Straight From the Church
How Korean American churches in California rallied against gay rights
By Jason Ma

Rev. Peter Kim literally thanks God for the campaign that he was able to cobble together in just a few weeks -- dedicated to putting an initiative on this year’s ballot in California.

“That’s what we call God’s providence,” he says.

Though his efforts will likely be unsuccessful (he needs over 400,000 valid petition signatures to qualify for the ballot), it marks the first state-wide political campaign by Korean Americans, who typically do not get involved in mainstream politics.

With only a few weeks to reach his target of 700,000 signatures by Tuesday (half are usually rejected), Kim mobilized the most influential institution in the Korean American community to get mostly older immigrants from Korea -- including many who aren’t fluent in English -- to register to vote and sign petitions.

That institution was the church.

And the cause it is rallying around is the California Defense of Sexual Responsibility Act of 2000, which would prohibit “public entities” from “endorsing, educating, recognizing or promoting homosexuality” as acceptable and from using the term “sexual orientation.”

Kim estimates that of the 1,000 Korean churches in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego, “almost all” of them are involved in some way.

Though Korean Americans in non-profit service organizations have criticized the church for staying out of community-wide political issues, such as immigration and bi-lingual education, supporters of the initiative say that the campaign to get the initiative on November’s ballot is not political, but religious.

“We are not interested in politics,” Kim says. “But because of this moral decline we cannot stand by.”

He is referring to the bills that California Gov. Gray Davis signed last year that strengthened laws prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians in public schools, the workplace and housing and allows domestic partners of state employees to qualify for health benefits.

“What the government did was against the Bible,” he explains. “The consequences of these bills will be the destruction of the next generation, the next Sodom and Gomorra.”

Only beginning last month, Kim’s campaign has quickly drawn the attention of other Korean Americans who disagree with Kim’s fire and brimstone predictions and see the initiative as a threat to basic civil rights.

The L.A.-based Korean Americans for Civil Rights (KACR) began its own campaign in December to counter Kim’s. On Monday, it held press conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco, announcing the start of an ad campaign in which KACR will buy full-page advertisements in Korean-language newspapers to persuade their readers not to support the initiative.

Several influential members of the Korean American community also endorsed the ad campaign against the Sexual Responsibility Act (SRA), such as attorney Angela Oh and UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Elaine Kim.

“This shouldn’t be the way Korean Americans get involved in politics,” KACR Coordinator Judy Han says. “Korean churches in general have not been politically active. An effort of this size is unheard of.

“We’re not asking for people’s forgiveness. We’re asking for tolerance and basic civil rights,” she adds.

Estimates of the Korean American population in California hover at 500,000 people, mostly in Southern California. However, with the number of registered voters approximated at only 50,000, community observers do not expect the churches to get enough signatures to put the initiative on the ballot. Kim will not say how many signatures he has received but the Christian Coalition estimates that Korean churches have registered 15,000 to 20,000 new voters.

Regardless of the initiatives success, the support of Korean churches for the campaign represents what could be the Korean American community’s first step into mainstream politics and reveals the church’s ability to mobilize people.

“THEY CAME TO US”

While the Korean churches are leading the campaign, they are not the authors of the initiative. In fact, the effort began in early November one day when Peter Kim was surfing the Internet and found a website created by Lee Olson, an engineer in Orange County and author of the SRA.

Olson’s website detailed “the homosexual agenda” that he says is exemplified in the anti-discrimination and domestic partnership bills that went into effect this year. But the website is the extent of Olson’s involvement in the campaign, and he insists that he has not sought support for his initiative nor solicited monetary contributions for it.

“If people respond to the Spirit, that’s fine,” says Olson. “If they don’t, that’s okay. It’s out of my hands. I haven’t pushed anybody; [the Korean churches] are the ones who moved.”

Beginning in March, Kim says he was working at a Korean-language radio station in Los Angeles, where he had a weekly show about Year 2000 preparedness around the world. The station had asked him to share his expertise as a retired computer systems engineer.

While researching U.S. government readiness over the Internet, Kim says he found a website describing Gov. Davis’ bills. “All of a sudden, this homosexual bill came up to my eyes,” he says. “That to me was a revolutionary bill because it violates biblical institutions of family and marriage.”

