A Critique on the Study of Asian American Religion: In Reference to the Case of Japanese American...

A Critique on the Study of ASiAn AmeriCAn religion:

in referenCe to the CASe of JApAneSe AmeriCAn tenrikyo followerS

in the SAn frAnCiSCo BAy AreA

Masato KATO

introduction

Recent ethnographic and sociological literature on new immigrants’ religion and Asian American religion in the U.S. has unveiled much of the socio-cultural dynamics peculiar to these groups.1 Students of this field of study have focused on various themes such as adaptation of immigrants’ religion, maintenance of ethnic cultures through religious participation, and other aspects of identity negotiation of the members as informed by such factors as generation, ethnicity, race, and religious affiliation. The rich insights they have drawn from their studies address the complexity of the social locations in which the members of these immigrants’ and Asian American religious groups are situated. As we will see, however, the theoretical assumptions elaborated in these studies are still confined in the perimeter of frameworks derived from particular religious groups and, therefore, will reveal their limitations in light of a case of a religious group that has not been represented in this field of study.

This article seeks to critique the recent scholarship on Asian American religion2 by referring to what is revealed through investigating identity negotiation of Japanese American Tenrikyo followers3 in the San Francisco Bay Area. My central argument is that much of the recent scholarship on Asian American religion—especially in studying second-generation members of those religious groups—is colored, both overtly and covertly, by theoretical assumptions laid out in the argument of “de facto congregationalism”—an influential theoretical framework in the study of immigrants’ religion in the U.S. at large. In particular,

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the assumption of voluntary membership and autonomy of local congregations—both of which are characteristics of religious groups assuming de facto congregationalism—are to a good extent what is reflected in the study of the younger generation of Asian American religions. This article will bring light to these two theoretical assumptions by pointing to anomalies that are revealed through the case of Tenrikyo followers and thus call for the need for researchers to go beyond the current presumptions. In the course of my argument, I will first give an overview of recent discussions on immigrants’ religion and Asian American religion, paying special attention to the issues surrounding identity negotiation of second-generation members.

i. mapping the theories: recent discussions on Second-generation members of Asian American religion

Literature focusing on different religious groups in the Asian American population has variably teased out themes that are distinctive to the younger generation who was born and raised in the U.S. It is generally accepted among the scholars studying this generational and racial cohort that offsprings of the immigrant generation are likely to claim their own religious, social, and cultural spaces in many different ways mainly because of their distinctive social locations and multi-layered identities. In consideration of the younger generation in Asian American religious communities, such identity markers as generational difference, ethnicity, race, and religious affiliation—among many others—come to play crucial roles in creating boundaries against their outgroups.4

First, scholars have pointed out that children of the immigrant generation of Asian American religious communities tend to create tension against the immigrant generation in terms of socio-cultural dynamics within the religious communities.5 For one thing, ethnoreligious characteristics of immigrant religious communities—which are critical for immigrants in orienting themselves in the U.S.6—can pose obstacles

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against the younger generation. The use of an ethnically specific language by the immigrant generation for worship services as well as ethnically-bound social gatherings can be quite alienating for the second generation, whose primary language is English and who has been socialized in the larger American society.7 Also, the lack of leadership roles for the younger generation in their parents’ religious communities is another dimension widening the gulf between the two parties. As the cultural milieu of the religious communities tends to be dominated by the immigrant generation, the younger generation is often denied the avenue into authority and leadership roles.8 Adding to this conflict is the different meanings of religious faiths between the two generations as informed by their different religious upbringing. In the case of Christian churches, while religious faith means more or less an ascription for the immigrant generation, religious faith tends to be a matter of evangelism, conversion, and something more spiritual for the second generation, who is often being brought up in a more evangelical cultural milieu.9 Consequently, when the immigrant generation cannot resolve the tension with the generation of their offsprings, the younger generation can, for example, seek out a separate English-speaking congregation that is governed by second-generation members of the church.10

Second, scholars—especially those of Korean American and Chinese American evangelicals—have revealed a somewhat ambivalent dynamic in light of their rejection of their parents’ religious communities. These scholars maintain that many of the younger generation of Korean American evangelicals are drawn to ethnically separate congregations despite the fact they turn their backs toward their parents’ communities that they think are too ethnically oriented.11 One of the major reasons pointed out by these members was the comfort zone that they can share with people from the same subcultural background.12 The flipside of what is entailing this inclination among the second generation, as Antony J. Alumkal points out, can be an “alienation from the norms of the larger society.”13 In explaining this paradoxical propensity, a couple of researchers have employed the notion of “emergent ethnicity.”14 First


coined by William Yancey et al., this idea points to the ways in which ethnicity is continuously constructed by structural conditions informed by occupational positions, residential circumstances, and institutional affiliation.15 According to this viewpoint, the second generation can create a distinctive cultural milieu wherein presumably the same ethnicity of the immigrant generation—e.g., Korean—can be understood among the members in different manners. Sharing the sense of ethnicity forged by certain social circumstances, cohorts of the same emergent ethnicity can create a closely-knit subgroup.

