Korean New Religions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 August 2025
Summary
Korea has an unusually diverse religious culture. In the north, Juche, which has taken on religious overtones, monopolizes articulations of beliefs and values as well as ritual practice. In the south, no single religion dominates, with over half saying that they have no specific religious affiliation. The remainder report being Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic. Smaller in number but nonetheless noticeable are members of Korea's many home-grown new religious movements. Reflecting South Korea's religious diversity, some of those new religions have Buddhist roots, some have Christian origins, some draw on Confucian beliefs and practices, and some have emerged from Indigenous religious traditions such as shamanism. This Element examines the most noticeable of Korea's new religions to discover what they can tell us about distinctive traits of religion in Korea, and how Koreans have responded to the challenge posed by modernity to their traditional beliefs and values.
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September 2025
Don Baker
University of British Columbia
Author for correspondence: Don Baker, don.baker@ubc.ca
Abstract:
Korea has an unusually diverse religious culture. In the north,
Juche, which has taken on religious overtones, monopolizes articulations of beliefs and values as well as ritual practice. In the south, no single religion dominates, with over half saying that they have no specific religious affiliation. The remainder report being Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic. Smaller in number but nonetheless noticeable are members of Korea’s many homegrown new religious movements.
Reflecting South Korea’s religious diversity, some of those new religions have Buddhist roots, some have Christian origins, some draw on Confucian beliefs and practices, and some have emerged from
Indigenous religious traditions such as shamanism. This Element examines the most noticeable of Korea’s new religions to discover what they can tell us about distinctive traits of religion in Korea, and how
Koreans have responded to the challenge posed by modernity to their traditional beliefs and values.
Keywords: Ch’ŏndogyo, Won Buddhism, Unificationism, Chŭngsan, Juche
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Ch’ŏndogyo: The Oldest New Religion 8
3 Won Buddhism 16
4 Confucianism and New Religions 23
5 Christianity and New Religions 31
6 Indigenous Gods of the New Religions 38
7 Religions and the State 46
8 North Korea and Juche 54
9 Conclusion 60
References 64
The Korean peninsula has one of the most diverse religious environments on this planet. That diversity can be seen first in the difference between North Korea (the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – DPRK) and South Korea (Republic of Korea – ROK). The northern part of the peninsula is dominated by a political philosophy called Juche which has strong religious overtones. North Korea’s communist government leaves little room for any other organized religious activity, so there is little religious diversity in that part of the peninsula. By contrast, in South Korea, religious diversity prevails. No single religion dominates the south. There are large numbers of Christians (both Catholics and Protestants) as well as large numbers of Buddhists there (Baker 2019). Moreover, in South Korea, there are tens of thousands of practitioners of the folk religion known as shamanism. Plus there are numerous new religions. All of those religions are free to preach their doctrines and perform their rituals openly, making South Korea an attractive laboratory for those who want to explore the many different ways human beings express their spiritual yearnings. Korea’s new religions, in particular, provide insight into how diverse the various manifestations of human religiosity can be. In this Element, because of the sharp difference between the wide-open religious culture of the ROK and the limited range of religious activity in the DPRK, the focus will be new religions in South Korea.
To understand Korea’s new religious movements (NRMs), it is necessary to first understand the religious environment which gave birth to them. The many NRMs we see in Korea today, the oldest of which, Ch’ŏndogyo, is a little more than 160 years old, are different from Korea’s traditional religions in many ways, but we can see a family resemblance. They are NRMs, but they are Korean NRMs and maintain Korean characteristics. Even those NRMs which have their roots in religions of foreign origin, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Christianity, nevertheless are clearly examples of Korea’s distinctive culture. To grasp what makes Korea’s new religions Korean religions, we need to examine the religious culture from which those new religions emerged.
Traditional Religions in Korea
For more than a millennium, there were only three significant religions on the Korean peninsula. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggest that the first of those religions was folk religion. Folk religion is hard to define, since, by definition, folk religion wherever it is found has no clearly defined creed, no formally trained clerical hierarchy, and no central headquarters to impose uniformity on how its rituals are practiced and its fundamental beliefs are taught. Nevertheless, we can distinguish two important features of Korea’s folk religion that distinguish it from Korea’s other religions: animism and shamanism.
Animism is a term scholars use for a belief that certain inanimate objects, such as mountains and rivers, as well as certain animate objects, such as trees, which lack consciousness are inhabited by conscious spirits human beings can interact with. The two most visible manifestations of animism in Korea were, in premodern Korea, sacred trees (tangsan) and mountain gods (sansin). When the vast majority of Koreans lived in small villages, each village usually had a particular tree which villagers saw as a protective deity (Y. Yi, K. Lee, & J. Choi 2015, 29–31). Over the course of the twentieth century, Koreans rushed out of those small villages into urban areas and left their sacred trees behind. However, belief in mountain gods remains strong even in modern industrialized South Korea (Kendall 2021, 405). Given the lack of doctrinal clarity in folk religion, it is not clear whether there is one mountain god for all of Korea’s mountains or whether each mountain has its own god. Nor is it clear if the mountain itself is a god – though mountain gods are usually depicted in human form – or if a mountain god is a god who dwells on a mountain.
What is clear, however, is that Koreans have long viewed mountains as sacred places. Shamans worshipped mountain gods in the ancient past and continue to do so today. In addition, older Buddhist temples usually still have a small shrine to the mountain god off to the side and up a hill from their main worship hall. Even when the existence of a mountain god is not acknowledged, many religious practitioners still regard mountains as sacred spaces since they allow respite from the mundane urban world. Over the decades since the Korean War ended in 1953 Christians have established many retreat centers on the bases of rural mountains on which others believe mountain gods dwell. Many of the new religions have also established headquarters or prayer halls on or near mountains rather than in flat urban areas. Animism, though it may not be as visible as it was in the past, still influences Korean religiosity, in that many Koreans continue to view mountains as having special spiritual power.
Shamanism is even more visible in modern South Korea than animism is. It is estimated that there may be as many as 200,000 practicing shamans in Korea (Sarfati 2021, 9). Those shamans claim a special ability to interact with supernatural personalities in order to provide assistance to those who seek their help. Normally, those interactions occur via a shaman’s performance in a ritual. As ritual specialists of the folk religion, shamans do not share a set of distinctive doctrines. Even their theological beliefs are not clearly defined. Different shamans interact with different gods and do not agree among themselves who the supreme deity is, if there is one. With no central authority to impose uniformity, what shamans say and do can vary widely.
Nevertheless, shamans can be distinguished from the practitioners of other religions. What makes shamans, shamans are the type of rituals they perform, the types of gods they interact with in those rituals, and the reasons they interact with supernatural beings in those rituals. Shaman rituals have two primary functions: fortune-telling and relieving their clients of medical, financial, or personal problems. The most popular shamans are those who act as spiritmediums, claiming to be possessed by powerful spirits who can tell those who paid that shaman to perform a ritual for them, what the future holds for them, or can promise to solve whatever problems they are confronting. Usually, those spirits are human beings from the past, either historical personages or deceased members of the family of the person who commissioned the ritual. (Mountain gods do not usually solve problems. Shamans turn to mountain gods, however, to access the spiritual power they need to summon other spirits who can solve problems or predict the future.) Koreans utilize shamans when they feel they need access to supernatural assistance and believe that only a shaman can provide that access. As practitioners of a religion focused on problemsolving, shamans do not impose ethical imperatives or demand doctrinal conformity on those who seek their aid. Their concern, and the concern of their clients, is on what they can achieve through their rituals.
The focus in shamanism on ritual rather than doctrine and on solving personal problems through help from spirits are traits seen in other Korean religions, including some of the new religions. In particular, both Christianity and many of Korea’s new religions have gained followers by claiming that their god is more powerful than any of the gods of shamanism and therefore can heal diseases and solve problems that gods of shamanism cannot.
The Imported Religions of Buddhism and Confucianism
Though animism and shamanism are found in many countries, the way they operate on Korean soil is so distinctive that their Korean versions are assumed to be Korean in origin. The folk religion is the only one of the three religions of traditional Korea which is homegrown. The other two, Buddhism and Confucianism, were imported from China, though they have been on the Korean peninsula long enough to have become organized.
Not only are the other two important religions in traditional Korea of foreign origin, but they are also institutional religions. Buddhism, for example, has a clerical hierarchy, standardized rituals, permanent worship halls, and many sacred texts articulating its core teachings. Buddhism in Korea is Mahayana Buddhism, which means its temples are usually filled with statues of various buddhas and bodhisattvas (supernatural beings one level below buddhas but who also are believed to have the power to respond to requests for help from human beings). It is therefore similar to the Buddhism practiced in China, Vietnam, and Japan, although Koreans have their own distinctive approach to Mahayana Buddhism.
Buddhism first entered Korea more than 1,500 years ago. Over the centuries since then it has grown more complex, embracing not only devotional Buddhism, which seeks supernatural assistance in order to solve the problems of everyday life, but also philosophical and meditative Buddhism which teaches ways to rise above the problems of this world, something not seen in the folk religion. Buddhism also provides more explicit ethical advice than the folk religion does. For example, it enjoins showing compassion for all living creatures. However, Buddhism’s ethical guidance is in the form of precepts (things you should do to reduce and eventually eliminate both your own suffering and the suffering of others) rather than commandments (things you should not do because to do those things is to violate the will of God.)
Buddhism has been on the Korean peninsula for so long that it has spread beyond its sectarian boundaries and has become a part of Korean culture in general. As a result, we can see Buddhist elements in some non-Buddhist Korean new religions, such as an emphasis on meditation and on precepts rather than commandments. The Buddhist notion that there is an underlying unity beneath the diversity we experience in everyday life has also influenced the beliefs and practices of some of Korea’s new religions (W. Yun 1997).
Similarly, Confucianism, over the 1,500 plus years it has been on the peninsula, has also become a part of Korean culture in general. Confucianism entered the peninsula about the same time Buddhism did. However, at that time, it functioned more as a tool for government than as a religion. It wasn’t until the late fourteenth century, when Korea was exposed to Neo-Confucianism, the more sophisticated form of Confucianism which emerged in China’s Song dynasty (960–1279), that Confucianism in Korea began to take on religious overtones.
Neo-Confucianism does not fit the usual Western understand of a religion. The notion of God or gods plays no role in Neo-Confucian thinking. Instead, Neo-Confucian ethics focuses on appropriate interpersonal interactions within the human community. “Appropriate” here means selfless, putting the needs of your community ahead of your own personal desires and benefits. This emphasis on ethics rather than theology has led some to call NeoConfucianism more of an ethical philosophy than a religion.