He immediately began asking around about the bill and eventually found Olson’s website in November. “Maybe it’s the Holy Spirit that arranged it that way,” he muses.

The two met for breakfast weeks later, and the next month Kim had invited Olson to the Oriental Mission Church (OMC) in Koreatown to speak to a group of Korean church pastors. That, Kim says, was when the campaign started in earnest.

Opponents of the SRA have criticized Kim’s campaign as a way for the Christian Coalition to enter minority communities, citing its endorsement of the initiative and its attendance at one of Kim’s meetings.

However, California Christian Coalition Director Miriam Archer says the Korean churches were the ones who initially got in touch with her organization. “They contacted us,” Archer insists. She adds that while her organization supports the efforts of the Korean churches, it has not mobilized its local chapters to gather signatures.

Instead, the California Christian Coalition is focusing its efforts around Proposition 22, also known as the “Knight Initiative,” which would define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

“These things take time,” she says. “We have to pick our battles. There just wasn’t time for the gathering of signatures. But it has waked [sic] up a lot of Koreans as to what is going on. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all positive. We’re not taking advantage of them.”

Archer notes that a Korean American chapter of the California Christian Coalition formed Dec. 3. For now, she says, it is still in its beginning stages with a board of directors yet to be formed.

But regardless of whether or not the mainstream religious organization is deliberately using the SRA to make inroads into the Korean American community, Korean Americans for Civil Rights Coordinator for Northern California Ed Lee said the Christian Coalition stands to benefit greatly from the campaign.

And with or without outside influence, there is no denying the widespread support for the SRA and the church community’s solidarity. “For a minister to [oppose the campaign] would be akin to professional suicide,” he says.

HUB OF THE COMMUNITY

While 20 to 30 percent of Koreans living in Korea are Christian, Koreans living in the United States are overwhelmingly Christian with most of them being Protestant. Charles Kim, executive director of the L.A.-based Korean American Coalition, says that 80 percent of Korean Americans go to church.

That is not surprising, he says, considering that the church has traditionally been the center of Korean American communities across the country, so much so, that non-Christian immigrants from Korea will convert to Christianity upon arriving in America.

It is typically a place where Korean Americans can meet, make friends and obtain information about the rest of the community, according to Kim.

“Since the beginning of the Korean American community, the church has been the local hub,” said John Kim, executive director of the Korean Community Center of the East Bay, whose non-partisan organization works with local Korean churches to provide social services. However, Kim points out that he is personally opposed to the initiative, though his organization remains officially neutral.

John Kim says churches are particularly important now that many Korean American families have been dispersing into the suburbs instead of clustering in urban centers. Thus, the church’s ability to bring Korean Americans together in one place makes it the “information gatekeeper” of the community.

Not only that, says Charles Kim, but while the number of Christian Korean Americans remains largely steady, the number of churches is decreasing. That means church-goers are moving from the smaller churches to the larger ones, concentrating more and more people in one congregation.

For example, the largest Korean churches in Southern California like Young Nak Presbyterian in downtown Los Angeles, with 10,000 members, and OMC in Koreatown, with 4,500, are involved in multi-million dollar expansion projects. “They’re buying and they’re building,” he says.

John Kim admits that because of the church’s role as the information gatekeeper over such a large segment of the Korean American community, misinformation can spread easily.

Charles Kim says he has heard of some Korean pastors mistakenly believing that the bills Gov. Davis signed into law would result in the prohibition of any sermons regarding gays. Nevertheless, Kim adds that the Korean churches are a key driving force on issues.

Although the SRA campaign is the first state-wide political issue that Korean churches’ have gotten involved in, that is not to say it has not mobilized its resources in the past, mostly for humanitarian purposes.

Most recently, he explains, the churches have raised money and food for famine victims in North Korea. And the churches in Southern California have also raised money for victims of the L.A. Riots in 1992, he adds.

The ability of the church to muster its resources is typified on regular Sundays when, even then, it raises a formidable sum of money. For example, on the week ending on Jan. 9, the New Community Baptist Church in Mountain View collected $35,453.39 from a congregation of slightly more than 1,000.

Charles Kim says he agrees with some Korean Americans who have criticized the church for not using its influence in more mainstream, political issues. But that is largely due, he says, to the fact that most of the church leaders are first generation Korean Americans who were raised in Korean and typically do not speak fluent English.