Third, similarly and equally significantly, researchers have underscored the roles that race plays in terms of the identity negotiation of second-generation Asian Americans.16 In response to the distinctive racial identity assigned by the dominant white society17 as well as the growing social climate of multiculturalism, some members in Asian American congregations of second and later generations have moved to form panethnic identities. Panethnic identity is a symbolic racial identity that transcends the boundary between people of previously different ethnic or national origins.18 Scholars suggest that ethnically specific congregations that have historically been the predominant model among Asian Americans are shifting toward panethnic or pan-Asian congregations based on a symbolic panethnic identity rather than ascribed ethnic identity.19 This panethnic identity, while differences in primordial ties such as history, culture, and physical characteristics also draw lines between subgroups—e.g., East Asian as opposed to South Asian—is a distinctive phenomenon especially among the native-born Asian Americans in terms of their identity negotiation. The inclination toward forging a coalition among people of Asian origin is, however, most likely related to stereotypes attached to Asian Americans by the mainstream society. Particularly, the notions of “model minority myth”—which assumes that “Asians, and Asian Americans are innately high-performing, intelligent, and driven to succeed”20—and “perpetual foreigner”—which renders Asian Americans as people from another country, regardless

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of whether or not they were born and raised in the U.S.21—can lead to forging among Asian Americans a sense of marginalization from mainstream American society.

Lastly and in relation to the issue of race, socio-cultural factors resulting from the Christian dominance in the U.S. can also entail a sense of marginalization from mainstream society as well as the need for social ties with coethnoreligionists among second-generation Asian Americans who practice non-Christian religions. In her study of Indian Americans, Khyati Y. Joshi asserts that, by virtue of being a racial and religious minority, second-generation Indian Americans suffer from “religious oppression” in many facets of their public life, faced by the normative racial and religious group—i.e., white and Christian Americans.22 This oppression is oftentimes fused with racial dynamics against people of color, thus leading to “racialization of religion,” whereby “race becomes a proxy for a presumed belief system…, enabled and aggravated by the presence of a white and Christian norm in American society.”23 Though Joshi’s study is confined within the category of Indian Americans, who, presumably, retain distinctive phenotype compared to other ethnic groups in Asian America, the implication of the hegemony of white and Christian normalcy can be applied to other Asian American second generations whose physical appearances and distinctive religious symbols and practices meet the criteria of a racialized religion.

In sum, all of the insights drawn from the past research point to the multiple realities these second-generation Asian Americans experience as informed by their generational, ethnic, racial, and religious identities. While factors such as ethnicity, race, and religious identities can distance them from the outside mainstream society, the characteristic differences from their parents’ generation place them in tension within religious communities. With their distinctive social locations, these Asian Americans seek to find their own distinctive religious and cultural boundaries.

These descriptions of the intricate push-and-pull that second-generation Asian Americans experience in negotiating their boundaries


allow students of Asian American religion to take a sophisticated look at children of immigrants and their religious experiences. Specifically, the fact that children of immigrants can create their own cultural spaces by distancing themselves from both their parents’ generation as well as the American mainstream culture may turn on its head the widely-held either-assimilation-or-non-assimilation paradigm that assumes a linear progression of those children’s assimilation into the wider American culture and the de-ethnicization of those children’s cultural identity. The above-mentioned findings indicate that second-generation Asian Americans can construct an ethnic, racial, and religious identity of their own, tapping into the cultural schema that they can draw from the multiplex cultural milieu in which they are situated.24 According to this viewpoint, the seemingly ambiguous social location of the second-generation Asian Americans can be considered as a distinctive cultural space of their own. The recent academic findings on the younger generation of Asian Americans thus provide a useful framework with which researchers can approach the identity negotiation of this Asian American subgroup in a much more elaborate manner.

ii. Critiquing the theories: the Assumptions of Voluntary member-ship and Autonomy of local Congregations

While offering cutting-edge findings and illuminative insights, the above discussions on religious experiences of second-generation Asian Americans are not without certain biases. The current research trend of Asian American religion is, I argue, for the most part colored, if not overtly dictated, by theoretical assumptions in the discussions surrounding “de facto congregationalism.” First coined by R. Stephen Warner and developed in his later articles, the theory defines “the model of the reformed Protestant tradition of the congregation” as a normative structure of religious institutions in the U.S.25 The major characteristics of a congregational form that Warner delineates include,

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among several others, voluntary membership, lay leadership, autonomy of local congregations, adoption of professional clergy, and expansion of social services.26 Applying the framework to the study of immigrant religious groups, Warner asserts that the adoption of congregationalism is emerging not only among Judeo-Christian religious groups but also among non-Judeo-Christian immigrant religious groups like Muslims.27

Students of immigrant religions have applied the theory in their research and found that de facto congregationalism is also developing in Asian American immigrant religious groups including Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu communities.28 While noting that different immigrant religious communities adopt different characteristics of de facto congregationalism, these scholars have emphasized the salience of the theory in approaching the study of immigrant religious groups regardless of specific ethno-religious groups.