Since they did not call for the worship or even ritual interaction with God or gods, Neo-Confucians did not build temples. However, like Buddhism, Confucianism had an institutional presence. Confucians built shrines to honor the spirits of their ancestors. They also performed elaborate rituals to honor those ancestors. The importance of rituals is one reason Neo-Confucianism is sometimes classified as a religion. Moreover, Neo-Confucians took their ethical principles seriously and tried to cultivate a moral character so that they would act in accord with those principles (Ni 2020). And they had revered texts which told them how to go about cultivating a moral character. Since Neo-Confucians placed so much emphasis on ritual and on living a moral life, and because NeoConfucians were as devoted to Neo-Confucianism as much as Buddhists were devoted to Buddhism, it seems reasonable to say that Neo-Confucianism should be treated as a religion (Sommer 2020).
Filial piety, loyalty, and sincerity are just some of the core values of NeoConfucianism which have become broader Korean values. As such, they often appear in the ethical discourse of Korea’s new religions. Another feature of Neo-Confucianism we see in some new religions is the importance of ki (C. Qi 氣). It is difficult to find a one-word English translation of ki because it refers to both the matter which constitutes the physical world, including our own bodies, as well as to the energy which animates everything in the universe, again including our bodies. For Neo-Confucians, ki was one of the two formative forces in the universe; the other was the network of principles defining appropriate interactions of things composed of and animated by ki. Given its importance in Neo-Confucian thinking which dominated philosophical and religious life on the peninsula from the early fifteenth century through to the late nineteenth century, it is not surprising that ki is also an important concept in many new religions.
Christianity and New Expressions of Religiosity
The three religions of premodern Korea did not easily correspond to Western expectations of what a religion should look like. The folk religion has no clear set of ethical principles or clearly defined doctrines, which is quite different from what we see in the major religions of the Western world. Buddhism, on the other hand, provides ethical guidelines as well as clearly articulated doctrines. However, it doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to theology as do the religions of the West. In fact, some Buddhists who favor philosophy and meditation over devotional practices might be called nontheists, since they consider Buddha more a teacher than a god. Devotional Buddhism is theistic, since practitioners pray to buddhas and bodhisattvas. However, there is no consensus among Buddhists on which Buddha (there are many) or bodhisattva is more likely to respond positively to entreaties from devotees. In fact, different temples may have different buddhas in the central spot in their main worship hall. Confucianism, as noted, doesn’t engage in theological talk at all. It is so focused on human interactions and on the cultivation of a moral character that we can label it an anthropocentric religion. The same adjective can be applied to meditating Buddhists. Devotional Buddhism and the folk religion, on the other hand, are clearly theocentric religions.
Whether they were anthropocentric or theocentric, Korea’s three traditional religions tended to place more emphasis on ritual than on doctrine, on practice more than on belief. Moreover, unless they were religious professionals such as shamans, monks, or Confucian scholars, premodern Koreans did not usually identify exclusively with a specific religious community but instead would draw on whatever ritual tool appeared appropriate at a particular time for a particular reason. In other words, laypeople normally did not form congregations which met frequently and on a regular basis to engage in ritual behavior which affirmed their communal religious identity. The one exception would be meetings of members of an extended family for ancestral memorial rituals. Those two aspects of Korea’s religious culture began to change when Korea encountered Christianity.
The first form of Christianity Koreans encountered was Roman Catholicism. A few Koreans in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were converted to Catholicism by reading books imported from China written by European missionaries there. They were immediately met with bloody persecution, which began when those early Catholics refused to perform the mandated ancestor memorial ritual – Catholic doctrine told them such rituals were an expression of idolatry, the worship of false gods. The Confucian government of Korea at that time could not understand why Catholics placed priority on doctrine over ritual obligations, so it executed them (Baker & Rausch 2017).
When the government found out early in the nineteenth century that some Catholics were inviting European military intervention to stop the anti-Catholic oppression, the persecution expanded, taking hundreds (some say thousands) of lives over the next seven decades. Despite years of abuse and brutality, Catholicism survived in Korea and grew to become one of the three major religious communities in South Korea today, claiming at least 7 percent of the population. Even when it was a small subjugated church, however, it was already having an impact on Korea’s religious culture.
Monotheism was not a significant force in Korean religion before Catholicism arrived. Those Koreans who worshipped supernatural beings tended to worship many of them rather than concentrating their prayers and devotions on a single supreme being. That has changed. Today most of the new religions imitate Christianity by focusing their spiritual gaze on one object only.
Another change Catholicism brought to Korea was the concentration on doctrine. One of the first Catholic texts written in Korean was a catechism. Many of Korea’s new religions also have a concise statement of the doctrines to which they expect their members to assent. Whereas earlier religious gatherings tended to be ritual-based, ever since the arrival of Catholicism more and more religious gatherings have become faith-based, with people coming together to affirm their shared beliefs as much as to engage in rituals related to those beliefs.
Catholicism also brought to Korea the notion of an exclusive religious affiliation for laypeople. Catholics were told that, as Catholics, they could not participate in the rituals of any other religious community – that included the ancestral memorial services of Confucianism. Many of them held onto that religious identity even at the cost of their lives during the decades of persecution, showing many of the non-Catholics who witnessed their execution that it was possible for a layperson to have a strong sense of an exclusive religious orientation. Finally, Catholics introduced to Korea the notion of congregations, of fellow believers meeting together on a regular basis for worship and fellowship.
Protestant missionaries first arrived in Korea in 1884, a decade or so after the oppression of Catholic Christians had died down. The Protestant community, free of persecution from the beginning, grew rapidly (Kim & Kim 2015). While doing so, Protestants reinforced contributions Catholics had already made to Korea’s religious culture: monotheism, a doctrinal orientation, an exclusive religious affiliation, and congregational organization. However, on top of that, they added three more elements of what became Korea’s modern religious culture out of which new religions emerged.
First of all, Protestant worship services were in Korean. Soon the Bible was available in Korean as well. At that point in time, Catholic worship services were mostly in Latin. The revered texts of Buddhism and Confucianism were in Classical Chinese. And the folk religion has no widely acknowledged revered texts. So, on that point alone, the Protestants stood out.
Moreover, since the language of their worship services was in Korean, they were able to have more active formal participation by laypeople than was common in earlier worship in Korea. Protestant congregations engaged in communal prayers, communal chanting, and communal singing, something unheard of previously on the peninsula. Even shamanic rituals – though shamans often interacted with those witnessing their rituals – did not have the sort of organized liturgical participation by those who were not ritual specialists that Protestants introduced.
A final contribution Protestants made to the religious culture on the peninsula was a new name for God. Catholics had called God the Lord of Heaven (Ch’ŏnju天主), a Sino-Korean term borrowed from Chinese Catholicism, which did not sound familiar to Korean ears. The names Buddhists used for their divinities were mostly Indic terms filtered through Chinese Buddhism. Confucians could see in ancient Chinese Confucian texts the name Sangje (C. Shangdi 上帝), which can literally be translated as the Lord on High. However, few in Korea before the arrival of Christianity saw that term as a reference to an actual supernatural personality. Protestants wanted to avoid a confusion of their God with the gods of what they considered erroneous religions. Therefore, they created a new term for the One God which, though a neologism, sounded indigenous and thereby became widely accepted (Baker 2002). That name is read today as both Hananim (the One God) and Hanŭnim (the Lord of Heaven) and has since spread beyond the Protestant community to become accepted as a generic term for God by even some non-Christians (Buswell 2007, 470–5).
The fertile ground containing both elements of traditional religions as well as the new ways of expressing religiosity introduced by Christianity became the foundation of the many new religions of the Korean people. Some of those new religions are theocentric. Others are anthropocentric. Some emphasize ritual more than doctrine. This is seen in traditional religions as well. However, others emphasize doctrine more than ritual. Breaking further with traditions, though some of Korea’s new religions are not monotheistic, others are adamant that there should be a singular supernatural personality as the object of their spiritual gaze. Moreover, all the new religions have services and revered texts in Korean, and all have participatory rituals. Their traditional components make them Korean religions. However their nontraditional components make them new religions.
2 Ch’ŏndogyo: The Oldest New Religion
Ch’ŏndogyo (the religion of the heavenly way) is the oldest of Korea’s new religions. It is also the first indigenous organized religion to emerge on the Korean peninsula. Indigenous Korean shamanism predates Ch’ŏndogyo by couple of millennia and though Ch’ŏndogyo shows some influence from that folk religion, it is very different. First of all, Ch’ŏndogyo is an organized religion, with standardized rituals performed in buildings erected for the performance of those rituals. It also has a set of sacred texts which articulate its doctrines. Ch’ŏndogyo shares those two features with Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. However, it is different from all those religions. It is a new religion.
Defining New Religions
What makes a religion a new religion? Before we can answer that question, we first have to ask what makes a religion a religion. Belief in God or gods, though a common feature of religions worldwide, is not necessary for a spiritual tradition to be called a religion. Otherwise, anthropocentric Confucians and meditating Buddhists could not be called religious. Similarly, an explicit set of moral principles, though usually associated with religions, is not an essential feature. Otherwise, we could not call shamanism a religion.
To encompass the full range of religious beliefs and practices on the Korean peninsula, we need a broad definition of religion, one that does not exclude the anthropocentric or an emphasis on ritual over doctrine and ethics. A sufficiently broad definition would identify as religious those beliefs and practices that promise to explain the otherwise unexplainable (such as why bad things happen to us), predict the otherwise unpredictable (such as where we go when we die), and prevent the otherwise unpreventable (such as contracting a serious illness) by relying on immaterial and nonmathematical means. Religions, as religions, consist of beliefs and practices that promise to minimize the uncertainties in life, which are inevitable because of our existence as individual mortal beings with all the limitations that entails.
This sounds comparable to what science promises. However, religion differs from science in that religion is grounded in nonempirical and nonmathematical assumptions. Religious claims cannot be proven or disproven through the scientific method. Religion is grounded in belief rather than data. Belief implies accepting that something is true even though it cannot be proven beyond a doubt through mathematical analysis, laboratory experiments, or empirical evidence.
In that sense, religion may appear to be not very different from philosophy. However, philosophers, as philosophers, don’t engage in prayer, meditation, chanting, ritual interactions with supernatural forces, or reading of sacred writings in order to overcome the limitations of existence as separate and distinct beings with a limited life span. Many religious practitioners do precisely that.
In another difference from scientists and philosophers, religious practitioners fasten a spiritual gaze on something that is both invisible and, more importantly, transcendent. It maybe a spiritual being, or it may be an impersonal force. Whether it is one or the other is less important than that it is beyond the realm of everyday experience filtered through our physical senses. Secular philosophies or scientific theories are generally not grounded in the experience of transcendence.
