Asian American Christians in the twenty-first century, like the more than 24 million Asian Americans, reflect a wide range of educational attainment, economic status, political orientation and diversity of language. They also experience fraught intergenerational dynamics and occupy an uneasy interstitial space in the American racial landscape. Identifying with a religion that continues to be associated with Euro-American culture and white racial privilege complicates the picture. Given the Euro-American perception of Asians as quintessentially ‘not Christian’ (or ‘heathen’), Christianity among Asian Americans has been a confounding idea. But the ground is shifting in the study of American Christianity and in Asian American studies; thus, many of this essay's conclusions necessarily will be provisional.

We begin with a discussion of the evolving meaning of the term ‘Asian American’. The origins of the moniker can be traced to the Third World Liberation Front student strikes at San Francisco State University (1968) and the University of California, Berkeley (1969). Prior to this, ‘Oriental’ was commonly used by missionaries and social scientists to identify people from Asia. Originally considered a descriptive term, ‘Oriental’ became problematic when it was rejected by Asian American activists and critiqued by postcolonial scholar Edward Said. ‘Asian American’ seemed to be a better description of the diversity of peoples with Asian origins and escaped the Western and white ‘gaze’.

Most Asian Americans, however, connect primarily to their ethnic communities. From the 1970s, ethnic identity – rather than Asian American consciousness – heightened as immigration from Asia swelled dramatically. Asian American organisations became tertiary spaces for pan-ethnic coalitions. But these efforts were often fraught as Filipinos, Southeast Asians, South Asians and other groups challenged the dominance of East Asians in the early 1970s. Each subsequent wave of Asian immigration has required Asian American organisations to broaden their coalition and stretch their definition of Asian American. For example, after the 9/11 attacks and anti-Muslim backlash, the inclusion of Middle Eastern and West Asian peoples under the ‘Asian American’ umbrella has been debated extensively.

The US Census Bureau's efforts to classify Americans by race has both fuelled uncertainty about and placed limits on the term ‘Asian American’. In 1980 and before, the census forms listed specific Asian ancestries as separate groups, along with White and Black or Negro. But in 1977 the US federal government required government agencies to maintain statistics on racial groups, including on ‘Asian or Pacific Islander’.