Kim, R. Y. 2006. God’s New Whiz Kids? Korean American Evangelicals on Campus. New York: NYU Press.
This book expands on Kim’s 2004 study of second-generation Korean American students (SGKAs) on college campuses. As that study and other recent reports have shown, Asian American college students constitute a sizeable and influential proportion of evangelical Christian campus groups across the country. The number of Asian American members of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship alone has increased by 267 percent in the past fifteen years. Kim examines the growing participation of U.S.-born Korean American students (who, along with Chinese Americans, form the vast majority of Asian American college evangelicals) in evangelical campus groups with the aim of addressing several issues: first, why SGKAs regularly choose to join exclusive evangelical campus groups over more inclusive ones; second, how SGKA evangelical groups compare with those of first-generation Korean-Americans; third, how the evangelical identities of SGKAs are shaped by interactions with the broader ethnic community and broader evangelical community; and finally, how SGKAs deal with challenges that emerge from the tension between ethnic separation and religious universalism. Kim rejects assimilation and retention explanations and argues instead that SGKAs are adopting an emergent, “made in the U.S.A.” ethnicity (see Kim 2004 for another discussion of this “emergent identity.”)
