I’m very pleased to have been interviewed as part of the journalist Douglas Todd’s piece ‘Hong Kong protesters turn 1970s hymn into anthem.’ My main role in this article is to sketch how the protests in Hong Kong have been using the Jesus Movement chorus ‘Sing Hallelujah to the Lord,’ which I also did with my colleague Melissa Borja on her Anxious Bench group blog on Patheos, and how Christians may or may not be part of the protests in personal and institutional ways.
I like how Todd positions my comments as the lead-in to the story that he really wants to talk about, which is the hundred or so pro-China protesters who picketed the evangelical Tenth Church Vancouver during a Hong Kong prayer rally organized by an inter-denominational and ecumenical group of clergy. Interviewing one of the clergy leaders Samuel Chiu, Todd sketches a broader picture of Chinese Christians in North America — and indeed, Chinese communities in a more secular sense — that are internally divided in terms of transnational politics.
In addition to the Hong Kong interest, this is a developing and interesting story in Vancouver. I’ve written about the senior pastor Ken Shigematsu before as a ‘different kind of evangelical‘ who emphasizes an Asian Canadian sense of social justice and contemplative spirituality, and I’ve also put an article on Tenth into the Brazilian journal Relegens Thréskeia. On this particular issue, Shigematsu has commented on the church’s solidarity with ‘justice issues’ in a non-partisan way, and Fr Richard Soo SJ — the Eastern Catholic priest who brought me into the Greek-Catholic church that has formed so much of my recent musings on the postsecular even while I continue to write, research, and teach on publics on the Pacific Rim — has written an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun about how religious solidarity with Hong Kong is not the practice of partisan politics.
I’m thankful to Douglas Todd for reaching out to me. Our first real conversation took place around my doctoral work on Cantonese Protestants, with a focus on the Vancouver case and their politics around sexuality. Since then, his stories have also engaged my work on the ‘Highway to Heaven‘ in the suburb of Richmond, the everyday lives of transnational Asian youth in Vancouver, and the wider implications of my work for the state of multicultural Canada. There was also a fun piece on the relationship between Christmas and ‘Chinese culture.’ I hope to return the favour for him writing about me — and more importantly, doing so with a constructive and critical eye in not so much giving me a megaphone, but really pushing me to figure out what responsibility I have to publics in Richmond, Metro Vancouver, and Canada that I study — by writing about how he has done the same, as I suggested in that dissertation of mine, for Chinese Christian communities in Vancouver.
Justin K.H. Tse 