[한국사회][기독교의 영향]
왜 한국의 경우, 기독교의 영향이 다른 아시아 국보다 크게 되었나? 그리고 어떤 면에서?
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<An Overview of the Impact of Christianity on Modern Korea>
Don Baker, University of British Columbia
Prepared for the Ninth Keimyung University International Conference on Korean Studies. June 4-5, 2015
A first-time visitor to Korea, unless he or she had done a little preparatory research before hand, would probably be quite surprised at how visible Christianity is in Korea. After all, if you visit Japan you are will see a lot more Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines than Christian churches. If you visit Taiwan, you will see plenty of Buddhist and Daoist temples but few Christian churches. Even in Vietnam, despite the experience of French colonial rule, Buddhism is a much bigger part of the cultural landscape than Christianity is. And, unless you travel to the few places in China in which Christianity has begun to flourish in recent decades, such as the port city of Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, you won’t see many churches there, either.
Korea, as you all know, is a totally different story. In 2011, the last year for which I have reliable figures, according to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism there were almost 78,000 Protestant churches in Korea and 1,600 Catholic churches. That makes a total of 90,000 Christian churches (I use Christian in the North American sense of encompassing Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, and Mormons). However, there were less than 27,000 Buddhist worship centers that same year. With almost 4 times as many Christian churches as there are Buddhist temples, it is no wonder that a first-time visitor to Korea may think they have come to a country that is predominantly Christian.
However, even though the majority of Koreans living in North America are Christian, that is not the case in Korea. The latest statistics we have, from a Gallup survey in 2014 (there will be new government census figures available after the figures collected in the census in 2015 are tabulated), show that 24% of Koreans living south of the DMZ call themselves Buddhists but only 21% call themselves Protestants and another 7% call themselves Catholics (the Catholic church itself claims 11% of the population, a figure more in line with the 2005 census figures as well as the government estimate of 2011). That means that, at most, slightly less than one out of every three Koreans is a Christians. Moreover, according to that latest Gallup survey, about half of the South Korean population says it has no religious affiliation at all.
In addition, a first time visitor to Korea should be careful not to see Seoul as representative of Korea’s religious culture. Christianity is much more visible there than it is in most of the rest of the peninsula. The 2005 census found that there were over twice as many Christians in Seoul (2.2 million Protestants and 1.3 million Catholics) as Buddhists (1.6 million). However, down here in Daegu the reverse is
the case. The government found a total of around 500,000 Christians (255,00
Protestants and 240,000 Catholics) compared to 821,000 Buddhists. In Busan the disparity is ever more in favor of Buddhism. In 2005 there were only around
626,000 Christians living there compared to almost 1.4 million Buddhists.
Despite the minority status of Christianity in Korea, Christianity has had significant
impact on Korea culture over the last two centuries or so both in Seoul and in the
rest of the the country. Just as Christianity architecturally dominates the religious
landscape in the southern half of the peninsula, even here in the southeast corner of Korea, at least in the cities, so, too, has Christianity had more influence on
Korea’s religious culture as well as politics and society in general over the last two centuries than either Buddhism or the indigenous religion of shamanism/ animism have had.
Moreover, though the legacy of Confucianism is still strong in Korea today, particularly in ethical rhetoric and in defining and strengthening family solidarity, Christianity had played a much greater role than even Confucianism has in stimulating the cultural transformations that have created the Korean culture we see today.
We need to ask a couple of questions about the unusual (for Asia) impact of Christianity: 1) why has Christianity established such a visible presence in Korea when it has not been nearly as successful in most of the rest of Asia and 2) why has Christianity played such a significant role in Korea’s modernization though it has never been more than a minority religion?
Before we attempt an answer to those questions, however, it behooves us to identify precisely what the impact of Christianity has been. Let’s begin with the first Christians in Korea, the Catholic community that emerged in the late 18th century and had to undergo almost a century of persecution before it was joined by Protestants in the last quarter of the 19th century.
