How should Asian American Christians begin the conversation around race and racism? How should we talk about race in the church? How does our Asian-ness fit into this dialogue? Do we have hope for change?
To help answer these questions, the SOLA Network hosted a conversation with Pastor Bryan Loritts, Dr. Alexander Jun, and SOLA Editor Hannah Chao on June 4, 2020. We hope their words help bring clarity and wisdom to Christians and churches so that we can be untied by the blood of Christ and be examples of racial reconciliation to the world.
The following is a transcript of the conversation with Pastor Bryan Loritts, Dr. Alexander Jun, and SOLA Editor Hannah Chao. It has been edited for clarity and length. You can listen to the audio here.
Hannah Chao: Hello, everyone to this special SOLA video that we are having. We are hosting two amazing guests to talk about the current political and social situation in America right now. We especially feel like it’s an important conversation for Asian Americans, who are experiencing this in a bit of a different way.
As we all know, the protests around the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and more have been in all of our consciences. I know that you two have been getting a lot of questions from people asking you how to process this.
So first of all, I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us. I’d like to have the first question go to Pastor Bryan. What would you say as a Black brother in Christ to our Asian American brothers and sisters who might finally have an awakening at this moment?
Pastor Bryan Loritts: We need you. We need you with us. And as it relates to what I’m saying specifically (when I say that we need you with us), a lot of people want to jump to solutions, and I understand that. But quick solutions without lament is cheap reconciliation.
The way that you can jump in there with us and advocacy is actually through empathy. It is what the Bible talks about when it says, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” And we know the law of Christ entails loving our neighbor as ourselves.
I like to tell people that Job’s friends were at their best that first week when they just sat with them and said nothing. Just a posture of availability and humility, which you can even initiate at this time, would mean the world to us. So as my friend Soong-Chan Rah says in his book, this whole idea of prophetic lament and grieving together is the primary way we need you in this hour.
Hannah Chao: Dr. Alex, what would you say as Asian American man and a Christian to Asian Americans, who feel kind of left out of the conversation. A lot of the conversation has been either within the Black community or [within] the White community or to one another. So what would you say to those Asian Americans who are trying to listen in?
Dr. Alexander Jun: I’m going to build off of what Brian just said about empathy. For a vast majority of Asian Americans and Asian American Christians, it seems to be our response to Black pain is, “I hurt too. What about my pain? What about my suffering and what happened to my family?”
In the most generic and loving way, I say [that sentiment] is so self-centered and not others-centered. It’s not denying that you have pain, but when others are suffering [to ask], “What do we do? How do we go alongside them and hold their pain with them and join them in suffering?”
Just in the last 70 days, there has been a shift for a lot of Asian Americans — recognizing what it feels like to have your pain on display, feeling like a perpetual foreigner, being called all sorts of things related to COVID-19. [They are] feeling that burden and then recognizing that you are not alone in your pain. That sadness and that feeling of alienation is a feeling that our Black siblings have had for just as long, if not longer, if not worse. We’re not comparing pain, but I think for the first time we’re recognizing, through our own pain, how much pain has been going on and how much suffering has been going on for our Black brothers and sisters.
If I can say one other piece, the poor Asian American police officer who is complicit in his silence plays such a pivotal role in raising the consciousness for so many Asian Americans who identify with that person — feeling the complicity of silence in the midst of Black death and Black pain, siding with the dominant White majority, and wanting to fit in — and just finding ourselves in that space. So the Lord has forced us through all of these issues that have come up to address this. I’ve seen more and more Asian American Christian leaders stepping up and stepping into this and recognizing how we’ve been complicit in our silence.
Hannah Chao: A lot of Asian American churches have actually shied away from talking about race in the church. Maybe they talk about themselves being Asian American a lot, but it kind of stops it stops there.
Now, because of everything on social media and the news, they find their congregants asking them “How do we process this? What do I do?” There are so many layers to this, but how do pastors begin leading their congregations into talking and thinking about race in a biblical way?