It has been argued, however, that Warner and other scholars have applied the theory of de facto congregationalism without taking into account variations among immigrant religions in the U.S. In her 2008 article, Wendy Cadge pointed out that researchers have failed to define specific fields, forms, and processes in which structural adaptations of immigrant religious groups occur.29 In proposing a more systematized approach, Cadge calls for the need to focus on the variations of religious tradition and country of origin, the diversity of organizational forms, and generational differences as pertinent variables in assessing the manner and extent to which immigrant religious communities seek changes.30 Cadge’s revised approach has thus called for a more nuanced way of looking at immigrant religions’ structural adaptations. It is against this background that I seek to critique the study of second-generation members of Asian American religions as it relates to the characteristics of de facto congregationalism that are prevalent among this racial and generational cohort.

Of the characteristics of de facto congregationalism listed earlier, the notion of voluntary membership is one of the theoretical assumptions underlying the current research on native-born members of Asian


American immigrant religion. The younger members of Asian American religion, as we have seen, can seek out a congregation consisting members of the same generational and ethnic cohort when they are faced with tension in the religious communities led and organized by their parents’ generation. That one can choose to affiliate with a congregation and/or denomination based on their own individual choice reflects the eminence of voluntary membership among these young Asian Americans. One of the ways in which this theoretical approach has been accentuated, if not perpetuated, is the relatively higher attention given to Christian evangelicals in the study of the second generation of Asian American religions. Many scholars studying second-generation Asian Americans—such as Antony Alumkal, Karen J. Chai, Rebecca Kim, Prema A. Kurien, and Soyoung Park—have focused on Christian evangelical groups, probably because of the higher visibility of these religious communities in this generational and racial cohort. Some of these researchers have, as we have seen, maintained that second-generation members in Asian American Christian evangelical churches tend to consider their faith in Christianity as driven by their spirituality, compared to a more ascriptive nature of faith among the first-generation members. Juxtaposed as such, the nature of religious participation of the second-generation members is considered to be voluntary.

Also permeating the recent discussions on second-generation Asian Americans’ religious experiences is the assumption of autonomy of local congregations. Related to the above-mentioned notion of voluntary membership, autonomy of local congregations is what engenders the findings derived from the investigations of the second-generation Asian Americans. The tendency of breaking away from the immigrant generation’s religious communities—the example employed in the above argument on voluntary membership—is also enabled by the relatively autonomous institutional characteristics of the local congregations these Asian Americans attend. Reflecting the tendency described in the discussions of de facto congregationalism, these religious communities scholars focus on have, presumably, little constraints from larger religious

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organizations with which they affiliate. With many cases pointing to this distinctive tendency, past research has highlighted the autonomy of local congregations among the religious communities of second-generation Asian Americans.

These two theoretical assumptions, while applying to many religious groups among native-born Asian Americans, may prevent researchers from taking a nuanced look at the socio-cultural dynamics surrounding these groups. The assumption of voluntary membership, on the one hand, can lead researchers to uncritically render religious participation of these Asian Americans as being voluntary in nature. In other words, these members’ involvement in religious communities—whether it is a worship service, a fellowship, or other social activities—can be considered as a choice based on their individual commitments regardless of particular religious groups. With the assumption of voluntary membership being influential in the study of contemporary American religion in general,31 the findings that the scholars of these Asian American religious groups present appear to be for the most part sound, legitimate arguments. One of the consequences this view entails at a theoretical level, however, is a black-and-white dichotomy that can, at its worst, blind scholars to many other social factors constraining the members’ decision-making to participate in their religious congregations. To the extent that individuals’ religious participation is not always driven by one’s spirituality, just as the aforementioned immigrant generation’s ascriptive nature of religious identity, there remains room for complexifying the theoretical presumption.

The assumption of autonomy of local congregations, on the other hand, may cause a lack of attention to transnational ties in analyzing the dynamics of identity negotiation among second-generation members of Asian American religion. Scholars have found that immigrants’ transnational ties with their homelands blur, in one way or another, the distinction between their respective old lands and the U.S. and thus entail multi-layered, complex social locations in which immigrants make sense of their distinctive realities.32 In studying the later generations


of these immigrant religions, however, students of Asian American religions have not paid much attention to social factors surrounding transnational ties. More precisely, researchers have not applied the notion of transnationalism in a specific and explicit manner to the study of identity negotiation of subsequent generations. Much of the literature focusing on the religious experiences of American-born Asian Americans—most likely due to the purpose of explicating what is distinctive about the native-born generations in contrast to the immigrant generation—discusses how those members negotiate their boundaries in relation to the social and cultural factors in the U.S. context. As is evident in the discussion in the previous section, issues pertaining to minoritized identities of the younger generations—especially in terms of their ethnicity, race, and religious affiliation—take up much of the space in recent discussions. While it is not so clear as to whether the religious congregations explored in those studies have transnational ties with their counterparts in their socially, nationally, and ethnically related countries, one can see that the U.S. context constitutes the primary research field for those studying the younger generations.

