Photos by Harriet Kim
Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim on Liberation Theology, the Role of Dominance in Christianity, and Living in Hope
Interview by Harriet Kim
Video Edited by Frances Kim
In early October 2024, I had the pleasure of attending Dr. Grace Kim’s worship and lecture for her book When God Became White during her visit to Toronto. In the days following the event, she joined me on Zoom to talk about her book in the context of this volume. Although our conversation does not focus explicitly on the theme itself, sex was not far from my mind as an implied and interconnected topic within our conversation. Especially after marking one year of genocide in Palestine and with 2024 on record as one of the hottest years in history, there was a focus on dominance, the ways colonization weaponized religion to justify violence throughout history, and how that is still prominent today. How do you think about sex and all its implications while thinking about how you are connected to your own body, to each other, and to the earth? We could not have found anyone more fitting than Dr. Kim, who has written or edited 24 books about religion and faith as forces moving upon, within, and between us.
Transcript
Harriet Kim (HK): Hi, Dr. Kim. Thank you for joining us today. We are here to talk about your book, When God Became White, and in particular, in the context of our volume 4 about sex. Welcome and thank you for joining us.
Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim (GJK): Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure and it was great to meet you during my travels in Toronto. So thank you so much for having me on.
HK: I was very glad to be able to see you preach and talk about your book in person. I will say I was surprised that the book is quite short, but it really packs a punch as you talk about the role of Christianity and its relationship to whiteness and how that's evolved over the years and throughout the world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but like it really feels like the book is a personal story of reckoning that you've done over many years as much as it was like a history lesson, or as much as it was like a critique of white supremacy, among other things, so I guess that's my first question. Does that feel like an accurate reflection of your book?
GJK: I never know what the end result will be when I start writing a book. Looking back, this included a lot of biography. During my visit and my speaking in Toronto, I was actually originally invited to speak at King's University Western Ontario, and that is in London, Ontario, and that's where I grew up. So it was quite fascinating and very emotional to visit. I've been back to speak at London, but I've never visited my old apartment, public school, or high school. So it's very emotional. And I write a lot about that in my book, When God Became White.
So at the beginning, I didn't know it was going to be a lot of my own story. But as I started to write, I had to include them to make sense out of why I'm writing it and why it's so important. that something happened 40, 50 years ago, but it's still all the same today in various degrees and different ways, but this racism, and also the sexism, is still with us in society and in the church.
So that's why a lot of my personal stories made it through. And as a theologian, I always tell my students, theology is biography and biography is theology. We could only come to know God from our own experiences or the experiences around us. There is…I can't bring God into a classroom or you can't bring God into the church, but we come to experience God.
And so the book, there's a lot of history. It was interesting that Amazon put it under church history or under the category of history, rather than theology. I thought it was going to be under social justice or theology. So it's interesting how different people view the book so differently.
I, myself, view it as a theological book, but others may view it as an autobiographical, theological, sociological, or a history book. So it's quite interesting how various readers are approaching the book.
HK: I think it speaks to the sort of topic at hand, how you can't really separate any of these things from each other. And you can only do so much when you're trying to market something. It really reduces it to one thing when really your book is really so expansive. And it was really interesting to hear how you're talking about these really big topics and how bringing in your own story really Helps to sharpen the focus of “okay, this is what it actually looks like.” This is not just like some big idea or a concept that we're talking about. this has some real impacts on the way that people are able to live their lives.
So again, you talk a bit about growing up in this conservative Christian household, and then you went on to study theology in school that led to more questions than answers about who Jesus was. I'm wondering how you would describe your sort of changing relationship with religion and spirituality in order to get to a place now in your life where you're comfortable preaching services that incorporate politics, incorporates like a very non denominational spirituality to it in the, in that, like arguably the sort of structure of organized religion very much feels like it's trying to discourage that. So I'm curious about that.
GJK: When you're a child and your parents take you to church as a child, you don't have much say, but you get immersed in that culture and you start learning about it and you accept it. So it's a very childish faith that many of us, if you grew up in the church or any religion, have experienced.
And, you know James Fowler’s stages of faith—he goes through this. That there might be five or six stages of faith and you move through those. Some people never move through these stages and they just may stay in the child or the adolescence stage. But it's interesting that some of us do progress and we move.
And I would encourage many people in the church, whether you're young or young adult or middle age or older that we get challenged by our faith. We're human beings and we grow and we progress and we change. And we learned so much that whatever our faith was 50 years ago, shouldn't be what our faith is today because so we've learned so much along the way, we've experienced so much.
So for me, when I was, you know, a child. It was, I would just took it all in. But then you grow up and when you see the experiences and, today I think, one of the challenges today is climate change and this genocide that's happening in Gaza. When we see that, then we have to ask ourselves, in light of this climate change that's happening, we just, in the United States, we had these huge hurricanes going through Southern U.S. The storms are getting worse and worse. People are losing lives. We know that the winters are getting hotter and hotter, warmer and warmer. We know this climate change is happening. So we have to ask ourselves, who is God in light of all these things that are happening?
So for myself, as a child, you experience racism and you feel like there's nothing you can do. But as you get older, you realize, yes, there's a lot of things we can do. We can speak out against it. We can try to change the culture and the laws and what is happening in the church because it all intersects. So for me, when I studied at Knox College, where my talk was, where I met you, everything seemed so theoretical and so philosophical. God and theology was something out there and it was so hard to comprehend.
