My life at a Korean law firm (part 19)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
In the late 1990s, around Paju, I saw several posters on utility poles. I no longer remember what they said, or even if the language was Korean or English, but they were bright yellow and featured an image in the middle of a spacecraft hovering over a man who stood transfixed, looking up at it.
I've always been fascinated by UFOs and things out of the ordinary, so these posters caught my eye. Maybe a year later I saw new posters with the same image. They were advertising a free film screening, I think in the Sejong Cultural Center in Seoul, about aliens. It was too far and the timing was wrong, so I didn't go, but it brought to my attention the fact that Raelism existed in Korea.
I had read a little in Australia about a French former race car driver who'd had an encounter with an alien, after which he had formed a new religion, but I had never actually encountered anyone who believed in it. In 1999 I finally met Korean Raelians at an exhibition of UFO photos that they were holding in the gallery inside Gyeongbokgung Station on Line 3. Intrigued, I talked to one of the members, who told me about their beliefs and practices, some of which are considered quite far out, especially in conservative Korean society.
In the early 2000s, there was a media hubbub about human cloning and a Raelian organization named Clonaid claimed to be ready to go ahead and implant several willing South Korean women with cloned embryos. Cloning is important in Raelian cosmology because eternal life to them (as I understand it) means “downloading” your personality, memories and intelligence into a succession of younger clones of yourself. In the end, the Korean offices of Clonaid were raided, and I haven't heard anything about actual efforts to clone humans for over 10 years.
But Raelians learned that the best way to get attention in Korea was to engage in unusual publicity stunts, usually in Insa-dong. There were free hugs campaigns, topless demonstrations against women wearing bras, and others against female genital mutilation in African countries, and so on. In fact, photos used in Wikipedia articles on Clitoraid and Nudity in religion are taken from Korean Raelian protests. There is also a tamer one from a demonstration against a ban by the Korean government forbidding the Raelian leader from entering the country. In recent years it seems they have been quiet, and I am not sure what the size of the movement is, although a 2003 article in this paper claimed there were 4,000 members back then.
In 2004 or 2005, I was walking through Itaewon when two young women with a clipboard stopped me on the street. They said they were surveying people on religious beliefs. It seemed like some kind of university assignment, and so I stood there and answered their questions.
It started out general enough: “Do you believe in a god?” and “Do you attend any religious activities?” Later questions began to take on a clear direction: “Have you ever imagined that God could be a woman?” and “Would you be interested if someone could show you in the Bible that God is in fact a woman?” Sure enough, this was a recruiting drive for the World Mission Society Church of God, a religion I had never heard of before.
This new movement sprang up in Korea and had its roots in the 1960s when a Korean preacher named Ahn Sang-hong founded a new church. When he died in 1985, a woman named Jang Gil-ja became the center of the movement. Now the church teaches that Ahn was the second coming of Christ in the flesh, and Jang is in fact God the Mother living with us on Earth. Despite its unusual beliefs, this movement has grown and now has churches in many other countries.
On YouTube I was able to find a plethora of videos from around the world in which congregants overseas perform dances and chant “we love you” to Jang as God the Mother. Although I haven't been approached lately for a survey about religions, when I am, I will know to expect a sales pitch at the end. Perhaps understandably, if a person were to stop you on the street and tell you that the creator of the universe is a 75-year-old Korean woman, it would be hard to take in, let alone believe. That is why the incremental step-by-step approach is chosen.
One day in 2012, when leaving Yongsan Garrison, I was stopped by some women with leaflets. They were recruiting “foreigners” to attend their “World Peace Festival” at Seoul Olympic Stadium. The organization putting on this festival was revealed to be “Mannam Volunteer Association.” I had already read about this group, which acted as a front for Shinchonji. Widely regarded in Korea as a heretical offshoot of Christianity, it too is a Korea-born and raised new religious movement.
Like the Unification Church, it uses world peace as a kind of “gateway drug” to introduce its spiritual concepts to prospective new believers. Its front group offered things like free Korean classes and volunteer opportunities. Mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches nowadays often have a poster on their notice board warning their members to beware of and avoid Shinchonji members, who are rumored to visit other communities of faith with the express purpose of recruiting new members.
For some reason, Shinchonji particularly wanted non-Koreans to attend its World Peace Festival, perhaps to lend it some legitimacy as an international movement. This led to criticism of the movement, a fact this paper reported on in October 2012, in an article entitled “Volunteer Body Accused of Deceiving Expats” before said article was pulled from the website a day or two later, allegedly after receiving an angry phone call from the church. Mannam is long gone and the church operates Heavenly Culture, World Peace, Restoration of Light (HWPL) to do much the same thing.
The tragic 2014 sinking of the ferry Sewol with the loss of so many people on board, mostly children, was also connected in the media and popular sentiment to a Korean religious movement. One of the three churches of Salvation Sect was once led by Yoo Byung-eun, who became quite wealthy and reinvented himself as a businessman and inventor, and later photographer.
There are allegations Yoo was the de facto owner of Chonghaejin Marine, the company that owned the Sewol. It appears while Yoo himself did not own any stake, his sons held the majority of shares, and through a complex web of cross-shareholdings, they invested in companies owned by Yoo Senior. Perhaps because of his role as leader of a controversial Christian sect, it was assumed Yoo was the hidden controller behind his sons. Yoo became Korea's most wanted man, and a bounty of 500 million won was put on his head as part of the investigation into the sinking of the Sewol and the resulting deaths. In the end, Yoo's body was found, badly decomposed, in a field.
On a side note, there remain hints and allegations that a famous South Korean pop star and talent agency mogul was, and perhaps still is, involved in the Salvation Sect.
It would be remiss of me to end this without briefly mentioning Choi Tae-min, the father of the famous friend of former President Park Geun-hye, Choi Soon-sil. He had been, at various times in his life, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister. In the 1970s he started his own church that contained elements of all three of these faiths, as well as traditional Korean shamanism. He befriended and mentored the young Park Geun-hye after her mother's assassination, which is how his daughter and the future president became friends.
That is where I will leave Korea's fecund field of faiths for now. For those wanting to know more about controversial religious movements in Korea, I recommend my friend Peter's blog: peterdaley.net/home.