Religions promise a way to overcome the limitations of our existence as mortal separate and distinct beings by providing techniques or rituals that they claim will bring us into contact with a transcendent being or force. That supernatural being or force, religions contend, not only can minimize the uncertainties in life, it can also help us escape the constraints of our physical and psychological separation from people and things around us and, in so doing, help us rise above quotidian existence. Even those members of religious communities who don’t pursue an actual emotional experience of transcendence nevertheless often rely on the possibility of transcendence as exemplified in the life of the founder of their religion.
If religion can be said to consist of beliefs and practices which offer tools for transcending our problems, then how do new religions differ from traditional religions?
One way of distinguishing a traditional religion from a new religion is chronological: New religions don’t have a long history. Ch’ŏndogyo, for example, emerged less than two centuries ago, in 1860, making it much younger than Korea’s folk religion, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Christianity. Moreover, new religions draw on elements found in traditional religions but organize them into novel configurations, combining them with beliefs and practices not seen in traditional religions. It is their youth and novelty that makes new religions new. However, most new religions that originated in Korea, with the exception of those with Christian roots, prefer the term “native religion” to “new religion” to stress that they emerged on Korean soil and have founders who were Korean (Yun et al. 2005, 3).
Ch’ŏndogyo is a typical example of a new religion constructed with both traditional and novel building blocks. It uses terminology, promotes practices, and extols virtues which are similar to the terminology, practices, and virtues found in shamanic, Buddhist, Confucian, and even Catholic circles. However, its ritual specialists are not shamans. Its rituals are not Buddhist rituals. The virtues it promotes are similar to, but nevertheless different from, Confucian virtues. And though it sometimes borrows both Catholic and Confucian names for its God, its God is very different from the God of Catholicism or of ancient Confucianism. That is clear in both the way Ch’ŏndogyo believers talk about God, and the way God is discussed in the Ch’ŏndogyo scriptures.
Ch’ŏndogyo’s Concept of the Divine
Ch’ŏndogyo emerged in 1860 in a manner we often see in new religions. Its founder,Ch’oeCheu(1824–1864)had apersonalencounter witha transcendental presence. (Here and throughout, the last name precedes the first name, as is customary in Korea.) As Ch’oe describes it, he suddenly heard a powerful voice speaking to him, though he could not tell where it was coming from. Startled, he asked, “Who are you?” The voice answered, “People call me Sangje (C. Shangdi)” (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 18–19; Kallander 2013, 158).
Sangje (the Lord on High) is a term that appears in ancient Confucian classics, where it appears to refer to a powerful supernatural personality abiding in heaven above. In Neo-Confucianism, which dominated intellectual discourse in Ch’oe’s time, any theistic connotations of the term Sangje are explained away as merely metaphorical. However, Ch’oe writes as though he is talking to an actual supernatural entity. The possibility that Ch’oe might have been referring to God rather than using a metaphor is strengthened by another term he uses in a different essay he wrote to explain what he had learned from his encounter with a transcendent presence. In that essay, he explains that there are some who explain the order we see in nature as the work of the Lord of Heaven, the Catholic term for God (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 25; Kallender 2013, 159). That Catholic term also appears in the twenty-one-syllable (in Chinese characters) incantation he taught his followers, and which is still chanted by Ch’ŏndogyo practitioners today. That incantation can be translated as:
Ultimate Energy being all around me, I pray that I feel that Energy within me here and now. Recognizing that the Lord of Heaven is within me, I will be transformed and my mind rectified. Constantly aware of that divine presence within, I will become attuned to all that is going on around me. (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 70)
In that incantation, however, we can also see ambiguity in the way Ch’oe thinks and talks about the most powerful spiritual force in the cosmos. “Ultimate Energy” refers to ki (C. Qi). Ki is not a supernatural personality. In Neo-Confucianism, ki is both the matter that constitutes the material realm as well as the energy which animates that matter. This incantation, therefore, is not asking that the spirit of God descend upon a human being below. Instead, it is asking that the person voicing the incantation become aware that Ultimate Energy – which gives the universe its dynamism and in so doing creates an underlying unity linking all entities and their actions in the universe – also exists and operates within that person.
In this incantation, the emphasis is clearly on ki as energy. Moreover, it is not simply energy which animates individuals but energy which, because it is shared with other people and things, allows human beings to “become attuned to all that is going on around” them. That gives ki much greater importance than it had in Neo-Confucianism (S. Park 2016). When we are attuned to all that is going on around us, we are able to interact appropriately with all the people and things we encounter. This is the point of the incantation. It is not calling for us to focus our attention on a Lord of Heaven as Catholics use that term, as a God in heaven above, but to recognize that we are connected to everything else in the universe. If we do that, our mind and therefore our behavior will be rectified.
Ch’oe called his teachings Tonghak (Eastern Learning) in order to make clear that what he was teaching was not Sŏhak (Western Learning). Sŏhak was the Korean name for the clearly theistic religion of Catholicism (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 30–2; Kallender 2013, 160–1). Later, in 1905 the third supreme leader of Tonghak, Son Pyŏnghŭi (1861–1921), changed its name to Ch’ŏndogyo, and that is the name by which it is known today (Young 2014, 104–6).
That is not the only change in Tonghak in the years after the execution of Ch’oe Cheu in 1864 after the government decided that he “posed a threat to the established order” (Kallender 2013, 81–9). There was both a change in the name used most frequently for the ultimate spiritual force in the Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogo teachings as well as an increasingly anthropocentric elaboration of the relationship between human beings and that spiritual force.
The writings Ch’oe Cheu left behind which are included in the Ch’ŏndogyo scriptures are two types. He wrote essays in Literary Sinitic (a.k.a. Classical Chinese), which only well-educated Koreans could read. And he wrote verses in Korean, which many more Koreans could read. In the Chinese-language essays, only the terms Sangje and Lord of Heaven are used for the ultimate spiritual force. However, in the Korean language compositions, the term Lord of Heaven doesn’t appear at all, and Sangje only appears three times. On the other hand, Hanullim appears thirty times, probably because its three syllables are a better fit for the rhythm of the verses (S. Park 2016, 86). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Sangje and Lord of Heaven (except for its appearance in the incantation) had fallen into disuse and Hanullim had become the standard name in Ch’ŏndogyo for the ultimate spiritual force. Hanullim sounds similar to Hanŭnim, the name some Protestants and now Catholics as well use for God, but it is different enough for Ch’ŏndogyo to make clear that they do not worship the God of Christianity.
The second change we see as Tonghak was transformed into Ch’ŏndogyo is a shift away from the ambiguity in Ch’oe Cheu’s depiction of the ultimate spiritual force as both a spiritual personality he could hold a conversation with and as the impersonal Ultimate Energy which both animates and unites everything in the universe. Ch’oe Sihyŏng (1827–1898), who assumed responsibility for nurturing the nascent Tonghak community after Ch’oe Cheu was executed, did not hold conversations with Sangje. Instead, he expounded on the phrase in the incantation which says “the Lord of Heaven is within me” to emphasize that heaven is within every human being. Therefore, the way to serve Heaven is to treat your fellow human beings as though they are Heaven. That will ensure you treat them with the respect they deserve (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 278; Young 2014, 144).
Son Pyŏnghŭi, who became the leader after Ch’oe Sihyŏng was executed, encapsulated the anthropocentric elements in Ch’ŏndogyo thought with a phrase that has come to be seen as the core of Ch’ŏndogyo teachings. That phrase, in nae ch’ŏn, literally means “human beings are Heaven” or “Human beings are God” (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 560). However, this does not mean that everyone is a god, or that God is nothing more than a human being. In nae ch’ŏn means that human beings all share in Ultimate Energy, which Ch’ŏndogyo understands to be the ultimate spiritual force. In other words, it is Ultimate Energy which is “God.” That Ultimate Energy is much more than any human being. In fact, it is much more than the entire human race put together. It is a cosmic force that, as the animating creative force of the universe, is present in every human being and, in fact, in all living beings. Ch’ŏndogyo teaches that we should recognize that each and every human being plays an essential role in creating the world in which we live, and therefore we should treat with respect everyone we meet. That is what in nae ch’ŏn means, and why it is best translated as “there is a bit of heaven in everyone.”
Kaebyŏk, the Great Transformation
Another distinctive element of Tonghak/Ch’ŏndogyo thought, though one which was adopted and modified by new religions that emerged later, is kaebyŏk 開闢. The term kaebyŏk appears in some ancient Chinese texts, where it means beginning something important, but Tonghak gave it new significance. It may be the emphasis on ki that made kaebyŏk – which in Tonghak teachings means “Great Transformation” – such an important component of Tonghak thought. Ch’oe Cheu and his successors assumed ki, in its manifestation as the material universe, decays over time. In fact, he said it had been 50,000 years since the last Great Transformation and this generation of ki had run its course. It was time for another kaebyŏk which will renew the universe and everything in it. They called the current stage in this long cyclical process of transforming rebirth, decay, and transforming again, Former Heaven. The stage which a forthcoming kaebyŏk will usher in is Latter Heaven, with heaven meaning the entire universe and all that is within it, including human beings. After kaebyŏk, a renewed earth and a renewed human race will result in a paradise, not in heaven above but on the earth on which we now live (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 323–4). Kaebyŏk promised not just a fresh start for the material world but also a regeneration of the mental and spiritual lives of human beings. The result would be an earthly paradise in which everyone treated everyone else the way they deserved to be treated as equally possessing a spark of the divine (ki as Ultimate Energy) within them.
The Ethics of Ch’ŏndogyo
If we want to hasten kaebyŏk and the emergence of the Latter Heaven, we need to act as morally as possible in the Former Heaven we live in now. Ch’oe Sihyŏng, echoing the words of Ch’oe Cheu, wrote that we can do that by preserving our original pure mind and rectifying our psychophysical endowment (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 295–302). The notion of “preserving our original pure land” has roots in Confucianism, which teaches that all human beings are essentially moral in their inner heart-and-mind but are led astray by the selfish emotions generated by the body and its emotions, that is to say, by their psychophysical endowment which is composed of ki.
However, the notion of rectifying our psychophysical endowment is a twist on the usual Confucian approach to cultivating a moral character. Confucians usually talked about rectifying the heart-and-mind so that they could control the ki which constitutes the psychophysical endowment of human beings. An ancient Confucian guide to cultivate a moral character, the Daxue, said “Wishing to cultivate themselves, they first rectified their minds” (Johnston & Wang 2012, 47). Ch’ŏndogyo places more emphasis on rectifying ki. The term Ch’oe Sihyŏng used for “rectifying our psychophysical endowment” is a two-character phrase in Chinese (chŏnggi正氣) which, before the emergence of Tonghak, was normally used as a noun to designate ki which was already in its best possible state. Ch’oe made this phrase an exhortation instead of a noun. He taught that you have to rectify your ki first and thereby link up with the ki which animates the entire universe as Ultimate Energy before you can rectify your mind which motivates you to act appropriately. Ch’oe wrote that, if we are able to “remove all impurities in the energy [ki] that runs through and animates our psychophysical endowment, then there will be no pollution from the mundane world in our heart-and-mind and we will not have to worry about selfish desires welling up from within” (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 295; Buswell 2007, 457).