I couldn't bring it down to earth, but through my studies and my interest in liberation theology, that's what liberation theology is. Making it for the people so that people can experience liberation, that people will come to understand God through their experiences and be lifted out of their oppression or subjugation. So that's what the book aims to do.
It's a very practical book. There's Q and A at the end of each chapter. That was not my original intent, but the publisher thought that it would be a great book study for faith communities and church groups. The book came out earlier this year and so far a lot of churches are using it. So I'm really glad that the publisher had that foresight and made me write those questions at the end of each chapter. They see that it is a very practical book that really challenges how we understand racism and sexism in our society and in the church. We can't just sit back as theologians or as Christians saying, “okay, that's how society is.” We have to fight against it because it costs lives. That's why genocides happened here in North America and in different places around the world, and even right now, genocides are happening. I think we can't take these topics lightly. Yes, I approach the book very personally, but I'm hoping that it becomes a lens Not just for Asian Canadians and Asian North Americans, but for everyone to see what is happening.
That's how I'm always writing my books. It's one of my other books called Invisible. I really wanted that to be a lens of how other groups are made invisible. So this book, When God Became White, yes, a lot of it, because you could only write from your own personal experience. I can't speak for black people or for white people. I'm just speaking for myself as an Asian Canadian, Asian American, and through our experiences, people will come to understand their own experiences and what is happening around them and be in solidarity with one another. That is always my hope that white people and other people of color will stand in solidarity with Asian Canadians and Asian Americans to fight against this racism, which is rampant and not just in our schools and in our workplaces, but right in our churches.
HK: I'm so glad that you brought in these very like “in-the-moment” realities that we're facing in the world. Because a lot of these things are not new. Again, you've talked about…you've written a lot of books, and a lot of it is about different aspects of things that we face, as you mentioned, like gender, race, climate change, also experiences like sexual abuse, and I think a lot of it goes back to this idea of dominance, which you write a lot about, especially in this book.
For me, personally I grew up in a Catholic community, and my sort of Catholic education provided very little context for the political, historical, or otherwise, to my learning about the life of Jesus. Things that would have been essential to who he was as a person. So growing up, I wouldn't have been able to locate Jerusalem or Nazareth on a map or tell you that Aramaic was the language that Jesus would have spoken in his everyday life. Or that, the fact that it originated in the ancient region of Syria, let alone any other sort of political implications of what any of these things would mean back then, and even today. Again, it's goes back to this idea of like really whitewashing sort of the history that has again, real implications of that you can pinpoint, in a lot of ways, like the genocide that happening in Gaza now.
And I think that also relates very much to, our current volume for choa, this idea of dominance and religion, as an institution anyway, and like the purity that has affected so many of our like day-to-day expectations for and around sex, outside of abuse, but also just purity culture and when it comes to dating or like celibacy for religious figures.
I think for choa, I would love to talk a little bit about sort of our beings, in the context of like Korean history, and I guess patriarchy since our community is mainly Korean women. You talk a little bit about Korean history and how that sort of intersects with the roles of missionaries and like imperialism and colonization and all these things. There's so much to that. I don't think we have a lot of time to go into that.
GJK: Let me just say it briefly. The book has a chapter called “Missiology of Whiteness” and I do talk about how missionaries, white missionaries, went into various parts of the world and they brought this white Jesus. So the book is really examining how our view of who God is really affects our worldview, our actions, our ethics, and our ways of thinking. Jesus was not a white man, but he suddenly becomes white and the book goes through that whole historical change of Jesus and I think that's why Amazon, and other groups, have just categorized it as a history of religion or history book.
But it goes through that to come to now a more present modern history where the white missionaries went into Korea and to different parts of Asia and they brought this white Jesus. So along with that is the colonialism, imperialism that has happened in India and in Indonesia and Vietnam and other parts of the world and in Asia, with Americans going into Korea. So all of that is intertwined and intersecting. So this colonization has been part of Christian history from the beginning with the Roman Empire trying to spread and colonize different parts of the world. And in doing so, uplifting a white Jesus and a white male God.
So that's why you see this spreading this missiology of whiteness right from the beginning. So when they came to Korea and in different parts of Asia, you see how the white missionaries viewed us so negatively. In the book, I use Edward Said's Orientalism. He does a great job in his book of how Asia, the East versus the West…The West has viewed the East as unintelligent, savage, undeveloped, backwards, and weak, and feminine. And you see this even when Christian white missionaries came, they told us that Koreans were not smart, were lazy, undeveloped, were not progressing. And so this whole whiteness was instilled in us, that we are less than these white Europeans or white North Americans on the other side of the ocean.
And that gets, you know, it doesn't just disappear. It stays with a nation for a while because these missionaries were there for a long time. And so when Korean immigrants go to Canada and to the U. S. and different parts, we internalize that. Our parents internalized it. I internalized it. And we always feel inferior., That we are not as smart. there's something wrong with us, our culture, our language, how we even our physical attributes and our physical traits, our beauty, this westernization of beauty. We aren't beautiful enough so that's why we need cosmetic surgery to make our eyes bigger and our noses more pointy. It's ridiculous what is happening. But this is all intertwined with Christianity. That white European, particularly male heterosexual theologians, kept saying that white was the best. Then they allowed that message to be shared with everyone else under the guise of Christianity. So these are all intersecting. It's very dangerous. And then we experienced that in our churches.
And as immigrants and children of immigrants, generation after generation, like in the U. S., Filipinos were one of the first to come here. That was 500 years ago. But it doesn't matter how long we've been here. We all still look different. People can see us that we're Asian or Hispanic or African, we look different. And so this racism still gets embedded and we are given all these inferior categories and labels, and we're told that we are less than in the schools, in our workplaces, in our communities, and also in our churches.