The first easily identifiable contribution Catholicism made is monotheism. I am well aware that many people, including scholars I have a lot of respect for, believe that the Korean people have long believed in a supreme deity. However, I have yet to see any documentary or archaeological evidence for even hints of monotheism before Christianity arrived in Korea less than two and a half centuries ago. Some people point to reports of the worship of heaven among tribes in and around the peninsula almost two millennia ago. However, those reports came from a Chinese observer, and it’s possible that he imposed on those tribes the Chinese practice of worship of heaven. Besides, just before there are reports that heaven was the object of rituals does not mean that heaven was seen as the Supreme Being. We know from later reports that heaven, always given the Sino-Korean name of Ch’ŏn, was seen as a powerful god but was not seen as the only god.
Before the nineteenth century, Koreans believed in many gods and other supernatural entities. They did not believe in a Supreme Being, in a God with a capital G. Moreover, none of their gods was believed to be omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent. Nor were there jealous gods in the Korean pantheon. The various gods recognized by the Korean people coexisted peacefully and shared responsibility for human affairs. Even Buddhists accepted the existence of a host of Buddhas and bodhisattvas to whom they could turn in times of need. It was not until Christianity entered Korea that that began to change.
Some may argue that heaven was seen as a particularly powerful deity, and that is not much different from Christianity. After all,in Christian theology God is not the only spiritual being. There are angels and devils. Moreover, in the Catholic tradition, saints are important spiritual intermediaries between human beings and Almighty God. However, there is one big difference. According to the Christian view, God is the one and only Supreme Being. The other spiritual entities either do his bidding or are in an ultimately ill-fated rebellion against Him. That’s not the way it worked in pre-Christian religion in Korea. Heaven was not seen as telling the other spirits what to do. Heaven was seen as having limited responsibilities, primarily determining who was and who was not a legitimate ruler as well as determining human life span and the weather. However, heaven shared those last two responsibilities with other spirits, such as the Big Dipper gods for life span and the dragon god, among others, for the weather.
We can also lay to rest the myth that Koreans have long worshipped heaven, even if they didn’t see heaven as a Supreme Deity. There is no evidence of the worship of heaven as the supreme god of shamanism. (The god of heaven in shamanism is just another nature god, and was not a very important part of the shaman pantheon nor a frequent object of shaman rituals). Moreover, we can’t forget that it was actually illegal to worship heaven in pre-modern Korea. Only the emperor in China was allowed to worship heaven. Even the king of Korea wasn’t supposed to do so. There are a few reports from the second half of the Chosŏn dynasty of commoners engaging in ritual shows of respect for heaven, but such activities were both illegal and rare (if the worship of heaven was common among the masses, then the authorities would have not bothered to take note of the few instances that came to their attention). Besides, in in those cases, there is no evidence those illegal heaven-worshippers saw heaven as the only god rather than simply one of the more powerful gods.
Some may argue that Korea did have a pre-Christian monotheistic tradition, though it was not indigenous. They point to Buddhism. However, Buddhism does not have the sort of well-developed theology, delineating the characteristics of God that way monotheistic traditions do. Moreover, Buddha was never called the Lord of Heaven (that was the name of a minor Buddhist deity). Nor was he ever called Hananim, the Honorable one.
A clear analysis of the documentary evidence available to us shows that it was Catholicism, in the last quarter of the 18th century, that introduced monotheism to Korea. However, within a few decades, monotheism had spread beyond the small and beleaguered Catholic community. In 1860 the first indigenous monotheistic religion emerged in Korea. It began with Ch’oe Cheu having a conversation with God. For centuries Koreans had been having conversations with gods, through the medium of shamans. But this was the first time a Korean claimed to have a conversation with the one and only God. Moreover, that God was called by the Catholic name of Ch’ŏnju, in addition to the Sino-Korean name of Sangje, making Catholic influence on Ch’oe’s monotheism undeniable.