How do we rectify our psychophysical endowment? We do that by “showing love and respect for our parents, by showing affection and concern for our siblings, by being kind and generous to our friends, and by being respectful and deferential to our elders” (Ch’ŏndogyo 1997, 301; Buswell 2007, 458) Those are all cardinal Confucian virtues. Like many of the new Korean religions that follow it, Ch’ŏndogyo accepts the anthropocentric ethical stance of Confucianism, asserting that living a moral life means acting appropriately in your interactions with others according to the role they play in. your life.
A Mixture of Old and New
Ch’ŏndogyo’s Confucian ethics remind us of traditional Korean anthropocentric religiosity. However, there are also clearly novel elements in Ch’ŏndogyo as well. Since the early twentieth century, Ch’ŏndogyo has held regular Sunday morning services which are as participatory as Christian services. Those services include communal prayer as well as communal singing of sacred Ch’ŏndogyo hymns. There are also sermons and readings from Ch’ŏndogyo scriptures. Even the buildings in which those services are held look similar to Christian churches. However, those services also include distinctive Ch’ŏndogyo elements such as the communal chanting of the incantation and the placing of a bowl of clear water on a table at the front of the ritual hall (Ko 2007).
Ch’ŏndogyo therefore fits the definition of a new religion provided at the beginning of this section. It is relatively new (less than 200 years old). It has many traditional elements, such as the use of the words Sangje for the Lord on High and ki for the energy that fills and animates everything in the universe. Its promotion of the anthropocentric ethical orientation of Confucianism and its belief that the human mind is pure and moral until it is led astray by selfish impulses are also traditional. However, Ch’ŏndogyo also has many more modern elements, such as the use of the Catholic word for God (Lord of Heaven) and the fact that it holds participatory services on Sunday mornings. In addition, it added such novel features as making ki, as Ultimate Energy, the primary spiritual force in the universe and giving a new meaning to the old term kaebyŏk. Ch’ŏndogyo has taken elements from Korea’s past and even some elements from the recent addition to Korea’s religious culture of Christianity and woven them into a tapestry that also includes novel concepts not seen before in Korea’s long history of religious beliefs and practices. It is that combination of the old and the new which makes Ch’ŏndogyo a religion which is both new and Korean.
Though Ch’ŏndogyo is the oldest of Korea’s new religions, it is not the largest. Nor is it the most respected. The official census in 2015 found only 66,000 followers of Ch’ŏndogyo, out of a population of over 49 million (Statistics Korea 2016, 17). In fact, many Koreans today are not even aware that Ch’ŏndogyo still exists as a religion (Bell 2004, 124–5).
Ch’ŏndogyo, at first under the name of Tonghak, was much more visible in its first six decades. For example, it lent its name to the Tonghak Uprising of 1894, which was the largest peasant rebellion in Korean history up to that point in time. Though most of the participants in that uprising were not members of the Tonghak community, that uprising took the Tonghak name because Tonghak provided some of its organizational structure as well as some of its ideological stimulus with its promise of kaebyŏk. Though that uprising did not bring about the fall of the then 500-year-old Chosŏn dynasty in 1894, it weakened it and made it easier for Japan to bring an end to Chosŏn and absorb the Korean peninsula into its empire in 1910. Under its new name of Ch’ŏndogyo, this religion again appeared on the political stage in 1919, playing a leading role in the March 1 nationwide nonviolent protests against Japanese colonial rule that year (Beirne & Young 2018, 259–62). That protest was unsuccessful. Japan maintained its rule over Korea for another twenty-six years. During those years of colonial rule and during the decades of independence for Korea which followed after the expulsion of Japan in 1945, Ch’ondogyo began to fade from view, surviving in the minds of most Koreans more as a political force from the past than as a contemporary religious movement.
3 Won Buddhism
It is Won Buddhism, a younger Korean religion, which has become the most respected of Korea’s many new religions. The 2015 census found only 84,000 Koreans who said they were Won Buddhists (Statistics Korea 2016, 17), although there are probably many more than that number suggests – some Won Buddhists may have checked “Buddhist” rather than “Won Buddhist” when the government asked them to identify their religious orientation. It has been treated since the beginning of the twenty-first century as one of the four major religions in South Korea, alongside Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and mainstream Buddhism. Since 2007, Won Buddhism has joined those three major religions in dispatching official chaplains to Korea’s military, though no other new religion is permitted to do so (Won Buddhism Sinmun 2013). Moreover, in 2009, when a state funeral was held for former president and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Kim Daejung, Won Buddhists were asked to send a cleric to participate in the ritual alongside a Catholic, a Protestant, and a mainstream Buddhist cleric. No other new religions were invited to participate at that level (Adams 2009, 1). The fact that it has not been involved in any major controversies, and that it includes the name of a religion long accepted in Korea in its own name, may be why Won Buddhism has been granted more official recognition of respectability than other new religions have (Adams 2009, 22–6).
The Birth of Won Buddhism
Won Buddhism is a little more than one century old. Its history begins on April 28, 1916, when Pak Chungbin (1891–1943), known to Won Buddhists as Sot’aesan, suddenly came to the realization that “all things in the universe are of unitary noumenal nature and all dharmas are of unitary source, amongst which the way of neither arising nor ceasing and the principle of cause-effect response, being mutually grounded on each other, have formed a round framework” (B. Chung 2003, 167). In plain language, Pak saw the interconnectedness of all phenomena, and that behind all those interconnected phenomena lay one unified cosmic Thusness.
His understanding of the nature of ultimate reality is very Buddhist in tone. However, Pak was not a Buddhist monk. In fact, he had not even been educated in Buddhist teachings. He said that it was only later, when he read the Diamond Sutra, that he realized that Sākyamuni Buddha had had the same insight into the nature of ultimate reality long before his own enlightenment experience.
Pak soon began sharing his insight with several friends and formed a group he called the Society for the Study of the Buddha-Dharma. Before he gave his group that name, however, he showed that his insight that everything was connected to everything else should lead to practical actions that helped our fellow human beings. In 1917 he founded a Savings Union for the poor farmers in his community. Then, in 1918, he organized a group effort to reclaim farmland from the sea by building an embankment on a nearby beach. Only after that, in 1924, did he proclaim the inauguration of the Society for the Study of Buddha-Dharma (Chung 2018, 303–6). That was the name the religious community he founded used until it adopted the name Won Buddhism in 1947.
The Unique Spiritual Gaze of Won Buddhism
Though Won Buddhism has Buddhism in its name, it is very different from traditional Korean Buddhism. There are no statues of buddhas or bodhisattvas in Won Buddhist ritual centers. In fact, Won Buddhism does not promote the worship of any supernatural personalities at all. Instead, Won Buddhist practitioners direct their spiritual gaze at an empty circle, which they call ilwŏnsang
(一圓相).
Sangmeans a symbol. The circle, ilwŏn, isnothing morethana “sang,” a visual reminder of the truth of ilwŏn, which Won Buddhists understand to be the Buddha-Nature, which is the ultimate reality. They also refer to that ultimate reality asDharmakāyaBuddha.Itisimportant tonote, however, thatDharmakāya Buddha is not a Buddhist deity. DharmakāyaBuddha refers tothe Buddha-Nature which underlies, and is the foundation of, all that exists and all that happens in the phenomenal world (K. Park 1997, 88–95).
Won Buddhists are not theists. Their religion is an anthropocentric religion, in that they direct their spiritual gaze on the ilwŏnsang in order to better understand the nature of ultimate reality so that they can act appropriately within the phenomenal world. The circle is used as a symbol of ilwŏn because it symbolizes perfection and interconnectedness. No part of a perfect circle is different from any other part and each part only exists as part of that circle. Similarly, we human beings exist only as part of the human community and as part of the natural world. Gazing at the ilwŏnsang, we should be inspired to let our actions be guided by the realization that we are not isolated individuals but are part of a greater whole.
Kaebyŏk in Won Buddhism
The circle had been used by Buddhists before Sot’aesan but it had never been given the central role Sot’aesan gave it when he replaced the traditional statues of Buddhist deities with ilwŏnsang. Sot’aesan’s declaration of his motive for founding his religious order looks much like a traditional Buddhist motive. He wrote
our founding motive is to lead all sentient beings, who are drowning in the turbulent sea of suffering, to a vast and immeasurable paradise by expanding spiritual power and conquering material powerthrough faith ina religion based on truth and training in morality based on facts. (Doctrinal Books 2016, 17)
However, the Won Buddhist approach to saving all sentient beings from suffering differs in many significant aspects from traditional Buddhist approaches.
One of its differences comes from its openness to other religious traditions. For example, Won Buddhism emerged decades after Tonghak had begun talking about kaebyŏk. Sot’aesan had heard of this promise of a better world and found it appealing. However, he redefined it to make it more realistic. In Won Buddhism, kaebyŏk does not refer to an actual physical cosmic cataclysm out of which the new and improved material world will emerge. Instead, it is used in a more metaphorical sense to refer to the dramatic changes science and technology are bringing to the modern world, and to the spiritual transformation that should accompany that transformation in the material world.
In the opening pages of the Doctrinal Books of Won-Buddhism (2016), we can find an entire page dedicated to just one sentence: “With this Great Opening of Matter, let there be a Great Opening of Spirit.” The word translated as “Great Opening” is kaebyŏk. This is not a Buddhist notion, yet it is core to the teachings of Won Buddhism. Sot’aesan argued that the scientific and technological advances of the modern world were already bringing about a great material transformation, but humanity was not keeping up spiritually. A spiritual transformation, therefore, was needed as well, and that was the goal toward which he intended to work. He invited his followers to join him in that process.
Moral Prescriptions
Traditional Buddhism has been accused by some of denying the reality of the world in which we all live. That is an exaggeration. Buddhists recognize that if you slam your hand down on a broken piece of glass, you will bleed and feel pain. However, Buddhist philosophy teaches that the world of everyday experience is not ultimately real because ultimate reality, as they define it, is limited to that which is unchanging and uncaused.
