The Making of Korean Christianity: Protestant Encounters with Korean Religions, 1876–1910 by Sung-Deuk Oak (review)

Outside of Korea, the field of studying Christianity on the Korean peninsula has grown in exciting directions over the past few years. In large part, this latest trend is a result of the publication of scholarly works that furnish fresh perspectives on the meaning, significance, and development of Korean Christianity in the past and present. These publications by scholars such as Paul Chang, Kelly H. Chong, Ju Hui Judy Han, and Nicholas Harkness have introduced methodological approaches that have not only shed deep insight into the relationship between Christianity; political, cultural, economic, and social structures; and people’s lived experiences in Korean society but also have raised new understandings of key questions and issues in fields outside of religious studies, including gender studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. In making the study of Christianity in Korea a multifaceted, stimulating medium for raising provocative questions about social and cultural life in Korea, employing theoretical concepts and addressing theoretical issues, and expressing ideas about the intersection between Christianity and modernity, these works have gradually shifted scholarship on Korean Christianity away from its traditional purpose of studying Christianity as a way to refine church practices and beliefs, to reflect on and enhance missionary practices, and even to rehabilitate the reputation and value of missionaries from their image as imperialists. Indeed, examining Korean Christianity as a form of missiology has long been a standard in Korean studies because the field has been dominated by descendants of missionaries, theologians, and historians of Christianity and world missions. In this regard, then, The Making of Korean Christianity—a well-researched, finely detailed book—falls into the traditional camp of studying Korean Christianity and clearly adheres to the methodological perspectives and goals of missiology.

The Making of Korean Christianity’s preface, introduction, conclusion, and six chapters are laid out in a way to explore fully the “history of the localization of North American Christianity in Korea through its encounters with Korean religions at the turn of the twentieth century” (p. xvi). The book emphasizes “congenial points of contact” between North American Christianity and religions in Korea through a study on missionary encounters with local beliefs and practices, such as shamanism, Confucian rituals, and ancestor worship (p. xviii). In so doing, Dr. Oak uses his book as a public platform to demonstrate the indigenization of Korean Christianity and consequently proves that missionaries never assumed the role of “fundamentalist destroyers of Korean religious cultures” (p. xvii). Dr. Oak vigorously argues that missionaries were far from active agents who embodied imperialist tendencies and instead were “moderate evangelicals” (p. xvii). To him, missionaries’ beliefs and behaviors ultimately “mitigates the common charges of cultural imperialism, white supremacy, and religious triumphalism” (p. xviii) that are commonly leveled against Western missionaries.

Dr. Oak’s desire to counter the long-standing charges that connect missionaries to imperialism is unsurprising in light of the historiography of Western imperialism commonly painting missionaries as figures who zealously attacked “primitive” beliefs and customs and tried to civilize and enlighten non-Westerners through Christianity. This view, while clearly validated by historical evidence, narrowly interprets the relationship between missionaries and non-Westerners without any nuance because it privileges the missionary’s point of view and deemphasizes the agency of those impacted and influenced by missionary projects. Hence, Dr. Oak should be commended for reexamining the missionary/native relationship by elaborating on the intention and practices of foreign missionaries in Korea and their relationship with Korean followers. Yet, despite his good intentions, his book shows missionaries exercising power in ways that led to a fundamental manipulation and alteration of standard interpretations of Korean culture and history in order to promote missionary goals—ways of power that were featured commonly in imperial projects for disciplining the colonized and legitimizing imperial rule in Korea and elsewhere.

Chapter 1 clearly shows how missionaries’ discursive approaches to Korea...