Even though Ch’oe’s followers interpreted his teachings so that they began to appear less monotheistic in the sense of belief in one God out there, transcending the human realm, and more of a belief in a divine force that is found both within and without human beings but still within the material real, it is nonetheless clear that Christianity had introduced a new idea to Korea’s religious culture: if not monotheism, at least mono-devotionalism (as seen, for example, in the Won Buddhist rejection of statues of many Buddhist deities in favor of a circle representing the universal Buddha body.
Monotheism is not the only change Christianity introduced to Korea’s religious culture. It is significant that the Korean Catholic church was founded in the absence of missionaries. That means it was at first composed only of lay people. That is significant since, until then, in Korea (unlike in Japan, for example) only religious specialists, such as monks and shamans, adopted a specific religious identity. Catholics, however, whether they were priests or lay people, called themselves Catholics and saw themselves as members of a specific religious community, one that was not only separate and distinct from other religious communities but required all of its members to keep their distance from other religious communities. This was a new idea for Korea - Confucians may have looked down on Buddhism and shamanism but the notion that a religious commitment by its very nature was supposed to be an exclusive commitment was something Koreans had not thought much about before.
The Catholic community introduced to Korea the concept that religious communities should not only be exclusive, they should also be confessional (bound together by a set of shared beliefs) and congregational (they should meet regularly for communal worship). These three concepts, usually associated with monotheistic traditions more than with polytheistic or otherwise non-monotheistic traditions, have since spread to not only Ch’oe Cheu’s Tonghak religion, even after it changed its name to Ch’ŏndogyo, but also to the new religions that followed Tonghak and even to Buddhism in the 2nd half of the 20th century. When Christianity in the form of Catholicism took root in Korea in the late 18th century, it introduced lasting and dramatic changes to Korea’s religious culture.
We can see the evidence for such a change in the rise in the percentage of the Korean population that today says it has a religious affiliation, from around 3% a century ago to around 50% today. I don’t believe Koreans are engaging in religious rituals or interacting with supernatural entities much more today than they were a century ago. The difference is that today they do so as self-conscious members of specific religious communities.
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When Protestants appeared in Korea a century after Catholicism arrived, it introduced more changes to Korea’s religious culture, changes that also had an impact on gender relations in Korea and on Korea’s political culture. The most significant change, however, was terminological.
At the end of the 19th century, Protestant missionaries, led by my fellow Canadian James Gale (1863-1937), coined the term Hananim to refer to the one and only God. Using creative linguistic arguments, they claimed that was actually an indigenous term of God. They convinced not only their fellow Christians but eventually many non-Christians as well, so much so that Hananim, with its variant of Hanŭnim, has become the most common name used for God in Korea, even by some non-Christian new religions.
I don’t have time today to get into all the details of my argument that this is an invented term. Let me just briefly mention two of the reasons I argue this is an invented term, created to support the assumption that Koreans had been monotheistic before Christianity arrived.
First of that, there is the confusion of the terms Hananim (The Honorable one) and Hanŭnim (Honorable Heaven). Despite what has often been argued, they are not based on the same root in pre-modern Korean. “One” was written 나, with the “arae a” in the first syllable but not in the second syllable. “Heaven” was written 하, with the “arae a” in the second syllable but not in the first syllable. In modern Korean, an initial arae a is normally replaced with the standard “a” while arae a in a later syllable in the same word is usually replaced with ŭ. That’s why today “one” is pronounced “hana” and heaven is pronounced “hanŭl.” Hananim and Hanŭnim therefore are separate words, not variant spellings of the same word.
The term “Hananim” never appears in pre-Protestant texts, just as we don’t see any discussion of monotheistic theology in any pre-Catholic texts. Moreover, Korea’s Catholics, when they wrote about their monotheistic deity in han’gul in the 19th century, never used the term Hananim. They probably would have used that term if it had been available to them as an indigenous term for the one and only God. Nor did Catholics use the term they often use now, Hanŭnim. They only began using that term in the 20th century. Before that they used the imported term “Ch’ŏnju” almost exclusively, though a few 19th century Korean Catholic texts written in han’gŭl also use the terms “Sangje” and even “Sangju” for God.
