Centering Asian Americans in Social Scientific Research on Religious Communities

Abstract

Social scientific research on American Christianity typically centers the experiences and practices of White American Christians and predominantly white Christian communities or churches. Asian American Christians remain more invisible than other racial minority Christians and their churches, especially in quantitative analyses. Researchers who aim to center Asian American Christianity face several challenges in developing a comprehensive quantitative empirical study of individual believers and churches. Practically, Asian American Christian surveys require multiple language translations and a wide array of outreach techniques to obtain a reasonably representative oversample. Substantively, survey questions on American Christianity often presume White American Christian categories, concepts, and frames—applying these without reflection could result in analytic findings that merely demonstrate how similar Asian American Christians are to their white counterparts. Asian American Christians diverge from the experiences of other American Christians drawing from diverse transnational resources, and the specific ways in which Asian Americans as a whole are positioned in the contemporary American racial order. Advancing an Asian American Christian—centered social scientific research program requires overcoming the present methodological obstacles and incorporating theoretical and theological insights from Asian Americanist scholars. This in turn will produce a new and unique body of research that should prove valuable for the continuance of Asian American Christian communities as well as other American Christian churches facing similar challenges.