Summary
South Korea, like Brazil, is a key centre of evangelicalism in the Third World, both in numerical strength and missionary-sending importance. But unlike Brazil's position within Latin America, this regional Protestant ‘superpower’ has a unique history and is probably not a forerunner of developments in other Asian countries. This applies also to its evangelical politics.
Korea is the most important case where knowledge of a non-Western language might significantly increase access to worthwhile secondary literature. (English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, in roughly that order, are the key languages for Third World evangelicalism.) While works in English on Korean Protestant politics are more numerous than for other Asian countries, the quality is behind that produced on Africa and Latin America.
The most relevant is Kang's Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea (1997). It is very useful but, like some other works, better on the pre-1945 period (the rise of Japanese influence and the colonial period itself), when Christianity was smaller and less fragmented and the Korean political agenda was very clear. In the post-1945 world the religious and political fields become more complex and Protestantism's contribution to nationalism (emphasised in rather self-congratulatory fashion by Korean Christian historians) seems to become shipwrecked on the rocks of anti-communism, dictatorship and the chaebol (Korea's huge conglomerates like Hyundai and Samsung which have grown up under state tutelage). Kang's picture of Protestant politics becomes rather one-sided, as if nearly all Christians were ‘progressives’.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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