Some have argued that, nonetheless, there is evidence for a pre-Christian use of the term Hanŭnim in the sense of the God of monotheism. They have only one source they can refer to: the Kasa called “song of peace (T’aep’yŏngsa) written in 1598 by Pak Illo (1561-1643). However, a close examination of that poem suggests that Pak used Hanŭnim as a synonym for the more traditional term for the Confucian absolute ch’ŏn (heaven) because he needed three syllables rather than one syllable to maintain the rhythmic structure of his poem. There is no indication in that poem that Hanŭnim refers to a distinctively Korean theological concept. Quite the contrary. Everything else in the poem is Confucian in tone, so his singular use of Hanŭnim to refer to ch’ŏn should be read the same way.
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In addition to this terminological contribution of Korea’s modern religious culture, Protestants also built on the changes Catholicism had already introduced. Like Catholicism, and also like Tonghak, Protestant Christianity was confessional and congregational. Protestants were defined as those who confessed belief in a specific creed, and they were expected to meet regularly for worship services. However, what the way those worship services were conducted transformed
Korea’s religious culture.
In pre-modern Korea, and in pre-20th century Catholic services as well, worship services were not participatory. The ritual celebrant performed the ritual, and the lay people present tended to simply watch what was happening. During a shaman ritual, an onlooker might interact with the shaman but there was no set format for participation by the onlookers. In particular, there was no [choral singing.]
Protestant services were quite different. The preacher would not only preach. He would also encourage choral prayers from his audience, in addition to responses such as “Amen” to things he said from the pulpit. In an even greater break with tradition, those seated in the pews were also encouraged to sign hymns. Such organized lay participation in religious services was unheard of in Korea before Protestantism arrived. However, it soon caught on. These days Catholics also sing hymns from their pews, as do people attending Ch’ŏndogyo services, Won Buddhist services, and even some mainstream Buddhist services in Seoul. (That’s why man temples now have pianos off to the side of the main altar.)
The introduction of choral signing to religious services has had an impact outside of ritual halls as well. A distinctive Christian approach to musical performance has emerged in Korea. In a recent study of Koreans holding concerts in which they sing predominantly Western classical music, the Harvard anthropologist Nicholas Harkness reveals that most of such singers in Korea are Christians, the vast majority Protestant Christians. (The same religious monopoly is not true of those who play the instruments of classical Western music.) Moreover, he noticed that vocal performance concerts held in secular recital halls usually include an encore of a Christian song of praise for the Lord. He also argues persuasively that such singers have developed a distinctive approach to singing, with a voice that is very different from the way traditional Korean songs are sung. [So Christianity, which introduced choral signing into religious services, has also changed the way music is performed in the secular realm.]
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Christianity has also had an impact on <the roles women> can play in society. Claims that Christianity has granted women equality with men in Korea are exaggerated. Korean churches, and Korean society in general, remains highly patriarchal. Not many women are allowed to preach from Korean pulpits. And men still monopolize the title of “elder” (changno) in Protestant denominations. Nevertheless, it is clear that women were given new responsibilities under Christianity, responsibilities that gave them greater public visibility. In other words, they were no longer kept in the “inner room” as much as they were before Christianity arrived. We see the first signs of women playing a more important role in formal organizations not long after Korea’s Catholic community emerged. In the 1790s Kang Wansuk (1761-1801) was made a catechist by Fr. Zhou Wenmo (1752-1801), the first priest to minister to a Korean congregation.
