One of the contemporary stereotypes or ideas about Asian Americans is that they’re model minorities that’s a construction that developed in the late twentieth century. HK: Rudy Busto, who works at UC Santa Barbara, wrote an important article that I read as an undergraduate about Asian-American evangelicals. In your dissertation prospectus, you talk about religion’s role in shaping the way we talk about “model minorities.” How do you see religion as affecting the development of these conversations? Why? These are the types of questions I’ve had since my time as an undergrad, and that I continued to think through when I got to HDS as a master’s student and into the PhD program. Liberation theology was an option for the poor, but a lot of people chose, even in Latin America, Pentecostalism. Of course, Marxists would say, because it’s an opiate! This was a fine answer, but seemingly limited as well, since it was hard for me to believe that the masses lacked such agency that they were duped by their religious tradition. As an undergrad, I wondered about why the marginalized are attracted to a tradition like Christianity, and, specifically, to pretty conservative forms of it, if it’s an opiate. In my advisor David Hempton’s work, he writes about the spread of eighteenth-century evangelicalism through the Methodist movement, and he talks about how evangelicalism appealed to poor people, to African-Americans, and to women. Is religion in fact an opiate? This question led me to thinking about evangelicalism in particular: the evangelical tradition is one that has appealed to the masses. It’s even related to our capitalism and religion class-“Christianity, Capitalism, and Consumerism in Colonial North America and the United States” with Catherine Brekus-and specifically how Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. HK: It’s related to some of the questions that I wrestled with as an undergraduate, which is now a long time ago for me. Was there something that originally drew you toward this project? You mentioned this has been five or so years in the making. I focus on the United States and South Korea. There are many different names for what it is my project is basically about how critical those international connections, regardless of how one frames them, were to the movement. There’s a global spread-some call this imperialism, some call it a mission. Most narratives about evangelicalism in the twentieth century frame it as a national narrative, but one of the key features of the evangelical tradition is that it is constantly reaching out to other nations. I seek to understand the rise of evangelicalism in the late twentieth century through a transnational lens. My dissertation project is a transnational religious history. Maybe even longer than that-actually, as an undergrad, some of these ideas were already formulating. Helen Kim: This is a topic I’ve been thinking about in a variety of ways since I was a master’s student, so around five or six years. Helen spoke to the journal about this dual approach to scholarship, as well as her own academic development, research strategies, and reflections on Harvard and beyond.Ĭould you give an introduction to your work and the driving questions behind what you’re doing? Her work likewise speaks to her own field, while also approaching questions that resist the limitations of specific places or times. As a doctoral student at Harvard with interests in Asian-American religion, Helen Kim has simultaneously drawn on a deep commitment to the study of evangelical Christianity at HDS and worked to establish connections with scholars who work in her developing field, or who also employ transnational historical perspectives.
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