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1 chapter 1 Breakthrough for a New Moral Order, 1885–1919 Everywhere the first impulse to social action is given as a rule by real interests, i.e., by political and economic interests. Ideal interests lend wings to these real interests, give them a spiritual meaning, and serve to justify them. Man does not live by bread alone. He wants to have a good conscience as he pursues his life-interests. And in pursuing them he develops his capacities to the highest extent only if he believes that in so doing he serves a higher rather than a purely egotistic purpose. Interests without such “spiritual wings” are lame; but on the other hand, ideas can win out in history only if and insofar as they are associated with real interests. —Otto Hintze From a century or so before 1885, when Protestant evangelism began in earnest in Korea, till the demise of the Chosŏn dynasty in 1910, Korea experienced cultural distortion.1 The roots of this distortion were varied and cumulative. In part, it was caused by famines and epidemics that had devastated the country with unusual frequency in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.2 The distortion was also caused by—and reflected in— the corruption in the Chosŏn government, which rendered the government in most Koreans’ eyes more nearly an instrument of exploitation than an agent of just order. In the midst of such distortion, most Koreans were oppressed and alienated from the establishment; and the ideals of Zhu Xian Confucianism, the state religion of the dynasty, incurred a loss in plausibility.3 Faced with such disorientation and suffering, multitudes of Koreans yearned for salvation, for a new moral order wherein their spirits could be empowered and their integrity as human beings reaffirmed. 2 | Born Again The search for a new moral order has been a leading theme in modern Korean history, a search that has been expressed in numerous forms—in rebellions , in the founding of new religions, in the acceptance of foreign religions and ideologies. In this context, evangelicalism, too, appealed to Koreans as a means of satisfying their salvific desires. Of all the new salvific efforts that began in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth, evangelicalism has been one of the most successful, to the point of becoming the most dynamic institutional religion in South Korea in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Thus we begin our study with two theses: that evangelicalism satisfied the salvific needs of a great many Korean individuals during its hundred-year history in Korea, and that it successfully adapted to Korea’s sociohistorical context. Of the first two decades in the twentieth century, two dates are especially significant for this study: 1907 and 1919. The first date is meaningful primarily to Korean Protestants, for this was the year of the great revival of 1907, in which Korean Protestants experienced a nometic breakthrough and fulfillment of their search for personal salvation.4 The second date is significant to all Koreans; this was the year of the March First Independence Movement , another kind of breakthrough—this one resulting in the birth of modern Korean nationalism.5 Though its significance was national, encompassing Koreans of all walks of life, the March First Movement was especially meaningful to Korean Protestants. It was through this movement more than anything else—more specifically, through the Protestants’ preponderant contribution to it—that evangelicalism successfully bonded with Korean nationalism and became legitimated in South Korean history. Searching for a New Moral Order A sign that a society is in the throes of cultural distortion is the appearance of millennial expressions, expressions that yearn for the end of the status quo and predict the establishment of a new and better order.6 Such expressions were widespread in the latter years of Chosŏn. From the perspective of Chosŏn rulers , a startling prophecy was the one expressed in Chŏnggam-nok, an obscure and portentous text originating in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. This text predicted the imminent collapse of the Chosŏn dynasty and the emergence of a new kingdom based in Kyeryong Mountain and ruled by the Chŏng lineage.7 In the end, neither a religious movement nor a political program crystallized around this text. But its diffused impact was considerable, as it helped to instigate many a popular uprising and influenced the rise of numerous new religions, including Tonghak, about which more will be said below.8...

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