BEYOND BIBLE STORIES: THE ROLE OF CULTURE-SPECIFIC MYTHS/STORIES IN THE IDENTITY FORMATION OF NONDOMINANT IMMIGRANT CHILDREN

Religious Education, Spring 2004 by Wenh-, Greer Anne

Abstract

The full identity of Asian heritage children growing up in Canada and the U.S. includes the Judaeo-Christian biblical tradition, the Euro-Anglo tradition of the dominant culture, and the traditions of their heritage culture. This article makes a case for including culture-specific stories from learners' own heritage for more holistic identity formation for younger members of immigrant Christian faith communities. The author examines obstacles that stand in the way, and discusses strategies to carry out this religious education endeavor. While examples are drawn mainly from East Asian culture (particularly Chinese), the discussion is intended to apply to most non-Euro-Anglo Christian faith communities of the North America diaspora.

In an essay on family and education from an Asian North American perspective appealing in Religious Education about a decade ago, the question was raised as to how parents could adequately tend to the threefold formation needs of their children: "Which story should I tell?" That is, are Bible stories for Christian faith formation and the ancestral culture s myths and tales the only stories that help a family retain their specific cultural heritage (Ng 1992, 57)?

Since the full identity of Asian heritage children growing up in Canada and the United States includes all three traditions-the judaeo-Chrisuan biblical tradition, the Euro-Anglo traditions of the dominant culture, and the traditions of their heritage culture-it would seem obvious that all three kinds of stories need to be told. Yet the realities of living as ethnocultural minorities within the dominant culture makes such an assumption, at best, idealistic. This article will inquire into some of the reasons for including culture-specific stones for more holistic identity formation for younger members of immigrant Christian faith communities, some obstacles that stand in the way, and possible strategies to move in the direction of this religious education endeavor. While examples will be drawn mainly from East Asian culture (particularly Chinese), the discussion is intended to apply to most non-Euro-Anglo Christian faith communities of the North America diaspora.

WHY BIBLE STORIES ABE NOT ENOUGH

Proceeding from the theological premise based on Jesus' statement in the Gospel of John: "I came that they may have life, life in all its fullness" (John 10:10b), such "fullness" for nondominant immigrant children in the North American diaspora cannot stop at encounters with biblical stories and persons because ior such children, as for Euro-Anglo children, their ethnocultural heritage, their identity, is constitutive of their very being. The difference is that for the latter, being Christian and being Western/European (or Anglo/Americans) has always coincided, so that there is no tension between these two facets of their identity, and both are being nurtured as they develop from infancy. For non-Western children, the ethnocultural dimension of their identity stands out as a distinct aspect of their being, but something which the dominant society does not guarantee to nurture since it is not seen as a "norm." Extra effort needs to be exerted, therefore, in attending to this special nurture. The proposal is that creation and other myths foundational to their specific culture can form one vehicle for such nurture, since such sacred stories "tell us who we are and how we relate to the world and our gods" (Simpkinson 1997, 224).

The perception of Christianity as a "Western religion" has been perpetuated by the missionary enterprise that has come on the heel of Western imperial expansion to peoples in Asia and Africa and the indigenous populations of the Americas. Conversely, Western cultural values and customs have operated as an integral part of Christianity around the world. Persons bom into Christian families or bom in and growing up in Canada or the United States, therefore, have relatively little difficulty being acculturated into the dominant culture. But even these persons, who have embraced dominant values and ways of life, will from time to time need to be reminded of their different (and by implication less valued) ethnocultural origin. As long as systemic racism continues to exist in covert if not overt forms, visible minorities in North America can never be totally assimilated into the dominant culture its minority European White persons can. Without a sense of rootedness in an identifiable culture (or, for mixed race/ethnicity persons, cultures), their psychological health will suffer. For this reason, therefore, as well as for their fuller humanity, such persons need more than simply the Bible stories of their church school or confirmation class for their full religiocultural development.

Thirdly, it is now generally accepted that young children have a special capacity for fantasy, wonder, and the life of the imagination (Csanyi 1982). John Hull carries this further by arguing convincingly that children's religious sense is nourished and deepened by exposure to a wide variety of images and stories of God/gods, rather than being confined to only those of their own faith [and cultural] tradition (Hull 1991, 29-30; 1996). And why not, indeed? If the God that Ghristians affirm is the God and creator of all peoples and cultures, then such a God also can be discerned in every culture's myths, those stories developed "so people could make sense of the different things that happened to them... the way the world is or the relationship between gods and goddesses and human beings" (Kingfisher 1994, 7). Extrabiblical creation myths, for instance, provide not only affirmation for the cultural identity of children, but also alternative visions of what the world can be. Children of the diaspora thus can come to appreciate both the unique and the common elements of their ancestral culture s contribution to the story of the world (Bierlein 1994). For minority children who usually are expected to consider the dominant culture as "norm" or superior, the mere fact of realizing that their own culture possesses its own creation myths is in itself empowering. To further discover, for example, that in Chinese creation mythology it was a female god, Nu Wa, who made humans out of yellow mud and gave them life, could be positively exciting.