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. 231