This vision of reality has psychological implications. Buddhists argue that we have moments of disappointment and suffering because we expect things that we enjoy and desire to always be there for us. However, the world of everyday experience is one of constant change because the phenomenal world is created by an unending series of causes and effects. They argue that we will always find ourselves “in a turbulent sea of suffering” because we cannot avoid being disappointed. Things we love as they are will inevitably change or go away.
However, traditional Buddhists argue that there is a solution: Once we realize that the world of constant change is not the real world, we can detach ourselves from it and no longer depend on things that we enjoy and desire to always be there for us. No longer expecting the impossible, we will rise above the “turbulent sea of suffering.”
Sot’aesan had a different solution to the problems inherent in human existence. Rather than detaching ourselves from the world around us, he suggested that instead we work to improve it. We do that not by denying the reality of the world in which we live but by affirming it by being grateful for all that makes our lives livable.
There are four things we need to be especially grateful for. These “four graces,” as Won Buddhist texts call them, are “heaven and earth” (nature), for providing us with the air we need to breathe, the water we need to drink, and the earth we need to stand on and cultivate crops in; our parents, for giving us our lives; our fellow human beings, for providing us with such things as houses, roads, machines, medical care, and all other things we cannot provide for ourselves acting alone; and, finally, law, by which Won Buddhists mean the rules and regulations that make a safe, orderly, and predictable society possible (B. Chung 1996; Doctrinal Books 2016, 25–38).
Here we can see the influence of Korea’s Confucian heritage, especially in the call for us to be grateful for what our parents have done for us (B. Chung 1988, 439–40). Filial piety is one of the most important Confucian virtues. Another, only slightly less important, is respect for laws and social order. Moreover, Sot’aesan’s overall approach here is more Confucian than Buddhist. He advocated engaging with the world rather than detaching ourselves from it (B. Chung 1988, 437–42).
We can see here the practicality of Sot’aesan’s vision. He recognized human beings as embedded in this world and therefore obligated to act within this world. Traditional Buddhism, he believed, had ignored this moral imperative. In 1935 he published Chosŏn pulgyo hyŏksillon (Treatise on the Renovation of Buddhism), a sharp critique of traditional Korean Buddhism. In that treatise, he argued that traditional Buddhism had become in Korea nothing more than monks seeking their own salvation in mountain monasteries and had nothing to offer the suffering masses. He insisted that Buddhism should come out of the mountains – which is where the vast majority of temples were during the Chosŏn dynasty – and become a Buddhism of the many, not of the few. To do that, he added, it also had to become Koreanized. That meant the core texts had to be in Korean instead of in the Classical Chinese used up until that time, so the general public could read them, He also said that Buddhists should stop making offerings to statues and instead concentrate on serving the people, recognizing that those people are the real buddhas (K. Park 1997: 292–302; Buswell 2007, 480–6). As he saw it, only a Buddhism for the masses could help end human suffering and therefore only a Buddhism for the masses was moral Buddhism.
To further his goal of diminishing human suffering and creating a more moral society, Sot’aesan also promoted a three-stage cultivation of a moral character which would make individuals the moral human beings they were meant to be, which he understood as individuals who interacted appropriately with people and things around them. Despite the many novel elements of other aspects of his teachings, Sot’aesan did not stray far from the Buddhist approach to cultivating a moral character. The first step in his program for the cultivation of a moral character was the cultivation of a calm and clear mind. This, he argued, would rid your mind of biases introduced by selfish thoughts and emotions. With a calm and clear mind, he pointed out, you would gain cognitive clarity which would allow you to understand how you should act to further the common good rather than pursue personal benefit.
Once your mind is calm and clear, you are ready for the second stage, which he defined as “inquiry into human affairs and universal principles” (Doctrinal Books 2016, 48–50). By “human affairs and universal principles,” he meant the difference between right and wrong. He advised using your calm and clear mind to analyze situations you encounter in daily life so that you can identify the right course of action in those situations.
Sot’aesan knew that knowing how to act in a particular situation did not always lead to acting appropriately. Sometimes people refrain from acting the way they know they should act because they believe they can gain some personal benefit by acting otherwise. Therefore, he said we had to go further into the third stage of the cultivation of a moral character. We had to cultivate the ability to make a “mindful choice in karmic action.” In other words, we had to discipline ourselves to always choose to act the way we know we should act (Doctrinal Books 2016, 46–52; Chung 2018, 311–12). He uses the term “karmic” action because he accepted the Buddhist notion of cause-andeffect, the idea that whatever we do now will have consequences for us later, if not in this life, in our life after this one – Sot’aesan clearly believed in reincarnation.
These three steps toward cultivating a moral character, he argued, need to be supported by proper attitudes. It is important for a practitioner to cultivate faith, by which he meant confidence in his or her own ability to become a better person. That confidence must be accompanied by zeal in working toward that goal, a determination to learn more of what is needed to achieve that goal, and dedication toward achieving that goal. At the same time, he insisted, practitioners must eliminate disbelief, overcoming any doubt that they really can become better persons through their own efforts. They also have to eradicate greed, laziness, and foolishness, attitudes which will hold them back from doing all they can do to improve themselves and, in the process, improve the lives of those around them. Only then can they become enlightened in thought and moral in action (Doctrinal Books 2016, 52–3).
Both Buddhist and New
Won Buddhism does not hide the fact that it is a Buddhist religion. After all, it teaches that Buddha-Nature underlies the world of everyday experience. Won Buddhism also accepts the Buddhist doctrines of karma and reincarnation. And Won Buddhism shares the Buddhist goal of eliminating human suffering. These are all core Buddhist teachings.
However, Won Buddhism also insists that it is a new religion and refuses to be treated as merely a denomination of traditional Buddhism. It shows that it is different from traditional Buddhism in its doctrines of the Four Graces, its acceptance of the notion of kaebyŏk, and its replacement of statues of Buddhist deities with the ilwŏnsang. Moreover, Won Buddhism has its own scriptures. Rather thantraditional Buddhist sutras, WonBuddhist scriptures are primarily the writings of Sot’aesan as well as those of Song Kyu (1900–1962), also known as Chŏngsan, who was his successor as head of the Won Buddhism community.
Won Buddhists also wear distinctive clerical clothing, and conduct their distinctive weekly rituals in buildings with their own distinctive architecture. Both outside and inside, Won Buddhist ritual centers look very different from traditional Buddhist temples. Another unique characteristic of Won Buddhism is the role of female clerics. Not only are women clerics of equal status with male clerics in Won Buddhism, there are actually more female than male clerics. In another departure from Buddhist tradition, male Won Buddhist clerics are allowed to marry. However, until recently women clerics were discouraged from doing so. That changed in 2019. Female Won Buddhist clerics are now allowed to marry as well. The one major difference that remains between male and female Won Buddhist clerics is that, except when they are performing some ritual function, male Won Buddhist clerics dress like any other Korean man living a white-collar lifestyle. They do not shave their head or wear monk’s robes. Female clerics, on the other hand, wear distinctive clothing all the time, although they do not wear customary Buddhist nun’s robes. Instead, they wear a modified version of the traditional Korean women’s clothing. In addition, they do not shave their head like nuns do. Instead, they wear their hair up in the bun generally worn by married Korean women (Baker 2012).
Won Buddhists call their ritual halls “kyodang,” which means “a place for teaching,” rather than using the Korean term for a temple. Moreover, you enter a typical Won Buddhist ritual hall through a foyer, where you can pick up a copy of the weekly parish bulletin. On a Sunday morning, you then normally sit in pews during a service that one prominent contemporary Won Buddhist admits, “is similar to that of a Protestant service. The ceremony is held on Sundays, and includes meditation, hymns, and preaching” (Yang 2008, 87).
One feature that Won Buddhism shares with traditional Korean Buddhism, but makes it different from other Korean new religions, is its international outreach. Over the last several decades, Won Buddhism has begun dispatching clerics abroad to establish ritual centers across North America as well as in Europe, Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand, and other parts of Asia. At first, those overseas outposts were intended to serve the Korean diaspora or engage in charitable work, but increasingly they have begun to attract non-Korean practitioners as well. Though the numbers are still small, Won Buddhism is moving in the direction of becoming a global new religion, not just a Korean new religion.
No matter how widely it spreads across the globe, Won Buddhism will retain its Korean roots and its Korean cultural elements. It will also continue to promote a different approach to the practice of Buddhism, one which Won Buddhists call a new Buddhism for a new age. As such, despite its many Buddhist elements, we are justified in calling Won Buddhism a new religion.
4 Confucianism and New Religions
Like Ch’ŏndogyo and Won Buddhism, Confucianism is not God-centered. Confucians do not focus their spiritual gaze on Ultimate Energy, as Ch’ŏndogyo does. Nor do they direct their spiritual gaze on an empty circle, the ilwŏnsang, as Won Buddhism does. Instead, Confucians tend to turn their spiritual gaze on human beings, both the living and the dead. Rituals honoring ancestors are a central feature of Confucianism.
However, as nontheistic religions, all three share an anthropocentric ethical perspective. The moral rules defining appropriate behavior for Confucians say nothing about honoring or obeying God or even gods. Instead, they provide guidelines for interactions within the human community. The most important guidelines are articulated as the Three Bonds and the Five Fundamental
Relationships.
The Fundamental Virtues
The Three Bonds traditionally are defined as the bond between a leader and those he leads – in Confucianism, the leader is almost always a male – the bond between a parent and a child, and the bond between a husband and a wife. Those Three Bonds are joined by the relationship between an elder sibling and a younger sibling, and the relationship among friends, to form the Five Fundamental Relationships. Though all but the relationship among friends assumes a difference in status among those involved in those relationships, these Five Fundamental Relationships are not totally one-sided.
A child is supposed to respect and obey a parent, but a parent is also expected to love and take care of a child. A political subordinate is supposed to be loyal to their political superior, but that political superior is supposed to lead paternalistically, protecting subordinates from violence, crime, and excessive taxation. Wives are supposed to obey and support their husbands, but husbands are supposed to guide their wives in creating a harmonious family. Siblings are supposed to recognize that an older sibling has a responsibility to provide guidance to younger siblings, and that the younger siblings should respect the older sibling and follow those directions. Finally, friends should treat each other with mutual respect.
Confucians don’t rely on commandments from a God above to tell them that sons should respect their fathers, that those on the lower rungs of society should obey those in positions of authority above them, or that wives should defer to their husband’s wishes. In the Confucian worldview, such inequality is a reflection of the natural order of things. Confucians believe that dealing with others in accordance with their status and how it differs from your own is the way human beings naturally behave when they let their basic human nature guide their actions. After all, Confucians assume, you would not speak to your teacher at school, to your boss at work, or to your father at home the same way you would talk to a friend you came across on the street.
