Religious Experience in Trauma

Koreans' Collective Complex of Inferiority and the Korean Protestant Church

KwangYu Lee

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030535834
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Religionssoziologie

This book offers a psychohistorical analysis of the rapid growth of the Korean Protestant Church. KwangYu Lee looks at some of the traumatic historical events of Korea in the 20th century, including the fall of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), the Japanese Occupation (1910-1945), the Korean War (1950-1953), and the Korean Military Dictatorship (1961-1987), and explores the psychological impacts of these events on the collective unconsciousness of Koreans. He argues that Koreans' collective (or cultural) complex of inferiority, which was caused and gradually exacerbated by these traumatic events, along with their psychological relationships with their two colonizers—the Japanese and Americans—prompted them to convert to Korean Protestantism en masse as a means to avoid their psychological pains and to fulfil their futile desire to become like Americans, their overtly idealized psychological-object.

© The Author(s) 2020

K. LeeReligious Experience in TraumaAsian Christianity in the Diasporahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53583-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Korean Protestant Church at Present and the Necessity of a Psychohistorical Approach to Its History

KwangYu Lee¹

(1)

Pastoral Care Program, Blanton Peale Institute, New York, NY, USA

End Abstract

1.1 The Declining Korean Protestant Church¹

For decades, the Korean Protestant Church (KPC) has been a symbol for the second heyday of Christianity. It is said that after its missionaries from the U.S. and other countries landed Korea, the KPC explosively grew within a century to the extent that, out of the twenty-five largest churches in the world, fifteen are in South Korea (hereafter S. Korea). From the 1960s to the 2000s, the number of Protestant churches dramatically increased, roughly speaking, from 5000 to 60,000. In parallel, the total number of Protestants also increased from about 600,000 to 8,760,300.² At present, there is no country that annually sends more missionaries than S. Korea, except for the U.S.

However, the KPC is facing its downfall. Korean scholars reported that from 1991 to 1994, its growth stagnated.³ From 1995 to 2005, for the first time since the 1960s its believers decreased from 8,760,300 to 8,616,000.⁴ In 2010, Won Gue Lee, a Korean sociologist of religion speculated that its decrease was mainly caused by two factors—one is external and the other is internal.⁵ First, the emergence of leisure industries that is quickly replacing Protestantism as an alternative religion and the democratization of S. Korea bolstered by an improved public welfare system are weakening South Koreans’ (hereafter S. Koreans) need for religion. Second, more and more S. Koreans are turning their backs on the KPC because they no longer consider it as an ideal to look up to let alone trust it. Three years later, the 2013 Global Research reported an analysis of the results of a survey on S. Koreans’ concerns about the KPC, presenting three main causes of the decline—church-individualism, materialism, and exclusivism.⁶ The three causes are helpful in understanding how and why S. Koreans came to turn their backs on it.

1.1.1 The Korean Protestant Church’s Individualism

Gil-Soo Han, an associate professor of Monash University, and his colleagues, Korean sociologists, coined the term church-individualism to explain one general tendency among Korean Protestant churches that each is only concerned about its own growth and well-being.⁷ The 2013 Global Research proved the observation right with various statistics, including that, in 2012, about 84 percent of Korean Protestants thought that their tithes should be used only for their own church; 55 percent expected to use their offerings only for their churches’ sake.⁸ To trace where such focus on a pastor’s own church originates, Han and his colleagues draw attention to the Nevius Mission Plan—a missionary plan designed by John Livingstone Nevius, a pioneering American Protestant missionary in China.⁹

Initially, the Nevius’ missionary plan aimed at fostering self-sufficient, self-propagating, and self-governmental local churches in China.¹⁰ While missionaries in China were reluctant about the plan, missionaries in Korea lost no time in applying it to their local churches as soon as they heard it from Nevius. Introducing it to Korean Protestants, they urged them to take material offering as a religious duty to ensure the survival and vitality of their churches.¹¹ Given that Confucianism considered making money as inferior to learning, the plan’s validation of making money as a religious behavior drew attention from commoners like merchants and farmers. It encouraged them to make more money in order to take care of their churches, giving a sense of autonomy and independence and at the same time a new perspective on money—money is not a contemptuous work as Confucianism claimed. The plan affirmed that making money and contributing it to the church is part of Protestants’ participation in God’s work.¹²

Later when the Japanese imperial government began meddling and step-by-step suppressing their missionary work, the missionaries more actively planned for Korean local churches to become self-sufficient. While urging them to actively engage in commercial activities, however, they strongly recommended them to remain apolitical, with stress on the spiritual rather than the worldly. Moreover, they urged them to obey the government in power. Han and his colleagues argue that the plan is self-contradictory, noting that while it planted in Korean Protestants a sense of independence and autonomy, it also injected a strong sense of individualism, leaving churches’ social concerns and actions for justice out of consideration. In a word, the plan worked like a two-edged sword for the KPC. On the one hand, it helped local Korean Protestant churches to become self-sufficient, self-propagating, and self-governmental. On the other hand, it became the root of the KPC’s individualistic propensity.