One may suppose that the theoretical limitations inferred above are products of abstract reasoning and thus may not cause serious problems in analyzing the religious experiences of second-generation Asian Americans. As I will demonstrate, however, what I have pointed out in the theoretical argument is identified in the case of second-generation followers in Tenrikyo communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

iii. demonstrating the Anomalies: the Case of Japanese American tenrikyo followers in the San francisco Bay Area33

In bringing light to the theoretical issues, I will apply the findings derived from the sociological field research that I conducted at three Tenrikyo churches in the San Francisco Bay Area from November 2008 to January 2009.34 Tenrikyo has been around in the U.S. mainland

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since the late nineteenth century, when some Tenrikyo followers sailed across the ocean as part of the Japanese immigrants to the U.S. The San Francisco Bay Area, which is the area where Tenrikyo’s mission in the U.S. was first initiated, is home to seven Tenrikyo churches and four mission stations. With a sizable number of Tenrikyo’s faith communities gathering within a relatively small locale, the San Francisco Bay Area serves as a rich research field for the study of Japanese American Tenrikyo followers.

In my research, I conducted participant observation at each church on a day of a monthly service, though only one time at each congregation due to time constraint. Two of the three congregations I chose as research sites are located within San Francisco while the remaining one is situated in the east side of the San Francisco Bay.35 All of these churches were, at the time I started my research, led by the immigrant-generation Japanese American head ministers with the subsequent generation being adults and young adults. With a sufficient number of Japanese American members, I was able to observe how worship services were conducted, how ethnoreligious aspects of the congregations were reinforced, and how intergenerational dynamics were played out in each congregation.

Apart from participant observation, I conducted 10 semi-structured personal interviews with Japanese American members who participated in a worship service at the three congregations. Of the 10 interview subjects, two were chosen from Church A, five from Church B, and three from Church C. Due to the unequal number of American-born members from each congregation, I paid attention to the characteristics that these Japanese American members shared in common so as to come up with a generalized account of their experiences.36 After first meeting with Japanese American members at each congregation, either at the time of participant observation or at other occasions, I conducted personal interviews with them at places of their choice. The interviews were tape-recorded and lasted approximately between thirty minutes to one hour. Because many of the interview subjects were bilingual speakers, they expressed some of their opinions in Japanese while a couple of interviews


were conducted primarily in Japanese. In the interviews, I first collected background information about the interview subjects and their religious involvement. I then asked them how they negotiate their religious, ethnic, and racial identity in relation to the wider U.S. society as well as the immigrant generation in the religious communities.

The 10 Japanese American members in the three congregations, all of whom were born and raised in the Bay Area except for one member,37 demonstrated more or less the same degree of involvement in Tenrikyo communities. Most of them rarely miss a monthly service at the church where I met them and have been not only to other churches in the U.S. but also to the Church Headquarters and other churches in Japan. Some of them make a visit to the Mission Headquarters in Los Angeles as well as to Tenri more often than others, but it has less to do with the strength of their religious commitment than logistics, whether it is school, fulltime jobs, or financial difficulty. Additionally, all of them were raised as Tenrikyo followers, either born into a family of a church head minister, of a head of a mission station, or of regular Tenrikyo followers.

Though small in size, the result of the field research revealed characteristics distinctive to these Japanese American Tenrikyo followers that challenge, if not turn on its head, the above-mentioned two theoretical assumptions underlying the study of second-generation members in Asian American religions. In regard to the assumption of voluntary membership, I have argued that much of the study of second-generation Asian Americans has emphasized voluntary nature of members’ religious participation. My research has revealed, however, that most of the research subjects—nine out of 10 members—showed a relatively ascriptive nature of their religious identity. For most of them, choosing to stay as a Tenrikyo follower is not entirely a conscious choice of their own informed by their spirituality. Because all of the interview subjects were raised with the religion, with their family as a whole involved in Tenrikyo, family obligation or religious upbringing associated with their family is for the most part what ties these younger members with the religious communities. Though many of the interview subjects

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looked at the teachings of Tenrikyo in a positive light, considering them as “commonsensical” or “universal” messages, they did not show a strong sign of holding onto a distinctive Tenrikyo identity. For example, a follower, in answering the reason why she thought she was being a follower of Tenrikyo, commented as follows:

It’s hard to say because it’s always been a part of me. Do you know what I mean? It’s just part of my identity. Is it something that I can really talk about? No, because I just grew up in it.… But I don’t know if I would necessarily have chosen any religion. The fact is I am who I am because I grew up with the religion, right? And we grew up the way we did (a female follower belonging to Church A; tape-recorded on November 2, 2008).

This does not mean, however, that these Japanese American Tenrikyo followers were in rejection of the cultural values of voluntary participation and individual choice. As a matter of fact, more than half of the members indicated the primacy of voluntary participation and individual choice over what they identified as the seniority-based assignment of leadership roles and decision-making process in the current Tenrikyo faith communities. For these members, who consider individual choice, freedom, and accomplishment as the primary criteria for religious involvement, the structure of the current Tenrikyo community goes against their core cultural values. A follower’s line illustrates this point:

I don’t really like the idea how the head family always leads, like the sons lead, everything. If your dad is a kaichosan [head minister], you are going to be the successor. You have to be the successor. Why? I don’t really know if it’s a Japanese culture, but whatever that is, I don’t like it at all. I think it’s ridiculous. Doesn’t make sense.… It’s your life. You could choose if you want to or don’t want to (a male follower belonging to Church B; tape-recorded on January 13, 2009).

