Innovating Church, Accidentally: (Digital) Presence and Processes toward Formation for Progressive Asian American Christians

In 2016, the Progressive Asian American Christians (PAAC) group was created by Lydia Shiu who was a pastor in San Francisco at the time. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) and now a pastor of Reservoir Church in Boston, MA, Shiu describes how questions about her identity as Christian, as Asian American, as socially and politically progressive kept her up one night. She explains: “I was just scouring Facebook at night, looking for progressive or like evangelical things, like ex-evangelicals. And I searched ‘progressive Asian American Christian.’ Nothing came up. So I was like I'll just start a page or something. Yeah, at first it was a page, and then I turned it into a group.” 

During the time of the creation of the Facebook group, a writer and educator just outside San Francisco named Liz Lin was working on a piece about how lonely it is to be a progressive Asian American Christian. In September 2016, Shiu and Lin had a fortuitous meeting in which they shared their common questions and struggles. Lin posted her piece on a progressive Christian blog called The Salt Collective on December 22, 2016, and put a link to the Facebook group at the end of her piece for other like-minded folks to find it. Within 24 hours, 300 people had joined the Facebook group; in less than three weeks, the group had 1000 members.

Its current organizational statement reads: “Progressive Asian American Christians, or PAAC for short, is a community for socially, politically, and theologically progressive Asian American and Asian diaspora Christians (of East, Southeast, South, and West Asian descent, as well as Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, and mixed-race individuals) to support each other and discuss faith, identity, and current events. It is an LGBT-affirming, feminist, justice-oriented, anti-racist, pro-immigrant space that holds a wide range of theologies.” The PAAC Facebook group has 7.1k+ members from all over the country and the world. It is a heavily moderated group whose facilitators see themselves as advocates for a conversation that endeavors to be open but intentional, and most of all, prioritizes the safety of all its members, especially those who see themselves as vulnerable and marginalized for other identities. 

At first glance, PAAC seems like any other new Christian community during this age of digital technologies. However, the relationship between race and religion for Asians in the U.S. diaspora materializes as a particular mode of resistance rooted in notions of citizenship and freedom, indeed, for participants of PAAC. Here, I theorize the ways in which this group of Asian American Christians as specifically “progressive” is an example of formation and transformation through their adversarial position in relationship to Asian American religious identities that are conservative and evangelical Protestant. 

I offer a textual analysis of their digital presence—their Facebook group, website, online magazine, podcasts, and news media, and supplement this with ethnographic research in the form of materials from IRB-approved interviews with key participants including leadership and “lay” members in the community. In this analysis I highlight the following themes: a spiritual homelessness, the theo-political language of affirmation, the inverted identity of religious-but-not-spiritual, and the significance of the formation of a (digital) sanctuary movement.  

I follow Travis Cooper’s strategies of analyzing “communicative narratives” by employing close readings that trace similar themes throughout these works—“co-texts” and “inter-texts”—within each group. Methodologically, I take a broadly textual ethnographic approach to this exploration. I consider their digital presence—their Facebook groups, websites, online magazines, and materials from (IRB-approved) interviews I conducted with members and participants. I use Cooper’s framework of legitimation as a social process: “the process by which certain procedures, activities, ways of being, knowledges and beliefs, or identities come to be taken as valid,” and how for “inchoate religious groups … must strive for legitimacy from at least “some portion of already established Christian structures in order to grow and persist.” [1] We see varying degrees of disenchantment with the larger culture of which they are a part (conservative, and particularly evangelical, Christianity, or mainline white Christianity including Protestant and Catholicism) resulting in projects of cultural critique towards legitimizing their group’s beliefs and practices. As they engage in these projects of legitimacy, they are also producing and disseminating a specific kind of authority, as well as the structures by which authority is established in a group.  

Perhaps this community emerged accidentally, and this in itself is potentially meaningful. Shiu shared in one interview: “They're looking for community, which is what church is. And so the old model of church is being broken open in all the churches anyways. And so if we were to say, like, PAAC is a church yeah, we would be doing the same thing that everybody else is doing right now, which is, like, breaking open. What does it mean to be a church? Which I think we've kind of innovated church, accidentally.” In looking at the example of PAAC as an emerging religious community employing digital technologies for their communicative narratives, specifically their Facebook group in order to innovate church, my aim is to show how these practices shape their identity and work in the world. But whether church is being innovated accidentally, or intentionally, or both in the case of this particular community, the hope is to construct their identities as Asian American Christians as distinctive from white evangelical or conservative Christianity in terms of their social and political positions. For most, it impacts the shape of their politics and faith—we see here one example of how they make themselves legible in relation to normative or mainstream expressions of not only Christianity, but their racialized selves and communities. 

[1]  T. W. Cooper, “Emerging, Emergent, Emergence: Boundary Maintenance, Definition Construction, and Legitimation Strategies in the Establishment of a Post‐Evangelical Subculture,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56, no. 2 (2017): 398-417.