So we really have to dismantle this whiteness, dismantle all of this colonization of our land and our minds and our bodies and really fight against it. This is really big. And I think some Koreans may not think of it as big, but it is a really big thing. And we really need to fight this.
HK: I appreciate that you started this off with, or this particular section, off with the sort of understanding that a lot of our struggles with Are so connected and similar to a lot of other people of other countries and other sort of diasporic groups.
And I will say for me you talk a little bit about the loss of culture and language and history that comes with colonization and the destructive process that it takes on. That kind of came up for me. It's like a very small detail that came up in my brain where growing up, I've met a lot of Korean parents who are very religious and also bring in their own sort of cultural and history and understanding and tradition and are also what I understood to be very superstitious. That may or may not be the right term to use but there is this idea that I had growing up that these two things were very much at odds with each other because I had this very Western understanding of religious purity. And if you're going to be a Christian or a Catholic, you couldn't carry any of these sort of like superstitious ideas.
GJK: I think what you're observing is that the church, the white church kept saying that white European culture is superior. So whatever religious and cultural traditions that Koreans had, In particular, like shamanism or Buddhism or Confucianism was evil and less than.
So that narrative, I know you got my book, The Grace of Sophia. So I touch a little bit on that book. There was a lot of Westerners telling people in the East that we were less than, but, a lot of this, when Christianity was brought to Asia. And when we look at Korea, a lot of it intersects and intertwines and this intermixing with Korean culture.
You can't divorce it. It just…it happens not just in Korea, but in other parts. So when we even think about Christianity, we always think it's like pristine and pure. And that there was no syncretism or no mixing, but all of Christianity is syncretism and mixing. But when Westerners do it, it's okay. But when Asians do it, it's oh gosh, that is just horrible. You guys aren't even real Christians.
These practices of shamanism, even our prayers in the, not so much in the Catholic church, but in the Protestant, many of the Korean Protestant churches, very shamanistic in many ways, with the Jeongsung Gido and many other prayers. It's very shamanistic. And even how we offer our different offerings to the minister is like a lot of shaman practice. And this Confucianism also gets embedded into Christianity, with the division of the men and the woman, how we even behave and interact within the church and within fellowship, et cetera.
So you can't divorce it, but we cannot put down our own cultural practices and say, “Oh, we're being all evil and now we're all this shaman kind of practices.” It's just what religion has been for the last 2000 years within Christianity or any religion. If we think of Judaism, Judaism was a mixing of everything as they roamed around in that Middle East Mesopotamia area.
It's very clear in the Old Testament that there was mixing with the Egyptians and the Canaanites and all the other people. It was always about mixing. So we cannot have this nostalgic idea. “Oh, everything was pure until what? Koreans came on the scene or black people.” We can't have this conversation. And for me, I get really upset about this because it always targets people of color and not to the white people.
HK: And I think that like this idea of the integration of shaman practices in the more sort of structured Christian practices, I think, makes a lot of sense. I think reading your book, one thing that also really stood out to me is this idea of Minjeong theology, which is something I've never heard about.
So I think given the sort of dominance of a certain narrative around Christianity I think we as diasporic kids growing up, we missed a lot of the sort of radical nature of how Koreans can actually practice Christianity and the true message of God's love and God as more of a spirit rather than what we think of, in terms of as you talk a lot about as a gendered male, I wonder how you think of that.
This is maybe more of a game of imagination. How do you think our experiences as Koreans could have been different if God was understood as a gendered female?
GJK: Yep. So maybe we'll wrap up with this question. I think that's a good one for people to study when God became white or any of my previous book, because I'm really dealing with the gendering of God and the racialization of God in this book and saying, Because Christians have continued, the white European Christians have continued to say that God is masculine and God is feminine.
This really allowed racism to exist within the church, whiteness to flourish and sexism to exist in the church. So it's not And I'm not talking about it in past terms. It's present and it will continue to be our future if we don't challenge this. Because how we view God is going to determine how we act.
So people knew that right from the beginning. That's why the Roman emperors insisted that Jesus was white. They can't go and colonize and kill people that look like Jesus. So they had to make Jesus white. So I think the Korean church would have been very different if we can, if we embrace the feminine images.
The book, When God Became White, ends with biblical traditions that have, that are, feminine and non gendered and non racialized. That is my hope for the church and those outside the church. So many people left the church because they're just so tired of the racism and the sexism and all the -isms that exist in the church.
So I'm really speaking to those outside the church or those who have left the church that if we can reimagine and retrieve these other images that are already in our tradition and in scriptures, then it's not just Koreans, everyone would have a different experience of who God is. And I think the world will be a different and a better place.
So that is always my hope. And I always live in hope.
HK: That's such a beautiful last note to leave on. I will say that, like just hearing you talk about that, I think for me, moving forward. From this idea of God as an all knowing, all powerful God who inspired fear and existed above us. Again, that idea of dominance and moving from that idea and thinking about God as a loving spirit existing and moving between and among us took a long time for me to accept.
I think for me, I grew up in a church that was a very intergenerational space. I think that for me, as much as I don't really practice religion as an institution anymore, I do miss that sort of sacred nature of that intergenerational space. I think we're always looking for the sense of belonging and what that could look like, with or without the church. I think there is that movement towards that, especially with a lot of younger folks.
