Christian Groups Organize Around Race

When he arrived at Harvard his freshman year, Alexander E. Johnson ’10 says he thought to himself, “This is a very irreligious place.”

A native of Houston and longtime member of the city’s 8000-strong, traditionally-black Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, Johnson was raised in a highly religious African-American family. Growing up, he would spend at least three days a week at church, attending choir rehearsals, Bible studies, and oftentimes daylong series of services on Sundays.

So when Johnson arrived in Cambridge, he says he was struck by what he believed to be the relative lack of religious organizations. While students were open to talking about everything from physics to French literature, he felt religion was not on the discussion agenda.

While he didn’t join a Christian group on account of being “skeptical about everything,” he began provoking fellow residents of Wigglesworth Hall to engage in religious conversations. His second semester, he joined SoulFood Ministry, a black Christian organization on campus, after having dinner with its members in Annenberg Hall.

Now, Johnson is a certified minister, and he preaches on the second Sunday of every month at the Western Avenue Baptist Church, an African-American church that’s about an eight minute walk from Mather House. His services regularly draw a crowd of black Harvard Christians, he said.

For many minority Christian students, religious organizations that provide a core of shared cultural values imbue their members with a level of comfort that allows them to explore their faiths.

CREATING COMMUNITY

Some Asian Christians on campus say race-specific organizations such as the Harvard-Radcliffe Asian American Christian Fellowship engender a sense of community and solidarity.

Elizabeth P. Shen ’10, the daughter of Protestant immigrants from China, is on the executive board of the AACF. Coming from an Asian community in Southern California, Shen says that there are values shared by her Chinese culture and her Christian beliefs.

“I think to some extent, work ethic and hard work could be considered that,” she says. “I think that in a sense, the idea of working hard, getting what you deserve, and good deeds are values that are based in, at least in China, very much based in family values.”

Due to the Chinese government’s limits on religion, there are few Christians who are from mainland China, Shen says. Most Asian Christians at Harvard, she says, are Korean.

Grace I. Kim ’10, raised in the borough of Queens in New York City, is a Korean Christian. She comes from a family that attends church services every Sunday and that has a verse from Thessalonians written in Korean in their dining room.

Going to a Korean church at home contributed to her being more comfortable becoming a part of AACF than the multi-ethnic Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship, she says.

At Harvard, Shen says that a separate organization for Asian Christians offers more opportunities for leadership, where students can make connections more easily.

“I have an easier time making friends with people who are Asian, partly because of where I grew up but also because it’s easier for me to share similar values with other Asians,” she says. “And I think for example in any community and any organization, if you’re Asian, it might be a little bit more difficult to be as good friends with all of these Caucasians, Europeans, whatever, enough that you’re so well-tuned with that community that it’s just as easy for you to be president or whatever of a certain club or organization.”

DEFYING STEREOTYPES

SoulFood’s most famous event of the year—and what brought Johnson from first semester-skepticism to the black Christian organization—was its annual dinner.

“It really draws the black community because when they start thinking there’s chicken, they’re more likely to come out,” says Shelley J. Thomas ’11, an African-American Christian. “They will always come for chicken and cornbread. You can count on that.”

On average, both Thomas and Johnson agrees that most African Americans at Harvard are Christian, and that Christianity underlies African-American culture.

Thomas says that SoulFood has enabled her to be more religious than she was in her Philadelphia home by giving her a community and forcing her to make a choice about her own religion.

What makes adhering to some Christian tenets more difficult for African-Americans, she says, are certain “hypersexual” stereotypes.

“You could see that in the way black people are portrayed now: you got the movies, you got the dancing, you got things like that,” she says. “I’m trying to live right, but if I go out to this dance, I’m expected to dance like they dance in the movies. I’m expected to wear what they’re wearing. So I think that’s a little more difficult,”

Johnson echoes a similar sentiment, noting that college temptations prevent some students from living in accordance with Christian doctrine in the present, instead relying on the promise of future clemency.

“You have people who want to outsmart God. They say, ‘If I could do it today, why can’t I do it tomorrow?’ So they push things off until they think they’re ready,” he says. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for. Maybe they think they’re going to get holier overnight or more acceptable to God.”

But Johnson disagrees with Thomas’s idea that stereotypes disproportionately afflict the black community.

“A stereotype is a stereotype, and I don’t believe that the Harvard black community especially falls into category of individuals who play into a stereotype simply because the stereotype exists,” Johnson says.

He adds that there is much to unite African Americans around their faith, including gospel music and an upbeat preaching style. On this point, Thomas agreed.

“I might be humming something in class somewhere, and someone hears me and they know the song, and I already go, ‘they’re Christian. They have a Christian background,’” she says.

—Staff writer Naveen N. Srivatsa can be reached at srivatsa@fas.harvard.edu.