by liberal japonicus
TLDR: While Christianity in Korea may look familiar, it got there in a pretty unique way and who knows where it is going. Supported by tons of random observations that may or may not be related, leading to a conclusion that is pretty weak. More below.
When I first got to Daejeon, I didn't have data on my phone and I had no Korean to speak of. I also didn't have a good knowledge of public transport, but Daejeon has a 1 line subway and subway stations don't move. [I later discovered that Korean public transport is amazing, more on that in another post] So one evening, in the first week of my stay, I got to the closest subway station to my home after an evening out and tried to walk back via an alternate route rather than take the bus that I knew got me back. I took a wrong turn and couldn't get anything on google map app (something I'll talk about in my tech and Korea post), so I ended up walking thru neighborhoods of Daejeon until 1 in the morning. One feature that amazed me was all of the neon red crosses marking churches. I later read that this means they are open 24 hours a day, but I didn't ever take the opportunity to drop in, because, while it would have been nice to practice Korean, TINSTAAFL.
The neon red crosses are even more in evidence in Seoul, where you have lots of high points where you can look over the cityscape. This article has two good pictures and an interesting explanation of all this. Coming from Japan, where the Christian population is quite small, less than 1%, this is pretty amazing. While Christianity is slightly more common down in Western Japan, it is still only a fraction. If you find a church, odds are that it is a Zainichi congregation, Koreans whose families may have chosen to stay after WWII and therefore do not have Japanese passports. Here's some background info on them.
After that, things like finding out that the world's largest Pentacostal Church (Yoido Full Gospel Church) is in Seoul, bumping into Jehovah's Witnesses with their stands of (multilingual!) pamplets, street preachers in full roar about eternal damnation, students cheerfully explaining they had to go to church on Sunday seemed to fit a pattern. This article suggests that South Korea send out more missionaries than any other country except the US, which I'm not surprised by at all. When I got my phone number, I immediately started getting texts apparently for the previous person who had my number about going to church on Sunday and other church events. All quite dizzying when you come from Japan, a country that has embraced virtually everything else Western EXCEPT Christianity. But it is not simply an embrace of a foreign religion, in a real sense, Christianity is a (but not the) national religion for Korea.
(This also explains why it is such a big thing that churches are not holding services because of corona, the faithful take Sunday very seriously)
There are only two tiny mentions of Christianity in Boon Joon-ho's Academy Award winning movie Parasite and the first one is immediately in the beginning, where the son Ki-woo establishes himself as the family member who holds information and initiative. He speaks to the pizzashop owner for whom the Kim family folds pizza boxes to earn a paltry living and says:
KI-WOO: The part-timer at your shop. He went MIA, didn’t he? During such a crucial time too. You have a large group order from The Love of Christ Church. That’s why you and your husband are out here working your bottoms off.PIZZA SHOP OWNER: How do you know that? Who told
you?
Note the utter banality. A church group ordering pizzas, probably young people given that it is pizza. That is Christianity in Korea, not something that anyone should be surprised about, totally mundane.
We can start with Daegu, where the recent corona virus outbreak in South Korea has been centered. Daegu is a city about 2 hours south of Seoul. It's sometimes called Daeprika, because it's the city that gets the hottest during the summer, and the outbreak there is apparently due to a Christian church group in the city known as the Shincheonji Church of Jesus. Now, many Koreans, Christians especially, will say that they aren't a church, they are a sect, but I will put them on the continuum, if on the far edge.
