A political factor in the rise of Protestantism in Korea: Protestantism and the 1919 March first movement

Church History

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 116-142

  Lee, Timothy S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249452334     PISSN: 00096407     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3170582     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. In Japan, according to a 1990 figure, Protestants accounted for about one-half of 1 percent of the total population. The total percentage of Japanese Christians, including Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox, was 0.88, which amounted to about 1.1 million. See Kumazawa Yoshinobu and David L. Swain, eds., Christianity in Japan, 1971-1990 (Tokyo: Kyo Bun Kwan, 1991)
2. and Ann Martin and Myrl Byler, "What's Happening to Christians in China?" Christian Century, 24 Sept.-Oct. 1997, 837
3. In 1807 Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society initiated the first Protestant missionary work in China. In Japan, three denominations from America - the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the (Dutch) Reformed Church of America - did the same in 1859. The first resident missionary to arrive in Korea was Horace N. Allen, who arrived in 1884. See Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a Revolutionary Age, vol. 3: The 19th Century Outside Europe: The Americas, the Pacific, Asia, and Africa (1961; reprint, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1969)
4. John K. Fairbank, ed., The Missionary Enterprise in China and America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974)
5. Winburn T. Thomas, Protestant Beginnings in Japan (Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959)
6. and L. George Paik, The History of Protestant Missions in Korea: 1832-1910 (1927; reprint, Seoul: Yonsei University Press, 1970)
7. Paek Chung-hyôn, Pukitanaedo Kyohoega Innayo? [Is There a Church in North Korea?] (Seoul: Kungmin Ilbo, 1998)
8. and Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997), 185-298
9. George T. B. Davis, Korea for Christ (London: Christian Workers' Depot, 1910), 14
10. Arthur Judson Brown, The Mastery of the Far East (New York: Scribner, 1919), 516
11. Charles Allen Clark, The Korean Church and the Nevius Method (Seoul: Christian Literature Society, 1937)
12. Spencer Palmer, Korea and Christianity: The Problem of Identification with Tradition (Seoul: Hollym, 1967)
13. Everett N. Hunt Jr., Protestant Pioneers in Korea (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1980)
14. and Lee, "Born-Again in Korea," 165-230
15. The epigraph, with added italics, is part of a larger quotation cited by Reinhard Bendix to characterize Max Weber's approach to socio-historical analysis. See his Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 45-47
16. Weber's classic works on the relationship between ideology and real interests are well known. They include Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978)
17. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Winchester, Mass: Allen and Unwin, 1930)
18. and Tire Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans, and ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free, 1949)
19. Young Ick Lew, "The Conservative Character of the 1894 Tonghak Peasant Uprising: A Reappraisal with Emphasis on Chôn Pong-jun's Background and Motivation," The Journal of Korean Studies 7 (1990): 149-77
20. and Yong-ho Ch'oe, "The Kapsin Coup of 1884: A Reassessment," Korean Studies 6 (1982): 105-124
21. On the legitimating power of nationalism, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
22. For example, see John McManners, ed., The Oxford History of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 536-37: "[Christianity] became identified with patriotic anti-Japanese feeling. After annexation in 1910 this tendency increased, since church groups were virtually the only independent bodies with national organizations and international ties." Though not entirely wrong, this is too simplistic a depiction of the relation between Protestantism and Korean nationalism - as will be shown below
23. Here, nationalism in Japan and China is regarded in the same vein as in Korea - in terms not of its specific contents but of the general sentiments and representations that the sovereignty of China or Japan must remain in the hands of its respective denizens. 10. On nationalistic Christians in Japan, see Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)
24. On Japanese Christianity, see David Reid, New Wine: The Cultural Shaping of Japanese Christianity (Berkeley: Asian Humanities, 1991)
25. on Chinese Christianity, see Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
26. and Alan Hunter and Kim-Kwong Chan, Protestantism in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
27. Paul Varg, Missionary, Chinese, and Diplomats (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958)
28. Kap-che Yip, Religion, Nationalism and Chinese Students: The Anti-Christian Movement of 1922-1927 (Bellingham, Wash.: Washington University Press, 1980), 2
29. On the conflict between missionaries and Chinese nationalism, also see Paul Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963)
30. and Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
31. The Uchimura incident occurred when he, a Christian school teacher, refused to bow before the imperial rescript on education, whose "supercharged symbolic value exceeded by far the prestige and authority of anything but the emperor himself." As a result, "This celebrated incident became the occasion for renewed invective against Christianity as an unpatriotic, foreign religion, incompatible with 'the Japanese Way.' Uchimura was pilloried in the press and removed from his position by the minister of education." See Helen Hardacre, Shinto and the State, 1868-1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 122-23
32. Thomas, Protestant Beginnings in Japan, 188
