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

• Main Author: TSE, Justin K. H.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Cyberspace; Asian American; evangelicalism; reform; Asian Studies; Religion
• 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
• Institution: Singapore Management University

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.