I think that for folks who are listening and watching, I hope they will pick up your book because your book does end with a lot of beautiful calls to action to like what that could look like moving forward and [in] very practical terms. I wish we had more time to talk about the theology of visibility and God is spirit and the biblical images of the feminine Dimensions of God, but yeah, hopefully people will pick up your book after this conversation to read more about that.
So again, thank you Dr. Kim for joining us for this conversation.
GJK: Thank you so much for having me. Maybe I'll come back to talk about my other book, Invisible, and I do have another one coming out next year So feel free to invite me back. Thank you so much for having me to share my new book, When God Became White.
Harriet Kim (HK): Hi, Dr. Kim. Thank you for joining us today. We are here to talk about your book, When God Became White, and in particular, in the context of our volume 4 about sex. Welcome and thank you for joining us.
Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim (GJK): Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure and it was great to meet you during my travels in Toronto. So thank you so much for having me on.
HK: I was very glad to be able to see you preach and talk about your book in person. I will say I was surprised that the book is quite short, but it really packs a punch as you talk about the role of Christianity and its relationship to whiteness and how that's evolved over the years and throughout the world.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but like it really feels like the book is a personal story of reckoning that you've done over many years as much as it was like a history lesson, or as much as it was like a critique of white supremacy, among other things, so I guess that's my first question. Does that feel like an accurate reflection of your book?
GJK: I never know what the end result will be when I start writing a book. Looking back, this included a lot of biography. During my visit and my speaking in Toronto, I was actually originally invited to speak at King's University Western Ontario, and that is in London, Ontario, and that's where I grew up. So it was quite fascinating and very emotional to visit. I've been back to speak at London, but I've never visited my old apartment, public school, or high school. So it's very emotional. And I write a lot about that in my book, When God Became White.
So at the beginning, I didn't know it was going to be a lot of my own story. But as I started to write, I had to include them to make sense out of why I'm writing it and why it's so important. that something happened 40, 50 years ago, but it's still all the same today in various degrees and different ways, but this racism, and also the sexism, is still with us in society and in the church.
So that's why a lot of my personal stories made it through. And as a theologian, I always tell my students, theology is biography and biography is theology. We could only come to know God from our own experiences or the experiences around us. There is…I can't bring God into a classroom or you can't bring God into the church, but we come to experience God.
And so the book, there's a lot of history. It was interesting that Amazon put it under church history or under the category of history, rather than theology. I thought it was going to be under social justice or theology. So it's interesting how different people view the book so differently.
I, myself, view it as a theological book, but others may view it as an autobiographical, theological, sociological, or a history book. So it's quite interesting how various readers are approaching the book.
HK: I think it speaks to the sort of topic at hand, how you can't really separate any of these things from each other. And you can only do so much when you're trying to market something. It really reduces it to one thing when really your book is really so expansive. And it was really interesting to hear how you're talking about these really big topics and how bringing in your own story really Helps to sharpen the focus of “okay, this is what it actually looks like.” This is not just like some big idea or a concept that we're talking about. this has some real impacts on the way that people are able to live their lives.
So again, you talk a bit about growing up in this conservative Christian household, and then you went on to study theology in school that led to more questions than answers about who Jesus was. I'm wondering how you would describe your sort of changing relationship with religion and spirituality in order to get to a place now in your life where you're comfortable preaching services that incorporate politics, incorporates like a very non denominational spirituality to it in the, in that, like arguably the sort of structure of organized religion very much feels like it's trying to discourage that. So I'm curious about that.
GJK: When you're a child and your parents take you to church as a child, you don't have much say, but you get immersed in that culture and you start learning about it and you accept it. So it's a very childish faith that many of us, if you grew up in the church or any religion, have experienced.
And, you know James Fowler’s stages of faith—he goes through this. That there might be five or six stages of faith and you move through those. Some people never move through these stages and they just may stay in the child or the adolescence stage. But it's interesting that some of us do progress and we move.
And I would encourage many people in the church, whether you're young or young adult or middle age or older that we get challenged by our faith. We're human beings and we grow and we progress and we change. And we learned so much that whatever our faith was 50 years ago, shouldn't be what our faith is today because so we've learned so much along the way, we've experienced so much.
So for me, when I was, you know, a child. It was, I would just took it all in. But then you grow up and when you see the experiences and, today I think, one of the challenges today is climate change and this genocide that's happening in Gaza. When we see that, then we have to ask ourselves, in light of this climate change that's happening, we just, in the United States, we had these huge hurricanes going through Southern U.S. The storms are getting worse and worse. People are losing lives. We know that the winters are getting hotter and hotter, warmer and warmer. We know this climate change is happening. So we have to ask ourselves, who is God in light of all these things that are happening?
So for myself, as a child, you experience racism and you feel like there's nothing you can do. But as you get older, you realize, yes, there's a lot of things we can do. We can speak out against it. We can try to change the culture and the laws and what is happening in the church because it all intersects. So for me, when I studied at Knox College, where my talk was, where I met you, everything seemed so theoretical and so philosophical. God and theology was something out there and it was so hard to comprehend.
I couldn't bring it down to earth, but through my studies and my interest in liberation theology, that's what liberation theology is. Making it for the people so that people can experience liberation, that people will come to understand God through their experiences and be lifted out of their oppression or subjugation. So that's what the book aims to do.