Pastor Bryan Loritts: One of my favorite texts to dive into is Ephesians 2. All of Ephesians 2. The beauty of Ephesians 2 is that verses 1-10 deal with vertical reconciliation, where Paul talks about in the opening verses who we were prior to Christ. We were by [nature] objects, children of wrath, but God (verse 4) being rich in mercy, and then several times “by grace you have been saved.” So I love verses 1-10 — vertical reconciliation.
But for many conservative evangelicals, they act as if that’s all of Ephesians 2. Well, verse 11, Paul begins by saying therefore, and you don’t need to spend a single day in seminary to realize that the “therefore” is connecting what he’s about to say with what he’s just said. And so he moves from vertical reconciliation, now to horizontal reconciliation along ethnic lines.
And we know that because Paul says, “Now I want to speak to you Gentiles in the flesh.” So again, don’t need to spend a day in seminary to know that he’s now dealing with the issue of ethnicity. He talks about how the cross of Jesus Christ has dismantled the dividing wall of hostility. That’s a poignant image, so that now Jews and Gentiles can rush in together and worship God with one another.
Now, it’s important that you do that, especially if you’re in a conservative setting. Because if you don’t connect issues of justice, and specifically ethnic justice, to the Gospel, then you are giving your congregation permission to see this as an elective and not core curriculum. Or you’re giving them permission to see issues of ethnic justice as a buffet item where I can now a-la-carte what justice issues I get in on, which is what historically conservative evangelicals have done.
You get a lot of conservative evangelicals who fight for life inside the womb, which I think is a noble fight. But then once that baby gets outside the womb, they don’t fight just as hard. I would say to that person, you’re not pro-life, you’re actually pro-birth. What we need is pro-life individuals, as Tony Evans says, “from the womb to the tomb.” We fight for all of w
ho we are. And so I like connecting that to the gospel, where horizontal reconciliation is an indicator light of vertical reconciliation.
Dr. Alexander Jun: Scripture is clear in how we approach any sort of problem. We begin with repentance and confession. We are so quick to point out the flaws in others and we fail to see the log in our own eye. So I begin with Asian Americans who are perhaps justified if we talk about White supremacy, some of the suffering of racism in our own midst, and some of the suffering perhaps in the hands of Black neighbors and Latinx neighbors. I understand that.
But what about our complicity? What about our sin? What has been harbored in our own hearts toward Black and Brown and White brothers and sisters that we’ve never named, never confessed to?
Where we need to begin in the church of all places is repentance and confession. But you can’t repent of what you don’t recognize. Part of the challenge for us leaders is to point it out and to say, “You realize this is sin.” So we argue and discuss and we get to a point where we finally recognize that this is wrong, that the Lord recognizes this as sin. Then we can lead to repentance and confession.
We do so not by browbeating or condemning. No one ever converts through browbeating and condemning, as Scott Sauls has once said. It’s through the kindness of the Lord. For us to come back to empathy and recognize how we’ve hurt other people, how we hurt ourselves by failing to love and empathize with others, and the hatred that we’ve held, held on to for so long for certain people groups that we’ve never uttered. I think the Asian American Christian church, maybe [needs] to begin with repentance and confession.
Hannah Chao: I think that’s a really powerful thing that you say, Dr. Alex because I’m also a Korean American. So we grew up with the 1992 L.A. riots. Every time we talked to the older generation about Asian American and African American relationships, it always goes back to ’92.
It’s so interesting to me, though, that when I hear Koreans talk about the riots, we talk about Rodney King. But we never talk about the Korean store owner who shot and killed a Black girl [Latasha Harlins]. It always boggles my mind that that’s completely not there. They just think: “Rodney King, [the] cops didn’t come, they were in our stores.”
I think one of the most encouraging things for me in this season is seeing so many of my peers start to talk to their parents about Black lives matter. Some of those conversations are really difficult and haven’t gone well. But I’ve also heard stories of conversations being meaningful and powerful. And that has to start from the church, from pastors, elder boards, deacons, leaders really confessing their own sins.