1.1.2 The Korean Protestant Church’s Materialism

When Korean scholars criticize the KPC with the term materialism, they highlight its “preoccupation with or stress upon material rather than intellectual or spiritual things.”¹³ To weigh how much the KPC is materialized, there are two things to take into consideration—the churches’ hereditary succession and the founding pastors’ handling of church property as their personal property.

First, one of the most frequently mentioned manifestations of materialism in the KPC is the hereditary succession of a church from a founding pastor to his son—mostly in the cases of large or mega churches. Koreans generally take a negative view on the phenomenon because it reminds them of the Korean chaebols’ hereditary successions such as Hyundai, Samsung, and so on. Considering the moral, social, and economic power of those churches in S. Korea, they are likely to identify the inheritance of those churches from the founding pastors to their sons with that of the chaebols.¹⁴ On July 15, 2007, Christian Times, a web magazine of the Korean Methodist Church, reported the result of a survey by the Christian Broadcasting System (CBS) of how Christians—both Catholics and Protestants—viewed the church’s hereditary succession. Sixty-four percent of all the respondents answered that they had an objection to it; 17.1 percent said that if it happened to their church, they would find another church.¹⁵ In July 2013, Gaesingyo Yeonhabdanche Gyohoeseseub Bandaeundong [the Protestant Federation for the Anti-movement to the Church Hereditary Succession] reported that, from 1977 when the founding pastor Chang-In Kim of Choonhyun Presbyterian Church handed over the senior pastorship of the church to his son Sung-Kwang Kim for the first time up to 2013, sixty-two churches in metropolitan areas had been handed over from the founding pastors to one of their sons and twenty-two churches were in the process.¹⁶ On November 12, 2017, the founding pastor Sam-Whan Kim of Myungsung Presbyterian Church, one of the largest Presbyterian churches in the world, appointed his son Hana Kim as his successor.¹⁷ Although the church stressed that the inheritance was decided by a reasonable and legal calling committee, Koreans, Christians as well as non-Christians, criticized that the process was identical with other mega churches’ hereditary succession. The controversy is still underway as of August 2020.

Andrew Eungi Kim and others view the hereditary succession as a clear sign of the corporatization and commercialization of the KPC like chaebols—Korean family-owned conglomerates.¹⁸ For example, in the Korean Methodist Church, there are three mega churches—Gwanglim, Geumlan, and Immanuel—that three brothers founded and grew each. They all bequeathed their senior pastorship to their own sons. Gwanglim completed the hereditary succession in 2001, Geumlan in 2006, and Immanuel in 2013. Moreover, Incheon Sungui Methodist Church made a landmark in the KPC’s history of the hereditary succession, completing a third-generation succession from the founding pastor, through his son, and then to his grandson in May 2008.¹⁹

In fact, the hereditary succession of a church is not unusual in the history of the Korean Protestant Church. Won Gue Lee, however, explains why the succession at present became a target of criticism in three points which is closely related to materialism manifested in the KPC. First, the churches that went through that process are mostly large or mega churches that have significant social influence in S. Korea with their various social welfare and cultural activities that draw attention from people of all social strata. Second, for the most part, successors of the large or mega churches contributed nothing to their birth and growth. Owing to that reason, people are likely to consider them as “free riders.” Of course, there are groups of people arguing that the hereditary succession is legally possible, based on the fact that there is no social law to prevent the hereditary succession of a church in S. Korea. There are also large or mega churches succeeded by pastors with no connection to the churches or their founding pastors.²⁰ Nonetheless, what is important to remember is that, even in those cases, the founding pastors continue to wield strong influence over the search committees for their successors. Third, the hereditary succession tends to work as a political tool for the founding pastors to keep their invincible authority over the churches’ domestic affairs, even after retirement.²¹

Second, large and mega church leaders’ unethical financial-handlings of church funds are also frequently mentioned as a yardstick to measure how much the KPC is saturated with materialism. For example, take two pastors of the worldly well-known mega churches. First, on August 14, 2003, the Eastern Branch of the Seoul District Public Prosecutors’ Office placed in court custody Rev. Hong-Do Kim, the former Bishop of the Korean Methodist Church and the founder and former senior pastor of Guemlan Korean Methodist Church—the largest Methodist Church in the world—on the cha...