THE RAINBOW COALITION ON THE RIGHT

On Campus, Spiritual Groups Witness a Cultural Conversion (David Cho, May 4, 2003, The Washington Post)

Isaac Chung and Richard Harvell both can trace their young careers to spiritual journeys they made while they were roommates at Yale University.

Chung, who is Korean American, started down a new path when he joined Yale's chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. By the time he graduated, he felt that God was calling him to drop his plans to study medicine and instead become a Christian witness in the entertainment industry. Now 24, he is attending film school in Salt Lake City.

Harvell, who is white, sought fulfillment in Buddhism and other religions native to Asia. He had intended to become a physics professor but instead took two years off from college to backpack through Europe and "figure out who I was." He ended up in Switzerland, spending much of his time with a group of Zen Buddhists, and, at 24, he has returned there to teach public school.

In a religious sense, Chung and Harvell traded places, each one embracing the faith of the other's forebears. But neither of them noticed the irony because so many other Asian and white students at Yale were doing the very same thing. Indeed, the 120-member Christian fellowship to which Chung belonged was about 85 percent Asian, while the Buddhist meditation meetings at Yale were almost entirely white.

Yale is hardly the only university where this is occurring. Asian Americans are rapidly becoming the face of Christianity on many college campuses across the country, joining evangelical clubs in large numbers and, in some cases, starting their own Christian organizations. The trend is most pronounced at elite private universities, where Asian American enrollment is high, but it also has been evident at public colleges, including the University of Maryland and the University of Virginia. Meanwhile, in smaller numbers, white students are increasingly gravitating toward Buddhism, Taoism and other Eastern religions.

At many colleges, the influx of Asian American students has given Christian organizations a much bigger presence on campus. Even at liberal schools such as Stanford, Harvard and the University of Chicago, better known as vanguards for gay studies and deconstructionism than for evangelical crusades, weekly meetings of Christian fellowships are drawing hundreds of Asian students.

"Even Asians are surprised at how many Asians there are in Christian circles," said Chin-ho Chang, a senior at Columbia University and a leader of its chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, one of several large fellowships on the campus. A dozen years ago, the Columbia chapter drew about 15 students, most of them white. Now it has 130 students who have split into two groups -- a branch that is entirely Korean American and a multiracial branch that is 85 percent Asian, Chang said.

Because of this phenomenon, the professional world soon will be absorbing waves of highly educated Asian Americans who are evangelical and poised to exert influence in their fields, researchers say.

This is why we tend to believe anti-immigrationists are so misguided. The future of conservatism in America, indeed in the world, isn't white. And, since it's the ideas that matter, who cares? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 7, 2003 6:57 PM