Evangelical Nationalism in Divided Korea

Abstract

One evening in January 2007, Kim Sang-chol, the president of the Commission to Help North Korean Refugees (CNKR)¹—as well as a church elder, a lawyer, and a former mayor of Seoul—was testifying about God’s call for the Christianization of the two Koreas. This highly political and religious account was made at a special event hosted by the CNKR to celebrate the fact that the total number of North Korean refugees (Talbuk-nanmin ²) who had arrived in South Korea had exceeded 10,000. Inspired by this speech, a middle-aged South Korean man sitting beside me began shouting, “Hallelujah!” with a clenched fist. What I was witnessing was a ritual of South Korean evangelical nationalists who aim to spread the gospel to both Koreas and a telling example of the culture that the majority of North Korean migrants are exposed to and encounter in their passage from China to the South.

Let us bring as many of our brethren from the North to the South as possible so that we can shorten the existence of the evil Kim Jong-il regime. At the same time, we all should vote for a Christian nominee [Lee Myung-bak, current president of South Korea] for our next president. That is the way to rebuild the national spirit that has been waning these past ten years, and to hasten the date we save the North by replacing Juche with Christianity and capitalism!

(Excerpt from Kim Sang-chŏl’s speech, January 27, 2007, my translation)