As a catechist, she was given responsibility for proselytizing among women, and for nurturing the faith of those women already converted to Catholicism. Kollumba, as she was known to Catholics, also hid Fr. Zhou in home in Seoul for six years at a time when the government was desperately searching for him. Though her activities were not widely known outside of the small Catholic community (after all, it was illegal at that time to be a Catholic, much less to actively recruit members to such an illegal organization), she was given a lot of responsibility. As Gari Ledyard noted in his study of her life and work, “I can think of no other woman in Korean history prior to the nineteenth century who played such an important public role with as many consequences for the country as the implantation on Korean soil of Christianity.”
Protestants have gone much farther than Catholics have in giving women a more active institutional role in the church. Catholics may have nuns, but Catholics did not put as much emphasis on proselyting “Bible women” as the Protestant missionaries did in the first decades of their proselytizing drive. Those Bible women not only brought the word of God to their fellow women, they also taught them to read at a time when most women in Korea could not read han’gŭl. In addition, Protestant churches have given women titles such as kwŏnsa and chipsa, as well as the responsibilities in their churches that go along with such titles. That does not mean, however, that Christianity has allowed them to escape from all the restrictions their patriarchal society places on them. As Kelly Chong explained, “churches provide women with an array of important channels or ‘outlets’ through which to cope with the problems and conflicts of the patriarchal family while seeking ultimately to bring about the resolution of those conflicts by securing women’s commitment to the principles of patriarchal gender relations.”
What is more significant, however, is that Christianity marked a shift from the pre-modern notion as the family as the primary unit for religious activities. In a society influenced by Christianity, ultimate responsibility for religious practices is often assigned to individuals instead. Whereas in the past there was a division of religious labor in which the wife and mother took care of the household gods and the male head of the household was in charge of honoring the ancestors, in households with Christian members it is up to each individual to maintain their own personal relationship with God and uphold personally their own ethical standards. That has encouraged families to allow women to join with men in showing through (Christianized) rituals love and respect for deceased parents and grandparents. However, in cases of families in which the one member is not a Christian but another is, this can lead to conflicts, as the Christian insistence on the ethical responsibility of the individual can contradict the Confucian notion that family responsibilities should be given priority over any individual beliefs and desires.
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It is clear that, though the patriarchy remains strong, women have been given more autonomy, more individual responsibility, and more public visibility since Christianity took root in Korea, and Christianity is one of the primary reasons for that change. That is not just because Christianity places ultimate responsibility on the individual, whether than individual is male or female, but also because Christianity introduced the first formal education for young women. With opportunities for education, including advanced education and professional training pioneered by Christians but further developed by first the Japanese and then the government of the Republic of Korea, young women now have essentially the same opportunities for formal education, and almost the same occupational opportunities, as young men do. That is a dramatic departure from the restricted opportunities available to women before Christianity began to undermine the old Confucian order, and has weakened, although it has not dissolved the old patriarchy.
Moving farther away from the impact Christianity has had on Korea’s religious culture, let’s move on to briefly examine the impact Christianity had had on Korea’s political culture, specifically Korea’s transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. The first important contribution Christianity made to Korea’s political culture came when Catholics in 1791 told the Chosǒn government that the state had no business interfering in an individual’s religious practices. This was more than just the first explicit call for religious freedom in Korea. It was the first time any group had explicitly stated that there were limits to the legitimate exercise of state authority. Until that Catholic challenge, even Buddhist monks and shamans, despite official animosity toward them, had not clearly stated that the state did not have the right to tell people which rituals they could perform, which ritual they had to perform, which gods they could worship, when, where, and how they could worship them, and who could lead such religious rituals. Monks and shamans may have tried to avoid the all-seeing idea of the state, but they did not challenge its theoretical power of ritual hegemony.
[The Catholic challenge to the ritual hegemony of the state is important because one of the essential building blocks of a democratic polity is the notion that the state is not all-powerful, that there are areas in society in which individuals should be left alone to do as they please as long as they didn’t hurt anyone else. Only when individuals are free to act as they best see fit can they begin to create the alternative centers of power that make democracy both possible and necessary.] After all, democracy is essentially nothing more than the political institutionalization of peaceful means for resolving conflicts of interest. When one side claims total all encompassing power, there is no need for such mechanisms. However, when competing centers of power arise, then normally people, including eventually people in power, will come to recognize that some way must be found to peacefully resolve differences of opinion and conflicts of interest.
