of At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among My Ancestors and Refugee Neighbors. He’s co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, a center that tracks COVID-19 discrimination and proposes policy interventions.

Leave your vote

0 Points
Upvote

Browse and manage your votes from your Member Profile Page


Share This Post

Share via

Share This Post

  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
More
  • Report
Advertisement
Ancestry US
131
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It
FM Editors

FM Editors

Faithfully Magazine is a fresh, bold and exciting news and culture publication that covers issues, conversations and events impacting Christian communities of color.

More Articles

Palestine
Uncategorized

Opinion: The Irony of Palestinians’ Desire for an ‘Historic Palestine’

May 17, 2018
Vaudeville star Bert Williams in blackface
Opinion & Analysis

What Is Blackface and Why Is Blackface Offensive?

February 6, 2019
Multicultural Church
Churches

Why Multicultural Churches Fail

October 24, 2019

Discussion about this post

Upcoming Events

Oct 5
1:00 pm - 6:00 pm EDT

Event: Black Religion and Critical Theory Colloquium

Oct 10
7:00 am - 11:30 pm EDT

Event: Free Virtual Church Mental Health Summit

View Calendar

Trending

  • Trending
  • Comments
  • Latest
Tony Evans and Carla Crummie engaged to be married

Dr. Tony Evans Engaged to Former Pastor’s Wife and Widow Four Years After Lois Evans’ Death

September 12, 2023
Pastor Albert Tate has been placed on a leave of absence by his church board for inappropriate text messages and questionable comments

Fellowship Monrovia Church Puts Pastor Albert Tate on Leave Over ‘Inappropriate’ Text Messages

October 2, 2023
faith leaders

‘God Will Work a Miracle’ — Thousands of Foreign-Born Faith Leaders Could Be Forced to Leave US

September 30, 2023
Jemar Tisby Color of Compromise

‘Color of Compromise’ Author Jemar Tisby Comments on Quitting Kendi’s Antiracism Center Amid Probe

September 23, 2023
Marla Frederick

Religion Scholar Marla Frederick Is First Black Woman to Lead Harvard Divinity School in 200 Years

September 30, 2023
Christian Cultural Center

5 Largest Churches in New York City

May 29, 2018
Twitter user posted image of Jesus sitting next to Donald Trump in court

Trump Shares Fake Courtroom Sketch of Him and White Jesus; Users Respond With ‘Fixed’ Versions of Satan, Black Jesus

October 3, 2023
iraq wedding fire

Wedding Fire That Killed More Than 100 in Iraqi Christian Community Prompts Letter From Pope

October 2, 2023
Pastor Albert Tate has been placed on a leave of absence by his church board for inappropriate text messages and questionable comments

Fellowship Monrovia Church Puts Pastor Albert Tate on Leave Over ‘Inappropriate’ Text Messages

October 2, 2023
Marla Frederick

Religion Scholar Marla Frederick Is First Black Woman to Lead Harvard Divinity School in 200 Years

September 30, 2023
faith leaders

‘God Will Work a Miracle’ — Thousands of Foreign-Born Faith Leaders Could Be Forced to Leave US

September 30, 2023
teacher classroom students

What Black Teachers Face Today Isn’t Much Different From What They Faced During Segregation

September 29, 2023

Most Shared Articles

  • Can Money-Making Microgrids Empower Black Churches to Close the Clean Energy Gap?...
  • Dr. Tony Evans Engaged to Former Pastor’s Wife and Widow Four Years After Lois Evans’ Death...
  • Kirk Franklin Finally Finds His Birth Father After 53 Years...
  • Christians Plea for Prayer, Help Amid Haiti’s Surging Gang Violence...
  • ‘Color of Compromise’ Author Jemar Tisby Comments on Quitting Kendi’s Antiracism C...
  • New and Upcoming Books: ‘Sacred Self-Care,’ ‘Unwind,’ ‘Damaged But Not...

From The Archive

Evangelical pastor Paula White and several other Christian leaders pray for President-elect Donald Trump in this screengrab from a Sept. 2015 YouTube video
Uncategorized

Pro-Trump Pastor: Porn Star Affair ‘Totally Irrelevant’

by FM Editors
March 10, 2018
Pastor Jean Pierre Ferrer Michel.
Clippings

This American Pastor Was Abducted in Haiti Weeks Ago, But No One’s Really Talking About It

by FM Editors
October 24, 2021
Dana Chanel and husband Prince Donnell
Clippings

Sprinkle of Jesus Founder Dana Chanel Accused of Scamming Black Business Owners

by FM Editors
November 5, 2021
community
Health

How Living in Community With Others Can Improve Our Health

by Shawn McClendon
July 27, 2019
phone call
Clippings

Pastor Who Spoke With ‘Facebook Killer’ Vows to Keep Conversation Private

by FM Editors
April 19, 2017

Who’s Online

There are no users currently online
Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram
Faithfully Magazine

Faithfully Magazine is a news and culture publication centered on Christian communities of color.

Recent News

  • Trump Shares Fake Courtroom Sketch of Himself and White Jesus; Users Respond With ‘Fixed’ Versions of Satan, Black Jesus

Category

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

  • From The Magazine
  • Inspiration
  • News
  • Opinion & Analysis
  • Profiled
  • Q&As
  • Remember
  • Specials
  • New Jersey
  • Listen & Watch
  • Web Exclusives
  • Shop
    • Clothing
    • Faith Heroes Bookmarks
    • eBooks
  • Events
    • FM Live Events
    • Community Events
  • Resources
    • Black Christian Content
  • About Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Submit Content
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Members
    • Log In
    • Your Freebies
  • Subscribe to Faithfully Magazine
  • Newsletter
No Result
View All Result

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms bellow to register

*By registering on our website, you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Share via

Share This Post

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Copy Link
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Flipboard
  • SMS

Add New Playlist

Log In

Sign In

Login with Facebook
Login with Twitter
Forgot password?

Don't have an account? Register

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Back to Login

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Accept

Add to Collection

  • Public collection title

  • Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.
Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?
Send this to a friend