本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛"On Faith" appears the first Sunday of each month.
Isaac Chung and Richard Harvell both can trace their young careers to spiritual journeys they made while they were roommates at Yale University.
Chung, who is Korean American, started down a new path when he joined Yale's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. By the time he graduated, he felt that God was calling him to drop his plans to study medicine and instead become a Christian witness in the entertainment industry. Now 24, he is attending film school in Salt Lake City.
Harvell, who is white, sought fulfillment in Buddhism and other religions native to Asia. He had intended to become a physics professor but instead took two years off from college to backpack through Europe and "figure out who I was." He ended up in Switzerland, spending much of his time with a group of Zen Buddhists, and, at 24, he has returned there to teach public school.
In a religious sense, Chung and Harvell traded places, each one embracing the faith of the other's forebears. But neither of them noticed the irony because so many other Asian and white students at Yale were doing the very same thing. Indeed, the 120-member Christian fellowship to which Chung belonged was about 85 percent Asian, while the Buddhist meditation meetings at Yale were almost entirely white.
Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.
At many colleges, the influx of Asian American students has given Christian organizations a much bigger presence on campus. Even at liberal schools such as Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago, better known as vanguards for gay studies and deconstructionism than for evangelical crusades, weekly meetings of Christian fellowships are drawing hundreds of Asian students.
"Even Asians are surprised at how many Asians there are in Christian circles," said Chin-ho Chang, a senior at Columbia University and a leader of its chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, one of several large fellowships on the campus. A dozen years ago, the Columbia chapter drew about 15 students, most of them white. Now it has 130 students who have split into two groups -- a branch that is entirely Korean American and a multiracial branch that is 85 percent Asian, Chang said.
Because of this phenomenon, the professional world soon will be absorbing waves of highly educated Asian Americans who are evangelical and poised to exert influence in their fields, researchers say.
"I think they are going to be very significant," said R. Stephen Warner, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As these Asians become professionals, he added, "they won't necessarily wear their religion on their sleeves. But they will be . . . religiously motivated, although being a racial minority might temper the otherwise conservative implications of their religion."
The white college students who explore Eastern religions are pursuing an activity that is not likely to be as transforming, scholars say. Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia, said he finds that such students want to experience something spiritual but are not interested in making a commitment to a religion or a lot of rituals.
"There is a whole lot of people when they hit that youth age, they will get into exploring Buddhism and New Age," Thurman said. "But one thing I see is that once they sit in my class and learn there's a history and there were conflicts between monks, they resist that. They don't want the history of the religion or the reality of the religion as it is on the ground in Asia."
More than half the 30 students in the Buddhist Community at Stanford are white. "It's kind of seen as being hip to be Buddhist," said David Yin, the group's co-chair. "For white students, you are doing something different."
Both campus trends have roots in the 1950s and '60s. At the time, white college students, mostly those from privileged backgrounds, were becoming disillusioned with Western religion and began to look at Eastern faiths. That interest has since expanded into meditation groups, yoga and other popular New Age trends.
The Asian American students flocking to Christian clubs are mostly the children of immigrants who were able to come to the United States after its immigration laws were relaxed in 1965. Some of those immigrants were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries working in Asia, while others joined vibrant ethnic churches after arriving here. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, their children began reaching college age.
Once on campus, the children searched for what was familiar to them. And in Christian fellowships, they found affirmation for their religion and ethnic identity, said Peter Cha, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
But the faith they have developed in college sometimes conflicts with the expectations of their parents, who immigrated to this country hoping their children would obtain a top-notch education and a prestigious career.
Rachel Lei of Falls Church said she has always been a high achiever, from her years at Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology to her biology studies at Johns Hopkins University. But after becoming heavily involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, she is strongly considering going to seminary.
She says that although her family has accepted her career direction, "my parents have had some questions about whether InterVarsity is a good place for me."
Even Asian Christians whose career plans did not change say their religious experiences in college have profoundly influenced them.
Liza Ching, who lives in Arlington and works for the State Department, said her involvement in a 100-member Asian fellowship at Harvard helped her understand God's call on her life. Now training to be a Foreign Service officer, she hopes to make an "impact for Christ" in her field.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of several national evangelical groups, has chapters at 560 colleges. In the last two decades, the number of Asian Americans in the group has increased by nearly 500 percent, from 693 to 4,101.
At colleges in the Washington-Baltimore region, hundreds of Asian students belong to campus evangelical organizations, usually to new Asian-sponsored groups rather than long-established national fellowships.
