My childhood home in Texas sits on a street off a major road lined with eight Protestant Christian churches. I know this because I used to count them on the way home from school, wondering as a ten-year-old if people shop for churches like they shop for cars . Down Barnes Bridge Road, you can have your pick of the week: a concrete warehouse in a golf-course-sized parking lot, a 3-in-1 megachurch facility with a stage, gym, and recreation hall, or a convertible brick house with a backyard for hot dog barbecues once a month.
Unlike the decorative facades of cathedrals or mosques, the most ornate thing on the property of a Christian church is most certainly the weekly message board, promoting platitudes like “Come to Jesus! He loves you!” in the same lofty register as “Want to know what hell is like? No? Come to church!” You might think I’m being funny, but nothing transforms you into a cynic with a loaded cache of religious humor quite like sitting in a church pew and listening to a white pastor tell you Obama is the anti-Christ. I kid you not, he spent ten minutes of his sermon playing a Wordle game with “B-A-R-A-C-K,” whipping out conspiratorial information from sites even Fox News would deem the equivalent of The Onion. The separation of church and state was—is—about as foreign a concept to this Texan demographic as the idea of loving thy neighbor, so it didn’t surprise me when, ahead of the 2016 election, a famous evangelical Christian pastor endorsed one particular candidate as a true follower of Christ and called the other a modern-day Jezebel. And that was just a dress rehearsal for 2024, because at least in 2016, the Democratic candidate was racially palatable.
How do I know all this? Well, because my family’s what you might call devout Baptists, the same denomination that once championed the Confederacy in the 1860s and “strongly defended Southern institutions, including slavery, as reflecting the divine will of God.” The marriage of Southern patriotism and Baptist religious fervor produced the special brand of the “Southern Baptist,” under which one’s loyalty to God must walk in step with one’s allegiance to the Confederate mission to protect the institution of slavery. The irony of my family’s proud South Vietnamese identity becoming enmeshed in this particularly racist and militant past is one I’m barely beginning to grasp as an adult who refuses to genuflect to a decontextualized spirituality just because it is passed down to me. Religion brought all of us together just as much as it tore some of us apart, and the traces of all these southern histories map themselves onto the sermons taught to me as love.
In the Bible Belt, Southern Baptist churches are as common as gas stations, but finding a Vietnamese one means you’ll either land in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, or Florida. The first strain of the religious denomination arrived in Vietnam in 1959 through the missionary work of Southern Baptists Herman and Dottie Hayes. Until South Vietnam’s collapse in 1975, the Hayes and other missionaries worked to build church communities in the war-torn country’s central and southern regions, where the U.S. military had occupied. When the war ended, only one church remained open as all others closed in the face of communist victory—Grace Baptist Church in Saigon. Pastors and their congregations slowly fled by boat to find religious refuge in the West. They found these havens in the familiar heat of the U.S. South, from Florida to Texas.
From the ages of 7 to 18, I went to a total of three different DFW-based Vietnamese Baptist churches, each one farther from our home than the previous. We switched churches whenever the oldest man in our family got into a fight with the clergy, which was every leap year on the Gregorian calendar. It could be over anything: interpretation of the Scripture, embezzlement of tithes, infidelity, or a bad case of food poisoning. Three truths and one lie.
On Sundays, as my parents sat outside with the Vietnamese congregation, I attended the concurrent “English ministry,” which was either run by a Vietnamese American theological seminary graduate (not that common) or a white pastor with a high probability of an Asian wife he married on an evangelical mission trip to some unproselytized part of Asia. In the darkened back room of a converted elementary school that the Vietnamese Baptist Church of Garland turned into a functioning worship center, a group of Vietnamese American youth sang along to Hillsong and Phil Wickham praise music, listened to a sermon praising Trump’s effective travel ban on seven Muslim countries (among other messages about the end times we live in because of trans people, IYKYK), and raised our hands to give our lives over to Jesus so that we are saved from our sins of cheating on our pagan partners, loving people of the same gender, or supporting Black presidents. Then, as soon as the lights turned back on, solemn pledges to read the Bible “this week” dissipated, and the lines to grab phở displaced our fleeting devotionals.
Until I moved to Los Angeles for graduate school in 2020, this was my lived experience of a Vietnamese community. My family lived and breathed the Protestant Bible, some members more so than others. My late grandmother recited her verses for Sunday school in our shared bedroom, where she proselytized me at the age of thirteen. I went to Christian summer camp and conventions with my Vietnamese and Southeast Asian friends in rural Texas. My dad, forced to convert to the Baptist faith in order to marry my mom in 1998, instructed my husband to do the same to marry me. That my experience was geographically, religiously, and politically specific to the Bible Belt did not occur to me until a common question I received from unknowing West Coasters regarding my upbringing became, “Is your family Catholic or Buddhist?” When I answered Baptist, the immediate assumption was that I must have attended a predominantly white Baptist church, not a Southern Vietnamese Southern Baptist church in Texas.
When my then non-religious great-uncle escaped by boat with my mom’s brother in 1984 and landed in Pulau Bidong, Malaysia, he met Southern Baptist refugee workers who helped him process his resettlement in Dallas, Texas. There, he would begin work at the post office and eventually buy a home in Sunnyvale, a little white-majority town nestled beside the largely Black and Brown city of Mesquite. He and my great-aunt, who arrived two years later, attended a Vietnamese Baptist church that cropped up there in the 1980s, run by pastors who’d fled their homeland churches for fear of persecution. Shortly after, my Ông and Bà received a spiritual call to evangelize their kin, and so they returned to Vietnam in the 1990s to spread the Gospel of Christ to my mother, grandmother, aunts, and cousins who were still living in Sài Gòn. At Nhà Thờ Giáo Xứ Khánh Hội on Tôn Bản Road in District 4, the rest of my maternal family converted to the Baptist faith, swearing their loyalty to God in the same breath as their fealty to the politics and memory of a defunct nation .
Born into this loyalist history, I’ve heard plenty about how “we” in the diaspora should be grateful to have religious and political freedom, possibilities curtailed under communism. A free church is a free state, they mimed with conviction. But when I think about what is happening right now in America, it feels distant from Jesus’s instruction in Matthew 22:39: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” In times of ICE raids and genocide in Palestine, such a commandment reads like a suggestion people abandon in favor of party lines. In many Republican strongholds, where preemptions of women’s abortion access and healthcare develop alongside prison-industrial complexes, a ruling religion—christofascism to be more precise—makes a warden state. The distance between loving thy neighbor and binding them grows wider by day and covenant. I think of my conservative family—of the South Vietnamese who fled persecution and imprisonment in search of freedom—and wonder what it means to inherit these southern histories. Is it a way of preserving freedom for future generations, or a way of rehearsing oppression under another name? Perhaps the truest test of faith is whether we can even tell the difference.
Ann Ngoc Tran is a scholar of the Vietnamese diaspora and a researcher of material history and boat migration. She received her PhD in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Asian American Studies and Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Outside of academia, she volunteers as a digital archivist at the Vietnamese Heritage Museum in Orange County, California.