Dr. Alexander Jun: I think we have to name it. We have to name [the] fear of Black bodies that’s passed on generationally from grandparents to parents. It’s part of their lived experience, I can understand that. But [we need] to address it, to say, “How did that lead to a deep-seated hatred of Black bodies?” We have not discussed it and we need to.
On the flip side, [there’s] cultural appropriation. “Oh, I love XYZ type of music and types of artists and athletes.” That’s sensationalizing, but that’s not necessarily loving and appreciating. We can love Black culture but not Black people. Reconciling that and having those conversations in our generations is something we just need to start talking about and opening.
Hannah Chao: Asian Americans tend to be more race-conscious in general just because we have either the perpetual foreigner syndrome or we have things like the Facebook group subtle Asian traits.
But how does that help or hinder you think? Or both help and hinder the conversation for Asian Americans when it comes to the bigger picture of race and race consciousness in our country in our country’s history.
Dr. Alexander Jun: The tension we have to recognize is [that] if you talk about your own racialized pain, we can be very specific as Korean Americans, or broader with East Asian Americans, and then even broader still with Asian Americans that include South Asian and other brown-skinned Asian Americans. There’s all levels of solidarity that we need to address and exclusion that we need to address. And we haven’t even got to our Black and Brown brothers and sisters. The danger is we assume it’s one or the other, and I think it’s all of it.
Can Asian Americans, and Korean Americans in particular, address some of their own issues and challenges of seeking solidarity within their own communities and also recognize the contributions of Black Americans, particularly in civil rights, how they have led, and how we benefited from a lot of the work and the sacrifice and the suffering, thankfully, at the work of African Americans? And in our own communities [can we] address anti-Blackness and colorism in Asian American communities and Asian American Christian communities? We haven’t done that yet.
This is out of turn for me to say, but I’m hoping that the same kinds of conversations are happening in Black spaces: “What about anti-Asian sentiment.” This is the challenge that I’m getting from some Asian Americans: “White people never teased me in elementary school. Black and Brown kids were the ones who did most of the teasing. I’ve got anger issues and fear issues all lumped in together. So I have a really hard time supporting some of the movement for Black and Brown justice when I actually suffered at the hands of mostly African Americans, and my parents in their stores, and all that kind of stuff.” So again getting to the root of some of that pain is going to be important.
Hannah Chao: Let’s bring it back to our churches. How do churches encourage people to start desegregating their lives and start to desegregate their thoughts? We talked about Ephesians, we talked about preaching from the pulpit, but what are some systems of thinking that can help us to really understand and process all of this happening?
Pastor Bryan Loritts: So how do we advance the ball down the field when it comes to these matters? We’re all experiencing a measure of fatigue at the cyclical nature of these things. An event will happen, there will be grief and outrage, maybe even protests, then all of a sudden, it just dies out, only to happen all over again. We’re fatigued with that, and we want to see some progress made.
One of the ways that I like to approach it is that as I look at the at the Bible, there are three institutions that God has created for what Andy Crouch calls “human flourishing.” The family is first, the government is the second, and then there’s the church. If we’re going to attack racism, both personally and systemically, all three of these institutions have to be in play.
First, it’s the family. We understand that racism is a matter of sin. We’re born into this world, David says, in Psalm 51, as sinners. But racism is a learned behavior. When it comes to the family, we have to have a more robust vision of discipleship when it comes to our kids. We don’t just disciple them along soteriological lines at the doctrine of salvation — teaching my kids to pray, have a good quiet time, and share their faith. We also have to hand them a robust anthropology. Angela Davis once said, “The opposite of racist is not not being racist, but the opposite of racist is actually being antiracist.”
It’s not good enough to say “I’m not racist.” We have to actually be very aggressive in the discipleship of our kids to cut this stuff off at the past, and that’s got to be modeled and taught in the home. I’m not just talking to White people about this or Asians about this. One of the challenges for me as a Black man is how to disciple my kids with a robust anthropology, where we tackle these issues of race without instilling bitterness and suspicion in them at the same time. That is very, very hard. But it’s something I’ve got a hand to my kids.
