Sung Joon Jang
Sung Joon Jang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Baylor University. Jang received his B.A. in Public Administration from Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea, and M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from University at Albany, State University of New York. Before assuming his position at Baylor in 2007, he taught at Ohio State University and Louisiana State University for eight and seven years, respectively.
Jang is a sociologist/criminologist, and his research focuses on various factors of family, school, peer group, religion, and community as correlates or causes of deviance and crime, including juvenile delinquency and drug use. His recent research applies a developmental approach to explain the causation of delinquency and adolescent drug use based on multilevel modeling. It also examines racial/ethnic differences in adolescent deviance with an emphasis on Asian American adolescents and the effects of individual religiosity on mental health as well as juvenile delinquency and drug use. He has recently completed a research project on the impact of spirituality and spiritual transformation on behaviors and attitudes among college students in America.
Jang lives in Waco, Texas, with his wife, Sunmi, and four children: Christine, Daniel, Joshua, and Nathan. Sunmi is stay-home mom and proud homemaker, while she enjoyed successful career in fashion design until they married. She paints, makes pottery, and does quilting (her fingerprints are all over the place in the house!). Christine loves to sing and plays viola, whereas Daniel plays cello and likes to play video games and listen to music, from classical to hip-hop. Joshua is percussionist, and Nathan plays violin.
While Jang and his family are currently searching for their home church since they moved to Waco, they were members of Istrouma Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, LA, and were actively involved in church activities. Jang taught adult Sunday School class on Christian worldview and apologetics couple of times a year, and served as adult leader of AWANA, a children’s weekly activity, for a group of 3rd to 6th grade boys. Christine and Daniel played in the church orchestra, and all four of them participated in the Bible Drill.
Jang used to actively involved in Christian Faculty/Staff Network (CFSN) at Louisiana State University (LSU), serving as Chair and a member of Leadership Team. He was also faculty advisor of The Chapel on the Campus College Ministry, Refuge, a student organizations at LSU.
Jang also served as Campus Advisor of the Veritas Forum at LSU. The first Veritas Forum in Louisiana as well as at LSU was held in 2005 with the theme, “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”, followed by second and third Forums in 2006 (theme: ”What Is Truth?”) and 2007 (theme: ”The Environment: Does God Care?”). To hear most of presentations at these Forums, please visit the national Veritas Forum website (click “Veritas Media” in the upper-right corner). The Veritas Forum Planning Team is preparing for the 2008 Veritas Forum, where Dr. Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California.
Jang enjoys listening to music, classical and jazz, and watching movies, especial thrillers, and walks with his wife regularly for exercise.
My Personal Story
“Religion is for the weak, lazy, and uneducated, and feeble-minded,” my dad told me since my childhood. He often added, “Religion is the opium of the people,” quoting Karl Marx. It was so strange, though, to see him wholeheartedly agreeing with someone he hated so much because he taught me that Marxism-derived communism was the ultimate cause of the Korean War (1950-53), which suddenly pushed his country in great turmoil and devastation and made his young life so miserable.
It was not until I grew up when I began to understand his mixed or rather inconsistent attitudes toward Marx. Like him, my dad was naturalist, who does not believe in anything other than the nature, matter, or physical world. For him, anything beyond the physical nature (i.e., metaphysical) or super-natural is fake and made up by some people for their own comfort and excuse for being weak, lazy, and uneducated. Based on his naturalism, my dad even told me that those who believe in God or something like heaven and hell are mentally ill, as the famous psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, said.
My father’s theory on religion seemed to be getting empirical support as I made my own observations of religious people around me. My father was less critical, though, of Buddhism than Christianity because the former religion does not require admission of built-in flaw in human nature, called “sin,” or total submission to God as the latter does. He disliked Christianity because he was moralist as well as naturalist, believing that the best life is lived when one practices “do good and no harm to others” and lives life of morals and ethics. He always taught me to work hard, diligently, and honestly so that I may be self-reliant and help others instead of being enslaved to anyone, including God, or anything. My father justified this teaching by explaining how this world operates according to Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” rule.
Like the father, like the son. While I strongly believed in moral life and strong work ethics, I increasingly became critical and cynical about religion. Numerous attempts were made by my friends and neighbors to convert me to their religion, but I always “proudly” refuted their claims about God as offensive and fatalistic and openly ridiculed them as naive and foolish.
I joined the Korean Army to fulfill military service duty after my junior year in college. Several months before I finished my duty, I began to feel that something was missing in my life, something that I could depend on, as I was thinking about and planning life after college graduation. So, I decided to try religion, specifically, Buddhism because I never liked Christianity like my father. Soon after this decision, someone in my unit began sharing the Gospel (Good News) and talking about Jesus Christ who came to this world as Son of God and Savior. ”Saving me from what? What a non-sense!”
I reacted to his evangelistic effort as sarcastically and nastily as I could, feeling like winning or, at least, nullifying his naive attempt. One day he asked me whether I had ever read the Bible. I never did, though I had many copies including several received from the Gideon organization. He gently pointed out how unintellectual it is for me to criticize Christianity without even reading the book about it. So, I told him I would read the book and teach him what’s wrong with Christian faith. As I began reading the Scripture, I quickly realized that God in the Bible was very different from who I thought he was, and that many parts of the books were very logical and made sense, although I didn’t fully understand all.
Although I thought I would be “free” by not believing in God, I became free by believing in God and began to understand what it means to be set free by the truth (John 8:32). Of course, the Bible contains so many things I don’t understand, and this world is full of pain and suffering as well as mystery and wonder that I cannot explain to my own satisfaction, not to mention of other people’s. However, the Bible provides intelligent and intelligible answers to fundamental questions of life, offering an intellectually viable, “testable,” systematic belief system or worldview that helps answer “big question” of life: Where did I come from? What is real? What is truth? Is there any truth? Why so much pain and suffering in this world? Is there any meaning and purpose in life? Is there any hope? Is this world all that exists?
In his book, Moral Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture, sociologist Christian Smith (2003, p. 46) said, “… at bottom, we are all really believers. The lives that we live and the knowledge we possess are based crucially on sets of basic assumptions and beliefs …” (emphasis in original). I agree. We all believe something or someone, and there is no exception to this fact of life. Even agnostics and nihilists believe, for example, that truth is unknowable (at least, this has to be true, though self-defeating) and that there is no ultimate meaning in life, and their lives are built upon such belief. So the question is not whether but what and why to believe. I would not build my life on any other foundation than a worldview, called “Judeo-Christian theistic realism.”