Catholicism began that process, though the decades of persecution the Korean Catholic Church faced in its first century shows that it did not make much progress. However, the situation began to change quickly in the last quarter of the 19th century. Two things made that speed-up possible. First of all, Korea was [forced to sign treaties with Western powers guaranteeing freedom of religion, protecting Christian public gatherings.] Second, Protestant congregations joined Catholic communities on the peninsula. It is particularly important to note that the strongest component of the Protestant presence, both in the late 19th century as well as today, has been the Presbyterians. Presbyterian congregations are self-governing, giving Koreans who were not members of local yangban associations their first experience with self-governance.
The Christian stimulus toward a more free and self-governing society was blocked from further progress when the Japanese seized control of Korea in 1910. It took a while for Christians to regain their political self-confidence after liberation. Finally, however, Park Chung Hee’s declaration of one-man rule in 1972, after Koreans had had their appetite for democracy stimulated by elections for a couple of decades, aroused some (though clearly not all) Christians to action. At first, Protestants took the lead, with only a few Catholics like Kim Daejung and Bishop Chi Haksoon joining them in the front lines. In the 1980s, after the Kwangju massacre, it became the Catholics turn to bear the brunt of government attempts to maintain dictatorial rule (probably because Catholic priests, unlike Protestant pastors, could go to jail without leaving their family high and dry).
Christians were even more of a minority in the 1970s and 1980s than they are now. Why were Christians, both clergy and lay believers, so much more visible in the fight for democracy than Buddhist monks or the non-religious (the majority of the population then) were? One reason is that South Korean governments have relied heavily on their alliance with the US, and throwing Christian leaders in jail would put that relationship in jeopardy in a way throwing Buddhists or non-believers would not. Christians, therefore, felt a little safer in demanding political change, though, of course, many of them ended up in jail and even tortured nonetheless. (I still remember seeing the posters on walls in Kwangju in 1974 asking people to report to the police any sightings of the leaders of a university student Christian group which had planned non-violent nationwide demonstrations against Park’s dictatorship. I didn’t see any such wanted posters for the leaders of any Buddhist groups.)
Two brothers, one a historian and the other a sociologist, have suggested a different reason. They argue that Christians have been disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of politics and government in South Korea since 1948 because of their experiences in their churches. Yongshin Park, the sociologist, asserted that “Christians gained communicative capability and indeed earned distinction by the ability to express openly their own opinion. The churches were a cultural institution as much as a religious body.” By this he means that the pre-Christian society was strongly oriented toward a vertical axis, with a focus on the social hierarchy, but Christian communities emphasized horizontal and therefore more egalitarian interactions. While there is room to disagree over whether the relationship between a pastor and the members of his congregation are typically egalitarian, even in a Presbyterian church, most would agree that there was much less concern for secular status in interactions within churches than there has been outside them, particularly in the first decades of Christianity in Korea. There is still a hierarchy within congregations, of course. However, that hierarchy has been different from, and not as rigid as, the hierarchy in the secular world. This made Christians better prepared to deal with the negotiations over differences of opinion and conflicts of interest essential to the smooth functioning of a democracy.
His historian brother, Chong-shin Park, made the political implications of Protestant practices even more explicit. He called Protestant congregations “political training grounds” because, he argues, that provided experience in political technique unavailable elsewhere on the peninsula, at least before 1945.