Secondly, is the government. Real briefly, that is pushing for legislation that’s going to attack these demonic powers that have attached themselves to systems such as the government. So one of the things in Divided by Faith that Emerson and Smith, these two White, Jesus-loving sociologists, attack is that the conservative evangelical narrative around matters of race has always been that it’s just kind of personal. It’s not just personal. It’s also profoundly systemic, and the way that we can attack that is legislatively.
So I would say to everyone marching in the streets, thank you. But if you really want to make change, register to vote and vote. Absolutely vote.
Thirdly, as a church. One of the things I’m grateful for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement is that you know because of them, as a Black man, I can sit on any seat of the bus that I want. I can drink out of any water fountain I want, sleep in any hotel that I want.
But the shortcomings of the Civil Rights Movement and the government is that while the government can change laws, it can’t change hearts. That’s where the Spirit of God and the institution of the church come into play. Because one of the promises of the New Covenant and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, God says, Here’s how I’m going to promote change. I’m going to do it from the inside out. I’m going to remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
The second thing I would say about the church is not just salvation, but discipleship into a new beloved community. Just think of the power of the George Floyds worshiping with White police officers, sitting in small groups with them. My friend Eric Mason says, “Proximity breeds empathy. Distance breeds suspicion.” So when I’m really doing life with people who don’t look like me, act like me, think like me, and vote like me, now the generalizations and the stereotypes start to fall. Now there’s empathy and understanding and love that takes its place.
Hannah Chao: When it comes to proximity, America is still so segregated, right? Redlining, housing segregation, even school districts are split because they don’t want to desegregate. But how would you try to help communities that are already segregated, like a local church that’s already segregated because its neighborhood is mostly White or mostly Asian. What would you say to those churches?
Pastor Bryan Loritts: The sociologist Dr. Korie Edwards, assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State University, is kind of our Yoda in the multiethnic church space. She’s pointed out that the latest research indicates that the average community that a church sits in is 10 times more diverse than the church. On average, the schools in that community that the church sits in are 20 times more diverse than the church. So are there exceptions to this? Absolutely. But diversity in our neighborhoods and schools is becoming more and more of the norm. So I think we might want to tweak that narrative just a little bit.
I would say, in general, that I don’t think that every church should be multiethnic. I think every church should reflect its community. The tension is more and more communities are becoming diverse, and if I want a vibrant ministry in that community, I’ve got to check the pulse of that community and engage those faces in that community.
Dr. Alexander Jun: So here is where I always get myself into trouble. I challenge the very idea of diversity and proximity. Because diversity is not enough, and diversity doesn’t solve the problem. We talk a lot about multicultural, multiethnic spaces, but many times we’re talking about window dressing. We’re counting noses and saying we have compositional diversity without actually addressing and having hard conversations. And when you talk about race with other races, they’re hard conversations.
Don’t misunderstand me: I get that we need diverse spaces and multiethnic spaces but proximity alone doesn’t help if we’re not addressing the issues. And if that’s actually the key, and I appreciate what you were saying about the different spaces, the government, the church, and the family, but if we’re not having these hard conversations with our own families, and if you’re not in a multiracial family, then everyone is monoracial. Then that’s kind of like the church in some places.
You don’t just naturally think because we have a biracial family that these conversations will happen. Just because we adopt transracial children, it doesn’t mean we’re naturally going to have these conversations. There has to be an intentionality, and the intentionality is painful and difficult.
I sometimes equate this to our conversations about lust and pornography — so difficult to talk about in the church, so difficult to talk about with family members and friends in some spaces. Because of the awkwardness of it all, we don’t want to address it. Because of the shame of it all, we don’t want to address it. I feel like race is the same thing, and racism is the same thing in our own spaces with our families that look like us. We haven’t talked about it.