Thus, many of these members consider their religious identity primarily


as a product of their family ties while stressing the eminence of values of individual choice and voluntary participation over the more seniority-based, non-voluntary nature of the current Tenrikyo communities. Then, why do these followers remain to be followers of Tenrikyo?

Living in a church building, which is the case with almost all of the interview subjects, can be part of what accounts for this anomaly. As is the case with Tenrikyo churches in its motherland, Japan, families of the head ministers of Tenrikyo churches in the U.S. mainland usually live in a church building, in which a sanctuary and a worship hall are set up in place of a living room or other spaces. For instance, all of the three congregations that I visited for my research had their sanctuaries inside or in place of their living rooms. With their family members being the head minister and/or core members of the church, American-born members are situated in close proximity with Tenrikyo’s rituals and leaders in the private spheres of their life on a daily basis. That these members are involved in Tenrikyo’s activities almost without any choice explains the less voluntary nature of their religious participation. With their religious participation not driven by their own choice, these Japanese American Tenrikyo followers pose a challenge against the assumption of voluntary membership.

The case of Japanese American Tenrikyo followers is also illuminative in testing the assumption of autonomy of local congregations. In the foregoing discussion, I have pointed to the tendency of not paying attention to transnational context in explicating the identity negotiation of native-born Asian Americans. This kind of neglect may plausibly, if not automatically, entail limitations in research when scholars look at a religious group like Tenrikyo. Tenrikyo in the U.S. mainland has regularly and on many levels maintained transnational ties with the Headquarters in Tenri, Nara, Japan, not only for logistic purposes but also for spiritual and devotional practices. In relation to leadership positions, the bishop of the Mission Headquarters is always appointed by and sent from the Church Headquarters in Japan to implement and reinforce the directives of the church hierarchy. In order to be qualified as a head minister of a church,

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a follower needs to go through certain training programs held at the Church Headquarters. For religious education, the young followers in the U.S. mainland, especially children of church head ministers, participate in the Oyasato Seminar—a summer youth program held at the Church Headquarters for those living overseas. The seminar serves as a program in which children in overseas, who cannot easily spend a substantial amount of time at the Church Headquarters—the spiritual locus for Tenrikyo followers—can be exposed to firsthand religious messages and practices in their formative years. Underlying all of these transnational ties is the notion of the Pilgrimage to Jiba, a pilgrimage trip to Tenri for the purpose of showing devotion, especially in commemoration of the anniversaries of the foundress to be held every ten years.

One of the ways in which these strong transnational ties with the Headquarters upon Japan play out is reflected in the way native-born members deal with the tension against their parents’ generation in their religious communities. Past research on second-generation members in Asian American religions has revealed that, when two generations cannot resolve internal conflicts, the younger generation tends to seek out their own worship space or congregations in order to bring together those who share similar religious values in the same location. As I have previously explained, second-generation members of Tenrikyo communities show similar attitudes toward ethnoreligious aspects in their congregations. It is unlikely, however, that generationally-separate congregations will come into being in Tenrikyo in the U.S. mainland, given the influence from the Church Headquarters in many different facets of the religious institution. On top of the transnational ties at the institutional level, the churches that I researched maintain strong continuity with the counterparts in Japan, e.g., sacred spaces placed in living rooms. This reflects the fact that, in the current Tenrikyo organization, local churches need to follow the official ritual procedures and arrangements of sacred objects as rigidly prescribed by the Church Headquarters. Resulting from this transnational influence is the younger generation disillusioned by the cultural baggage and other obstacles in the current faith communities while being unable to break


ties with the communities so long as they stay with Tenrikyo. Adding to this complex dynamics is the aforementioned relatively ascriptive and family-oriented nature of their religious identity, which makes it less likely for the members to completely withdraw from religious participation. This kind of intricate balancing act is, as far as the available evidence goes, to a good extent peculiar to religious groups like Tenrikyo in the U.S. mainland, which is not situated in socio-cultural contexts confined to domestic environments. As this suggests, the case of Tenrikyo in the U.S. mainland problematizes oft-claimed autonomous religious congregations that younger generations of Asian American religious groups tend to attend.

Concluding remarks

In conclusion, let me go over the foregoing discussion on the issues surrounding the recent research on American-born generations of Asian American religions. Scholars have maintained that American-born members of Asian American religions tend to be situated in a social location defined by their distinctive ethnic, racial, and religious identities. Their minoritized ethnic, racial, and religious identities create a socio-cultural milieu different than that of the so-called mainstream culture whereas their cultural values conflicting with the immigrant generation’s cultural expectations can set the two parties apart. Their multi-faceted cultural identities, as have been highlighted above, can affect the ways in which these younger members negotiate their boundaries pertaining to religious identity and participation—e.g., formation of ethnically, racially, religiously, and generationally separate worship spaces.