Confucians believe that interacting with others the way you are supposed to interact with them is natural, even though they can see a lot of evidence that human beings don’t always treat others the way they should. To them, “natural” means acting in accordance with your innate tendency to act virtuously. In other words, unlike Christians who argue that human beings are morally weak by nature, Confucians believe that deep down, despite the way their emotions and desires sometimes lead them to act in pursuit of selfish advantage rather than the common good, human beings are moral by nature.
One reason for this assumption is the Confucian tendency to favor normative definitions. For them, things, human beings included, are not worthy of the name given them unless they act the way that name implies they should act. The only real human being is someone who acts as a human being should; in other words, someone who acts appropriately in all interactions with fellow human beings.
That is why one of the Five Cardinal Virtues of Confucianism is “benevolence.” That standard translation of in (C. ren 仁) is misleading. It really means being fully human, which you are only if you always act with the best interests of others in mind. The remaining four of the Five Cardinal Virtues similarly refer to human interactions. They are righteousness (acting appropriately), propriety (acting politely), wisdom (acting wisely), and trustworthiness (acting in a trustworthy fashion).
These Five Cardinal Virtues, as well as the Three Bonds and the Five Fundamental Relationships, appear in some form or another in the moral discourse of the majority of religions in Korea. However, they are particularly salient in the teachings of those new religions based primarily on Confucianism.
Kim Hang and an Explanation for Kaebyŏk
Many new religions in Korea also assume a view of the natural world and how its components should behave that is rooted in Confucianism. That worldview is based on three important assumptions: (1) that the world we live in is one of constant change, (2) change tends to follow certain regular channels, and (3) orderly change is the result of the interactions of the natural forces known as yin and yang, and the Five Phases, which complement each other. This acceptance of change as natural, orderly, and propelled by complementary natural forces is much more explicit in new religions rooted in Confucianism, but we can see traces of it in most of the other religions in Korea today as well.
We can also see yin and yang on the flag of the Republic of Korea (ROK) today. Yin and yang are labels for two complementary ways things interact or phases unfold. Sometimes explained as yang being bright, active, masculine, and hard contrasted with yin being dark, passive, feminine, and soft, they would be better defined as brighter compared to darker, more active compared to more passive, more masculine compared to more feminine, and as harder and softer. Yin and yang have no meaning apart from their contrasts, which emerge in the different stages of various natural phases or in the roles played in any interaction.
The Five Phases are somewhat more complicated than yin and yang. They are listed as wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, but those names do not refer to actual physical substances. Instead, each name represents a stage in an endless cycle of growth and decline. Wood stands for slow increase and growth, fire for peak growth and activity, earth for balance and neutrality, metal for slow decrease and decline, and water for maximum decrease and inactivity. Moreover, they are correlated with corresponding seasons, major bodily organs, directions, and more (Smith 2008, 32–6).
Since Confucianism and the new religions emerging from it do not believe that there is a God directing the way the universe has come into being and has continued to develop, they rely on yin and yang, and the Five Phases, to explain why things are the way they are and how they expect things to change. As forces explaining what, to Confucians, are otherwise inexplicable changes in the natural world, they take on religious significance.
This religious significance of Confucian attitudes toward the reasons behind changes in the material world is clear in the life and teachings of Kim Hang (1826–1884), better known as Ilbu. Kim was an unemployed Confucian scholar who could see that the world around him in the late nineteenth century was changing in ways he at first could not understand. Modern science and technology had not yet begun to reshape life on the Korean peninsula during Ilbu’s lifetime. However, he was aware that Western military might was successfully challenging the position of hegemony that China had held in East Asia for centuries. Such a dramatic change puzzled him.
To seek an answer to that puzzle, he spent several years engaged in a unique form of dancing meditation. He would sing the five vowels of the Chinese pentatonic musical scale (which are correlated with the Five Phases) while moving his hands and feet and stomping his feet on the ground in a ritual dance which has come to be called yŏngga mudo (S. Chung 2010, 2–3). He explained to those who wondered what he was doing that this ritual performance would bring him into harmony with the natural world, healing any diseases he might have and giving him a clear mind (H. Kim et al. 1997, 139–40). Yŏngga mudo (“singing a song while stomping the feet”) was later adopted by some new religions as part of their ritual practice.
However, that was not Ilbu’s most important contribution to the history of new religions in Korea. His major contribution came to him, he claimed, in a vision after he had been singing and stomping his feet for nineteen years. He saw eight trigrams in an unusual formation (H. Kim et al. 1977, 137).
Trigrams are an important feature of the Classic of Changes (a.k.a. the I Ching), which is one of the revered thirteen ancient Confucian Classics. The trigrams consist of three horizontal lines arranged one above the other, for example like this ☵ or this ☲. (We can see four trigrams on the national flag of the ROK today.) Those lines can be a solid line (in which case they are yang lines) or with a break in the middle (in which case they are yin lines). There are only eight possible such three-line combinations (Smith 2008, 116). In the Classic of Changes, two trigrams are combined, one above the other, to form sixty-four different hexagrams. The Classic of Changes was originally a book of divination, with yarrow stalks used to determine which hexagram was operative at the time the divination was made. Determining which particular hexagram was operative at a particular time or in a particular situation was believed to allow a prognosticator to know what was coming next. The Classic of Changes is based on the notion that the universe we live in is a universe of constant change. Those changes, however, follow particular patterns that are expressed in the way yin and yang lines are arranged in those hexagrams (Hon 2024).
Starting about a thousand years ago in China, two charts with different arrangements of the eight trigrams appeared and stimulated a lot of discussion. Both placed trigrams in different locations identified with eight different geographical directions such as north, south, southeast, and northwest. The first chart, called the Chart of the Earlier Heaven, is traditionally attributed to Fuxi, a mythical founder of Chinese civilization. The second chart, called the Chart of the Later Heaven, is attributed to King Wen, the eleventh-century BCE founder of the Zhou dynasty that established the ideal model of the Chinese state (Nielsen 2014). Those two charts place the trigrams in different locations, signaling to those who compared them that the cosmic forces operative at those different times were not the same.
Ilbu’s vision was of a different configuration of the eight trigrams. In those charts, the future is foretold by moving through the circle of trigrams counterclockwise (Smith 2012, 96). In the Chart of the Earlier Heaven, movement starts in the east and goes through five trigrams to get to a full yang trigram (three unbroken horizontal lines), which symbolizes heaven. In the Chart of the Later Heaven, again starting from the east, it takes passing through only two trigrams to get to full yang. Ilbu’s version repositioned the trigrams so that there is only one trigram between the eastern starting point and full yang. Moreover, he said that the trigram in the eastern spot represented Korea, the Eastern Kingdom. This meant, he said, that not only was a new heaven, and therefore a new age, dawning soon, it would do so with Korea replacing China as the most important spot in that chart and therefore as the most important place in the world. He called this new chart chŏngyŏk (correct changes 正易) (J. Lee 1983).
This chart was not only descriptive, it was also intended to be normative. Human beings are supposed to align themselves with the patterns of change in the material world so that they harmonize with nature rather than acting at crosspurposes with it. Moreover, those who became aware of where the world was heading (i.e. toward a new age) and acted accordingly, would actually hasten the arrival of that new age. Ilbu didn’t use the term kaebyŏk, but that is what he was referring to.
The earlier charts of the eight trigrams were, in Kim Hang’s view, correct for their time. However, as birth, growth, and completion represent the three stages everything goes through, so also do the patterns of changes in the universe go through three changes. He believed he provided the third, and therefore, complete stage for his time by altering the order in which the trigrams appeared in his chart (J. Lee 1983, 43–4). As he saw it, Fuxi’s chart was appropriate for a tribal era. King Wen’s was appropriate for China as an empire. However, his own chart was appropriate for the upcoming Korea-centered world.
In the upcoming new age, Ilbu argued, disharmony which had been introduced into the universe after King Wen’s time would be rectified. The earth will stand upright on a north–south axis, rather than being tilted as it is now. The result will be that a year will be exactly 360 days long, with each month exactly thirty days long, and there will be no great seasonal changes. It will be as comfortable as late summer and early fall all year around (S. Chung 2010, 16). Inhabiting this regular and harmonious natural world, human society will also become harmonious. The old ways of people competing with each other for personal gain will be replaced in the new age by people cooperating with each other for mutual benefit (S. Chung 2010, 11).
The Rectified Confucian Way
Kim Ilbu’s ideas inspired the birth decades later of a few very small religious groups, one of which even called itself the Religion of Singing Songs and Stomping Feet (H. Kim et al. 1977, 145–7). However, there are two other Confucian-inspired new religions, the Rectified Confucian Way and Sŏngdŏkto, which have become better known in recent decades. In those religions, as in Kim Ilbu’s teachings, change occurs through natural phases, influenced somewhat by human actions, rather than by the intervention of a God into earthly affairs. Moreover, they make Confucian anthropocentric ethical principles their defining core. Those Confucian-inspired religions, though quite small, are much more visible on the peninsula’s religious landscape than any of those more closely associated with the Correct Changes.
The most visible of the Confucian new religions is the Rectified Confucian Way (Kaengjŏngyudo). It may have no more than 30,000 members (Kaplan 2021, 65). However, the unique lifestyle of those twenty-first-century Confucians – the male believers dress like Chosŏn dynasty-era Confucian scholars, including weaving their long hair into topknots – draws a lot of attention to them when they are in public. They also attract tourists to their Blue Crane Village, which sits high up on Chiri Mountain in Kyŏngsang South Province, away from modern urban areas. The remote location of Blue Crane Village allows practitioners to live what they believe is a traditional Confucian lifestyle, which is why they are visited by tourists.
However, Kaengjŏngyudo members may be better known for their role in promoting the study of Confucian texts and of the Literary Sinitic in which those texts are written. Founded in 1929 by Kang Taesŏng (1890–1954), Kaengjŏngyudo began to gain favorable public attention in the 1990s when more Koreans began looking back on their country’s Confucian past as a component of the Korean tradition of which Koreans today can be proud. That is when we began to see camps emerging to teach school children Confucian ethics and etiquette. Members of Kaengjŏngyudo are not the only ones teaching Confucian ethics and etiquette to Korean school children today, but they are a major part of the movement to restore traditional Confucian values and politeness in the twenty-first century (Kaplan 2018).
In these Confucian schools, children learn the way their ancestors did. They chant and memorize a text written in four-character Literary Sinitic phrases. While doing that, they are immersed in the moral duties entailed by the Three Bonds and the Five Fundamental Relationships and how they should be applied in everyday life (Kaplan 2016). These schools are for children in general, not just for members of their religious community, and focus on teaching Confucian ethics and etiquette only.
