Question: What factors of your native culture have informed your religious world view? Explain the impact of these factors.
Before further response, I'd like to mention that I am not entirely confident that I am aware of what my native culture is. I was born to Korean parents, but my family has (especially in my toddler and childhood years) spent substantial time outside of Korea, and I find the way my parents interact with me quite different from that in the stereotypical "orthodox Korean" families. Of course, stereotypes will not completely satisfy an anthropologist, so this alone would not serve to truly demonstrate if my family is quite similar to the general Korean culture. Nonetheless, the point can still be made that I am not exactly sure if my native culture is exactly part of the general Korean culture. So I will speak more in terms of the cultures of my family and other places I have been exposed in some influential manner, such as school, and the impacts of these cultures on my world view.
To begin with my family, I was born to Evangelical Christian parents who eventually became missionaries to the country of Tanzania, Africa. Approximately, since the eighth month of my life until the tenth one, I was a missionary kid in Tanzania with occasional visits to the neighboring country, Kenya, furloughs back to Korea, and some other travels out of Tanzania. Without having to comment upon my parents and their faith and spirituality, I can still I was exposed to the evangelical Christianity since a very young age. My thinking wasn't quite matured then (not to say that I am free from all callowness now; but my thinking could be described as, and probably rightly, simpler back then), and I'm not sure how well I comprehended the Christian theology then. Nonetheless, it was not an awkward thing for me to be a theist, regardless of my grasp of Christian theology and faith in Jesus Christ.
I feel compelled to claim now, that I am now a Christian. I am not exactly sure when I had my conversion, but I can say right now as I write this post that I believe in Jesus Christ, God's Son and God Himself (to clarify, I believe in the Holy Trinity, that there is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit); I believe that He came to earth as a man while still being fully God, and that He died on the cross, three days after which He was resurrected; I believe that humans, including myself, can be saved from sin and the punishment for sin only by believing in Jesus Christ who completed all the works necessary for the salvation for anyone who believes in Him. Having said some part of who I am now, I'll return to my family.
So, the Bible and the church, as well as the existence of God was not completely foreign to me at least partially because of the family I was born in.
The society outside of my family, too, had a cultural impact that made Christianity not such an alien thing for me. I think it is quite obvious how the church would have done this -- a place of worship of God exposed me to Christianity and did not place a stigma in having faith. Two schools (one attended in my first three elementary years with possibly some time spent as a kindergardener, and the other attended for part of my second semester of the sixth grade year until now, my 11th grade year) I attended were Christian schools with chapels. I have been in dormitories of a boarding program with Christian staffs since my arrival to the school I currently attend; classes were taught by Christian instructors. Speaking in terms of general cultural impact, these groups that I have been part of exposed me to Christianity and made me more likely to at least assent to Christianity, even if I wasn't truly converted until a certain point.
I wouldn't necessarily say that the cultural exposure alone contributed to making me a serious Christian, but it could have contributed -- though I'm not perfectly sure to what extent it did. I do figure that the Christian culture might have even a greater impact on me when I was a personal believer, rather than when I merely assented superficially at the surface to some of the Christian beliefs.
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The blue text are additions or editing done after the initial posting on 18 November 2010.