Grace Life Church at Johns Hopkins, for instance, began in 1997 with about 20 Asian students and now has about 75 members. For most members, Grace Life is the major activity outside of classes, as they spend nearly all their free time in Sunday services, prayer sessions, small-group Bible studies, weekly organizational meetings and, at times, evangelical campaigns on the campus.
Some white college chaplains say Asian Americans in campus Christian groups tend to be more intense in their faith than their white counterparts.
A recent Friday night gathering of Grace Life Church lasted four hours, ending just before midnight. It began with 40 minutes of singing led by Janet Lee, an Asian American who graduated from Johns Hopkins two years ago. With a microphone set strapped on her head and both arms raised high, Lee belted out: "Blessed be the name of the Lord. . . ." Two backup singers, three guitars, a synthesizer and a six-piece drum set accompanied her, filling the small lecture room with rock.
Many students wandered in late in sweats and T-shirts, bowing under the weight of enormous backpacks. They quickly became caught up in the music, singing along and clapping at first, then lifting their hands in worship.
Some Asian American religious activists say other students often mock or frown upon their evangelical outreach. Tony Tran, a senior at Johns Hopkins who belongs to Grace Life and converted last year from Buddhism to Christianity, said classmates have criticized him for joining such an intense movement.
Their comments "really hurt a lot," Tran said. But being among so many other Asians provides some comfort, he added. "They affirm my identity," he said.
Asian students who have broken away from multiracial Christian organizations to form their own groups say they did so to address issues special to Asian Americans, such as the pressure of living under the high academic expectations of immigrant parents. Some also say that their overwhelming majority in nationally sponsored Christian clubs was making white members uncomfortable.
Buddhist meditation groups, which tend to be much smaller, rarely stir controversy on campuses, and many require little from their members other than to gather a few times each semester in a room and, literally, sit still for about 30 minutes.
Matthew Lammens, a senior at Columbia who leads biweekly meditation sessions there and describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, says most of the dozen or so students who attend the meetings would not formally identify themselves as Buddhist.
Both white and Asian students are breaking long-held stereotypes about race and religion, says Warner, the sociology professor. "It'll come to the point where Buddhism won't be an Asian thing anymore and Christianity won't be a white thing," he said. "You will look at somebody and you won't be able to tell what religion they belong to."更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net
Isaac Chung and Richard Harvell both can trace their young careers to spiritual journeys they made while they were roommates at Yale University.
Chung, who is Korean American, started down a new path when he joined Yale's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. By the time he graduated, he felt that God was calling him to drop his plans to study medicine and instead become a Christian witness in the entertainment industry. Now 24, he is attending film school in Salt Lake City.
Harvell, who is white, sought fulfillment in Buddhism and other religions native to Asia. He had intended to become a physics professor but instead took two years off from college to backpack through Europe and "figure out who I was." He ended up in Switzerland, spending much of his time with a group of Zen Buddhists, and, at 24, he has returned there to teach public school.
In a religious sense, Chung and Harvell traded places, each one embracing the faith of the other's forebears. But neither of them noticed the irony because so many other Asian and white students at Yale were doing the very same thing. Indeed, the 120-member Christian fellowship to which Chung belonged was about 85 percent Asian, while the Buddhist meditation meetings at Yale were almost entirely white.
Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.
At many colleges, the influx of Asian American students has given Christian organizations a much bigger presence on campus. Even at liberal schools such as Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago, better known as vanguards for gay studies and deconstructionism than for evangelical crusades, weekly meetings of Christian fellowships are drawing hundreds of Asian students.
"Even Asians are surprised at how many Asians there are in Christian circles," said Chin-ho Chang, a senior at Columbia University and a leader of its chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, one of several large fellowships on the campus. A dozen years ago, the Columbia chapter drew about 15 students, most of them white. Now it has 130 students who have split into two groups -- a branch that is entirely Korean American and a multiracial branch that is 85 percent Asian, Chang said.
Because of this phenomenon, the professional world soon will be absorbing waves of highly educated Asian Americans who are evangelical and poised to exert influence in their fields, researchers say.
"I think they are going to be very significant," said R. Stephen Warner, a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As these Asians become professionals, he added, "they won't necessarily wear their religion on their sleeves. But they will be . . . religiously motivated, although being a racial minority might temper the otherwise conservative implications of their religion."
The white college students who explore Eastern religions are pursuing an activity that is not likely to be as transforming, scholars say. Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies at Columbia, said he finds that such students want to experience something spiritual but are not interested in making a commitment to a religion or a lot of rituals.