It's a very practical book. There's Q and A at the end of each chapter. That was not my original intent, but the publisher thought that it would be a great book study for faith communities and church groups. The book came out earlier this year and so far a lot of churches are using it. So I'm really glad that the publisher had that foresight and made me write those questions at the end of each chapter. They see that it is a very practical book that really challenges how we understand racism and sexism in our society and in the church. We can't just sit back as theologians or as Christians saying, “okay, that's how society is.” We have to fight against it because it costs lives. That's why genocides happened here in North America and in different places around the world, and even right now, genocides are happening. I think we can't take these topics lightly. Yes, I approach the book very personally, but I'm hoping that it becomes a lens Not just for Asian Canadians and Asian North Americans, but for everyone to see what is happening.
That's how I'm always writing my books. It's one of my other books called Invisible. I really wanted that to be a lens of how other groups are made invisible. So this book, When God Became White, yes, a lot of it, because you could only write from your own personal experience. I can't speak for black people or for white people. I'm just speaking for myself as an Asian Canadian, Asian American, and through our experiences, people will come to understand their own experiences and what is happening around them and be in solidarity with one another. That is always my hope that white people and other people of color will stand in solidarity with Asian Canadians and Asian Americans to fight against this racism, which is rampant and not just in our schools and in our workplaces, but right in our churches.
HK: I'm so glad that you brought in these very like “in-the-moment” realities that we're facing in the world. Because a lot of these things are not new. Again, you've talked about…you've written a lot of books, and a lot of it is about different aspects of things that we face, as you mentioned, like gender, race, climate change, also experiences like sexual abuse, and I think a lot of it goes back to this idea of dominance, which you write a lot about, especially in this book.
For me, personally I grew up in a Catholic community, and my sort of Catholic education provided very little context for the political, historical, or otherwise, to my learning about the life of Jesus. Things that would have been essential to who he was as a person. So growing up, I wouldn't have been able to locate Jerusalem or Nazareth on a map or tell you that Aramaic was the language that Jesus would have spoken in his everyday life. Or that, the fact that it originated in the ancient region of Syria, let alone any other sort of political implications of what any of these things would mean back then, and even today. Again, it's goes back to this idea of like really whitewashing sort of the history that has again, real implications of that you can pinpoint, in a lot of ways, like the genocide that happening in Gaza now.
And I think that also relates very much to, our current volume for choa, this idea of dominance and religion, as an institution anyway, and like the purity that has affected so many of our like day-to-day expectations for and around sex, outside of abuse, but also just purity culture and when it comes to dating or like celibacy for religious figures.
I think for choa, I would love to talk a little bit about sort of our beings, in the context of like Korean history, and I guess patriarchy since our community is mainly Korean women. You talk a little bit about Korean history and how that sort of intersects with the roles of missionaries and like imperialism and colonization and all these things. There's so much to that. I don't think we have a lot of time to go into that.
GJK: Let me just say it briefly. The book has a chapter called “Missiology of Whiteness” and I do talk about how missionaries, white missionaries, went into various parts of the world and they brought this white Jesus. So the book is really examining how our view of who God is really affects our worldview, our actions, our ethics, and our ways of thinking. Jesus was not a white man, but he suddenly becomes white and the book goes through that whole historical change of Jesus and I think that's why Amazon, and other groups, have just categorized it as a history of religion or history book.
But it goes through that to come to now a more present modern history where the white missionaries went into Korea and to different parts of Asia and they brought this white Jesus. So along with that is the colonialism, imperialism that has happened in India and in Indonesia and Vietnam and other parts of the world and in Asia, with Americans going into Korea. So all of that is intertwined and intersecting. So this colonization has been part of Christian history from the beginning with the Roman Empire trying to spread and colonize different parts of the world. And in doing so, uplifting a white Jesus and a white male God.
So that's why you see this spreading this missiology of whiteness right from the beginning. So when they came to Korea and in different parts of Asia, you see how the white missionaries viewed us so negatively. In the book, I use Edward Said's Orientalism. He does a great job in his book of how Asia, the East versus the West…The West has viewed the East as unintelligent, savage, undeveloped, backwards, and weak, and feminine. And you see this even when Christian white missionaries came, they told us that Koreans were not smart, were lazy, undeveloped, were not progressing. And so this whole whiteness was instilled in us, that we are less than these white Europeans or white North Americans on the other side of the ocean.
And that gets, you know, it doesn't just disappear. It stays with a nation for a while because these missionaries were there for a long time. And so when Korean immigrants go to Canada and to the U. S. and different parts, we internalize that. Our parents internalized it. I internalized it. And we always feel inferior., That we are not as smart. there's something wrong with us, our culture, our language, how we even our physical attributes and our physical traits, our beauty, this westernization of beauty. We aren't beautiful enough so that's why we need cosmetic surgery to make our eyes bigger and our noses more pointy. It's ridiculous what is happening. But this is all intertwined with Christianity. That white European, particularly male heterosexual theologians, kept saying that white was the best. Then they allowed that message to be shared with everyone else under the guise of Christianity. So these are all intersecting. It's very dangerous. And then we experienced that in our churches.
And as immigrants and children of immigrants, generation after generation, like in the U. S., Filipinos were one of the first to come here. That was 500 years ago. But it doesn't matter how long we've been here. We all still look different. People can see us that we're Asian or Hispanic or African, we look different. And so this racism still gets embedded and we are given all these inferior categories and labels, and we're told that we are less than in the schools, in our workplaces, in our communities, and also in our churches.
So we really have to dismantle this whiteness, dismantle all of this colonization of our land and our minds and our bodies and really fight against it. This is really big. And I think some Koreans may not think of it as big, but it is a really big thing. And we really need to fight this.