Apart from these schools, it becomes clear that there is more to Kaengjŏngyudo than teaching Confucian texts. Practitioners have rituals in which their spiritual gaze is not directed to a supernatural being but to a chart in which the traditional twenty-four traditional season divisions of the year are arranged in a circle (H. Kim et al. 1977, 363–4). Called the Sŏndanggung, that chart shows that worship in Kaengjŏngyudo “is focused on the natural transformations of the universe and the impending re-creation of a new era” (Kaplan 2021, 67). The “impending recreation of a new era” is a reference to the kaebyŏk Kim Ilbu wrote about. Kaengjŏngyudo joins Kim Ilbu in teaching that the old yin era is coming to an end and that it will be replaced by a new yang age. In this new yang age, Korea will be recognized as the leading nation on earth because of its superior Confucian ethics, and “the Korean language will be used internationally, and Korean traditional culture will become the culture of all peoples” (Korean Native Religions 2005, 130). Kaengjõngyudo has also a chant-and-dance ritual, a Yŏngga mudo similar to what Kim Ilbu taught. However, instead of chanting the five vowels of the Confucian musical scale, they chant Confucian ethical aphorisms from the modernConfucianprimer.Moreover,theyclaimtheydidnotlearn thatritualdance from Kim Ilbu’s disciples. Instead, they claim Kim Taesŏng learned it when he briefly ascended to heaven in 1929 and saw various spirits there performing that dance ritual (MaUMtainer 2023).
Sŏngdŏkto
If Kaengjŏngyudo is a religion aiming at restoring an ideal Confucian past (Kaplan 2021, 69), Sŏngdŏkto (the Way of Sagely Virtue), in contrast, is a Confucian religion aiming at showing that Confucian ethics are compatible with the modern world. It was founded in 1952 by a man and a woman working together as equals, contrary to traditional Confucian expectations. Kim Okchae (1909–1960) and To Haksu (1904–1983) declared that promoting morality in society should come first, with promoting material or technological progress second. In fact, they argued that you cannot make true material or technological progress if you do not live by the correct moral values.
Correct morality for them meant Confucian morality, although they said that their teachings combined the best from Confucian, Buddhist, and Sŏn traditions. Sŏn was a term that originally meant the legendary immortals who live deep in Korea’s mountains. However, they used that term for teachings that eradicated evil and brought good into the world (Korean Native Religions 2005, 151). They explained that they drew on Confucianism for ethical principles, Buddhism for a clear heart-mind (by focusing on one’s true inner nature), and Sŏn for abandoning superstitions and instead transforming evil to good, including educating the masses to moral truth.
Kim and To insisted that human beings should leave behind what they called the superstitious worship of transcendental deities and instead focus on cultivating their innate moral nature, a key Confucian concept. Their one important scripture is rather short, with no more than eighty-eight pages. However, the title of that scripture is long and says it all: “The ethical canon on self-reflection on your moral nature in order to have the heart-mind of the sages shine within you.” They also have a mantra they chant. It is only seven syllables long in Korean but the English translation is longer: unfathomably pure, tranquil, righteous, and well-rounded heart-mind. (Korean Native Religions 2005, 148– 9). Such a heart-mind is the goal of traditional Confucian self-cultivation. (In Confucianism the distinction between the heart and the mind is weak because the heart is responsible for both thought and emotions.) It is also the goal of Sŏngdŏkto, which teaches that chanting that mantra would help practitioners obtain that goal.
Chanting, however, is not enough. It is also important to act appropriately in all human interactions. Sŏngdŏkto emphasizes the importance of the Three Bonds and the Five Fundamental Relationships. More concretely, among its ten guiding principles are injunctions to (1) act in a filial manner toward your parents, (2) be loyal to your country, (3) respect your teacher, (4) maintain harmony with your spouse (literally, the husband should cooperate with his wife, and his wife should follow the lead of her husband), and (5) respect the elderly. There are five more injunctions, but none of them say anything about respecting or obeying a god (Korean Native Religions 2005, 155). Sŏngdŏkto is a completely nontheistic religion. The goal of Sŏngdŏkto is to promote harmonious cooperation within the human community, not between human beings and supernatural personalities.
Sŏngdŏkto issodeterminedtolimititselftotraditionalConfucian conceptsthat it doesn’t explicitly mention kaebyŏk. However, it does teach that humanity is entering a new era in which it will leave behind the yang-dominated relations that created inequalityinthe past and insteadbuild a society inwhich yin and yangare equal and harmonious in the future. Though it is a very small religion, especially when compared to the major religions of Buddhism, Won Buddhism,
Catholicism, and Protestantism, its members hope that what they consider their rational approach to morality and spirituality will be adopted by more and more peopleastimegoesonsothatthisplanetonwhich welivewilleventuallybecome the earthly paradise it is meant to be. It is that anthropocentric dream, one defined by Confucian moral principles, and one that is shared by Kaengjŏngyudo, that allows us to label both of those groups as new Confucian religions.
5 Christianity and New Religions
As we have seen, a number of Korean new religions emphasize human beings and ignore theological issues. However, there are also some new religions that engage in God-talk and take theology seriously. Many of those theocentric new religions have their roots in Christianity. That is not surprising, since Christianity has grown over the last couple of centuries to become a significant feature of the religious landscape of the Korean peninsula. What is noticeable, however, is that all of these new religions which emerged from a Christian background originated in Protestantism.
The Catholic community in Korea is a century older than the Korean Protestant community, yet it has produced no new religions in Korea. That is because the Catholic Church is highly organized and hierarchical. A zealous Catholic cannot simply decide to establish a church and expect to be immediately accepted as a legitimate priest. Anyone who wants to be a Catholic priest has to go through years of theological training and then be ordained by a religious superior before they can be accepted as a priest.
The Protestant community does not maintain as tight a grip on clerical credentials as the Catholic community does. It is not unheard of to see someone with no formal theological training establish a church and begin preaching to a hopeful congregation, gaining recognition as a legitimate pastor from at least a small group of devotees. The vast majority of Protestant clerics in Korea today have undergone rigid theological training. In fact, many of them have earned doctorates in theology from theological schools either in Korea or abroad. And most Protestant preachers in Korea have been recognized as legitimate spiritual leaders by their denomination’s leaders. Nevertheless, there are still some who give themselves titles, such as reverend, or claim to be a pastor though they have never received formal theological training or been authorized to preach by any pre-existing Protestant organization. Such is often the case with the founders of Korea’s new religions with a Christian foundation.
The Unification Church
One such founder is the late Moon Sun Myung (1920–2012). He founded one of the best-known Korean new religions, the Unification Church. The Unification Church is well known because of its global reach and because of the political activities of Rev. Moon, as he was known. It is also one of the more controversial of Korea’s new religions, not just because of Moon’s political activities but also because of the active proselytizing of his followers in the movement’s early years.
Moon did not follow the usual path to becoming a religious leader. He was trained as an engineer, not as a theologian or even a preacher. Nor did he have a Christian upbringing from birth. His first formal education was in a Confucian elementary school, in which he learned to read Confucian Classics in their original Literary Sinitic. His family did not convert to Christianity until he was ten years old (Breen 1997, 17–23), and he, of course, followed them into the church.
When he was still quite new to Christianity, before he began studying engineering, he had a religious experience that changed his life. When in his mid-teens, in 1935, he had a vision in which Jesus appeared to him and told him that he was entrusting him with a great mission to bring joy into a suffering world. Not understanding yet what that entailed, Moon went on to study at a school centered on commerce and industry in Seoul. While there he became involved with a Pentecostal church founded by the controversial revival preacher Yi Yongdo (1901–1933) (Mickler 2022, 8–10). In 1941, he left Seoul for Tokyo to pursue studies in engineering. It is unclear if Moon became involved with any Christian groups while he was in Tokyo from 1941 to 1943. We do know, however, that he spent much of his free time in Tokyo studying the Bible on his own. That is when he began to formulate his own unique interpretation of what the Bible was saying (Breen 1997, 10).
After Moon returned to Korea in 1943, he became involved with another small nonmainstream Christian Pentecostal community, the Jesus Church Israel Monastery, whose leader taught that Korea was where the second coming of Jesus would take place (Breen 1997, 56). Moon appears to have been an ordinary member of that congregation. There are no records that he was awarded a position of church leadership, much less being asked to share preaching duties with the pastor.
After Korea was liberated from Japanese rule at the end of World War II in 1945, Moon grew restless with his secular job in Seoul and left for P’yŏngyang in 1946 to begin preaching his understanding of the Bible to whoever would listen. P’yŏngyang had become part of the Communist-controlled sector of Korea after 1945 and the Communists running the government there were not pleased when small groups began to gather to hear Moon’s explications of biblical passages, contradicting their Marxist ideology. He was put in prison twice in the north, once for a few months in 1946 and then again in early 1948. He was still in a prison labor camp in Hŭngnam when the Korean War started. He was able to leave prison when United Nations forces approached that city, and his guards fled. He then returned to the south, where he resumed proselytizing even while living as a refugee in Pusan (Pokorny 2018a, 323–4).
In 1954 Moon announced the inauguration of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity – popularly known as the Unification Church – to promote his unique interpretation of the Bible. At first his intention was not to create a separate denomination, but to instead bring the various Christian denominations together under one roof, and under his guidance. That did not happen because the way Moon read and explained the Bible was very different from the way mainstream Christians read and explained it.
What Moon Taught
For example, the influence of Moon’s early education in Confucianism on his version of Christianity is clear. Nowhere does the Bible mention yin and yang.
However, Moon insisted that:
Every entity possesses dual characteristics of yang (masculinity) and yin (femininity) and comes into existence only when these characteristics have formed reciprocal relationships, both within the entity and between it and other entities. (Moon 1996, 30)
That includes God. He taught that God has both male and female characteristics and that is why we can say that God created Adam and Eve in God’s image (Moon 1996, 33). Such emphasis on complementary formative characteristics is much more Confucian than traditional Christian teachings.
In another sign of Confucian influence, Moon wrote that, “The fundamental energy of God’s being is also eternal, self-existent and absolute. It is the origin of all energies and forces that allow created beings to exist. We call this fundamental energy universal prime energy” (Moon 1996, 35). Moon doesn’t use the term ki we see in Confucian writings but his talk of “universal prime energy” sounds like ki under another name. The Bible does not talk about energy that way.
The most obvious example of Confucian influence on Moon’s approach to Christianity is his overwhelming emphasis on the family. Of course, families are important in all religions and in all human societies. However, Moon went further and made marriage and the family central to salvation. Only those who have married will be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven after they die. In Moon’s world, there was no room for celibate clerics as in the Catholic and Buddhist traditions. As one scholar has noted, “In the Unification Church, the family is regarded as the fundamental unit of society and the world; no individual completes him or herself until being blessed in a God-centered marriage” (Miyamoto 1999, 68).
