- Religions in Cold War Korea and PeacemakingGuest Editors' Introduction
The Cold War is commonly understood as a global conflict that was principally about secular ideologies, the confrontation between two mutually exclusive visions of modernity that we refer to as capitalism and socialism. This understanding prevails in the existing academic literature concerning the second half of the twentieth century, and it also affects how we conceptualize the constitution of the contemporary world. The decade following the end of the Cold War witnessed rising ethnic nationalism of a religious nature, especially, but not exclusively, in the former Eastern Bloc. The Bosnian War (1992–1995) in the former Yugoslavia was one of the most shocking and tragic examples in this regard. The ensuing decade saw a series of other military crises—conventional and unconventional—which were often conducted in the name of specific religious doctrines or as countermeasures to these manifestations of religious fundamentalism. This situation provoked prolific debates, both in academia and the broader public, about the nature of modern secular society. Concerned commentators questioned what had happened to the ethics of secularism and whether modern political systems could coexist with forces that denied religious freedom and pluralism, the cardinal principles of modern political life. The whole situation reinforced the impression that religion had reentered politics in today's world, and the related understanding that our time is in contrast to the Cold War era in which secular, rather than religious, ideologies held sway.
Recent studies of Cold War history clearly show, however, that the above impression is misguided. Religious ideas and forces played formative roles in the making (and unmaking) of the bipolarized world of the Cold War era. For instance, Andrew Preston (2012) has explored the role of American Christian groups and movements in shaping US foreign policies during the Vietnam War. Observers of Central Asia and the Middle East are well cognizant of the fact that questions of Islamic fundamentalism, which are debated furiously [End Page 5] today, were inseparable from the end game of the Soviet-US standoff, especially in the history of Afghanistan. Cold War history also contains other streams of religious fundamentalism. Some of the evangelical movements in the so-called American Bible Belt evolved closely with radical anticommunist politics. Thus, Helen Jin Kim argues in her essay featured in this present collection that, "religion is not an epiphenomenal or second order variable, but a central and independent category in the historical reconstruction of the global Cold War." Kim investigates a transnational network of evangelical anti-communism activity that was once active between South Korea and the United States, the legacies of which continue to reverberate in both societies today. Similarly, Jeongran Yoon's recent work explores the impact of the Korean War on some of Korea's Protestant groups (Yoon 2017). She shows how these groups developed powerful transpacific ties with church leaders and sectors in the United States, a network that exerted considerable influence in state policies in both places as well as in the unfolding of the alliance between the two countries.
One commonality among the recent innovative studies of religion and the Cold War is that they raise a subtle yet crucial difference between actors in South Korea and their counterparts in the United States in their respective understanding of the meaning of anticommunism. Whereas the latter generally understood communism as a form of atheism and a force of the anti-Christ, for Korean evangelicals, especially those who experienced the Korean War, communism was far from an abstract principle. Rather, it was an immediate and unforgivable enemy and a primary existential threat, responsible for the death and suffering of their families and kin who had succumbed to North Korea's violent anti-religion politics. For these actors, the Bible, rather than capitalism, was the singularly meaningful antagonist to communism, and the Cold War was, fundamentally, an existential struggle between the church and a particular secular ideology. Within this framework of values, communism was also principally an ideology of religious disposition, that is, a political religion that was defined, above all, by its negation of the place of religion in human society. Many of these transnational...