Seeing like a Church, Seeing like a State: The Church-State Relation

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Jaeeun Kim is Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at the University of Michigan. She is a political sociologist and law and society scholar, studying race/ethnicity/nationalism and migration/citizenship. Kim is the author of the award-winning book, Contested Embrace: Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea (Stanford University Press 2016). Her article won the 2019 Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016–2017) and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2020–2021), where she holds a permanent fellow position from Fall 2024.

Presentation of the project

"This seminar examines various challenges that asylum claims-making on religious grounds pose to asylum adjudications in the U.S. and beyond. I draw on case law, asylum officer training modules, advocacy publications, and my own ethnographic research in Protestant congregations in the U.S. that help with religious asylum claims-making. While credibility is a common issue in all asylum adjudications, it is especially fraught in religious asylum cases. That religious freedom includes the freedom to change one’s own religion enables migrants to cite conversion that took place after leaving their origin countries as prima facie evidence of “well-founded fear of persecution.” This contributes to the greater suspicion of the sincerity of their newly adopted religious identities. Moreover, the essentially “orthodoxy-establishing” nature of the credibility test generates constitutional issues involving the state-church relation. To avoid conducting “religious trials” themselves, asylum officers and immigration judges tend to delegate part of their verification authority to religious organizations in the countries of asylum. The relationship between state and church (broadly conceived) in this context, however, is ridden with tensions. In the U.S. in particular, the question of church-state relation is complicated further by the active involvement of faith-based organizations, especially evangelical Christians, in centering religious persecution in asylum adjudications and endorsing a theo-political discourse about America’s manifest destiny."

Speaker

• Jaeeun Kim is Korea Foundation Endowed Associate Professor of Sociology and Professor of Law (by Courtesy) at the University of Michigan. She is a political sociologist and law and society scholar.