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Both Park brothers point us toward an important factor in explaining [the Christian impact on Korea’s political culture] The sorts of congregations they describe can be said to represent the core units necessary for a civil society to emerge. Social scientists define civil society as composed of non-kinship and non-governmental organizations composed of members who join together voluntarily to work toward their perceived shared self-interest. Social scientists have usually focused on organizations of merchants as providing the primary building blocks for a civil society. However, they should include churches as well, since church congregations, too, are composed of people who are not necessarily related each other and have not been brought together by their government but instead have come together voluntarily to work together toward a common goad. Since a vibrant civil society is usually considered necessary for a democracy to emerge and function properly, incorporating congregations, especially those Christian congregations of the sort the Park brothers discuss, into an explanation for why Korea (at least South Korea) has democratized would appear to be only reasonable.
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They, therefore, help us answer the second question we posed at the beginning of this paper: why has Christianity played such a significant role in Korea’s modernization though it has never been more than a minority religion? However, the nature of interactions with Christian congregations is not enough of an answer to explain sufficiently what Christianity has played such an important role in determining the way Korea looks today. Another explanation may be the openness to new knowledge that Christians displayed. By becoming Christians, they rejected much of their tradition as out-dated (most of them remained unaware of how much their tradition still influenced their values and their behavior) and therefore sought out news forms of education. [Christians, especially in the first decade of the 20th century, were more likely to receive a modern, Western education than other Koreans were, especially if we focus on an overseas educational experience.] It is only to be expected, therefore, that they would take the lead in reshaping Korea to make it a better fit with the modern world. Even if they didn’t receive a modern Western education, the ideas they acquired in church, including the idea (not often practiced) of gender and social equality, prepared them to take an active role in building a new Korea in which the old notions of gender and social inequality can no longer be openly applied. That tells us why Christianity has been such an important player in the construction of modern Korea.
But that doesn’t answer the question of why the Christian model of what a modern religion should look like has been so powerful in reshaping Korea’s religious culture. To answer that question, we have to remind ourselves that, as Korea began embarking on the arduous path of modernity, it was confronted with two competing models of what the modern world should look like: the Japanese model and the Western model. Since most Koreans resented Japanese colonial rule, they preferred to follow the Western road to modernity. Such a choice allowed them to be both modernizers and nationalists. Included in that choice was the Western notion of religion (a new concept for Korea at the end of the 19th century) and how a religious organization should function and what it should look like. The fact that Korea was colonized by Japan rather than a Western imperial power is an important reason modern Koreans, even non-Christians, has come to share so much of the Western notion of what a respectable religion should be (mono-devotional, confessional, congregational, and with participatory worship services).
This still leaves unanswered the first question I posed: why has Christianity established such a visible presence in Korea when it has not been nearly as successful in most of the rest of Asia? South Korea, in terms of the percentage its population calling itself Protestant, is the most Protestant nation in Asia (Singapore comes in 2nd, at 11%). There are more Protestants in China and almost as many in India but, in terms of the percentage of the population, it’s closest Protestant neighbor is Papua New Guinea part of Asia (around 70% of its people are Protestants and another 25% are Catholic). There are two Asian countries which are predominantly Christian, but both the Philippines and East Timor were colonized for centuries by Christian powers. Besides, they are mostly Catholic, not Protestant. The large Christian population in Papua New Guinea can be explained by the fact that there was not organized religious community there to resist Christian advances. That cannot be said of Korea, which has a strong Confucian community along with centuries of Buddhist tradition as well as a distinctive folk religion.
The best explanation for the amazing success of Christianity in Korea lies in the fact already mentioned that [Korea was colonized by a non-Christian power and therefore it was possible to be both Christian and a nationalist] However, Taiwan has a similar colonial experience but Christianity is much weaker there than it is in Korea.
The most likely explanation for that difference is that Buddhism and Daoism both were strong on Taiwan when the Japanese took it over. In Korea, on the other hand, Daoism had hardly any institutional presence and Buddhism has been weakened by five centuries of being pushed to the margins by the Chosŏn government. Shamanism was too disorganized to put up strong resistance to Christianity. And Confucianism lost its persuasive power when it failed to prepare Korea for the challenge of the modern world and, more importantly, failed to resist the Japanese takeover. That led the field open for Christianity.
