The Sacred and the Secular: Protestant Christianity as Lived Experience in Modern Korea: An Introduction

According to Statistics Korea, in 2015 the number of South Koreans identifying as Protestant Christians was 9,675,761 (19.7 percent of the population), making Protestantism the most popular religion in the country. Buddhism ranked second, with 7,619,332 (15.5 percent).¹ These results are particularly eye-opening when one considers that Buddhism was introduced into Korea in the fourth century and has been a significant religious tradition in Korea for centuries, while Protestant Christianity was introduced only in the late nineteenth century.² One may note other signs of the dramatic success of Protestant Christianity in South Korea. A series of gargantuan evangelistic campaigns—most representatively "Thirty Million to Christ" (1953–69), "Korea '73 Billy Graham Crusade," "Expo '74," "'77 Holy Assembly for the Evangelization of the Nation," and "World Evangelization Crusades" in the 1980s—mobilized millions of Christian adherents.³ Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is the site of eighteen megachurches, including the world's largest megachurch, Yoido Full Gospel Church, with a membership of approximately 800,000.⁴ Further, in 1999 "Korean Protestant churches commissioned more missionaries than did any other national church except the United States," and thus South Korea took a prominent role in global Christianity.⁵ In fact, some Korean Christian missionaries, represented by the University Bible Fellowship, target white Americans for conversion, reversing the conventional direction of evangelical activities, which had been dominated by white Western missionaries targeting nonwhite, colonized subjects.⁶

The embrace of Protestant Christianity in Korea has been remarkable. Beyond the overwhelming numerical surge of Korean Christians, growing from a handful of converts in the late nineteenth century to nearly 10 million adherents today, Protestant Christianity has been a critical force in shaping virtually every aspect of modern Korea. It has been intertwined with shifting political conditions since the late nineteenth century, such as Western imperial expansion, Japanese colonialism, Korean nationalism, the building of the modern nation-state, the division of the nation into North and South Korea, the Cold War, and democracy movements and neoliberalism in South Korea.⁷ It has also had a significant impact on class formation, gender relations, and everyday life practices.⁸ This special issue was born out of consideration of this essential question: How should we understand the phenomenal growth and ubiquitous presence of Protestant Christianity in secular modern Korea?

Religion was supposed to be cast off in favor of secularization in the age of modernity. Under the banner of the separation of church and state, the modern nation-state was understood as a secular entity in which religion was assigned to the private, individual domain, away from the public and the political.⁹ With urbanization, industrialization, and the advancement of science and technology, human life and society were expected to be governed by rationality. However, history amply demonstrates that the modern development was far from a full embrace of the secular and a rejection of religion. Religion has been a powerful sociopolitical and cultural force and a significant aspect of public life. The boundary between sacred/religious and secular/material has always been fluid and constitutive. As Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini put it, "The religious and the secular have been constituted in relation to each other in modernity and, indeed, as modernity."¹⁰

It is important to note that secularism is central to the European Enlightenment narrative. In that narrative, religion is a regressive force that oppresses humanity, while reason and science free people from "the bonds of religion" and eventually lead to the liberation of humanity.¹¹ The problem with most representative debates on the topic of secularism lies in the fact that those debates are largely based on Euro-American histories and societies centered on religious traditions, especially Catholicism and Protestantism. With a few exceptions, there has been a pronounced lack of analysis focusing on non-Western societies for historical and sociological comparison.¹² Analyzing Charles Taylor's-influential book A Secular Age (2007), the historian Don Baker questions whether it is "even reasonable to apply the same term secular" to Korea, because "Korea does...