While far from being all-encompassing, the data generated from the case study of the Japanese American Tenrikyo followers in the San Francisco Bay Area brought to surface some of the theoretical assumptions that need to be addressed and clarified in developing the scholarship surrounding the younger generations in Asian American religions. In assessing the current research trend, I have pointed out two

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theoretical limitations—the assumption of voluntary membership and the assumption of autonomy of local congregations—that color the nature of the studies of second-generation Asian Americans’ religious participation. The argument that younger generation of Asian American religions tend to participate in their religions on a voluntary basis can be problematized by the relatively ascriptive nature of religious participation among the Japanese American Tenrikyo followers. In addition, researchers primarily focusing on the American socio-cultural contexts have not examined the on-going transnational connections that religious groups like Tenrikyo have maintained in studying these younger members.

Both of these views are mirrored, as I have briefly touched upon, in the arguments surrounding Stephen Warner’s de facto congregationalism. Though it is not clear whether those scholars’ views are explicitly influenced by Warner’s hypothesis, the fact that the findings of these scholars do not challenge these two assumptions can hinder them from looking at cases outside the mold. As I have shown, the case of the Tenrikyo followers stands against the core of his theory and thus calls for the need of not simply taking for granted what is presumed in this influential framework.

The scholarship on Asian American religions—particularly the discussions on growing and diversifying American-born generations—is still in its infancy and has been shaped by the research trend of a larger study on immigrants’ religion in the U.S. As this article has shown, a study of Tenrikyo in the U.S. mainland—an underrepresented (ethno)religious group in contemporary American immigrant religion—has contributed to exposing the theoretical filters through which scholars have approached their research. These critiques can be further advanced if, for example, students of Asian American religion focus on other Asian American religious groups such as Shin Buddhism, which also maintains transnational ties with its mother temple in Japan. In future research, students of Asian American religion must be cognizant of their own biases shaped by de facto congregationalism in exploring socio-cultural dynamics in this ever diversifying racial group.


Notes 1. Studies on immigrants’ religion and Asian American religion have begun to

emerge as the newly arrived religious groups have become visible in many parts of the U.S. society. The majority of these groups are of origins in the Middle East, the Caribbean, Latin America, and East and South Asia, in contrast to the ethnoreligious groups of European and African ancestry that traditionally dominated the U.S. landscape. Some of these new immigrants arrived at the shore as a result of the Immigration Act 1965, which abolished the 1920s-era national origin quota system that barred the immigrants of non-European decent. The others, ranging from the immigrants of the 1800s to the recently arrived groups, include the one who became present as a result of political unrest overseas and American needs for laborers. Of these immigrant groups, Asian American is one of the fastest-growing groups and amounted to more than 10 million as of the year 2000. These groups have not only transplanted non-Judeo Christian traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam but also brought with them Christian traditions that had developed in Asia; Pyong Gap Min, “Introduction,” in Religions in Asian America: Building Faith Communities, ed. Pyong Gap Min and Jung Ha Kim (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2002), 1-5; and R. Stephen Warner, “Immigration and Religious Communities in the United States,” in Gatherings in Diaspora: Religious Communities and the New Immigration, ed. R. Stephen Warner and Judith G. Wittner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 5-8. Major edited volumes on these immigrants’ religious groups include: Tony Carnes and Feggang Yang, eds., Asian American Religions: The Making and Remaking of Borders and Boundaries (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants: Continuities and Adaptations in Immigrant Congregations (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2000); Jane Naomi Iwamura and Paul Spickard, eds., Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (New York: Routledge, 2003); Karen I. Leonard et al., eds., Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2005); Min and Kim, eds., Religions in Asian America; Warner and Wittner, eds., Gatherings in Diaspora; and David Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999).

2. While paying attention to the distinctive characteristics of each individual religious group in Asian America, researchers have variably used this categorical term in order to tease out common issues surrounding religious groups attended by Asian Americans. It is evident in the fact that many of the anthologies dealing with this group are entitled with such words as Asian America or Asian American religions. One may notice, however, that this overarching racial category may lead researchers to overlook differences among not only different ethnic groups but also different religious traditions, e.g., Christianity vs. Buddhism. While being aware of the limitation, I have followed

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other researchers in using this umbrella term so as to identify issues at stake in this field of study.

3. In this article, the term “Japanese American” generally refers to people of Japanese ancestry in second and/or later generation when it is used to qualify a subgroup within the wider Tenrikyo followers in the U.S. mainland. Depending on the context, the words “American-born” or “American-raised” interchangeably appear referring to the same group of Tenrikyo followers.

4. The contention that social locations such as ethnicity and race affect religious communities stands in opposition to a cultural assumption that religious faith overcomes ethnic and racial divide. This assumption, which has been prevalent mainly in evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity, is now questioned even in those communities. See, for example, Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

5. Karen J. Chai, “Beyond ‘Strictness’ to Distinctiveness: Generational Transition in Korean Protestant Churches,” in Korean Americans and Their Religions: Pilgrims and Missionaries from a Different Shore, ed. Ho-Youn Kwon, Kwang Chung Kim, and R. Stephen Warner (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 157-80; Karen J. Chai, “Competing for the Second Generation: English-Language Ministry at a Korean Protestant Church,” in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and Wittner, 295-331; Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants, ch. 21; Prema A. Kurien, “Christian by Birth or Rebirth? Generation and Difference in an Indian American Christian Church”; Victoria Hyonchu Kwon, “Houston Korean Ethnic Church: An Ethnic Enclave,” in Religion and the New Immigrants, ed. Ebaugh and Chafetz, 122; and Soyoung Park, “‘Korean American Evangelical’: A Resolution of Sociological Ambivalence among Korean American College Students,” in Asian American Religions, ed. Carnes and Yang, 182-204.