HK: I appreciate that you started this off with, or this particular section, off with the sort of understanding that a lot of our struggles with Are so connected and similar to a lot of other people of other countries and other sort of diasporic groups.
And I will say for me you talk a little bit about the loss of culture and language and history that comes with colonization and the destructive process that it takes on. That kind of came up for me. It's like a very small detail that came up in my brain where growing up, I've met a lot of Korean parents who are very religious and also bring in their own sort of cultural and history and understanding and tradition and are also what I understood to be very superstitious. That may or may not be the right term to use but there is this idea that I had growing up that these two things were very much at odds with each other because I had this very Western understanding of religious purity. And if you're going to be a Christian or a Catholic, you couldn't carry any of these sort of like superstitious ideas.
GJK: I think what you're observing is that the church, the white church kept saying that white European culture is superior. So whatever religious and cultural traditions that Koreans had, In particular, like shamanism or Buddhism or Confucianism was evil and less than.
So that narrative, I know you got my book, The Grace of Sophia. So I touch a little bit on that book. There was a lot of Westerners telling people in the East that we were less than, but, a lot of this, when Christianity was brought to Asia. And when we look at Korea, a lot of it intersects and intertwines and this intermixing with Korean culture.
You can't divorce it. It just…it happens not just in Korea, but in other parts. So when we even think about Christianity, we always think it's like pristine and pure. And that there was no syncretism or no mixing, but all of Christianity is syncretism and mixing. But when Westerners do it, it's okay. But when Asians do it, it's oh gosh, that is just horrible. You guys aren't even real Christians.
These practices of shamanism, even our prayers in the, not so much in the Catholic church, but in the Protestant, many of the Korean Protestant churches, very shamanistic in many ways, with the Jeongsung Gido and many other prayers. It's very shamanistic. And even how we offer our different offerings to the minister is like a lot of shaman practice. And this Confucianism also gets embedded into Christianity, with the division of the men and the woman, how we even behave and interact within the church and within fellowship, et cetera.
So you can't divorce it, but we cannot put down our own cultural practices and say, “Oh, we're being all evil and now we're all this shaman kind of practices.” It's just what religion has been for the last 2000 years within Christianity or any religion. If we think of Judaism, Judaism was a mixing of everything as they roamed around in that Middle East Mesopotamia area.
It's very clear in the Old Testament that there was mixing with the Egyptians and the Canaanites and all the other people. It was always about mixing. So we cannot have this nostalgic idea. “Oh, everything was pure until what? Koreans came on the scene or black people.” We can't have this conversation. And for me, I get really upset about this because it always targets people of color and not to the white people.
HK: And I think that like this idea of the integration of shaman practices in the more sort of structured Christian practices, I think, makes a lot of sense. I think reading your book, one thing that also really stood out to me is this idea of Minjeong theology, which is something I've never heard about.
So I think given the sort of dominance of a certain narrative around Christianity I think we as diasporic kids growing up, we missed a lot of the sort of radical nature of how Koreans can actually practice Christianity and the true message of God's love and God as more of a spirit rather than what we think of, in terms of as you talk a lot about as a gendered male, I wonder how you think of that.
This is maybe more of a game of imagination. How do you think our experiences as Koreans could have been different if God was understood as a gendered female?
GJK: Yep. So maybe we'll wrap up with this question. I think that's a good one for people to study when God became white or any of my previous book, because I'm really dealing with the gendering of God and the racialization of God in this book and saying, Because Christians have continued, the white European Christians have continued to say that God is masculine and God is feminine.
This really allowed racism to exist within the church, whiteness to flourish and sexism to exist in the church. So it's not And I'm not talking about it in past terms. It's present and it will continue to be our future if we don't challenge this. Because how we view God is going to determine how we act.
So people knew that right from the beginning. That's why the Roman emperors insisted that Jesus was white. They can't go and colonize and kill people that look like Jesus. So they had to make Jesus white. So I think the Korean church would have been very different if we can, if we embrace the feminine images.
The book, When God Became White, ends with biblical traditions that have, that are, feminine and non gendered and non racialized. That is my hope for the church and those outside the church. So many people left the church because they're just so tired of the racism and the sexism and all the -isms that exist in the church.
So I'm really speaking to those outside the church or those who have left the church that if we can reimagine and retrieve these other images that are already in our tradition and in scriptures, then it's not just Koreans, everyone would have a different experience of who God is. And I think the world will be a different and a better place.
So that is always my hope. And I always live in hope.
HK: That's such a beautiful last note to leave on. I will say that, like just hearing you talk about that, I think for me, moving forward. From this idea of God as an all knowing, all powerful God who inspired fear and existed above us. Again, that idea of dominance and moving from that idea and thinking about God as a loving spirit existing and moving between and among us took a long time for me to accept.
I think for me, I grew up in a church that was a very intergenerational space. I think that for me, as much as I don't really practice religion as an institution anymore, I do miss that sort of sacred nature of that intergenerational space. I think we're always looking for the sense of belonging and what that could look like, with or without the church. I think there is that movement towards that, especially with a lot of younger folks.
I think that for folks who are listening and watching, I hope they will pick up your book because your book does end with a lot of beautiful calls to action to like what that could look like moving forward and [in] very practical terms. I wish we had more time to talk about the theology of visibility and God is spirit and the biblical images of the feminine Dimensions of God, but yeah, hopefully people will pick up your book after this conversation to read more about that.
So again, thank you Dr. Kim for joining us for this conversation.
GJK: Thank you so much for having me. Maybe I'll come back to talk about my other book, Invisible, and I do have another one coming out next year So feel free to invite me back. Thank you so much for having me to share my new book, When God Became White.