This Guardian article gives some background. I'm not sure if it was inevitable that this particular group would have this problem, but it's easy to see how it happened. The church is evangelical and the founder, Lee Man-hee, says he is the second coming of Jesus and he will establish a new promised land where his followers will be able to go to. The number given in a number of articles like this one is 144,000, is strangely specific and that number along with a lot of other information about the practices of the church has been repeated, which I take with a tiny grain of salt, because I think there is a desire to scapegoat here, though the explosion in cases makes it a convenient explanation that may downplay the ability of the virus to spread, which would be comforting to a lot of people. This FP article, behind a paywall unfortunately, has this:
Shincheonji teaches illness is a sin, encouraging its followers to suffer through diseases to attend services in which they sit closely together, breathing in spittle as they repeatedly amen in unison. If they were off on their own, that might be one thing—but according to Shin Hyeon-uk, a pastor who formerly belonged to the cult, Shincheonji believes in “deceptive proselytizing,” approaching potential converts without disclosing their denomination. Shincheonji convinces its members to cover their tracks, providing a prearranged set of answers to give when anyone asks if they belong to the cult. Often, even family members are in the dark about whether someone is a Shincheonji follower. The net effect is that Shincheonji followers infect each other easily, then go onto infect the community at large.
The 'breathing in spittle' has me cautious, but the fact of secret proselytizing is supported by the existence of an app that gave locations of Shincheonji churches so one could avoid these proselytizing attempts (link to a Korean article that I ran thru google translate) which is now quite popular as a way of avoiding perceived corona hotspots. It's not clear if they just infected each other, or they infected a lot of other people, given the lack of clarity in how many members they have and that members may be hiding their affiliation when they test positive. The government has demanded the membership lists from the church in order to test all the members and the founder has, in response to a lawsuit by Seoul city against him and the church (for "murder, injury, and violation of prevention and management of infectious diseases"), apologized for the church's role in the outbreak. Various membership lists have been leaked and there is currently an interesting kerfluffle about the watch he was wearing when he gave his apology.
The actions of the 'superspreader' member of the church who is said to be responsible for the main outbreak within the group was widely reported (with her identity leaked, as were several lists of purported membership) and because it refers to specific incidents, it may be more accurate
The woman first checked in to a hospital following a small car accident. On the fourth day of her stay, she developed a fever, but refused to get checked for the virus because she hadn’t traveled abroad or been in contact with anyone contaminated [this may not be completely true, at the time, I thought that testing was confined to people who potentially been exposed to the virus because of a connection to Wuhan. However, there were also reports that the church had a branch in Wuhan. It all gets fuzzy, but regardless, she wasn't tested] . She was finally tested on Monday, and on Tuesday she received positive results. Up until that point, she had slipped out of the hospital at least four times to attend services that attracted up to 1,000 people.
A passing reference in a popular movie and a sect that most Korean Christians don't believe is actually Christian may seem like a slender reed to balance this post on, but it highlights some interesting aspects of Christianity in Korea. First, it is woven into the fabric of society. Second, the Church scene, especially in terms of Protestant churches, is highly fragmented and can be highly evangelical. The evangelical bent conforms to a lot of stereotypes of Koreans in Japan being the opposite of shy, retiring Japanese, which may be true, but I also see something else there. The end of the Guardian article on the Shincheonji Church has this:
Mi-soon Jeong, a server at a nearby restaurant, is more sympathetic. “I don’t condone them but in a way I don’t blame them for joining a cult,” she says as she sprays disinfectant onto tables. “You can’t find good jobs nowadays and people are so unhappy and lonely. It is hard for people.”
I'd suggest that evangelism in the US and in South Korea is often underpinned by the bringing in of people to a group that can act as substitute family and the proselytized are often responding to that, especially if they feel they are not comfortably within their own 'natural' social groups (family, education, work). In the movie, the second and last appearance of Christianity is here, when Ki-Woo, introduced as the one who develops the plans and who has bluffed his way into a job for the upper class Park family, recommends his sister as an art tutor for the son and then describes the mother who would be hiring her to his family in this way:
KI-WOO She’s a nice lady. Young. Not the brightest tool in the shed. The money is good, and most of all, she’s a ‘believer.’CHUNG-SOOK
She’s religious?KI-WOO
No, it’s just-- She tends to
trust people rather easily.
