Michael Karim (mkarim1015@fuller.edu)
Fuller Theological Seminary, 2020
Abstract
The quandary of university freshmen losing their Christian faith during the first year of university life is a well-known problem. Most explanations come from sources in structure and culture that deny the agency of the first year student; rarely is the ethnic identity of first year student or their experience of racism examined with regard to their faith. I argue from a case study of second generation Chinese American freshmen that they sustain their Christian faith commitment through reflexive mediation across the first year of university life, while accompanied by mechanisms of enablement from the Asian bubble and mechanisms of constraint from a racialized university structure. By employing an explanatory framework of morphogenesis to link ontology, i.e., the personal power of reflexivity of the students, to the theorizing of mission, the data collection covered structure, agency, and culture across the length of the first year of university life for the first year student. The morphogenetic analysis found the importance of reflexivity to sustaining the Christian faith commitment by the freshmen. Additional mechanisms were adduced: The presence of co-ethnics sharing the same faith commitment contributed to increasing and sustained gathering outside of the academic context, i.e., the Asian bubble, thus reinforcing the faith commitment. Concurrently, mechanisms emerging from the experience of microaggressions, the absence of positive symbols of East Asian Americans on campus, and theological content from sermons omitting discussion of ethnicity but tacitly endorsing white experience as normative promoted constraints upon the second generation Chinese American freshmen. These mechanisms contributed to formation of and a movement into the Asian bubble, where reflexive mediation on both the constraints of race and the enablements of the Asian bubble contributed to not only the sustaining of the faith commitment, but also persistence toward other ultimate concerns, e.g., career aspirations and graduate school. Theorizing on faith development and ethnic identity follows from the morphogenetic analysis.
Methods
Qualitative: Interviews and ethnographic surveys.