When Asians arrive in Evangelical America

Trigger warning: it’s some messy, nasty religion

You might think that Evangelicals are a lot of white folks, which is how they seem to like it. But Asian Americans tend to show up from time to time.

I’m thinking of those odd moments when Asians have been seen on the religion’s lily white stage. The stories are tinged with racism and colonialism, and horror endings—as gets passed off as ‘God’.

1. Kenneth Nally

His father, Walter, was an American serviceman in the Korean war, and married a Japanese woman. They moved to America. She’d changed her name and religion, but her husband’s family never accepted her.

Their son, Kenneth, would become a truly ugly story in Evangelical America. It didn’t start out that way. He’d gone to Catholic schools, then UCLA. But there was something wrong with him? From a court report:

“He often talked about the absurdity of life, the problems he had with women and his family, and he occasionally mentioned suicide to his friends.”

Then Ken got “saved” at an Evangelical church. The pastor? John MacArthur. As the friend later testified, Ken became “a completely different person. He was always talking religion, religion, religion.”

The Asian man was now a member of America’s biggest, whitest religion. Still, something was wrong. He started getting ‘biblical counselling’—while changing schools to Biola College, then Evangelical seminary. It wasn’t working. His ‘counselor’ later recalled Ken saying: “I just can’t live this life.”

He was depressed. His girlfriend broke up with him, telling him to turn to ‘God’. A medical doctor recommended involuntary commitment. His parents thought that ‘crazy’, and John MacArthur agreed, saying of such help: All they do is fill you up with pills and scramble your brain.”

Ken stayed with the MacArthur family for a few weeks. MacArthur’s wife was later quoted saying that Ken was “very sick and needed to be committed.” But Ken was sent back to his parents’ home, told to listen to John MacArthur sermons.

It wasn’t working. On April 1st, 1979, age 24, Ken killed himself. It became a big news story because his parents sued the church for practicing medicine in an epic lawsuit, Nally v. Grace Community Church of the Valley.

After a near-conviction from a jury, set aside by the judge, the church was released from liability on First Amendment grounds. It was a landmark case for churches being declared free to practice mental health counselling without oversight if it was dressed up as ‘religion’.

Maria Nally was interviewed, weeping and recalling a dream in which she’d seen her son standing in a white room, covered in blood. She said: “I ask him what happened, and he says, ‘Mom, help me.’”

2. Ravi Zacharias

Evangelicalism is always looking for people who are skilled at “apologetics,” which means trying to explain the religion to regular people. It’s not an easy job, and Evangelicals don’t do it very well. The #1 figure in the field is C.S. Lewis, an Anglican.

But back in 1990, a guy from India named Ravi Zacharias became a star with his book A Shattered Visage: The Real Face of Atheism. He seemed to be a genius with six Ph.D.s—and gave it all up to serve Jesus. Ravi became a household name in Evangelical America.

An atheist lawyer named Steve Baughman smelled a rat, and did a lot of social media on problems in Ravi’s stories. Evangelicals ignored that, and Ravi died in 2000 a practically sacred figure.

Then a nightmare history of rampant womanizing and rape came out. Turns out, Ravi had girlfriends around the world, and ran a massage parlour as his personal harem—applying force when needed.

Ravi’s 2006 memoir, Walking From East to West, began to read like a post-colonial horror story of a young Indian man with an inferiority complex who’d seized on a white religion that promised a dramatic boost of power and importance—and all he had to do was tell whopper after whopper. Many Evangelical leaders knew, and kept it quiet. It’s all a show.

3. Joshua Harris

In 1997, a young Evangelical man from Oregon published an era-defining book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The religion had a new star: an exotic young man who seemed to be constantly wrestling with a huge sex drive, but promised that if you do it “God’s way,” you’ll get major rewards.

A 1997 newspaper profile begins: “Joshua Harris is, like, a major babe.”

He was half-Japanese. His mother, Sono Sato Harris, was largely unknown to Evangelicalism, but she was a dedicated homeschooling activist with the rest of her family.

Joshua’s model in launching himself as a public figure was, of course, Ravi Zacharias. As Josh writes early on:

“He not only influenced my style of speaking, he taught me the importance of developing my mind and having a ‘ready defense’ of my faith.”

As it turned out, that really meant: make up everything. Evangelicals will love it! It was another post-colonial tale about a half-Japanese trickster trying to position himself as a star in a white religion. As he only began to discuss in 2021, Josh’s stories of his early life were largely invented.

Like Ravi, he married a white woman, and coasted on his stardom. He had more bestsellers about his constant quest for “purity” when he was just so damn sexual! How easy to see now that Joshua Harris’ racial otherness facilitated this fiction.

Over the years he backed away from the “purity culture,” but it was his wife Shannon who brought a halt to the madness in 2019 by getting a divorce.

Finding himself attack from the religion for that, Josh announced that he was no longer Christian.

4. Christopher Yuan

When Evangelicals want to reflect on “bad” sexual examples, they do seem to choose Asians as representatives of ‘sin’. For help with that nasty homosexuality, there’s Christopher Yuan.

His 2011 memoir, Out of a Far Country, tells a story of a young Chinese-American man who immersed himself in a hell of homosexuality and drug dealing, got HIV, then got “saved”—with his Christian mother’s help!

The book, which they co-wrote, was Evangelical magic, selling 100,000 copies. It was a cocktail of religious loathing: Asianness, gayness, drugs, and AIDS. When he said he was celibate, the congregation shouted: ‘Amen’.

5. Amy Pinto

Throughout the 1980s, a ho-hum painter was going nowhere until he did one of a cottage in England—and then more. As his wife Nanette recalled, “The cottage images just sold like crazy. People were eating them up.”

Then, Evangelicals got interested. They didn’t usually collect art. Art was “bad.” But Thomas Kinkade art was okay, and he made a fortune. “My paintings are messengers of God’s love,” he told Christianity Today in 2000.

All along, he was a fall-down alcoholic. In 2010, he had a DUI. His wife staged an intervention, and he left her, and met an Indian woman, Amy Pinto-Walsh. As Eric Kuskey writes in Billion Dollar Painter: “Besides her pleasing features and her considerable intellect, she had a figure that could be described as voluptuous. ”

On April 6, 2012, Kinkade drank himself into a stupor—with some help from Valium—and died in bed. The autopsy reported on the great artist’s last work. His toenails were painted ‘glittery gold’. Amy gave an odd statement, saying that Kinkade “died in his sleep, very happy, in the house he built, with the paintings he loved, and the woman he loved.”

He loved her enough to have scrawled out a will that left her money, property and most of his art. With her lesbian lawyer in tow, Amy settled with Nanette for a reported eight-figure sum. I love a good hustler, and Amy took one to the cleaners.

There’s so many more Asians in Evangelical America.

We could talk about Joshua Ryan Butler, the half-Japanese pastor telling the religion to imagine having sex with Jesus. Why are Asians so often given the sex messages?

There’s Francis Chan, the star pastor with the 2008 bestseller, Crazy Love. Asians are crazy like that?

So don’t go thinking Jesusland is all-white. It’s just…mostly white. 🔶