Christians Oppressed for Challenging Colonial Rule
By Michael Breen
Korea Times Columnist
When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the authorities saw Christians as the main source of potential opposition. With hymns like ``Onward Christian Soldiers'' and groups such as the Salvation Army, clearly this foreign religion needed to be watched.
The strategy was a combination of direct suppression of Christian political and social activity on the one hand, and support for a revival of a more familiar religion, Buddhism, on the other.
Fear of Christianity seemed to be confirmed by the strong Protestant influence in the 1919 Independence Movement.
Fifteen of the 33 signatories to the Declaration of Independence were Christians. Over 22 percent of the 9,458 people jailed after the protests were Christians. At the time, only around 1.3 percent of Korea's 16 million people were Christian.
While churches responded differently to this crackdown, with some opting out of political action in favor of internal cultivation, it nevertheless thrust Christians to the forefront of nationalistic resistance within Korea (communists were the most active outside of Korea).
There then came a new challenge. In the mid-1920s, Shinto was gaining ground as the nationalistic Japanese religion, which worshiped the emperor as the divine descendant of Amaterasu, the sun-goddess.
A central shrine was built in Seoul and followed over the next 20 years by 1,140 similar shrines throughout the peninsula.
Students and citizens ordered to attend ceremonies, not for worship, the Japanese claimed, but to demonstrate good patriotic loyalty to nation and emperor.
For Korean Christians, this posed a double dilemma. They were offended both as Koreans and, despite the authorities' claim that the ceremonies were not religious, as Christians. Failure to comply was punishable and easy excuses unacceptable. But many Christians did resist.
Indeed, the shrine issue between Japanese and Korean nationalism and Shinto and Christian belief became the main political, social and religious conflict of the 1930s.
It began as an initiative by authorities to control Christian schools. In 1935, George S. McCune, president of Union Christian College in Pyongyang, was the first foreign missionary to be forced to leave Korea over his resistance to Shinto.
In the following year, Presbyterian missionaries in the city voted to close the college and schools they operated. In 1937, the Southern Presbyterian mission followed suit.
The Methodists, meanwhile, took the objection of parents to heart about closing schools and accepted the Japanese interpretation that the shrine ceremonies were patriotic.
The next step for the Japanese was to control the denominations themselves. The general assembly of the Korean Presbyterian Church for example, passed a resolution approving of attendance at Shinto rituals, in a meeting in which police manned the doors and blocked critical voices.
After this, individual Presbyterian resisters were on their own. An unknown number of believers died at the hands of the police.
A number of Presbyterians escaped to Manchuria where they formed a separate church and condemned those who had compromised on the Shinto issue.
The scholar James Grayson, in a 1993 paper on the Shinto issue, noted that it was conservative Christians opposing Shinto on religious grounds became nationalist heroes. ``Whilst in the early part of the century, liberal patriotic Korean Christians built schools and engaged in social and political activity lending Korean Christianity a patriotic character, it was the religious protest and sacrifice of mid-century conservative Christians which further deepened the patriotic image of the church.''
The authorities also undermined denominations by deporting missionaries. By 1937, Koreans who contacted foreigners risked being seen as spies. By the end of 1940, 90 percent of missionaries had left the country.
Those who stayed behind were harassed by police. Two, for example, got prison sentences for the serious crime of removing movable Shinto shrines from the homes of Korean Christians.
After the Dec. 8, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' declaration of war against Japan, the remaining missionaries were imprisoned (and released four months later in exchange for Japanese civilians). The churches then fell under Japanese control and could not meet with a police permit.
Three denominations, including the Seventh Day Adventists, were suspended because their views on the return of Christ seemed to carry a political undertone.
A few weeks before the end of the war, all Protestant churches were forcibly folded into a united Korean Japanese Christian church.
Many church leaders were arrested. After the war, it was revealed that they were to have been executed as the military feared they would have sided with the enemy had the allies attacked Korea. Japan surrendered on Aug. 15, 1945, three days before the scheduled execution date.
With the end of the war, the former colony was split into two zones, the northern part falling under Soviet control and the southern part under American control.
Christians engaged some furious debates over how they had acted with regard to the shrine rituals, as well as in a process of repentance and reconciliation.
Entire groups, nevertheless, quit their denominations and set up rival bodies, one reason for the fractiousness of Korean Protestantism today