HK: When I spoke with Dr. Kim in mid-October, we only had a limited amount of time. And towards the end of our conversation, I mentioned that I wish we had more time to talk about her theology of visibility. Reflecting on our conversation since recording it, I thought it would be worth following up with her to ask her to share some of her thoughts and she has very generously sent us some recordings.
Before we play those recordings, I wanted to share a couple of my own reflections. First, you can read a bit more about her theology of visibility in her book, Invisible Theology and Experience of Asian American Women. But to briefly talk about what her Theology of Visibility is, it talks about how Han, Ouri, Jeong, and Chi can move us forward in our liberation from whiteness.
And although her Theology of Visibility isn't necessarily speaking to a Korean audience alone, I'm sure these ideas of Han, Ouri, and Jeong in particular are familiar to a lot of you. And I think this integration of these Korean themes will resonate with a lot of you as much as it has for me as I think about this sort of quote unquote in between space that a lot of us are navigating in terms of reimagining and renegotiating our individual and collective relationships with religion, faith, and what that means for an intergenerational fight for liberation.
Personally, I've found that it's been hard to find the language to talk about this experience in English. At least for me, I think Dr. Kim is one of the first, if not only, people to connect that experience with these Korean concepts that I've heard before get talked about a lot in regards to the experience of being Korean women moving through this world but not necessarily in relation to faith and liberation in the explicit way that she talks about it.
But it makes total sense to use these Korean concepts and words to talk about what I think is a very unique Korean experience, especially for those of us in the diaspora. For Dr. Kim, she has written a lot about this reimagination before, talking about some of the political and socioeconomic realities of Koreans, especially those migrating to countries like so-called Canada and the U.S., and again, you can read more about that in her books. Today, the political and socio-economic landscape in Korea and North America looks very different from when Koreans first migrated to a place like the U.S.A. almost 120 years ago that have changed the reality of so many Korean women today and will look different in another 120 years from now.
What hasn't changed is this fight for and to find freedom. Part of the work is to embody the theology of visibility in ways that we can continue to honor our Korean heritage while forging new paths and spaces that respect the earth and those that have been marginalized, in the true image of Jesus.
So to ground some of these thoughts in our volume, although we don't talk about sex so much in the conversation that we recorded in mid October, I think the important point is that we've acknowledged sex as this part of this bigger interconnected conversation about liberation. What I will loosely call sexual liberation, and all the ways that can take on meaning, can only come with the liberation from genocide, patriarchy, colonization, racism, and more.
This is what Dr. Kim had to add.
GJK: I wrote my book, Invisible, a few years ago. In that book, I do a theology of Asian American women and I finished the book by introducing a theology of visibility. And in that Theology of Visibility, I use Korean and Asian concepts of Han, Ouri, Jeong, and Chi and how it will really help us to bring to light our invisibility as Asian Americans in this society, of our history, our long pain and suffering, discrimination, and oppression in racism. For more detail, please consult the book, Invisible.
But just to say a little bit about Han, Ouri, and Jeong, and the importance of how these terms help us to move towards a theology of visibility. Han is a Korean term meaning unjust suffering.
Ouri is a Korean term which means ‘our’, and in the Korean language, the plural possessive is what you use instead of the singular possessive. That is the correct Korean grammar. And that really changes our scope of how we see the world, and how we see Christianity, and how we see one another. That the community is more important than the individual.
Jeong, the third term, is a Korean notion of love, which really gets to the heart of being connected with one another. It is an image of a sticky love, where it's really hard to separate us from one another. So I use these three terms, plus chi, to develop the Theology of Visibility, and I hope that it'll be a lens for many people, not just Asian American women, but for any group of people who feel marginalized or made invisible, due to their sexuality, their gender, their race, their economic status, etc.
HK: And to ground this conversation in our reality today, like I mentioned, we recorded our conversation around mid-October, which was also around the time marking one year of genocide in Palestine. We talked a bit about the erasure of Jesus as a Palestinian Jew, who really embodied these themes of Han, Ouri, and Jeong in what I think are really radical ways, even though that's not necessarily the exact words that Jesus himself would have used. So I asked Dr. Kim to tell us a bit about her trip to Palestine last October in 2023 and what she saw and experienced, and if it influenced or changed her idea around Jesus and/or understanding of theology of visibility.
GJK: Last year, just before October 7th, I was in Palestine for a conference on land and religion and colonialism. No one had expected what would happen on October 7th. I returned home on October 5th. During my time there, I experienced so much hospitality, love, acceptance, and warmth.
The second day there, I fell and I broke my knee.The care and the respect and the concern and the kindness is overwhelming. The Palestinians are very, very hospitable, very generous, very kind people. Those memories will never leave me and my embodied being because of the kindness I experienced. When I think about that, it does a lot to us about this Theology of Visibility.
It's not just Asian American women that are made invisible. I think today, Palestinians are made invisible. Their concerns are not that important. Their lives don't count as much as other people's lives, and it's easy to just discard them. So I think we as human beings have a lot to do, to rethink how we understand one another and how we treat one another.
And I'm hoping that this Theology of Visibility will really challenge us, that it will be another lens to see the world, and challenge us of our own problems, of our own misuse of power, and really work towards loving one another and embracing one another.
Before we play those recordings, I wanted to share a couple of my own reflections. First, you can read a bit more about her theology of visibility in her book, Invisible Theology and Experience of Asian American Women. But to briefly talk about what her Theology of Visibility is, it talks about how Han, Ouri, Jeong, and Chi can move us forward in our liberation from whiteness.
