Christian identity, ethnic identity: Music making and prayer practices...

Full Title: Christian identity, ethnic identity: Music making and prayer practices
among 1.5- and second-generation Korean-American Christians

This dissertation is based on more than two years of fieldwork focusing on one-point-five (1.5) and second-generation Korean Americans in a Presbyterian church in Flushing, New York. My approach to these issues emphasizes the phenomenological embodiment of the structures of experience with an attention to the sociality of music and other sonically marked expressive modalities. My research explores the use of contemporary praise songs, hymns, and “cry-out-loud” prayers (tongsongkido) in worship services as well as during prayer meetings. A central question for this research is how these expressive domains construct a sense of spirituality that not only mediates the experiences of worship and an understanding of “God's message,” but also informs the discourses of generation, gender, and both spiritual and ethnic identity. I reveal how the words used in sermons, prayers, prayers with music, songs, and Bible study classes creates a “discursive frame” that transforms an individual from a passive listener into an active singer and re-producer of the Reformed Christian biblical exegesis presented at this church. By attending to the ritual structures of the worship service, I show how congregants come to embody belief structures and how these structures impact senses of identity. For instance, differences in musical choice and prayer styles between the Korean- and English-language services reveal unique modes of engagement within the worship time. In part, I show how these differences are rooted in modernist critiques of “emotion” and an attempt to emphasize a more “rationalist” approach. There are also debates within the church that pit stereotypes of “Korean culture” against an understanding of Reformed Christianity. For instance, though congregants of the English ministry disagree with what they see as a “Korean” argument for female subjugation, they reinscribe female subordination through a Christian filter. I demonstrate how interpretations of “Korean” and “Christian” do not simply reify generational divisions, but rather provide a porous boundary zone across which congregants traverse in order to create, contest, and reformulate fluid understandings of Korean-American and Christian identity.