The film uses geography and location to describe the class differences. Boon Joon-ho could, I think, have made the Parks a family with some sort of religious affiliation, but that would have obscured the message of social classes fighting each other (and probably brought out a lot of protest), as well as undermining their splendid isolation, but it isn't a surprise that the lower class Kim family takes to a sort of Neo Confucianism in the form of the scholar stone. Neo Confucianism holds that "everything has a place under the heavens" and emphasizes social hierarchy and people conforming to their place, while Christianity, especially the evangelical kind, pushes for providing new social groupings and providing options for those left out. While this wouldn't have worked in the movie, this is a state of affairs that seems to explain a lot, at least to me, about why Korean society is the way it is.
Christianity has deep and rather unique roots in Korea. It was originally brought in not by missionaries, but by a Korean aristocrat/diplomat who was baptized by a French Jesuit in Beijing who returned to Korea and baptized others. This means that the Korean Catholic Church is the only national Catholic church founded by laymen rather than by missionaries. (The Catholic Church in Japan, on the other hand, was established by missionaries, most notably St. Francis Xavier) In Korea, Catholicism operated for a short time side by side with Confucianism, which encourages ancestor worship. But the Chinese Rites controversy occurred and ancestral worship was banned, and when this change in Catholic Church doctrine was taken on in Korea, the Catholic Church was banned and several of many future martyrs were made (Pope Francis beatified 124 when he came to Korea in 2014 and there seem to be a lot more to choose from) and Catholicism became an underground religion. The same thing occurred in Japan, where a number of aristocrats became Catholic before Christianity was banned, but Japan, being an island, was able to enforce sakoku (the policy which isolated Japan until the late 19th century) much better and was much more efficient in stamping it out, though like Korea, there were secret Christian groups in Western Japan. This article has a good explanation about why Christianity found fertile ground in Korea, but not in China or Japan.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, missionary work in Korea didn't have to contend as much with government control and interference as in Japan, and the Pyongyang Revival took place (yes, that Pyongyang, capital of North Korea) Again, what is interesting to me is that while there were foreign missionaries, the Revival was led more by native Koreans and when Korea became a Japanese colony, Korean Christian leaders were often associated with Korean nationalism, which then separates it even more from Japan.
The last push was the Korean war and the presence of Americans in larger numbers than in Japan, Americans who were treated as defenders and liberators rather than a victorious enemy had an impact. It was also pushed because the Anglo-American churches, their missionaries, and the Korean churches supported the South Korean government, the United States, and the UN during the Korean War and because of this, North Korea regarded Christianity as an anti-patriotic religion so a lot of Christians in the South fled there during the war. (Contra to the dissertation, I don't think this wasn't inevitable, Kim Hyong-jik, the father of Kim Il-Sung, the first dictator of North Korea, was a Presbyterian missionary who studied with American missionaries and his mother, Kang Pan-sok, referred to as the 'Great Mother of Korea', has a Presbyterian church in Pyongyang dedicated to her memory and the second part of her given name, Sok (石) means stone named so after St. Peter) Because so many Christians still have connections, if not to family, at least to hometowns (to which Koreans are deeply attached to), and the presence of North Korean Christians is such a powerful image (many of the South Korean networks that help North Koreans who are able to escape to the South are centered around churches), this has an interesting effect to end up supporting or at least being more tolerant, of pushes for Korean reunification, which may explain the seeming ambivalence when dealing with the North.
And because postwar Korea was fertile ground for Christianity, especially from the US, and Korea itself was able to transform itself into an economic powerhouse in those post war years, from the turn of the new century, Protestantism has developed under the influence of ideas of the Prosperity Gospel, where God's grace is considered to manifest itself in wealth for his followers. On Sundays, there are multiple television programs of Korean preachers doing a Korean Hour of Power in a Seoul version of the Crystal Cathedral. These trappings seemed very familiar to me, being from the Deep South, but despite these resemblances, the landscape wasn't the same. The striving was there to see, but the underpinning isn't really there. In the South, the exotic small (and not so small) Christian groups exist on the deck of the ship while the mainline Protestant groups provide the ballast. In Korea, all Protestants are roughly 20% total, while Catholicism has a foothold of about 10% (Buddhists are 15%), so it's like a wild, overgrown garden with all sorts of different and varied plants.
