Pastor Owen Lee sings during a service at the Christ Central Presbyterian Church on Sunday in Centreville, Va.
The Associated Press

The Rev. Wayne Lee leads an English-speaking church of second- and third-generation Chinese Americans in the heart of Philadelphia’s Chinatown.

His 120-strong evangelical Christian congregation in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania is under the same umbrella as two other immigrant congregations totaling 500 members who speak Mandarin and Cantonese respectively. While those members hold conservative views and support former president Donald Trump, Lee’s younger flock tends to lean left.

“We’re just one church,” he said. “But we’re so diverse that it’s hard to make a blanket statement about political affiliation.”

This community in Philadelphia reflects experiences among the nation’s larger Asian American Christian population. Asian American evangelicals are a diverse, evolving group of voters increasingly seeking to distinguish themselves from their white counterparts.

Lee and others emphasize that while they still hold theologically conservative views on abortion and LGBTQ+ issues, their opinions on those and other issues such as immigration and racial equity tend to be more nuanced and diverse.

Pastors and leaders in the Asian American Christian community say younger evangelicals are moving away from their parents’ and grandparents’ more unconditional loyalty to the Republican Party. That makes them part of a key demographic — independent voters in battleground states who could swing tight elections at the national and local level.

Reaching out to this population can be challenging, experts say. While a few justice organizations gained traction due to increases in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, political and civic engagement is still relatively rare in Asian American communities.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing voting bloc in the country along with Latinos. Among Asian Americans, Christians are the single largest group of voters, followed by those unaffiliated with religion. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, about a third of Asian American adults identify as Christian. Additionally, about 18% said they felt “close to” Christianity for reasons such as family background, which means a little over half of Asian Americans feel connected to Christianity.

Only 10% specifically identify as born-again or evangelical Protestants. But that number might not include those who hesitate to label themselves “evangelical” because that word now denotes a political identity rather than a religious one, said Jane Hong, associate professor of history at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“With the rise of the religious right, the term ‘evangelicals’ has been used as a partisan category connected usually to white, conservative Christians,” she said.

Rather, Asian American Christians, particularly immigrants, widely consider themselves evangelical in a theological sense because of their historic connection to U.S. missionaries in their home countries, said the Rev. Walter Kim, president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

These are people who relate to the key elements of evangelism — submitting to the authority of Scripture, understanding the need to convert and the belief that Christ’s crucifixion is the only sacrifice that can atone for sin.

“The Asian American Christian’s identity is the convergence of cultural experience, historical background and core theological transformation,” Kim said. “Many scholars have argued that Korean Americans, regardless of their denomination, tend to be evangelical because Korean Christianity was heavily influenced by U.S. evangelicals.”

In the Asian American and South Asian diaspora, even some Catholics and Pentecostals count themselves as evangelical.

Owen Lee, senior pastor of Christ Central Presbyterian Church in Centreville, Virginia, who leads a 600-strong Korean American congregation, said Asian American Christians, for a long time, believed they were part of white evangelical spaces — until Trump’s candidacy in 2016.

“To see white evangelicals rallying around (Trump) was discombobulating,” Lee said. “They wanted, for the first time, to distance themselves from white evangelicals without distancing from evangelicalism. White evangelicals tend to be single-issue voters, but that’s not the case with us. Yes, abortion matters to us, we are pro-life. But a candidate’s character matters as well.”

This year, ahead of the presidential election, Lee said, “politics fatigue” appears to have set in and his community members don’t seem happy with either candidate.

“I do hope and pray Asian American Christians take their civic responsibility seriously,” he said. “We should care about how our society is governed and run.”

Pastor Raymond Chang, president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, an ecumenical nonprofit that began as a response to combating anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic, said neither political party is taking this important voting bloc seriously.

“We don’t fall neatly within party lines,” he said, adding that people’s political leanings often depend on their transnational history, family heritage and the way they experience life in America.

“We’re often quiet from the pulpit and the pews when it comes to politics,” he said. “We don’t see much civic engagement beyond voting, but we do vote.”

James Cho, a former seminary professor who has led a Chinese American congregation in Orange County, California, believes this could be a “time of transformation” for Asian American evangelicals even though some are not as politically active as they were four years ago.

Cho, who had always voted Republican, said he sat out the 2016 election because he didn’t like either candidate. In 2020, he said he “quietly voted for Joe Biden.” This time, Cho has decided to vote for Harris. What moved the needle for him was Trump’s baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“As immigrants and children of immigrants, we’ve all felt alienated at some point in our lives,” he said, adding that some Asian communities face similar stereotypes. “It hits us hard to see another group of immigrants targeted in that manner.”

Younger evangelicals are less loyal to the GOP

Cho sees a chasm between white and Asian American evangelicals — especially the younger generation — quickly widening. For example, Cho says he believes in the separation of church and state, and that the church “should not play a political role in the LGBTQ issue.”

“While I believe it’s a sin to be gay, I also believe I’m a sinner just like them,” he said. “To discriminate against someone who is gay is just wrong.”

The political diversity of church members can be a challenge for pastors. In Philadelphia’s Chinatown, Pastor Wayne Lee says he navigates that landmine by not divulging his political leanings. But he does have conversations with relatives in an attempt to understand their political allegiances.

The pastor said he asked an older relative if he was aware that a vote for Trump could mean immigrating to the U.S. could get more complicated for their family members or make life difficult for existing community members. The response he got was that a vote against Trump would be a vote against God.

The origins of Asian American churches influenced their evolution, said Jerry Park, associate professor of sociology at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In immigrant churches, elements of ethnic culture were mixed in with religious practice, he said. But as they became more exposed to white evangelical teachings, they started viewing that as the authentic version of Christianity.

“For example, patriarchy is a part of Confucianism,” Park said. “But the churches here, instead of citing Confucianism, pointed to white evangelical rhetoric to justify the subordination of women. So in this racialized environment, we need to question who we’re leaning on to understand our own culture and religious practices.”

For politicians and parties that are attempting to reach out to Asian American Christians, it is important that they don’t assume it is a monolithic group, said Walter Kim.

“There is a diversity of political and social concerns,” he said. “This gives both parties an opportunity to step back from political rhetoric to understand how to negotiate complex issues and build consensus and unity across the community.”