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Over the past decade, an interest in the transpacific has transformed scholarship on American Christianity. As Helen Jin Kim argued in Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire<\/em><\/a>, \u201cit simply is not possible to understand evangelicalism without looking at transnational linkages and movement across the Pacific, especially when we move into the twentieth century.\u201d<\/p>\n Justin Tse<\/a>, a religion scholar and geographer at Singapore Management University, offers one of the most exciting contributions to the growing body of research on transpacific Christianity. In his new book, Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific<\/em><\/a>, which was published by Notre Dame Press earlier this month, Tse studies Christian communities in the Pacific Rim, a region that he views \u201cmore as a dream than as a regional geography, its work as a fantasy engine that powers civil society imaginations.\u201d He focuses his attention on Hong Kong, Vancouver, and the Bay Area and explores how Cantonese Protestants in these locales engaged in politics and secular civil society, especially as they mobilized around controversial issues such as gay marriage and democratic reforms. In his telling, Cantonese Protestants are a \u201csheet of scattered sand\u201d\u2013characterized by diversity, disunity, dysfunction, and disorganization. However, they are united by the experience of being drawn into participating in the secular world of politics, and sometimes with great reservation, since many Cantonese Protestants believed that the church and the secular world should be separate.<\/p>\n I had the good fortune of discussing Sheets of Scattered Sand <\/em>with Tse at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting this month. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.<\/p>\n Melissa Borja: <\/strong>What is the central argument of your book?<\/p>\n Justin Tse: <\/strong>The central argument of [this book] is that Cantonese-speaking Protestants who were trying to engage the Pacific Rim societies of Vancouver, San Francisco, and Hong Kong from around 1989 to 2012 described themselves as \u201csheets of scattered sand.\u201d They described themselves as ideologically fragmented and politically disunited. There are actually two parts to this. One is what they described as political and ideological fragmentation. They were fragmented around a central anxiety, and that anxiety had to do with the world outside of their churches that they described as secular.<\/p>\n What I then argue about that secular is that it\u2019s a Pacific Rim secular. The Pacific Rim is a set of narratives and ideologies that basically propose a transpacific frame, in which Asia and the Americas should somehow coalesce together around the Pacific Ocean as a rim and create a kind of Asian multicultural society that lends itself to geopolitical stability, economic co-prosperity, and ecological sustainability. The secular outside of Cantonese Protestant churches was continuing to transform. Between 1989 to 2012, Cantonese Protestants were very nervous about that and were often fragmented around what the Pacific Rim secular is and how they should respond to it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n MB: <\/strong>So how does it help us think differently about Asian and Asian American religious life?<\/p>\n JT: <\/strong>Oftentimes when we try to describe Asian and Asian American religious life, we think culturally. We think about identity. And so there is a real temptation to attribute this fractiousness to either Cantonese Protestants being Cantonese\u2013you know, mostly from Hong Kong or South China\u2013or that they had some kind of essentialized Chinese culture, or that they were Christian or Protestant Christian, and so for a set of religious reasons, they were fragmented. And what I propose is no. When we think of a sheet of scattered sand, the scattered sand is scattered on a sheet or in a container. And that means that the sheet and the container has to be external<\/em> to their communities.<\/p>\n So how it makes us think differently about Asian and Asian American religious life is to ask us to consider what, outside of our communities, is the thing that our communities are responding to, or what structures impinge on our communities. In my book, it\u2019s the Pacific Rim secular.<\/p>\n MB: <\/strong>We just did a roundtable about new scholarship about religion and the transpacific. How do you define transpacific, and how does understanding experiences of Cantonese Protestants help Asian American studies scholars think anew about the transpacific?<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n