One could say that the ballast is Catholicism, and it was also quite surprising to me. I quickly became used to seeing nuns out and about. Pope Francis visited in 2014, which galvanized the Catholic church there, and I got the impression that being Catholic was even fashionable and cool, by the Korean crime drama where a (tall handsome Kpop style) priest works with a bunch of young policemen and women to deal with crimes and solve problems and the neighborhoods where the Catholic churches were located. This article, which places the current growth of Catholicism in terms of Catholic history in Korea notes, the higher in the social hierarchy you go, the more likely you will find someone was a Catholic. I was surprised to meet the higher ups of my university and their business cards would often have a foreign name that, when I enquired, was a baptismal name, which almost seemed like a secret handshake. The current president of Korea is a practicing Catholic (baptismal name Timothy) and he's the third Korean president who is a Catholic, with the other two being Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun (a lapsed Catholic). (Roo committed suicide while under investigation for bribery after he left the presidency and the story of all that deserves reading if you want to see how complicated things can be in Korea)
I also got the impression that Catholicism was more on the left, something that the previous article also explains. The three presidents are considered to be from the left and all of them were related to the labor movement. I mentioned that the current president, Moon Jae-in, has been attacked from the right for his stances on China and North Korea and this Foreign Affairs article (behind a paywall), suggests a link between Moon's politics and his religious beliefs. The story I mentioned about Lee Man-hee's watch as a gift from Park Geun-hye, the previous president who was impeached and jailed in 2017 for corruption and abuse of power (and is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the 3rd president of Korea who was assassinated by the head of the Korean CIA in Oct 79 after Park declared martial law in response to student protests in Busan and Masan) and you can see how conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism could be seen as proxies for left/right conflicts as can be seen with Korean conservatives defying current bans on large gatherings (put in place to deal with COVID-19) to protest President Moon's actions. This twitter link has a video of one such protest, which can give you an idea of demographics.
There are other things, ranging from demographics to #metoo that are playing themselves out within Korea thru churches that seem like a mirror what happens in the US, such as courts being asked to deal with ties between church and state, tensions between Protestants and non Christian groups, demographic changes and church growth, pornography and censorship. (and discussing LGBT issues and the Korean church will be a separate post) But one shouldn't think it is mirroring, it has some uniquely Korean characteristics that may mean that it will move in a very different direction in the future.
By way of a conclusion, in Shusaku Endo's Silence, Endo puts what I feel are his words in this exchange between a Japanese magistrate and a Spanish missionary
A tree which flourishes in one kind of soil may wither if the soil is changed. As for the tree of Christianity, in a foreign country its leaves may grow thick and the buds may be rich, while in Japan the leaves wither and no bud appears. Father, have you never thought of the difference in the soil, the difference in the water?
I've always loved this quote because I thought it revealed something profound about Japan, but after my encounter, it may be saying something that applies not only to Japan, but everywhere.
The 144,000 number is no doubt derived from Revelation, e.g. Rev. 14:1 "Then I looked, and there was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion! And with him were one hundred forty-four thousand who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads."
Posted by: heckblazer | March 03, 2020 at 11:00 PM
Thanks! I'd forgotten about that bit of numerology. So now I wonder if he actually claimed that, or if he mentioned the bible verse and it's reported to make the group seem more like a sect.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 04, 2020 at 02:20 AM
Is not protestantism associated with the Korean struggle against the Japanese occupation in a way that catholicism is simply not ?
https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/2019/august/march-1st-movement-korean-japanese-missionaries.html
Posted by: Nigel | March 04, 2020 at 02:58 AM
Yes, that very true, but I didn't see it deployed in a way to dismiss Catholicism or other religions. I also think that the Protestant connection also contributes to the generation gap between the generation that experienced the occupation and the Korean war and the so called 'Sampo generation'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampo_generation
I think this is also why Catholicism is more trendy, while Protestant churches are suffering a decline in membership.