Sometimes we wait to have these conversations until somebody else who doesn’t look like us joins us. But I think the danger is we just take comfort in saying, look, I have different people in my spaces in my pews. And we’re satisfied with that, but we don’t actually address race and racism.
Pastor Bryan Loritts: I could not agree more. When we talk about the multiethnic church, there’s three kinds of multiethnic churches. At the most surface is what’s been called the multicolored multiethnic church. It’s sort of like the NBA All-Star game, where people show up from different teams, they play in the event, but when the event is over, they go back to their own teams. Obviously, that’s not what we’re going for. That’s diversity without true unity or true koinonia.
The second level is actually extremely oppressive. It’s the multiethnic monocultural church. It’s where it’s multiethnic, but ethnicities are assimilating into a master culture. I think that is the most harmful kind of church that exists.
The third level is what you want to go for. It’s what’s been called the integrated multiethnic church. It’s where there’s this mutual submission of cultural preferences and norms; laying down my rights for the good of the other. That’s more of a tension to be managed than a box to be checked. But that’s what we’re really looking for.
I could not agree more with that premise that diversity is not enough. And actually, if you’ve got diversity without true koinonia, without true unity, that’s actually oppression.
Hannah Chao: As we start to wrap this up. Pastor Bryan, you already talked about the cyclical-ness of this conversation. What gives you hope, right. Do you have hope? Deep. So if you have hope, and then do you have any hopeful words for the church? Dr. Jun, why don’t why don’t you start for this one?
Dr. Alexander Jun: I’m very tempered in the way I approach this, recognizing tremendous ongoing suffering and pain in Black communities. The tinge of hope for me in every cycle that this comes up is the encouragement, ever so small, of a handful of people who have now recognized and engaged. It comes at a tremendous cost. But there are people, Asian American Christian leaders who say, “Hold on. What is going on here? I need to address this.”
They didn’t do it for Michael Brown. They didn’t do it for Trayvon Martin. They didn’t do it for, I could list the names, but for some reason, in this case, they did. Some Southern White female sisters of mine in my denomination, who had never mentioned a word on social media about “Black Lives Matter,” suddenly mentioned it with tremendous resistance from their circles. I’m like, well, something’s happening.
So I’m tempered in my response because there is a glimmer of hope in that, but I think some of us are too quick to rush to say, “Ah! This is getting better.” The temptation is to say we’re getting better and we’re not. I think we hold those two things in tension. But if it means for another handful of people, the scales have fallen off and they recognize the need to engage in this as Christians as a Gospel issue, there’s a glimmer of hope. So we take that.
Pastor Bryan Loritts: The hopeful part for me is I have never felt this much White empathy and advocacy over any other event like this than now. So that gives me incredible hope.
There’s great sociological debate as it relates to, “Can people of color, can minorities truly be racist?” You’ve got a whole side [of sociology] that connects racism with power. Let me go with that argument just for the sake of argument.
If this is a power issue, then what we’re going to really need is our White brothers and sisters who still hold the keys to power, to actually use your privilege, steward it well, and dismantle the power. It’s not just good enough to be a social media warrior. It’s not just good enough to get out in the streets a couple of times. You’re gonna have to go, “I’ve got a modicum of power. How can I use this to bring about true change?”
I was talking the other day with a group of African American leaders. One of the things we African American leaders are lamenting is that the difference between what’s happening now and in the Civil Rights Movement is that that movement was located in the church. It was led by Christians. It was led by pastors. After they got finished marching, Ralph David Abernathy, Andrew Young Martin Luther King, they’d hop on planes, they would go to Washington D.C., and they would lobby for legislative change. Who are the leaders of this movement?
So I will be far more hopeful if I see Whites using their power to bring down these systems. And we’ve got to have more leaders who are stepping into the void, lobbying for legislative changes.
Hannah Chao: There’s so much more to this conversation, and there are so many more steps to be done. But I want to thank both of you for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate the honesty and your wisdom, and I hope that we as the church, we as Asian Americans in the church, and all of us can exemplify the reconciliation that God has with us with one another. So thank you again so much for joining us.