"There is a whole lot of people when they hit that youth age, they will get into exploring Buddhism and New Age," Thurman said. "But one thing I see is that once they sit in my class and learn there's a history and there were conflicts between monks, they resist that. They don't want the history of the religion or the reality of the religion as it is on the ground in Asia."
More than half the 30 students in the Buddhist Community at Stanford are white. "It's kind of seen as being hip to be Buddhist," said David Yin, the group's co-chair. "For white students, you are doing something different."
Both campus trends have roots in the 1950s and '60s. At the time, white college students, mostly those from privileged backgrounds, were becoming disillusioned with Western religion and began to look at Eastern faiths. That interest has since expanded into meditation groups, yoga and other popular New Age trends.
The Asian American students flocking to Christian clubs are mostly the children of immigrants who were able to come to the United States after its immigration laws were relaxed in 1965. Some of those immigrants were converted to Christianity by Western missionaries working in Asia, while others joined vibrant ethnic churches after arriving here. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, their children began reaching college age.
Once on campus, the children searched for what was familiar to them. And in Christian fellowships, they found affirmation for their religion and ethnic identity, said Peter Cha, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.
But the faith they have developed in college sometimes conflicts with the expectations of their parents, who immigrated to this country hoping their children would obtain a top-notch education and a prestigious career.
Rachel Lei of Falls Church said she has always been a high achiever, from her years at Fairfax County's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology to her biology studies at Johns Hopkins University. But after becoming heavily involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at Johns Hopkins, she is strongly considering going to seminary.
She says that although her family has accepted her career direction, "my parents have had some questions about whether InterVarsity is a good place for me."
Even Asian Christians whose career plans did not change say their religious experiences in college have profoundly influenced them.
Liza Ching, who lives in Arlington and works for the State Department, said her involvement in a 100-member Asian fellowship at Harvard helped her understand God's call on her life. Now training to be a Foreign Service officer, she hopes to make an "impact for Christ" in her field.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, one of several national evangelical groups, has chapters at 560 colleges. In the last two decades, the number of Asian Americans in the group has increased by nearly 500 percent, from 693 to 4,101.
At colleges in the Washington-Baltimore region, hundreds of Asian students belong to campus evangelical organizations, usually to new Asian-sponsored groups rather than long-established national fellowships.
Grace Life Church at Johns Hopkins, for instance, began in 1997 with about 20 Asian students and now has about 75 members. For most members, Grace Life is the major activity outside of classes, as they spend nearly all their free time in Sunday services, prayer sessions, small-group Bible studies, weekly organizational meetings and, at times, evangelical campaigns on the campus.
Some white college chaplains say Asian Americans in campus Christian groups tend to be more intense in their faith than their white counterparts.
A recent Friday night gathering of Grace Life Church lasted four hours, ending just before midnight. It began with 40 minutes of singing led by Janet Lee, an Asian American who graduated from Johns Hopkins two years ago. With a microphone set strapped on her head and both arms raised high, Lee belted out: "Blessed be the name of the Lord. . . ." Two backup singers, three guitars, a synthesizer and a six-piece drum set accompanied her, filling the small lecture room with rock.
Many students wandered in late in sweats and T-shirts, bowing under the weight of enormous backpacks. They quickly became caught up in the music, singing along and clapping at first, then lifting their hands in worship.
Some Asian American religious activists say other students often mock or frown upon their evangelical outreach. Tony Tran, a senior at Johns Hopkins who belongs to Grace Life and converted last year from Buddhism to Christianity, said classmates have criticized him for joining such an intense movement.
Their comments "really hurt a lot," Tran said. But being among so many other Asians provides some comfort, he added. "They affirm my identity," he said.
Asian students who have broken away from multiracial Christian organizations to form their own groups say they did so to address issues special to Asian Americans, such as the pressure of living under the high academic expectations of immigrant parents. Some also say that their overwhelming majority in nationally sponsored Christian clubs was making white members uncomfortable.
Buddhist meditation groups, which tend to be much smaller, rarely stir controversy on campuses, and many require little from their members other than to gather a few times each semester in a room and, literally, sit still for about 30 minutes.
Matthew Lammens, a senior at Columbia who leads biweekly meditation sessions there and describes himself as a lapsed Catholic, says most of the dozen or so students who attend the meetings would not formally identify themselves as Buddhist.
Both white and Asian students are breaking long-held stereotypes about race and religion, says Warner, the sociology professor. "It'll come to the point where Buddhism won't be an Asian thing anymore and Christianity won't be a white thing," he said. "You will look at somebody and you won't be able to tell what religion they belong to."更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net