Christianity's fascinating history in Korea

By Kyung Moon Hwang

Outside of enclaves such as Armenia and Georgia, South Korea remains the only country in Asia, home to more than half of the world’s people, where Christians make up a substantial portion of the population.

In historical terms, this means also that Korea became perhaps the only civilization where Christianity grew into a major religion without the aid of colonial or political domination.

But it took a long time for Christianity to gain acceptance in Korea. And in some ways its development repeated, in abbreviated form, the difficulties that the religion suffered initially in southern Europe and the Levant nearly 2,000 years ago.

There were probably some people in ancient Korea, beginning in the Silla era, who had heard of Christianity through traders. But this did not lead to any community of Korean Christians, and the religion did not draw any significant attention until the 16th century. That was when Jesuit priests made their way to China and Japan, where they worked as scholars and teachers and even attracted some converts.

One convert, in fact, was a general who led the Japanese invasion of Korea in the 1590s. (His new Catholic faith obviously did not deter him from ordering the mass slaughter of innocents.)

After the Manchus subdued Korea in the 1630s on their way toward conquering China, they took a Korean prince as hostage, and it was whispered that, while in captivity in Beijing, this Korean prince took an interest in Catholicism. However, those Catholic priests in China were very limited in their influence because they could not readily leave the capital city and were not allowed to proselytize openly.

It took another 150 years for the first Korean Catholic, Yi Seung-hun, to appear. Yi, part of a diplomatic mission to China, became baptized in Beijing in 1784, after which Chinese priests and their Korean sympathizers began secretly to evangelize within the peninsula. The Confucian elite became very concerned, because it appeared that Catholicism promoted the abandonment of well-established notions of social order and ritual behavior.

When King Jeongjo, who had called for a “wait-and-see” approach to Catholicism, died in 1800, there followed severe persecution of Catholic converts in which hundreds were killed.

For the early Korean Catholics, the first two-thirds of the 19th century represented a savage period of trial and constant danger, not unlike the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. The thousands of martyrs were later sanctified as having made the ultimate sacrifice for the faith.

About 100 years after Yi’s baptism, Christianity gained formal recognition in Korea amids the country’s “opening” to the outside world in the late 19th century. Protestants from the West, as diplomats, educators, and physicians, carried an aura of progress and advancement, which helped Christians in general, including Catholics, to gain a legal foothold on the peninsula. This process, however, also spawned severe tensions and confrontations.

Once into the early 20th century, in fact, the political impact of Christianity, particularly Protestantism, was just as important to its growth as its association with Western advances in medicine, education, and technology. At the same time as the Japanese takeover of Korea, a revivalist form of Protestant Christianity, influenced by American missionaries, took hold, especially in the northwest.

In the early part of the Japanese colonial period, this Protestant community led by foreign missionaries and Korean clergymen maintained an uneasy co-existence with the colonial regime. Such tensions were shown most starkly in the Protestant leaders’ central role in the March 1 independence movement.

Many of these leaders eventually worked out a functioning compromise with the colonial state, but some did not. When the authorities demanded that students in Christian schools participate in rituals to honor the Japanese emperor, some Protestant officials chose to shut down the schools rather than engage in what they considered sacrilegious behavior. But the persistence of Protestantism’s resistance to the Japanese might have heightened its appeal among Koreans, who embraced the religion in great numbers.

Following the peninsula’s liberation in 1945, the next major chapter of Christianity’s political role began as the Soviet army occupied the northwestern region, the center of Korean Protestantism. This led to the persecution and the mass flight of Christians to the south in the years leading up to the Korean War.

After the war, these northern Christians’ bitter memories of their experiences fueled their ideological support for anti-communism, driven by dictatorships, as a dominant feature of South Korean society. The cultural, economic, and political influence of northern Koreans in the shaping of South Korea remains an extremely important, complex topic to be further explored, but undoubtedly the religious impact was among the most important.

Not all Christians were so fervently anti-communist and pro-regime in South Korea, however. The Catholic Church, in particular, became a staunch advocate for democratization, social justice, and human rights.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the leaders of both major Christian branches, including some Protestants originating from the north such as Ham Seok-heon, published critical works, harbored dissidents, and organized resistance efforts against the dictatorships. For today’s Christians, this can be considered one of several proud legacies of their faith’s fascinating history in Korea.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).