In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Hmong refugees left Laos and fled to Thailand after the Hmong had fought as the anti-communist allies of the United States during the Lao Civil War. In Thailand, they applied for resettlement in the United States. During that process, Joint Voluntary Agency (JVA) officials completed a biographical form that asked refugees for their name, date of birth, and place of birth. They also asked a deceptively simple but more complicated question: What is your religion? For many Hmong refugees, it was a difficult question to answer. Hmong people historically had not ..read more

“Well, that was a religious experience,” my friend exhaled. We had just seen Everything Everywhere All at Once, the superhero multiverse film that all my Asian American friends had implored me to see for weeks. I knew what she meant. My heart was still racing as we tumbled out of the movie theater into the twinkling dusk. Kendall Square—a cluster of developments in Cambridge that I usually found deadening with their modern glass-and-steel façades—shimmered, almost enchanted. The boundary between myself and those around me felt oddly permeable. I am told this is what taking hallucinogens feels ..read more

Centering the study of American religion with a focus on Asian Americans would complicate a number of well-worn framings with which many scholars are familiar. In this brief essay I explicate how Asian Americans and their religions complicate three of these: the Black-white binary narrative in the study of American Christianity, the Christian-secular binary narrative of American religion, and the “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” narrative of American religion. Recent insights from the sociology of religion and the sociology of race allow us to reconsider earlier theories of “the religious factor” and ..read more

Thenmozhi Soundararajan describes caste as secretive. “So much is hidden. So much is unspoken,” she writes in The Trauma of Caste. “There is so much shame, secrecy, complicity. It is taboo held in place by ignorance and violence.” Caste originated in India as a system of organizing people based on birth and hereditary position. As such, it is a category of power, similar to race, gender, class, and religion. Through religion, caste engages with ideas rooted in race as well as class and gender to disempower in ways that range from ridicule to exclusion. But seeing how caste operates as a catego ..read more

About ten years ago, I started to research the early history of yoga in the United States. The conventional wisdom of scholars over the last several decades has held that yoga became popular in America after the liberalization of immigration laws and the rise of countercultural spiritual seekers in the 1960s; before then, there was little yoga to speak of save for a handful of key figures like Yogananda and Swami Vivekananda. As I began to search through historical newspapers of the interwar decades, however, I came across an abundance of display advertisement for yogis, swamis, rishis, and ma ..read more

On September 10, 2022, a group of Mariamman devotees gathered at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Van Siclen Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. Although observing rituals on the street by their mandir (temple) in Brooklyn is common, that day they gathered for another purpose: to celebrate the co-naming of a section of Van Siclen Avenue to Pujari Basdeo Mangal Way. Pujari Basdeo Mangal, who passed in 2016, helped to establish in New York City Mariamman or Kali Mai worship, also known as the Madrassi tradition, within Guyanese or Caribbean Hinduism. The co-naming is a testament to Pujari Basdeo Mang ..read more

In the prologue of Heathen: Religion and Race in American History, Kathryn Gim Lum critically reflects that as a child, she felt a combined sense of luck and guilt about being born into a Christianized Chinese American family rather than “somewhere in the middle of heathen China, waiting to be rescued from my superstitious ways.” Lum’s personal experience highlights how the notion of the “heathen other” is still alive in contemporary American society. Moreover, she illustrates the profound ways this particular conceptualization of religious difference—as non-Christian, superstitious, damned, a ..read more

As a Vietnamese American Muslim engaged in the work of constructive Muslim theology, religion and race are a throughline of my critical inquiry. The present exploration, however, does not take as its starting point a focused exposition on either. Rather, I am approaching religion and race from another vantage: story. I am interested in what stories can disclose and animate. Moreover, the disciplinary lens I employ is that of theology. I understand theology as intimately bound to story, specifically the stories of our lives. If revelation is God’s disclosure to humankind, then theology can be i ..read more

There is no doubt that religion and race constitute potent forces in US politics. It is nearly impossible to imagine an election cycle absent attention to white evangelical voters. Wrenching our attention from the white Christian nationalism that fueled the rise of Donald Trump, the subsequent appointment of conservative Supreme Court justices and conservative assaults on reproductive and racial justice across the nation can be difficult. But expanding our lens beyond the white evangelicals that dominate headlines reveals more complex ways in which race and religion interact to shape political ..read more

Uchimura Kanzō wanted Americans to be more nuanced. A Japanese convert to Christianity, he came to the United States in his twenties, where he found himself scrutinized by Americans curious to see what conversion could do to former “heathens.” “There are some people who seem to imagine that the cause of Missions can be upheld only by picturing the darkness of heathens in contrast with the light of Christians,” he complained. “So they make a diagram showing heathens by jet-black squares, and Protestant Christians by white squares.” In a remarkable diary published in New York City in 1895, Uchim ..read more