6. A number of researchers have pointed to the tendency that immigrant congregations help the members to preserve their ethnic identity and cultural traditions. In many cases, the ethnoreligious aspects of immigrant congregations become highlighted as a result of the need for social order in the midst of new life. See, for detailed descriptions, Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants, ch. 19; Prema Kurien, “Becoming American by Becoming Hindu: Indian Americans Take their Place at the Multicultural Table,” in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and Wittner, 37-70; Kwon, “Houston Korean Ethnic Church”; Pyong Gap Min, “Immigrants’ Religion and Ethnicity: A Comparison of Korean Christian and Indian Hindu Immigrants,” in Revealing the Sacred, ed. Iwamura and Spickard, 125-41; Pyong Gap Min, “A Literature Review with a Focus on Major Themes,” in Religions in Asian America, ed. Min and Kim, 15-36; Sharon A. Suh, “‘To Be Buddhist is To Be Korean’: The Rhetorical Use of Authenticity and the Homeland in the Construction of Post-Immigration Identities,” in Revealing the Sacred, ed. Iwamura and Spickard,


177-91; and Min Zhou, Carl L. Bankston III, and Rebecca Y. Kim, “Rebuilding Spiritual Lives in the New Land: Religious Practices among Southeast Asian Refugees in the United States,” in Religions in Asian America, ed. Min and Kim, 37-70.

7. Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants, ch. 20 and ch. 21. See also Mark Mullins, “The Life-Cycle of Ethnic Churches in Sociological Perspective,” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 14, no. 4 (December 1987).

8. Chai, “Competing for the Second Generation”; and Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants, ch. 21.

9. Chai, “Competing for the Second Generation”; and Kurien, “Christian by Birth or Rebirth?”

10. Chai, “Competing for the Second Generation.” 11. Antony W. Alumkal, Asian American Evangelical Churches: Race, Ethnicity,

and Assimilation in the Second Generation (New York: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2003), 97-121; Chai, “Beyond ‘Strictness’ to Distinctiveness”; Chai, “Competing for the Second Generation”; Rebecca Y. Kim, God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Rebecca Y. Kim, “Negotiation of Ethnic and Religious Boundaries by Asian American Campus Evangelicals,” in Asian American Religions, ed. Carnes and Yang, 141-59; and Park, “‘Korean American Evangelical.’”

12. Chai, “Beyond ‘Strictness’ to Distinctiveness.” 13. Alumkal, Asian American Evangelical Churches, 111. 14. Alumkal, Asian American Evangelical Churches; and Kim, God’s New Whiz

Kids? 15. Kim, God’s New Whiz Kids?, 6-7. 16. See, for example, Alumkal, Asian American Evangelical Churches; Carnes and

Yang, Asian American Religions; Russell Jeung, Faithful Generations: Race and New Asian American Churches (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Khyati Y. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Kwon, Kim, and Warner, Korean Americans and Their Religions; Min and Kim, Religions in Asian America; and Yoo, New Spiritual Homes.

17. In making this statement, I am subscribing to the idea that race is a notion that has been defined in many different ways over the history. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in pushing forward what they call “racial formation theory,” point to the formation of race as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed”; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55. In this view, race is neither an essentialized identity based on internal characteristics of biology and physical appearances, nor a mere social construct that will disappear if people do not pay attention to it. Race as it relates to the second-generation Asian

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Americans can be, therefore, viewed as something defined and assigned by dominant social discourses in a certain period of time.

18. Jeung, Faithful Generations, 10. 19. Ibid.; and Kurien, “Becoming American by Becoming Hindu.” 20. Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground, 105-6. 21. Ibid., 111. 22. Ibid., 118-44. 23. Ibid., 117. 24. This viewpoint is elaborated in Ann Swidler’s influential work on “culture as

tool-kit”; Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 104. In her work, Swidler persuasively analyzes how differently people utilize cultural schema that is available to them depending on circumstances in which they find themselves. Instead of asserting that culture structures individuals in a one-way street manner, the tool-kit model stresses the agency of individuals in deploying cultural schema that they need to make sense of a certain reality. See the entire work for more detailed discussions.

25. R. Stephen Warner, “The Place of Congregation in the Contemporary American Religious Configuration,” in New Perspectives in the Study of Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis, vol. 2 of American Congregations, ed. James P. Wind and James W. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 54.

26. R. Stephen Warner, “Religion and New (Post-1965) Immigrants: Some Principles Drawn From Field Research,” American Studies 41 (2/3): 277-78, quoted in Wendy Cadge, “De Facto Congregationalism and the Religious Organizations of Post-1965 Immigrants to the United States: A Revised Approach,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 2008): 345-46; and Fenggang Yang and Helen Rose Ebaugh, “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions and Their Global Implications,” American Sociological Review 66 (April 2001): 273.

