Building A Heaven on Earth: Religion, Activism, and Protest in Japanese-Occupied Korea by Albert L. Park (review)

Albert Park’s Building A Heaven on Earth is a welcome addition to scholars’ intensifying call for a modern Korean historiography that moves beyond modernist- (including Marxist) and nationalist-centered approaches. Park compellingly argues against these two interpretative extremes by presenting three religious communities in 1920s and 1930s colonial Korea that experimented with an alternative vision of religion, modernity, capitalism, and nation. The YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo organizations, led by Hong Pyŏngsŏn (1888–1967), Pae Minsu (1896–1968), and Yi Tonhwa (1884–1950), respectively, responded to the deleterious effects of modern and capitalist onslaughts on peasants at the margins of colonial Korean society and mobilized rural agrarian campaigns, both spiritual and economic, to actualize a heavenly kingdom on earth.

In placing the origins and developments of these nation-wide communities at the center of scholarly debates on nationalism, colonialism, and modernity in colonial Korea, Park makes a number of theoretical and interpretive contributions to the field. First and foremost, Park problematizes the aforementioned interpretative approaches, both of which are linear-, urban-, secular-, and capitalist-centered, by focusing his argument on the rural, religious, and cooperative environments of these movements. Park contends that these modernist and capitalist approaches, represented by scholarship centered on the notion of colonial modernity and the nationalist paradigm, prevent a nuanced understanding of the period’s complex history and overlook the significant power operative in religious communities, a power which gave displaced peasants, in an opportune and careful manner, "an alternative vision of modernity" (p. 3) as well as of religion and nation. Secondly, Park debunks the theory of secularization that claims that, with modernization, society will progress and religion recede into superstition, losing its relevance to the modern individual. He sets forth new interpretive frameworks for modernity, which scholars of cultural/ post-colonial studies have advanced in recent years. These frameworks include Fredric James’s and Charles Baudelaire’s sense of a new "feeling" (p. 14), Talal Asad’s inseparability of "the religion and the secular" (p. 17), and Courtney Bender’s and Ann Taves’ mutually mirroring and generative forces of religion and secularity (p. 17). Thirdly, Park utilizes these frameworks to effectively bring to light how religion can skillfully rearticulate its own symbols, ideas, and worldviews at different times and in different situations, allowing it to bring global and local forces under the rhetoric of tradition. In other words, religious leaders are experts in combining traditional and modern (also global and local) elements creatively and tangibly. With these theoretical and interpretative underpinnings, Park presents the three faith-based movements, whose period of activity spanned from 1920 to 1937 in colonial Korea. He maintains that these were collectively "one of the largest and most powerful rural campaigns in Korean history" (p. 12). The following articulates the main argument structuring Park’s book:

In response to the contradictions of modernization and the antireligious campaigns, leaders from the Ch’ŏndogyo, the Presbyterian Church, and the YMCA rearticulated conventional religious languages and transformed religion into a vehicle to question the norms of modernity, pursue social change in response to modernization, and achieve political, economic, and social justice.

(p. 10)

The book is divided into two parts of three chapters each, with six chapters altogether plus a conclusion. The first three chapters provide political, economic, and intellectual backgrounds for the origins of the faith-inspired rural movements. Chapter 1 outlines how the decline of the Neo-Confucian order from the late nineteenth century to 1919 left a vacuum in which the popularity of western Christianity and the indigenous Ch’ŏndogyo could grow. This chapter also traces the ways in which these traditions molded a new set of languages, worldviews, and communities that could withstand the chaos and animosity resulting from the period’s tumultuous changes and bestow new meaning and direction to the displaced Korean people.

Chapter 2 details the full...