At Dartmouth, I spend a lot of time at my new fraternity, in the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra as a French hornist, and with Agape, the Asian-American Christian fellowship. I believe each of these groups contributes towards my unique feminist lens, whether it be as a member of Greek life, a musician, an Asian-American, or a Christian. However, given that the Greek system is relatively new to me and that while I believe there are many gender inequalities experienced by professional female musicians, I don’t see many inequalities facing women in DSO, therefore I lack personal reflection. Instead, I will focus on doing an intersectional feminist analysis of Agape Christian Fellowship. Agape has two fundamental characteristics (Christian and Asian-American) that I will analyze individually but intersect collectively with a feminist lens to create some sense of my own identity and sense of belonging within this group and to understand Agape’s social location at Dartmouth. Ultimately, by the end of this intersectional analysis, I will better understand how race relates to and affects religion within Agape.
The literal Greek translation of Agape is God’s love for His children, which corresponds with Jesus’s two commandments: love your neighbors and love God. Agape and Christianity in general are somewhat idealistic in that everyone should love each other and God, however religion, namely Christianity, plays such a large role in America as a foundation for inequalities between man and woman. Two weeks ago, during an Agape large group, we discussed how in 1 Peter 3, the bible explicitly says that wives should submit to their husbands, and husbands should respect their weaker partner. Also, marriage itself is explicitly stated as a relationship between a man and a woman, and anything else is considered sin. For me personally and many others in Agape, it is ironic to love everyone while also acknowledging that females are inferior in some capacity to males. It is easy for me to ignore these discrepancies because I am a cis-male Christian, which puts me in a position of privilege. Trans-female non-Christians are not just at a disadvantage within Agape, but they are nonexistent, and I am at an advantage because I am part of the socially constructed norm (McIntosh). The women in Agape reacted to this passage from 1 Peter 3 initially with a lot of anger, which surprised me because even though gender inequalities don’t explicitly exist in Agape, they certainly exist implicitly at Dartmouth and outside of Dartmouth, and I was reminded how women are still disadvantaged, especially in academia. Although Agape promotes a sense of love for our neighbors and God, it is easy to let this love blind us from the implicit inequalities facing women, and as a privileged person, I do not always question bible passages that, at face value, support gender inequality.
Agape is now formally called an Asian-American Christian fellowship, but this was a recent change in that it was just another Christian fellowship until last year. Although I personally would not find it weird to see a person of color (someone not Asian) in Agape, I do feel an unspoken ease being around people of the same race. Sometimes it can be hard to admit this because I feel like there is a societal pressure to be colorblind. More and more, however, I am learning that being colorblind is synonymous with being ignorant. Tim Wise describes in White Like Me that it is better to be color aware than colorblind.
Even though Agape has historically been Asian-American, we never officially considered ourselves an Asian-American Christian fellowship until recently. Rather, Agape was considered a Christian fellowship that was coincidentally Asian-American. It was hard to make this distinction because we saw ourselves as Christian first and did not understand what it meant to be an Asian-American Christian. Some of my friends would ask me what it meant to be part of Agape fellowship, and my answer was that it is like being a part of a regular Christian fellowship but with Asian people. I had an essentialist view regarding my race and my faith, where the only intersectionality occurring was that sometimes the Koreans would converse with one another in Korean during a service. Last year, however, Agape officially identified itself as an Asian-American Christian fellowship with the purpose of answering what it meant, from an intersectional understanding, to be an Asian Christian (without fragmenting the two) (Grillo).
Since being Christian usually entails being white, it was intimidating to be part of a minority, and in the past I was just willfully ignorant of this fact, hiding behind the belief that Christians love their neighbors and love is colorblind. A problem remained, however, that even though there are Christians of every race, Jesus and his disciples and many others in the Bible are always portrayed as white in America. I know white people were far from being the chosen race, but I did not know how Asian people fit in historically with Christianity or the Bible and failed to see how being Asian could be seen as a blessing.
I was very fortunate to be addressing these questions of white privilege and how being an Asian Christian can be a blessing with Agape people. For example, Asian Christians are unique to white Christians in America in terms of evangelism because Asians have cultural similarities among themselves that can serve as a basis for conversations about religion. Within the Dartmouth Christian community, Agape is not discriminated against, and within the larger Dartmouth community, Agape is not explicitly discriminated against, but there are still inherent differences between the different fellowships on campus. These differences arise from the intersectionality of race and religion, and it’s unfortunate that white privilege implicitly exists at Dartmouth, especially within the Christian community even though it says in the Bible that everyone is created equal. These problems would not have arisen from a purely an essentialist analysis of Asians or Christians.
Bibliography:
- Grillo, Trina. Anti-Essentialism and Intersectionality: Tools to Dismantle the Master ‘s House. 2013.
- McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack.” 1989.