Kim’s organization, the Korean American Coalition (KAC), tried to register Korean Americans to vote in the past by going to churches on Sunday mornings. However, KAC stopped sending people there because of a lack of interest.

But since the churches have started their SRA campaign, Kim says the KAC has helped churches register voters again on Sunday mornings.

He is quick to point out though that KAC is officially non-partisan and did not help the churches obtain signatures. Kim adds that his name, along with the Korean American Coalition’s, was used without his permission in the churches’ full-page advertisements in Korean-language newspapers in the L.A. area.

However, he would not publicly say what his individual opinion on the matter is or whether he signed the petition, which he says his church distributed on at least one Sunday last month.

But the false endorsement of a community service organization does not have as great an impact on the community as the actions of the church itself, he says. And the decision over which issue, political or not, the church should get involved in rests with one person or sometimes just a handful of people.

CHURCH HIERARCHY

Most medium-sized Korean churches are top-down organizations with clearly defined tiers of authority, Charles Kim says.

Typically the pastor sits at the top, sometimes sharing power with a “council of elders.” Below them are associate ministers at the head of individual church departments, such as the youth ministry, senior services or music services. And completing the power structure are “evangelists” still receiving training in seminaries and lay officials who are not ordained ministers.

While the pastor and the council of elders enter into disputes over who should lead the church, decisions coming from the top are dutifully carried out by the subordinates, Kim says.

But it is usually the pastor who carries more influence throughout the rest of the Korean American community. Indeed, the pastor’s word is so revered, his influence is comparable to that of an archbishop’s within a Catholic parish, says Charles Kim, who himself attends a church in Cerritos, Calif.

In addition to the hierarchy within churches, a hierarchy exists within the denomination to which a church belongs, adds John Kim, though it is not as strict. Consequently, those denominational connections help to spread the word about issues affecting member churches.

Judy Han of Korean Americans for Civil Rights agrees there is a strict hierarchy in Korean churches. “When they say this is the way, other ministers have to follow the lead,” she says. “And if the minister delivers a sermon, you have to be courageous not to agree. We’re unhappy with the sense of obligation that exists at the churches.”

Rev. Peter Kim took advantage of the hierarchy when he first started. While he is not a pastor at a church, he worked as a missionary coordinator in the former Soviet Union and looked to his colleagues in church and denominational leadership positions to bring momentum his campaign.

After meeting with Olson, the author of the initiative, for their late November breakfast, Kim says he contacted the heads of the Jesus Awakening Movement in America and a Korean American children’s ministry.

The three of them, along with seven other ministers, met in early December to have a prayer meeting. Following this, Kim says the attendants of the meeting immediately contacted their friends and fellow pastors. “This was the explosion point,” he says.

Things began to move very quickly after that. On Dec. 8, Kim says the first large gathering of Korean ministers took place at the Oriental Mission Church. He estimates about 200 people were there.

It was at this meeting that Kim asked Lee Olson to talk to the Korean pastors and explain the meaning and purpose behind his initiative.

Then on Dec. 15, Kim held what he called a “Korean pastors summit,” again held at OMC. This meeting was attended by only 40 to 50 “leading senior pastors” and “denominational pastors only.”

The next day at OMC, Kim says he held another meeting of pastors, but this time a multiethnic one, consisting of some Chinese American and Japanese American pastors.

Miriam Archer, who says she attended this last meeting, adds that while other ethnic churches are involved in the effort, it is the Koreans who have been the “movers and the shakers.”

“I always knew a great many Koreans were devout believers,” Archer says. “They’re going to realize how important their vote is. This is going to get a lot more Korean people to register to vote. It’ll be a great thing for America.”

An official from OMC, speaking on condition of anonymity, says Peter Kim first contacted their church about getting involved in the campaign and convinced them of its biblical justifications.

The official recalls that OMC made announcements about the petition to congregation members on the second and third Sundays of December after the sermon and continued to make it available after that. The official adds that the church did not register voters on its premises, instead directing interested parties to their local post office to obtain the necessary paperwork.

Repeated requests for comment to the Young Nak church in Los Angeles, the other large Korean church there, were not returned.

Facing the likely failure of his campaign, Kim says he may try to get the initiative on the ballot again or may attempt legal action in federal court to repeal existing state laws.

