‘The open letter to the evangelical church’ and its discontents: The online politics of Asian American evangelicals, 2013-2016

Recent treatments of Asian American evangelicals tend to focus on a shift of attention from their identity-based attempts to found autonomous congregrations to online self-publications. I evaluate this new trend by considering two episodes in Asian American evangelical self-publication: the 'op...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: TSE, Justin K. H.
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3341
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4598/viewcontent/AMC_av.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
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Summary:Recent treatments of Asian American evangelicals tend to focus on a shift of attention from their identity-based attempts to found autonomous congregrations to online self-publications. I evaluate this new trend by considering two episodes in Asian American evangelical self-publication: the 'open letter to the evangelical church' in 2013 and the Killjoy Prophets initiative from 2014-2016 when their leader Suey Park disappeared from the Internet. I argue that while Asian American evangelical online self-publication is intended to reform evangelicalism, its discursive nature leads to debates among Asian American evangelicals about whether the cyber-discourse about them is adequately representational. This sobering analysis demonstrates that the identitarian claims of Asian American evangelicalism are not transcended by cyberspace, but are exacerbated by it.