Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 231
Christianity in South Korea
( Mary Connor, Advisor, National Korean Studies Seminar)
In spite of the fact that Korea is a country steeped in ancient beliefs, Christianity has
become the dominant religion. In 1900, only 1% of the population in Korea was Christian, but
through missionary and church efforts, Christianity has grown rapidly. In 2014, Pew Research
reported that more South Koreans are now Christian (29 %) than Buddhist (23 %).
Approximately 12 million are Protestant (primarily Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and
Pentecostal) and 5 million are Catholic. The Pew Research report also revealed that
approximately 46 % of the population has no religious affiliation.
Since the introduction of Catholic worship in the eighteenth century and the coming of
Protestant missionaries in the late nineteenth century, the influence of Christianity is now evident
everywhere. Women have been central to its growth. Until Christianity arrived, most people did
not think of themselves as Buddhists rather than Confucians, or of Buddhism and shamanism as
being mutually exclusive. It has been primarily in response to people claiming to be Christian
that others have taken religious labels for themselves. Protestants and Catholics appear to be
among the most religious in terms of frequency of church attendance, praying, and scripture
reading.
Catholicism came to Korea in 1784 by a Korean Confucian scholar who had been
baptized by a French priest. He quickly converted other Confucian scholars to the new religion.
In time the growth of Catholicism became a problem. Authorities in Rome said that Catholics
could not perform Confucian rituals because ancestor worship was a form of idolatry. When one
of the converts refused to perform a Confucian mourning rite in the prescribed manner, he was
sentenced to death and became Korea’s first Christian martyr.
Catholics refused to comply with the state supported belief in ancestor worship and
performed the Catholic mass without official permission. This new faith challenged not only the
authority of the king, but also ideas that were at the core of Confucianism and hundreds of years
of tradition. By the end of the 19 th century, thousands of Catholics were executed. The effort to
extinguish Catholicism was the first significant act of religious persecution in all of Korean
history. When Pope John Paul II visited Korea in 1984, 93 of the Korean martyrs were canonized
for their piety. As a result of the Pope’s visit, citizens could boast that South Korea had more
officially recognized Catholic saints than any other nation outside of Western Europe. In 2014,
the visible high point of Pope Francis’s visit to South Korea was the beatification of 124 Korean
martyrs. An estimated one million people packed the mile-long route from Seoul's City Hall to
the plaza before Gyeongbokgung, a royal palace dating from the 18th- and 19th-century era of
the martyrs.
The first Protestant missionaries in Korea were American and arrived in 1884 at a time
when religious persecution was coming to an end. They emphasized the mass circulation of the
Bible which had been translated into Korean and established the first modern educational
institutions in Korea. Horace Allen (1858–1932) a physician-missionary attached to the U.S.
legation, contributed to the acceptance of the missionaries by saving the life of Prince Min after
an attempted coup d’état. Allen opened the first hospital in Seoul in 1885. Protestant
missionaries were allowed to proselytize and operate freely because the government felt their
activities were helping the country to modernize. In 1898, in response to pressures from the
West, the government acknowledged freedom of religion.
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