But rather than church or denominational hierarchies, Kim credits God for the rapid movement among Korean churches in support of the SRA. “It is the Holy Spirit who has lead us so far. It’s up to the Lord. Humanly speaking, it’s very hard. Let me continue to press on.”

SUNDAY MORNING

With a little over 1,000 members the New Community Baptist Church in Mountain View is large by Bay Area standards. Though many consider the Korean American population in the Silicon Valley to be the fastest growing in the area, it still does not come close to Southern California’s population.

A converted warehouse, the church sits inconspicuously on Middlefield Road, belying its spaciousness and the ongoing construction that will expand the church grounds further.

Like most Korean American churches, New Community Baptist has two separate ministries: one for Korean-speaking first generation Korean Americans and another for English-speaking second generation members.

A bulletin board near the main entrance posts separate announcements for the Korean and English ministries. Of the postings in Korean is a flyer for the SRA initiative, which requests that members sign the petition. There is no mention of the campaign on the English side.

Rev. Don S. Kim, delivers the weekly sermons at the English ministry. As on most Sundays, he is also busy teaching scripture classes and attending staff meetings. And as a member of the second-tier of the church leadership, Kim said he first heard about the campaign through the Korean Southern Baptist Church Association, of which his New Community Baptist is a member.

Kim says his church has distributed petitions among the over 700 Korean-speaking members and expects that a quarter of them will sign it, with many lacking the citizenship status to vote or to register to vote. However, he says he is worried that his, and other churches’, involvement in the SRA initiative will create the appearance that all Korean Americans are against gays and lesbians.

“This is a religious issue,” he says. “Korean Americans just happen to be involved.”

While he admits that he does not have a full grasp of how the SRA would be implemented or the full effects it would have, Kim says that he is particularly concerned that a “homosexual lifestyle” will be taught as acceptable in schools. He adds that the Korean Americans who support the initiative at New Community Baptist are mostly older and have children.

Like other ministers, Kim does not see the campaign as being political nor as an imposition on civil rights, as opponents have said. Instead, he says it is a way to counter the potential imposition of gay teachings in public institutions. “If it’s allowed in textbooks, we are being pushed.”

He acknowledges that the members of the congregation would not have sought out a petition for the initiative themselves and are only signing it now mainly because it was presented immediately before them at tables on church premises.

“People are neither for or against it; they’re more obedient,” Kim says. “I’m providing the opportunity for them to take their stand publicly. Because it’s there at hand, people are willing to do that.”

Hong Byung Ahn, 34, has been attending New Community Baptist for a year. While he is not yet a U.S. citizen, he says he would sign the petition if he could because of his concern that children in schools might become influenced .

Ahn, who lives in Sunnyvale, Calif., with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, emigrated from Korea and is among the hundreds of first generation Korean and Korean Americans attending the church. He says he had heard about the petition before but not in much detail. “If it’s spoken about there could be problems, because children might become confused if it is taught in school,” Ahn says in Korean. “Teachers shouldn’t say that wrong things are right.”

However, KACR spokesperson Jee Yeun Lee notes that the law prohibiting discrimination against gays and lesbians in public schools does not necessarily translate into a curriculum that actively promotes what Korean churches call a “homosexual lifestyle.”

Gathering in the church parking lot, a group of young, second generation Korean Americans have a more reserved reaction to the campaign. Initially unaware of the SRA, they are surprised to find out that their church circulated a petition.

Though expressing their disapproval of homosexual behavior on biblical grounds, they are reluctant to embrace a state-wide ballot initiative as a manifestation of that disapproval.

“If issues come up, we need to address that,” Peter Lee, 31, says, noting the separation of church and state clause in the U.S. Constitution. “But I don’t think it’s necessarily our job to be a political policing force. But it’s our job to state what we feel.”

Henry Cho, 28, says he did not know about the campaign or his church’s involvement in it but says it is good that the congregation is being informed about gay issues, adding that it had been taboo to discuss it before. “You can’t hide homosexuality. People have to know what it’s about.”

Although saying that she would not sign the petition due to lack of information on it, Ellyn Lee, 25, adds that there is a double standard in regards to what can be taught at schools. She points out that while schools are barred from teaching the Bible to students, a measure that would bar the teaching of gay lifestyles is considered too controversial.

