The Sacred and the Secular: Protestant Christianity as Lived Experience in Modern Korea: An Introduction

According to Statistics Korea, in 2015 the number of South Koreans identifying as Protestant Christians was 9,675,761 (19.7 percent of the population), making Protestantism the most popular religion in the country. Buddhism ranked second, with 7,619,332 (15.5 percent). These results are particularly eye-opening when one considers that Buddhism was introduced into Korea in the fourth century and has been a significant religious tradition in Korea for centuries, while Protestant Christianity was introduced only in the late nineteenth century. One may note other signs of the dramatic success of Protestant Christianity in South Korea. A series of gargantuan evangelistic campaigns—most representatively “Thirty Million to Christ” (1953–69), “Korea ’73 Billy Graham Crusade,” “Expo ’74,” “’77 Holy Assembly for the Evangelization of the Nation,” and “World Evangelization Crusades” in the 1980s—mobilized millions of Christian adherents. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is the site of eighteen megachurches, including the world’s largest megachurch, Yoido Full Gospel Church, with a membership of approximately 800,000. Further, in 1999 “Korean Protestant churches commissioned more missionaries than did any other national church except the United States,” and thus South Korea took a prominent role in global Christianity. In fact, some Korean Christian missionaries, represented by the University Bible Fellowship, target white Americans for conversion, reversing the conventional direction of evangelical activities, which had been dominated by white Western missionaries targeting nonwhite, colonized subjects.