Session 182: Christianity and the (Re)Construction of Self and Other in Korea

Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Timothy S. Lee, Texas Christian University

Keywords: Christianity, Korea, history of religions, modern.

Christianity entered Korea over two centuries ago; since then, it has interacted with Korean culture at its deepest core and has grown to encompass a third of the current South Korean population. In the course of such interaction and growth, Christianity has figured importantly in the way identities are constructed and reconstructed in Korea. Sometimes Christianity has served as an Other against which traditional Korean identities were revalorized. Other times, it has provided a basis for the (re)construction of new Selves, collective and individual, often by "othering" things traditional. The four papers in this panel explore the dynamics of such identity (re)construction in Korea. Donald Baker does so by focusing on a late-eighteenth-century debate between Roman Catholics and traditional religionists over the nature of God, a debate in which each party seeks to construct a vision of God that "others" the other’s vision. Sung Deuk Oak focuses on a genealogy of Korean Shamanism, arguing that the perception of Shamanism as a demonic "other" is largely a construction of Protestant missionaries. Donald Clark addresses the theme by focusing on missionaries who came to Korea reconstruct its society in the image of American Protestantism, only to undergo profound transformation in their own understanding of Korea and selves. James Grayson then discusses adherency statistics of Korean Christian communities, seeking to distinguish reliable data from grist to the mill of communities bent on constructing exaggerated pictures of themselves. Timothy Lee commentates on all these papers, putting them in proper theoretical and historiographical contexts.

How to Construct God: Anthropomorphism or Anthropocentricism or What?

Donald L. Baker, University of British Columbia

When Christianity first penetrated the Korean peninsula near the end of the 18th century, it encountered a dualist religious culture. The general population was polytheistic, worshipping a number of gods conceived anthropomorphically. Neo-Confucians, on the other hand, were non-theistic. They believed there was one governing force in the cosmos, but that force was immanent and impersonal and therefore anthropomorphic language should be avoided in describing it. Christianity challenged both sides of traditional Korean religious culture by rejecting polytheism while insisting that an anthropomorphic deity, who existed above, beyond, and outside our universe, nevertheless ruled that universe. Neo-Confucians rebuffed Christian arguments for a transcendent, anthropomorphic God on both textual and ethical grounds, saying it was based on a misreading of the Classics and also encouraged human beings to engage in the selfish pursuit of personal salvation. Among the general population, there was growing agreement with the Christian rejection of polytheism coupled with a rejection of an anthropomorphic theology of transcendence. This shift in popular religious culture became evident in the mid-19th century with the birth of the new religion—Tonghak. Motivated by fidelity to Confucian ethics, which gave primacy to interactions among human beings over interactions between humans and gods, Tonghak insisted that God lived within human beings. This allowed Tonghak to preach the existence of one and only one God without abandoning the anthropocentric ethics of Confucianism or adopting the anthropomorphic theology of Christianity.

A Genealogy of an "Other": Protestant Missionaries’ Discourse on Korean "Shamanism," 1895–1914

Sung Deuk Oak, University of California, Los Angeles

At the turn of the twentieth century, Protestant missionaries pioneered the study of Korean religions. Though they claimed objectivity for their study, theirs was a discourse motivated by a theological agenda: they approached Korean religions with the attitude akin to that of an entomologist who would approach pesty insects with the aim of controlling and ultimately eliminating them. This attitude was especially apparent in the missionaries’ study of Shamanism, a folk religion that—much more than the official religion of Confucianism—was intimately involved in everyday lives of the Korean populace, with its myriad gods and spirits, with its influential shamans and rituals, and with its knack for intermingling with magisterial religions such as Buddhism and Daoism. It therefore is not surprising that in the missionaries’ discourse, Shamanism emerged as an "Other" par excellence—described in terms such as superstition, fetishism, devil/demon worship, and sorcery. This paper is a genealogy of this discourse that largely shaped the category we now know as Korean Shamanism. The paper focuses on the first twenty years of the discourse. More specifically, the paper examines the Korean terms the missionaries used for "Shamanism," "shaman," and "shaman rituals"; a pantheon of Korean Shamanism the missionaries elaborated; the impact of Shamanism on Protestantism; comparing views of Shamanism among Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist missionaries in Korea; and the well-known phenomenon of the shaman-converts-become-Bible women.

American Missionaries’ Transformation in Korea

Donald N. Clark, Trinity University

The first Protestant missionaries in Korea came from an America that combined ideologies of imperialism and pre-millenarianism, keen to spread the gospel on "foreign fields." They arrived in Korea with their heads full of orientalized conceptions of Korea as a benighted and sterile "Other," needing Westerners’—mainly the missionaries’—stimulus to be dislodged from heathenism and be prepared for the imminent Second Coming. While engaged in their work, however, some of the missionaries found Korea to be a great deal more resilient and fecund than they had thought. Consequently, even as other missionaries continued to harbor orientalist prejudice toward Korea, these more sympathetic missionaries took the trouble of making themselves well versed in Korean language, history, and culture. In the course of such dialogical efforts, this paper argues, the missionaries underwent profound transformation not only in their understanding of Korea but also in their sense of themselves—in effect becoming Peace-Corps types before Peace Corps. This paper seeks to elaborate this argument by examining representative missionary figures such as James Gale and Homer Hulbert and their works from publications like Korea Repository and Korea Mission Fields, works that bear fruits of their conversation with Korea.

Religious Adherency and the 1985 and 1995 Censuses: What They Tell Us and Don’t Tell Us about Korean Christianity

James H. Grayson, University of Sheffield

In the early 1980s, the question of the relative size of the differing religious communities in the Republic of Korea became a major concern for students of the contemporary Korean religious scene. Doubt was raised about the claims made by various groups (principally Protestant Christians) about the actual size of the communities, since these claims seemed to inflate the numbers to support the communities’ exaggerated conceptions of themselves. In 1985, the ROK Government for the first time asked questions about religious adherency in the quinquennial census of that year, and subsequently in 1995. This paper proposes to examine the trends which the statistics from these two censuses reveal, and to contrast them with self-reported statistics from the various religious organizations. Comparisons will be drawn between Korean and Japanese statistics for religious adherency. Methodological questions will be raised about what information can actually be derived from these statistics and what information cannot be derived from them. Suggestions will be made for further lines of research.