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-nanmin²) 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.