Protestant lobby during his election campaign in 2007, with some megachurch pastors openly asking their congregations to pray for his election.
The political left accuses the Protestant right of being an over-politicized, socially conservative bloc. In 2004, a group of conservative church leaders to set up a Christian political party modeled on American televangelist Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, with an agenda of opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. During the 2011 Seoul mayoral election campaign period, Kim Hong-do, pastor of Keumran United Methodist Church, asked this question in a sermon, with reference to left-of-center candidate Park Won-soon: “What are we to do if someone who belongs to Satan and demons becomes mayor of Seoul?” In 2011 another group, led by pastor Jeon Gwang-hoon of Sarangjeil Presbyterian Church, announced plans to form a political party that would oppose the separation of church and state. Jeon later lost credibility when he stated that he would combat the nation’s low birth rate by sending people with less than five children to prison.
Protestantism is seen as the pro-capitalist religion. This may be due in part to its history of association with the United States, as the opponent of Communist North Korea. But also, 42 percent of CEOs of large Korean firms are Protestant. Large Protestant churches are criticized by some as places where business networking and deal-making take place. Somang Presbyterian Church in the affluent Gangnam area of Seoul is popular among executives and conservative politicians. Competition to become a church elder there is very intense, as it offers excellent opportunities to make connections. President Lee Myung-bak himself is an attendee of the church. Despite being a member of the National Assembly and former CEO of Hyundai Engineering and Construction at the time he sought this office, he failed to be elected as an elder in 1994. After volunteering as a car park attendant while his wife cooked meals in the church kitchens, he finally won election the second time around.
This association has not always guaranteed President Lee a free ride by the Protestant right. Cho Yong-gi, the powerful founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, a Pentecostal church, intervened in 2011 when the government introduced an Islamic Finance Bill, aimed at allowing the development of a Sukuk bond market in Korea, chided the president for failing to remember that the Protestant lobby elected him. Cho Yong-gi warned that Islamic finance would provide funding for “terrorists.” He followed this up just weeks later with the claim that the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 was a result of that country’s lack of Christian faith.
Aspects of Korean Christianity
Protestantism in Korea has adapted to native cultural ways. This is evidenced in one respect by the size of certain churches. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Yoido Church in Seoul has the world’s largest congregation. Around 150,000 people are believed to attend services in the main church complex, but the membership the church claims reaches one million, and the reason for this is that Yoido has created a network of affiliated churches that may be likened to franchises. Pastor Mark Cho (not his real name) of a Seoul-based church with the relatively small membership base of 75,000 attributes this collectivization and franchising of belief at least partly to the Korean people’s fondness for group bonding and uniformity.
Pastor Mark goes on to state that the culture of uniformity in religion has other consequences. Korean Christianity has a tendency toward “finger-pointing,” that is, a dogmatic intolerance, toward those who practice their religion in a different way: “If you have a slightly different perspective, they’ll use it and say you’re a heretic,” he comments. His own church has ironically faced criticism for being too “Bible-centric.”
Despite the general distaste Korean Christians have for Musok, Korea’s deeply ingrained animist shamanism has affected Christian worship in several ways. Some churches are markedly materialistic, just as shamanism is. Yoido Church admonishes believers to reject “misguided thoughts considering material wealth as being equated with sin.” Furthermore, “a poor Christian is not a good Christian” was the message delivered in one famous Yoido sermon, for example. Not surprisingly, some Korean Christians—Protestants in particular—hold that their Christian beliefs will somehow help them become wealthy. The history of Protestantism in Korea as the “modernizing religion” and the religion of the business and political elite may well contribute to this feeling.
Shamanism may have helped pave the way for Christianity to be so successful in Korea, according to Pastor Mark. The shamanic association of spirituality with peaks like Inwang-san, Jiri-san, and Baekdu-san resonates with the spiritual significance of mountains like Mount Sinai, at which Moses received the Ten Commandments in the Book of Exodus. Around Korea, there are hundreds of gidoweon, small “prayer houses” located in the mountains, where church members can go for extended periods of concentrated prayer. The founder of Pastor Mark’s church spent three and a half years in a cave at Jiri-san, where he read the Bible over a thousand times. His text was from an imported religion, but his choice of location was the most traditional one possible for a Korean.
Fervor
Perhaps what is most striking about Protestantism in Korea is its fervor. Pastor Mark observes that, “Koreans have had a difficult history, so many people believed that praying harder would help them.” Unlike Buddhism or Confucianism, Christianity offers salvation. During the time Protestantism has been present in Korea, this country has suffered from poverty, war, colonialism, and division into two separate states. During Japanese rule, Protestants were among the most determined rebels. And following the creation of South Korea, Protestantism became associated with the new American-inspired capitalist order, which was seen to be the people’s road out of poverty. Given all this, it is perhaps unsurprising that believers have clung to Protestantism so strongly.
The rate of Protestant church attendance, with 80 percent of believers attending at least once per week in 1995—dwarfs the rate at which Catholics attend church and Buddhists attend temples. Every day, around 10 percent of practicing Korean Protestants attend early-morning devotional prayers. There are also many thousands of cells, small groups of Protestants who gather, often on Fridays, for extra prayer sessions. Most members tithe as well, giving on average ten percent of their income to the church; “if you’re getting married to a Protestant here, the tithe is definitely something you’ll need to discuss before you tie the knot”, says one Korean Protestant.
Research firm Gallup conducted a survey on the fervency of Korean Protestants in 1997. It found that 52 percent had “experienced the Holy Spirit”; 68 percent were “certain of their salvation”; and, 69 percent believed in “the imminent end of the world.” Of all the various Protestant denominations in Korea, only the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, and one sect of theologically liberal Presbyterians are non-evangelical, according to Timothy S. Lee, author of Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea. According to him, in the late 1990s at least 75 percent of all Korean Protestants were “solidly evangelical.”
Korea is now the world’s second-largest exporter of missionaries after the United States. In 2006, some 15,000 Protestants from South Korea engaged in mission work. Protestant missionaries have been abducted while preaching in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite the missionaries’ obvious risks to themselves and the liability for South Korea’s image and defense policy, the government has not been able to stop groups from going to such danger zones. On July 19, 2007, twenty-three missionaries were kidnapped on the road between Kandahar and Kabul. The twenty-one who survived the ordeal were eventually released for a reported ransom of twenty million U.S. dollars, paid directly to the Taliban by the South Korean government.
This fervor is much less pronounced among Catholics. In the same year that 15,000 Protestants went abroad for missionary work, only 634 Catholics did so, according to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea. Even within Korea, Catholics generally do not proselytize, but rather wait until someone expresses interest in joining their church. In contrast, it is very common for Protestant Koreans to exhort their non-Protestant friends to attend church with them. Some evangelical groups even stop people on the street. Seoul abounds with public preachers, usually old men and women, who sometimes employ megaphones to harangue passersby and bear placards with the message “Yesu, Cheonguk—Bulshin, Jiok” (“Jesus, heaven—No belief, hell”).
Protestantism and Catholicism also differ in how their adherents relate to other