27. R. Stephen Warner, “Work in Progress toward a New Paradigm for the Sociological Study of Religion in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 98 (March 1993): 67.

28. See, for example, Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, “Structural Adaptations in an Immigrant Muslim Congregation in New York,” in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and Wittner, 235-61; Ebaugh and Chafetz, eds., Religion and the New Immigrants, ch. 17; Kurien, “Becoming American by Becoming Hindu,” 37-70; Irene Lin, “Journey to the Far East: Chinese Buddhism in America,” in New Spiritual Homes, ed. Yoo, 134-66; and Yang and Ebaugh, “Transformations in New Immigrant Religions,” 269-88.

29. Cadge, “De Facto Congregationalism and the Religious Organizations.” 30. Also noteworthy of Cadge’s incisive article is that she named out the theoretical

framework underlying the arguments surrounding de facto congregationalism. In Cadge’s analysis, Warner’s original hypothesis is based on an assumption


colored by, if not deliberately derived from, Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell’s notion of “institutional isomorphism.” This theory explains that organizations in modern society come to resemble each other in order to attain legitimacy in the environment in which they are situated. For a detailed discussion of the theory, see Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields,” in The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis, ed. Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

31. For example, R. Stephen Warner has pushed forward the idea of voluntary membership as a distinctive characteristic prevailing religious congregations in the U.S. at large; Warner, “Work in Progress,” 1044-1093. Also, Christian Smith, in his seminal work on American evangelicalism and subcultural identity theory, has pointed out that individual choice constitutes the basis of identity and, rather than mere ascription, can create stronger religious identity in modern American society; Christian Smith, American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 102-4. These views suggest that the notion of religious voluntarism is quite established in the study of contemporary American religion and, therefore, one way or another, shapes the way researchers seek to analyze the motivation of religious participation among Americans.

32. See, for example, Helen Rose Ebaugh and Janet Saltzman Chafetz, eds., Religion Across Borders: Transnational Immigrant Networks (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2002); Kenneth J. Guest, “Religion and Transnational Migration in the New Chinatown,” in Immigrant Faiths, ed. Leonard et al, 145-63; Kurien, “Becoming American by Becoming Hindu”; Vinay Lal, “Sikh Kirpans in California Schools: The Social Construction of Symbols, the Cultural Politics of Identity, and the Limits of Multiculturalism,” in New Spiritual Homes, ed. Yoo, 87-133; Luis Leon, “Born Again in East LA: The Congregation as Border Space,” in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and Wittner, 163-96; Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: The New Press, 2007); Lin, “Journey to the Far East”; Marie Friedmann Marquardt, “Structural and Cultural Hybrids: Religious Congregational Life and Public Participation of Mexicans in the New South,” in Immigrant Faiths, ed. Leonard et al, 189-218; Elizabeth McAlister, “The Madonna of 115th Street Revisited: Vodou and Haitian Catholicism in the Age of Transnationalism,” in Gatherings in Diaspora, ed. Warner and Wittner, 123-60; and Kathleen Sullivan, “Iglesia de Dios: An Extended Family,” in Religion and the New Immigrants, ed. Ebaugh and Chafetz, 148.

33. Unless otherwise noted, the descriptions of Tenrikyo in the U.S. is based on Tenrikyo Mission Headquarters in America, 50 Years of the Path: A History of the Tenrikyo Mission Headquarters in America, 1934–1984 (Los Angeles: Tenrikyo Mission Headquarters in America, 1984); and Susumu Yoshida, ed., Tenrikyo Beikoku Fukyo Junenshi [A History of Tenrikyo’s Mission in

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the United States, 1927 – 1937] (Los Angeles: Tenrikyo Amerika Dendocho [Tenrikyo Mission Headquarters in America], 1938).

34. This field research was initially conducted for my MA thesis “Negotiation of Religious, Ethnic, and Racial Identity among Japanese American Tenrikyo Followers in the San Francisco Bay Area” submitted to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA in April 2009. That this research was conducted primarily for my MA thesis explains the relatively short period of the fieldwork.

35. As this field research was not a large-scale sociological research, I did not examine how ecological elements (e.g., racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of the neighborhood in which these Tenrikyo churches are situated) had affected the development of each local church. For a more extensive study, however, one needs to control the variables caused by ecological characteristics in order to attain more nuanced findings. The salience of ecological analysis is well documented in Nancy T. Ammerman, Congregation and Community (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997).

36. The generalized descriptions of Japanese American members in these three churches may not necessarily apply to other Tenrikyo communities in the Bay Area. In a more extensive study, one should conduct a survey research to test whether the findings derived from the three church communities are representative of the entire area.

37. One of the members I interviewed at one of the three churches was a person who was originally from Sacramento and moved to San Francisco as an adult. While showing many similarities as a Tenrikyo member in the U.S. mainland, some of his experiences related to his birthplace set him apart from others in terms of how he construes his ethnic and racial identity. Yet he goes along the same line with other research subjects in relation to the ethnoreligious aspects in Tenrikyo churches in the U.S.

* This article is based on my MA thesis “Negotiation of Religious, Ethnic, and Racial Identity among Japanese American Tenrikyo Followers in the San Francisco Bay Area” submitted to the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA in April 2009.

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