Journalism Fellow 2023-24

DEBORAH JIAN LEE: Hi, my name is Deborah Jian Lee. I'm an author and journalist working at The Economic Hardship Reporting. Project, which covers economic inequality in America, and we co-publish our stories with outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many others.  

So my burning question is, what can we learn about our society when we listen to people on the margins? This question has helped me grasp both how systems impact the vulnerable and how the marginalized take action, make mistakes, evolve, and tell their own stories. It's guided my reporting from covering former skinheads deprogramming from violent extremism, to Chinese migrant workers forced to live apart from their children as they make American consumer products.  

One group I keep returning to is the evangelical community. Now, depending on how you look at them, evangelicals may not seem marginalized. I get it.  

Evangelical is often code for white conservative Republicans. But that's only because a few of them with power anointed themselves as representatives, And for a long time, journalists turned to these leaders over and over, assigning them even more authority. Now, things are changing. But for a long time, it was like this symphony got reduced to a single note.  

So my burning question really helped me restore some of the layers of that symphony. I wrote a book. It's called Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism. And you can see the intersections with the RPL methods and frameworks pretty clearly. In the book, I tease out the internal diversity that's been lost in the evangelical narrative.  

And as I braided their stories, their histories, and theologies, I also wove in my own situated knowledge. So, for example, I told the story of how in undergrad I was leading a double life. I spent half of my time as a leader in a mostly white, socially conservative, evangelical student group.  

The other half, I was steeped in literature classes, just doing this real deep dive into Asian and Asian-American history, African and African-American history, and the postcolonial experiences of Indigenous people from around the globe, all told from their perspectives, and it sparked an awakening to my own identity that I had rejected.  

So I'm the descendant of refugees, dissidents, farmers, engineers, immigrants, Buddhists, Christians, and atheists. I grew up in a Midwestern white suburb where I faced anti-Asian violence. I was raised non-religious, but I found my first place of belonging in a Chinese immigrant church. And so I converted, and in college I somehow got swept up in this religious political movement. But literature classes woke me up to my story and my own discomfort with evangelical practices that hurt the marginalized.  

I brought these concerns to my fellowship, hoping we could decolonize our faith together. But I learned that when I no longer upheld the system, I was no longer of any use to the system. I'd eventually leave that world, only to return with the lens of a journalist. And after seven years of reporting from the margins, I found these powerful stories of people trying to make sense of faith in the context of a system that rejected parts of them.  

I met this underground network of LGBTQ Christians creating spaces of support and healing and met women breaking free from purity culture. I met evangelicals of color reconciling their Christianity with their ancestors' faith traditions. I began to hear beyond that single note. I began to hear the layers of the symphony.  

And that's our responsibility as journalists, to listen to people on the margins, to bring out these layers, to spark awakenings, and to move toward a better understanding of our society.