Identity, Community, Belonging: A Postcolonial Asian/American Kachin Baptist Ecclesiology

Abstract

This dissertation examines theological and ecclesiological approaches to Christian community, identity, and belonging from an Asian/American and postcolonial feminist perspective. Specifically, I examine how the Kachin Baptist community in the U.S. constructs their ethno-nationalist religious identity in changing geopolitical contexts. The Kachin are an indigenous, minoritized ethnic group who began to migrate from Burma/Myanmar to the U.S. in the 1950s. Divisions within the U.S. based community emerged during a period marked by intensified militarized conflict in Burma, leading Kachin immigrants and resettled refugees in the U.S. to debate intensely about the contours of their community. I examine these divisions by analyzing the influential role of American Baptist missionaries and the Burmese sociopolitical context beginning in the 19th century to the present. My interdisciplinary project expands ecclesiological studies by putting Asian American and postcolonial feminist discourse into conversation with Pauline texts, Christian theology, and womanist theological anthropology. Given the Kachin Baptist divisions, I illustrate a mimicry of the hegemonic colonial ethos while critiquing the alliance between Kachin patrilineage and colonial heteropatriarchal Christianity. My study proposes a radical incarnation praxis that holds differences in a religiously pluralistic world as an alternative. This project considers experiences of Kachin border crossing, trauma, wounds, displacement, and relocation/resettlement in the North American context. I show how to destabilize past colonial narratives dominated in the Kachin Baptist church community, recognize internal diversity in communal identity-making, and generate new theological meanings of community. I offer a constructive theo-ethical praxis of rau (embodied solidarity of togetherness) to imagine a radical reformulation of ethical responsibility and re/construction of community in the context of Kachin immigration to the U.S., and to situate the Kachin Baptist diaspora within the study of Asian American religions.