And although her Theology of Visibility isn't necessarily speaking to a Korean audience alone, I'm sure these ideas of Han, Ouri, and Jeong in particular are familiar to a lot of you. And I think this integration of these Korean themes will resonate with a lot of you as much as it has for me as I think about this sort of quote unquote in between space that a lot of us are navigating in terms of reimagining and renegotiating our individual and collective relationships with religion, faith, and what that means for an intergenerational fight for liberation.
Personally, I've found that it's been hard to find the language to talk about this experience in English. At least for me, I think Dr. Kim is one of the first, if not only, people to connect that experience with these Korean concepts that I've heard before get talked about a lot in regards to the experience of being Korean women moving through this world but not necessarily in relation to faith and liberation in the explicit way that she talks about it.
But it makes total sense to use these Korean concepts and words to talk about what I think is a very unique Korean experience, especially for those of us in the diaspora. For Dr. Kim, she has written a lot about this reimagination before, talking about some of the political and socioeconomic realities of Koreans, especially those migrating to countries like so-called Canada and the U.S., and again, you can read more about that in her books. Today, the political and socio-economic landscape in Korea and North America looks very different from when Koreans first migrated to a place like the U.S.A. almost 120 years ago that have changed the reality of so many Korean women today and will look different in another 120 years from now.
What hasn't changed is this fight for and to find freedom. Part of the work is to embody the theology of visibility in ways that we can continue to honor our Korean heritage while forging new paths and spaces that respect the earth and those that have been marginalized, in the true image of Jesus.
So to ground some of these thoughts in our volume, although we don't talk about sex so much in the conversation that we recorded in mid October, I think the important point is that we've acknowledged sex as this part of this bigger interconnected conversation about liberation. What I will loosely call sexual liberation, and all the ways that can take on meaning, can only come with the liberation from genocide, patriarchy, colonization, racism, and more.
This is what Dr. Kim had to add.
GJK: I wrote my book, Invisible, a few years ago. In that book, I do a theology of Asian American women and I finished the book by introducing a theology of visibility. And in that Theology of Visibility, I use Korean and Asian concepts of Han, Ouri, Jeong, and Chi and how it will really help us to bring to light our invisibility as Asian Americans in this society, of our history, our long pain and suffering, discrimination, and oppression in racism. For more detail, please consult the book, Invisible.
But just to say a little bit about Han, Ouri, and Jeong, and the importance of how these terms help us to move towards a theology of visibility. Han is a Korean term meaning unjust suffering.
Ouri is a Korean term which means ‘our’, and in the Korean language, the plural possessive is what you use instead of the singular possessive. That is the correct Korean grammar. And that really changes our scope of how we see the world, and how we see Christianity, and how we see one another. That the community is more important than the individual.
Jeong, the third term, is a Korean notion of love, which really gets to the heart of being connected with one another. It is an image of a sticky love, where it's really hard to separate us from one another. So I use these three terms, plus chi, to develop the Theology of Visibility, and I hope that it'll be a lens for many people, not just Asian American women, but for any group of people who feel marginalized or made invisible, due to their sexuality, their gender, their race, their economic status, etc.
HK: And to ground this conversation in our reality today, like I mentioned, we recorded our conversation around mid-October, which was also around the time marking one year of genocide in Palestine. We talked a bit about the erasure of Jesus as a Palestinian Jew, who really embodied these themes of Han, Ouri, and Jeong in what I think are really radical ways, even though that's not necessarily the exact words that Jesus himself would have used. So I asked Dr. Kim to tell us a bit about her trip to Palestine last October in 2023 and what she saw and experienced, and if it influenced or changed her idea around Jesus and/or understanding of theology of visibility.
GJK: Last year, just before October 7th, I was in Palestine for a conference on land and religion and colonialism. No one had expected what would happen on October 7th. I returned home on October 5th. During my time there, I experienced so much hospitality, love, acceptance, and warmth.
The second day there, I fell and I broke my knee.The care and the respect and the concern and the kindness is overwhelming. The Palestinians are very, very hospitable, very generous, very kind people. Those memories will never leave me and my embodied being because of the kindness I experienced. When I think about that, it does a lot to us about this Theology of Visibility.
It's not just Asian American women that are made invisible. I think today, Palestinians are made invisible. Their concerns are not that important. Their lives don't count as much as other people's lives, and it's easy to just discard them. So I think we as human beings have a lot to do, to rethink how we understand one another and how we treat one another.
And I'm hoping that this Theology of Visibility will really challenge us, that it will be another lens to see the world, and challenge us of our own problems, of our own misuse of power, and really work towards loving one another and embracing one another.
Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim is an ordained minister of word and sacrament within the Presbyterian Church (USA) denomination. Kim is the Professor of Theology at Earlham School of Religion. She is also the author or editor of 24 books and is the host of Madang podcast, which holds conversations on Christianity, religion and culture. She received her M.Div. from Knox College (University of Toronto) and her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. | IG @gracejisunkim
Video Editor:
Frances Kim is an emerging filmmaker (writer, director, editor) and an independent growth marketing consultant. She is based in Toronto, Canada.
| Youtube: @FrancesKimFilm, Bluesky @franceskim.bsky.social
Frances Kim is an emerging filmmaker (writer, director, editor) and an independent growth marketing consultant. She is based in Toronto, Canada.
| Youtube: @FrancesKimFilm, Bluesky @franceskim.bsky.social