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/05/young-south-koreans-turning-religion-170524144746222.html
This was obviously of great interest to me, and I wanted to see the on the ground feeling about the boycott of Japanese goods and the Abe/Moon tit for tat. This is anecdotal, but though the Korean younger generation had a much better knowledge of history than their Japanese counterparts, it seemed primarily among the older generation that anti-Japanese sentiments have a foothold.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 04, 2020 at 04:20 AM
Korea is a fascinating society, and I am greatly enjoying what is I hope a series of posts from you.
The relationship with Japan is indeed a curious one - and clearly it is not only in this that there is a generational difference.
Life in Korea has changed dramatically since independence - the've gone from one of the poorest countries in the world, and decades of effective dictatorship, to one of the world's more prosperous democracies, within a single lifetime. A compression of social change hard to get your head around.
One other thing I was going to ask about in the religious context was any examples of syncretism you might have come across. S Korea must be one of the most religiously diverse societies on the planet, so a place of rich potential in this respect.
(There is still a continuous tradition of shamanism which reaches back to prehistory, is there not ?)
Posted by: Nigel | March 04, 2020 at 04:34 AM
Yes, I was told there is a strong shamanistic component, and in my walks around, a professor at Daejeon pointed out flags that indicated fortune tellers and after he did that, I saw them all over the place.
I was quite interested in traditional housing, so I tried to notice neighborhoods with the standard Korean house, one which is being rapidly replaced by apartment complexes and these traditional areas would often have those flags.
I wasn't clear whether they were shamanistic or Buddhist or syncretic. I wish I had started studying Korean 20 years ago, it would be really interesting to research it more.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 04, 2020 at 05:05 AM
Some have argued that the strong shamanistic element in Korean culture "laid the groundwork" for Pentecostal type Protestant Christianity, what with the glossolalia and "gifts of the spirit" and all.
Posted by: DMC | March 04, 2020 at 12:55 PM
In this article, there is thiss
Most evangelical Christians in Korea widely shun Shincheonji’s 200,000-plus followers as heretics, and posters prohibiting Shincheonji members from poaching evangelical members are common in Korean churches. “Our members have beloved friends and family who got sucked into the cult [of Shincheonji], and so negative sentiment towards them is nothing new,” said Lee Won-joon, associate pastor at Sarang Church. “But anger certainly has intensified over the last month.”
Onchun Church in Busan, Korea’s second-largest city, announced it was “investigating the possibility of Shincheonji’s infiltrating into our church” after it closed following the first confirmed case of coronavirus among its parishioners on February 21. The church, located 60 miles southeast of Taegu and belonging to the conservative Kosin Presbyterian denomination, held an emergency elders’ meeting and has cooperated with health authorities since then. Nevertheless, COVID-19 cases traced to Onchun have hit 32, about half of all cases in the city of 3.5 million people.
So perhaps my concern about the Shincheonji Church being scapegoated may not be well placed
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 04, 2020 at 09:38 PM
lj, I assumed this post wouldn't be of much interest to me: how wrong can you be. Actually, I found it fascinating. Thank you, and like Nigel I look forward to the ones to come.
Posted by: Girl from the North Country | March 05, 2020 at 09:37 AM
lj: Very interesting post! I lived in Korea Town in LA back in the 80's for a bit and the Evangelical presence there surprised me when I first arrived. Thanks for that outsider/insider's view into that part of the culture. My kids and I did Tang Soo Do together and two of my daughters are still very into it. The culture interests us.