But why has Protestantism done so much better (until recently anyway--for the last two decades the Catholic Church in Korea has been growing faster than the Protestant community) than Catholicism, which was here first? There are two reasons.
First of all, the Catholic community suffered from almost a century of persecution, during which they retreated to the mountains for safety. Even after the persecution ended, they remained apart from the larger society and did not begin to make significant contributions to the modernization of Korea’s educational and medical systems until the 1960s. Protestantism was identified with modernization. Until recently, Catholicism was not.
The second reason is the nature of Catholic worship and Catholic congregations before Vatican II in the 1960s. Mass was said in Latin until the early 1970s. That meant Catholic believers could not participate in their primary worship service the way Protestants did. Also, Catholic churches were, until Vatican II, more hierarchical, with the priest wielding more power than a Presbyterian pastor. Catholics still don’t have elders and kwŏnsa, although Vatican II has encouraged greater lay participation in parish management. Finally, until the 1960s, the leadership of the Korean Catholic church retained a strong foreign component. The Protestant community, on the other hand, had a much more Koreanized leadership as far back as the first decade of the 20th century.
This is an all-too-short survey of the impact Christianity has had on modern Korean culture. It would take a book, if not two or more, to do justice to how much the politics and culture of Korea today owes to the Christians of past generations. I am a historian. To my fellow historians who think that all we need to do to understand historical change is to look at political, economic, and social development, I say “include religion in that mix.” As an example, I point to Korea. It is impossible to understand modern Korean history without taking into account the role Christianity has made in making Korea what it is today.
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Don Baker was born in United States and immigrated to Canada in 1987 to assume the Canada-Korea Business Council Chair in Korean Language and Civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at UBC. He first became involved with Korea in 1971 when he went to the southwestern provincial capital of Gwangju to serve as a Peace Corps Volunteer middle-school English teacher. Baker stayed in Gwangju for three years, learning to speak the local dialect and falling in love with Korean culture. In 1974 he left Gwangju to return to North America and pursue graduate work in Korean Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 1983 Baker graduated from the University of Washington with a Ph.D. in Korean history. His dissertation was a study of the Confucian confrontation with Catholicism in eighteenth-century Korea, with special attention paid to the famous Confucian scholar and Catholic apostate Dasan Jeong Yagyong. Baker taught Korean, Japanese, and Chinese history at various universities in the United States before moving to UBC in 1987.
Since coming to UBC, Baker has taught Korean language, history, and culture classes. His research has focused on cultural history. Among his publications are articles on measles and smallpox in the writings of Dasan Jeong Yagyong, on worship of the Healing Buddha in Korean Buddhism, on the folk dance-drama known as Songpa sandae nori, and on religion and the rise of civil society. He has recently finished a lengthy article on the history of Oriental medicine in Korea and is currently working on a study of Qigong in contemporary Korea. In 1997 the Korean publishing house Iljogak published his "Joseon Hugi Yugyo wa Cheonjugyo ui Daerip?" [The Confrontation Between Confucianism and Catholicism in the Latter Half of the Joseon Dynasty], a collection of ten of his articles on Korean history in Korean translation. He also was a coeditor of the "Sourcebook of Korean Civilization?" published by Columbia University Press in the US.
In July, 2001, Baker became the Director of the Centre for Korean Research in the Institute for Asian Research at UBC. In that capacity, he assists visiting scholars from Korea who come to UBC to engage in research on Korea. He also oversees a Korean Studies seminar series in which UBC professors as well as visiting scholars share their research findings with the UBC community and the general public. Baker is also the president of the Canadian Korean Studies Association, and a member of the Korean Studies Committee of the Association for Asian Studies. In addition to his home in Vancouver, he maintains a home in Seoul, not far from the Lotte World shopping complex, in order to have a base from which to continue his exploration of Korean culture, past and present.
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