Finding “Angels” for the Boat People

This chapter covers evangelical resettlement of Southeast Asian refugees from 1975 to the early 1980s. During this time, a number of evangelical organizations ran resettlement ministries and refugee service programs. This chapter describes the professionalization of evangelical refugee resettlement, including the founding of the first evangelical resettlement agency, World Relief Refugee Services. Evangelical volunteers and former missionaries to Vietnam played a significant role in running recreational and educational activities in the refugee resettlement camps in the mid-1970s. These “missionaries without a country” became an important resource for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which relied on their interpreting and translating services. By differentiating between mainstream evangelical and progressive evangelical responses to the government’s appeal for evangelical sponsors, this chapter shows that evangelicals’ political stances on the US involvement in Vietnam fundamentally shaped their response to the refugees.

The Strangers in Our Midst

The Strangers in Our Midst tells the story of how American evangelicals have responded to refugees and immigrants—ranging from the Cuban refugee influx in the 1960s, to Southeast Asian refugees in the 1980s, to undocumented immigrants from Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s. Evangelical Christians have been a pillar of US immigration and refugee policy since the end of World War II in two key ways: by acting as refugee sponsors and by offering legalization assistance to undocumented immigrants. They developed an elaborate evangelical theology of hospitality, which emphasized scriptural commands to “welcome the stranger.” Initially, evangelicals did not distinguish between legal immigrants and refugees and “illegal,” undocumented immigrants. However, a growing anti-immigrant consensus in American society at large and their political alignment with the Republican Party caused them to shed their welcoming approach to immigrants in the 1990s. Evangelicals were now divided in their stances on immigration, as conservative evangelicals viewed only legal immigrants as deserving of their aid, while progressive evangelicals—led by their Latinx coreligionists—emphasized the need for Christians to help all immigrants. In the twenty-first century, a group of Latinx evangelical leaders resurrected and reshaped the evangelical theology of hospitality in an effort to turn the tide in the evangelical debate on immigration. The results are mixed: unprecedented numbers of evangelicals favor a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Yet as the 2016 presidential election showed, this preference had no impact on their political choices.

Southeast Asian Refugees in North America

Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia have historically been nations with large Buddhist populations. While Mahāyāna Buddhism predominates in Vietnam, most people in Cambodia and Laos have been dedicated to Theravāda Buddhism. In 1975, these three countries came under the domination of Communist governments, which had earlier been in conflict with factions militarily supported by the United States. This led to the beginnings of the massive movement of refugees from Southeast Asia to North America. An especially radical regime had taken power in Cambodia, and after war broke out between Cambodia and Vietnam the flow of refugees became a flood. All of the new governments of these countries were hostile to independent religious organizations and practices. The Khmer Rouge in power in Cambodia took its antagonism to religion to an extreme, attempting to violently eradicate traditional Buddhist practices and institutions. As refugees settled in ever-greater numbers in North America and other locations, they established Buddhist temples and other organizations in the new homelands. In consequence, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Lao communities in the United States and Canada have also become sites for the rapid growth of North American Buddhism. Southeast Asian Buddhism has become a part of a pluralistic religious environment, adding new rites, celebrations, and cultural activities to American society. Buddhism has also played a central part in maintaining ethnic identity among refugee populations and their descendants, as well as in helping Buddhists adapt to life under changing circumstances.