Which brings me to my main question that has nothing to do with Christianity in Korea: Do they serve that amazing silky tofu over there that we found at Do Re Mi House in San Diego? Keep trying but haven't found it's equal yet.
Posted by: bc | March 05, 2020 at 10:23 PM
I ate a lot of tofu there, but I tended to buy from the supermarket. The freshly made regular tofu (which I think was regular rather than silken) at street vendors looked great, but it was in huge blocks and I couldn't imagine consuming it by myself. I'm more a fan of regular tofu, I like the rougher texture, though I did have the silken tofu as a few times as a side dish at Korean restaurants and it was really good.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 06, 2020 at 03:05 AM
On tofu, the tradition of eating a block of it on release from prison is interesting symbolically.
Clearly it's not religious symbolism, but it does carry some sort of comparison with the Catholic consumption of the host ?
Posted by: Nigel | March 06, 2020 at 06:13 AM
http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2014/03/tofu-after-prison.html
Nothing like this in Japan, I think
I also enjoyed the blog, lots of interesting insights and explanations
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 06, 2020 at 06:49 AM
I wonder what changes the coronavirus outbreak might bring about ?
Communal activity is at the heart of religious practice (and was indeed the major vector of the Korean outbreak).
From today’s Guardian...
Hundreds of churches across South Korea were closed on Sunday as the country battled to stop the spread of coronavirus.
The country's largest protestant church, Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has about 560,000 registered members, held its services online....
Posted by: Nigel | March 08, 2020 at 08:04 AM
Been talking to some Korean friends and they are super pissed about Japan's travel restrictions, which, since they are only for China and Korea and were set out after Xi's visit was cancelled, are assumed to be a sop to Japanese conservatives, especially since there is still no widespread testing here in Japan.
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20200307/p2a/00m/0na/008000c
Of course, what goes around comes around
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/07/national/27-countries-regions-restrict-entry-japan-coronavirus-crisis/#.XmTu85P7Tew
Posted by: liberal japonicus | March 08, 2020 at 09:24 AM
As noted on the Wuhan's First thread, when quarantines are done for non-medical (e.g. political) reasons, they fail to achieve anything useful medically.
Posted by: wj | March 08, 2020 at 10:32 AM
The country's largest protestant church, Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has about 560,000 registered members,...
Currently the world's largest christian congergation.
Posted by: CharlesWT | March 08, 2020 at 11:27 AM
Pro tip: never join a congergation.
Those congers are vicious, and bite.
Posted by: Snarki, child of Loki | March 08, 2020 at 12:28 PM
This is a somewhat disturbing development;
Shincheonji followers kill themselves amid public criticism intensifying
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2020/03/251_285988.html
Posted by: Nigel | March 11, 2020 at 11:57 AM
Cults do things like that, in my observation.
(Makes you wonder what the Trump cult will do when he's gone.)
Posted by: wj | March 11, 2020 at 12:13 PM
Kill us.
There are too entitled and ideologically self-regarding to do the right thing and slit their own throats, unless thee act suicide might garner them a tax cut.
Posted by: John D Thullen | March 11, 2020 at 12:27 PM
Larry Kudlow declared: "Baby Jesus on a respirator, may God bless Covid-19! We may not have to kill ourselves after all, or just yet."
"Reuters: U.S. TREASURY LIKELY TO PUSH BACK APRIL 15 TAX FILING DEADLINE - WSJ"
Posted by: John D Thullen | March 11, 2020 at 12:53 PM
America is in grave danger:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/11/1926464/-Hearing-on-coronavirus-ends-abruptly-as-White-House-tells-experts-come-to-emergency-meeting
Look and see what is going through Trump's single-celled reptilian brain stem, which is smart in a way normal human beings cannot comprehend.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/world/europe/putin-president-russia.html
Think with your lizard brains if you hope to compete with and kill the conservative movement around the globe.
Posted by: John D Thullen | March 11, 2020 at 01:03 PM