Like Rev. Don Kim, Lee expressed the concern that the campaign would make the entire Korean American community appear to be hostile towards gays and lesbians.

“It comes across that we hate the people,” she says. “And that’s not what the Bible teaches. We don’t claim to be better than them. We’re not perfect.”

COUNTERMOVES

At the Korean Americans for Civil Rights press conference in San Francisco on Monday, Jee Yeun Lee points out that it is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, speaking before some 20 people gathered in the American Civil Liberties Union’s office. Earlier that day the KACR held another press conference in Los Angeles.

“We’re not asking for special rights,” she says, noting the anti-discrimination laws on housing, the workplace, public schools and domestic partnerships for gays and lesbians. “These are the same civil rights that should be available to all. They do require special laws because gays and lesbians are discriminated against in special ways.”

The purpose of the press briefings was to announce the start of the KACR’s ad campaign in which it would purchase full-page ads in two Korean Language newspapers in Southern California: the Korea Times and the Korea Central Daily.

So far, KACR has collected $4,000 from concerned individuals and other gay and lesbian advocacies such as the Gill Foundation and the National Center for Lesbian Rights, according to Han, with each ad costing $1,500.

The ad campaign, Han says, is the start of an overall mission that will also include educating the Korean American community about other “anti-gay” initiatives like Prop. 22, raising other gay and lesbians issues in the community through a series of public forums, and establishing long-term alliances.

Roughly 20 organizations have endorsed the ad campaign. Of those, there are at least six Korean American organizations, including Korean Immigrant Workers Advocates and the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, who are also founding members of KACR.

In addition, the pastors of two Korean churches have issued their endorsements as well: Rev. Seung-bae Paik of the Wesley United Methodist Church in Glendale, Calif. and Rev. Kil Sang Yoon of the United Methodist Church national office in Tennessee.

Bob Kim, a staff attorney at the ACLU, was also in attendance at the San Francisco press conference and says the danger of the SRA initiative is that the language is “extraordinarily broad” and “extremely vague.”

“It’s hard enough to be a member of two minority groups,” says Kim, who is openly gay and Korean American. “When one group you are affiliated with attacks another; that’s really disturbing.”

The KACR has yet to meet with church leaders, though they have been requesting time with them, says Ed Lee, of the Northern California KACR. However, Lee says he has detected a “backpedal” in their outspokenness as of late and wants to initiate a substantive dialogue with them to assess what they know and what they are thinking.

Indeed there are signs that the churches are more cautious in expressing their support. For example, the OMC official insists that the church’s senior pastor, Rev. Dong-sun Lim, does not have a leadership role in the campaign, despite the fact that Peter Kim refers to him as the “chairman” of the campaign’s committee. Moreover, the official says OMC was chosen as the meeting place for pastors during the campaign’s early days in December strictly for its central location in Koreatown.

Finally, the official says that since the start of January, OMC has not been actively involved in raising support or gathering signatures. The KACR, however, contests that statement.

Despite both sides’ almost diametrically opposed views on civil rights versus biblical morality, Lee is confident that there can still be some common ground. “The Bible has a lot to say about how you treat other people,” he says. “Koreans can also look to how we’ve been treated in this country in terms of racism.”

Young-Hwan Cho, a theologian and Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s Graduate Theology School says the “sexual moralism” of Korean churches goes against the teachings of Jesus Christ. He adds that the influence of Confucianism in Korean culture and the views of the American missionaries who first introduced Christianity in Korea have created a tradition of ignoring gay and lesbian issues.

Cho says many ministers of Korean churches have a narrow view of what “natural” means, defining homosexuality as “unnatural,” and thus, as a sin.

“The Korean churches’ definition of homosexuality as unnatural is an expression of hubris,” he says. “That is most sinful.”

He points to an episode in the Book of Mark, where Christ is barred from entering a “sacred community” after touching a leper, as a demonstration that the spirit of Christianity is to include those who were previously shunned.

Echoing this spirit in a different way, Rev. Don S. Kim of the New Community Baptist Church says he is willing to accept gays and lesbians into his congregation -- but with the intention to convert them to heterosexuality.

“We cannot condemn anybody,” he says. “I’d be willing to work with them. I don’t think they have the power to change. What will change them is love. ...We will leave it up to God. He can’t do it through our judging them, but through a loving community.”