33. On the history of Catholicism in Korea, see Yu Hong-yôl, Han'guk Ch'ônju Kyohoesa [A History of the Korean Catholic Church], 2 vols. (Seoul: Katollic Ch'ulp'ansa, 1962)
34. Also see Choi Suk-woo, "Korean Catholicism Yesterday and Today," Korea Journal, Aug. 1984, 4-13
35. On Confucianism in Korea, see William Theodore de Bary and JaHyun Kim Haboush, eds., The Rise of Neo-Confucianism in Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)
36. Yu Hong-nyo̊l, Han'guk Ch'ônju Kyohoesa, 2:44
37. Nyung Kim, "The Politics of Religion in South Korea, 1974-89: The Catholic Church's Political Opposition to the Authoritarian State" (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 1993)
38. Paik, History of Protestant Missions in Korea, 168
39. Lee, "Born-Again in Korea," 35,55
40. Carter Eckert, et al., Korea Old and New: A History (Seoul: published for the Korea Institute, Harvard University, by Ilchokak; distributed by Harvard University Press, 1990), 192
41. J. R. Moose, "A Great Awakening," Korea Mission Field 2 (1906): 51-52. Korea Mission Field (hereafter KMF) was an interdenominational journal dedicated to publicizing issues relative to Protestant missionary work in Korea. It ran from November 1905 to November 1941
42. Kenneth M. Wells, New God, New Nation: Protestants and Self-Reconstruction Nationalism in Korea, 1896-1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 44
43. Kidokkyo Taebaekhwa Sajôn [Christian Encyclopedia], s.v. "Yi Chae-myong"
44. and Han Young-je, Han'guk Kidokkyo Inmul 100nyôn [Who's Who in One Hundred Years of Korean Christianity] (Seoul: Christian Literature, 1987), 132
45. W. M. Baird, "Pyeng Yang Academy," KMF 2 (1906): 221-24
46. See Han'guk Kidokkyo Yôksa Yóriguhae [Institute for the Study of Korean Church History], Han'guk Kidokkyohoeai Yoksa [A History of the Korean Church] (Seoul: Christian Literature Press, 1990), 2:84
47. Min Kyoung-bae, Iljaehaûi Han'gukkidokkyo Minjok Sinang Undongsa [A History of Korean Christian National and Religious Movements under Japanese Rule] (Seoul: Taehan Kidokkyo Sôhoe, 1991), 249
48. Peter Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2:457
49. Church Growth in Korea (New York: International Missionary Council, 1934), 78,96
50. For detailed treatment of this event, see Frank P. Baldwin Jr., "The March First Movement: Korean Challenge and Japanese Response" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University
51. and "The March First Movement," in Lee Chong-shik, Politics of Korean Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 101-25
52. There appears to be no connection between the March First Movement and the May Fourth Movement that occurred in China in the same year. The latter, also a mass movement, was sparked by the Allied victors' decision to leave in Japanese hands the German concession in Shandong. John K. Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1992), 267
53. "My thesis is that what we mean in naming certain texts, events, images, rituals, symbols and persons 'classic' is that here we recognize nothing less than the disclosure of a reality we cannot but name truth... some disclosure of reality in a moment that must be called one of 'recognition' which surprises, provokes, challenges, shocks and eventually transforms us; an experience that upsets conventional opinions and expands the sense of the possible; indeed a realized experience of that which is essential, that which endures." David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 108
54. Lee Ki-baik, A New History of Korea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 344
55. See Baldwin, "March First Movement," 2-13
56. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 12
57. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 132
58. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 39, 38. Tokyo, as the metropolis of the Japanese empire, attracted young and ambitious people from Korea (and China and elsewhere). Once there, in an atmosphere much freer than in Korea, many of them were exposed to various streams of Japanese intellectual life, including communism, and, instead of studying to be loyal imperial subjects, strove to free Korea
59. Lee, New History of Korea, 344
60. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 53
61. Quoted in Cynn, Rebirth of Korea, 64
62. "The Present Movement for Korean Independence," State Department Record, Consular Bureau (filed 8 July 1919), 44
63. Frank P. Baldwin Jr., "Missionaries and the March First Movement: Can Moral Men Be Neutral?" in Andrew C. Nahm, ed., Korea Under Japanese Colonial Rule, (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Western Michigan University Press, 1973), 197. In this article, Baldwin argues that during the March First Movement the missionaries in fact remained neutral. But if neutrality required that the missionaries aid or hinder neither the Japanese nor Koreans, they failed to be so. For the missionaries, as will be seen below, hindered the Japanese by helping to turn international opinion against their suppression of Korean demonstrations
64. The Journals of Mattie Wilcox Noble, 1892-1934 (Seoul: Han'guk Kidokkyo Yóksa Yôn'gusó [Institute of Korean Church History Study], 1993), 275
65. Baldwin, "Missionaries and the March First Movement," 197
66. FCCCA, "The Korean Situation," 37
67. FCCCA, "The Korean Situation," 33
68. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 185
69. Hong Suk-jang, Yu Kwan-sun Yang'gwa Maebong Kyohoe [Yu Kwan-sun and Maebong Church] (Seoul: Toso Ch'ulp'an Amen, 1989), 92
70. Baldwin, "March First Movement," 3
71. Alfred W. Wasson, Church Growth in Korea (New York: International Missionary Council, 1934), 98
72. Wasson, Church Growth, 102
73. On the difficulty Christians are having in mainland China, see Martin and Byler, "What's Happening to Christians In China?" To see how Korean Protestants parlayed their nationalistic credentials into evangelistic success, see Lee, "Born-Again in Korea," 121