In the theological perspective of the Unification Church, that applies even to Jesus.
Jesus was to embark on the path to save the world but he could not do it alone. ... Before he could do so, he first had to form a family of his own. However, he could not do that in his lifetime ... in order for the Messiah to save humankind on earth, he must form a model family for others to emulate.
(Chambumo Gyeong 2015, 32)
The Unification Church argues that the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, which brought humanity under the dominion of Satan, was that they had carnal relations before their union was blessed by God. Jesus was able to bring spiritual salvation to humanity by teaching about God’s love. However, he was not able to undo the damage done by the creation of a physical lineage linked to Satan when Adam and Eve had their illegitimate carnal relations. To do that, Jesus needed to have children of his own.
In order to free humanity both spiritually and physically from the yoke of Satan, a second messiah was necessary. The messiah had to meet a perfect spouse, have their union blessed by God, and then give birth to children who were free of the taint of Original Sin, which would make the wife a messiah as well. Unificationists believe that Moon and his wife Han Hak Ja (b. 1943), whom he married in 1960 when he was forty and she was seventeen, are the messiahs who completed the task Jesus began but was unable to complete due to his crucifixion. Since they have made it possible, through the marriage ritual called the Blessing, for others to also escape from original sin and thereby allow their children to do so as well, they are called the True Parents (Pokorny 2018a, 332).
The Blessing, not baptism, is the most important ritual in the Unification Church since it is this ritual which is believed to bring human beings back into union with God. It is a complicated set of rituals that can take several days to complete (Miyamoto 1999, 68–71; Buswell 2007, 502–6). The best-known part of the Blessing is the mass wedding in which hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of couples are blessed in the same place at the same time. Often those couples are from different countries and do not even know each other until the Unification Church informs them that they have been chosen to become a blessed married couple. At first, the Blessings were only given to people who had already committed to the Unification movement but, starting in the mid-1990s, couples who were not members of the Unification movement, and may in fact be members of different religious communities, were also allowed to have their marriage blessed (Mickler 2022, 36).
The Family Federation for World Peace and Unification
Highlighting the key role the family plays in Unificationist thought, the name Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity was replaced in 1994 by the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification. Though the name Unification Church continues to be used as well, this formal name change also signaled that Moon wanted his movement, as exemplified by offering the Blessing to non-Unificationists, to move beyond a denominational identity and embrace all humanity (Introvigne 2000, 31–2).
However, there were other developments in Unificationist circles which showed that Moon’s movement still had many Korean rather than universal elements. One such Korean element can be seen in the belief that the dead can speak through the mouths of the living. As noted earlier, Korea has a long tradition of spirit-mediums – people, usually women, who claim that a dead person is speaking to the living through them. There was one particularly dramatic spirit medium in the Unification Movement. Starting in 1994, and lasting until 2015, a woman named Kim Hyonam began speaking in the voice of Hong Sunae (1914–1989), the deceased mother of Han Hak Ja. She was granted official recognition of that role by Moon and Han but later, after Moon had passed away, was told by Han that her service as official medium was no longer needed (Pokorny 2018a, 339; Mickler 2022, 37).
Moon died in September, 2012 (Mickler 2022, 44). His wife, acting as the True Mother, continues to promote his ideas and his movement. One project she brought to fruition was the declaration one year after Moon’s passing that Cheon Il Guk (天一國 an abbreviation for Kingdom of Cosmic Peace and Unity) had been established. In words similar to claims that other Korean new religions have made, she declared that “a new heaven and a new earth have opened, and a new day has dawned” (Chambumo Gyeong 2015, 1487; Pokorny 2018a, 332–3). Few outside the Unification Movement, however, have embraced the opportunity she offered them to become citizens of Cheon Il Guk, though it is described as actualizing God’s ideal world of peace, unity, and happiness (Cheon Il Guk Constitution 2014).
One reason Cheon Il Guk has not grown as fast as the members of the Unification Church had hoped is that the Unification Movement remains controversial for several reasons. Its sharp departure from mainstream Christian doctrines has led many Christians to denounce it as heretical. In its early years, its vigorous proselytizing tactics, and its insistence that members devote their entire lives to spreading Moon’s teachings even if that meant distancing themselves from family members who had not joined the movement, alarmed many observers (Introvigne 2000, 57–60). On top of that, after Moon moved to the United States in 1972, he became involved in US politics, most notably supporting US President Richard Nixon when he was facing impeachment (Gorenfeld 2008, 162–89).
In addition, Moon and his Unification Movement faced public scandals. In the mid-1980s, Moon was imprisoned for tax evasion (Mickler 2022, 29). In the late 1990s a former daughter-in-law published an exposé of behavior by Moon family members which contradicted their claim to be exemplars of virtuous behavior (Hong 1998). And, after Moon passed away and his wife assumed leadership of the movement, she faced opposition from some of their fourteen children. Two of their sons have now established competing organizations in the United States. One run by Preston Moon out of the Seattle area is called the Family Peace Association. Another is the World Peace and Unification Sanctuary established in Pennsylvania by Sean Moon, who has become sharply critical of his mother.
Despite the many obstacles the Unification Movement has faced, not only has it survived, it has become the most visible of Korea’s new religions on the world stage. Determined early on to promote his interpretation of the Bible worldwide, Moon dispatched a missionary to Japan in 1958 and another missionary to the United States in 1959. Though total global membership today is not very large, the Unification Movement has adherents scattered across the globe, a result of sending missionaries to ninety-five different nations (Mickler 2022, 16). That is the reason most non-Koreans, when asked to name a Korean new religion, are most likely to name the Unification Movement.
Olive Tree Movement/Church of the Heavenly Father
Moon was not the only Korean preacher without formal theological training to attract a large enough group of devoted followers to build his own religious organization, attracting a lot of controversy along the way. He was the most successful, however. Others such groups have not had the global impact the Unification Movement has.
One such new religion originating in Christianity began as the Olive Tree Movement. The founder, Park T’aesŏn (1917–1990) was a dynamic and faithhealing preacher who came to public attention after the Korean War. His followers began to see him as one of two witnesses to the power of God mentioned in the New Testament book of Revelation (11:3–12). Those witnesses were called olive trees, so that title was bestowed on Park, and on his movement.
Park had been ordained an elder in a mainstream Presbyterian church in 1954 but was expelled in 1956 for heresy. That didn’t stop him from attracting thousands of followers. Soon he had enough followers to build what he called Villages of the Faithful, towns in which the only inhabitants were those who believed in his teachings. To support themselves and Park’s mission, they worked in factories in those villages that produced goods such as soap and snacks under the Zion label to sell in secular markets.
Park and his Olive Tree movement were a significant presence on the Korean religious landscape until 1980, when he suddenly moved far beyond what most Christians consider acceptable rhetoric. Park declared that the Bible was 98 percent lies and that Jesus was not the son of God but instead was the son of Satan. He added that the true God, the creator of the universe and the one who will preside over the Final Judgment at the end of time, and the only one who can offer salvation to human beings, was none other than Park himself. He also declared that he had lived on earth for 5,780 years already and would never die. Soon afterward he changed the name of his religious community to “The Proselytizing Hall of the Revival Society of the Korean Church of the Heavenly Father.” The Heavenly Father was a reference to Park, not to the Supreme Being in heaven above traditional Christians believed in. The number of his followers dropped dramatically after he began making these startling claims.
Nonetheless, there were still some who continued to believe in his message even after Park died in 1990. Now operating under the name “Church of the Heavenly Father,” they have 124 churches in Korea itself plus four more in the United States (Chunbukyo 2024). Park’s sermons are available in book form under the title “The Word of God” (Hananim malssŭm). Regular Sunday services at a Church of the Heavenly Father begin with a video of Park leading the worshippers in singing hymns. They repeat the same short hymns five or six times. At the end of the video Park is shown using his hands to spread blessings over the crowd of worshippers. Though Park has left this earth, he is still present to those who believe in him (Baker & Kim 2020).
Shincheonji
A more recent new religion with Christian origins is Shincheonji. Shincheonji means “a new heaven and earth,” which echoes the talk among some non-
Christian religions about kaebyŏk. Nevertheless, Shincheonji is firmly rooted in Christian tradition.
The founder, and still the leader, of Shincheonji, is Lee Manhee (b. 1931). Part of the Olive Tree Movement from 1957 to 1967, he left before Park T’aesŏn began claiming that he was God. After searching for several years for a new religious home, in 1984 Lee founded Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony, known usually simply as Shincheonji (Introvigne 2020, 4–6).
Though Lee, like Moon and Park, had no formal theological education, he insists that he has learned what others have not: How to read the Bible correctly. He preaches that much of the Bible should be read as parables which are prophecies. The prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled during the time of Jesus, he says. The prophecies of the New Testament are being fulfilled through Shinchoenji (Introvigne 2020, 9).
Lee tells his followers that he is the “promised pastor” whom he believes the Bible assures will appear near the time of the Second Coming to prepare humanity for the Kingdom of God. He does not claim the title of messiah. He is simply someone God has chosen to help people understand the Bible correctly so they can prepare for the Second Coming (Introvigne 2020, 10–11). Understanding the Bible according to Lee’s interpretation is so important in Shincheonji that people are not admitted into Shincheonji through baptism but through passing an exam testing their comprehension and acceptance of Lee’s interpretations (Introvigne 2020, 13–14).
Because what Lee teaches is so different from what pastors in mainstream Korean Protestant churches teach, his followers have often felt dismissed by outsiders and have therefore sometimes tried to hide their religious orientation. That tendency ended up damaging Shincheonji’s public image at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020 when the government was trying to trace the spread of that disease. Shincheonji was falsely accused by members of the general public of refusing to provide a full list of its members to the government (Grisafi 2021, 42).
Shincheonji is important primarily for the critical attention it received during the Covid pandemic, hurting the reputation of new religions in general. The Church of the Heavenly Father is important both for its rapid rise and fall and for the influence it had on new religions with Christian roots that followed it. The Unification Church is important for becoming the first Korean new religion to gain attention, and adherents, outside the peninsula. All three are important for showing us that Korea has both theocentric and anthropocentric new religions, making it difficult to treat the various new religions in Korea as having a similar spiritual orientation.
6 Indigenous Gods of the New Religions
New religions that emerged from a Christian foundation are not the only theocentric new religions in Korea. There are also several new religions which, from their foundation, have focused their spiritual gaze on a supreme God who, they believe, was incarnated in Korea and, while living as a human being on the peninsula, taught religious truths known at first only to Koreans.
This set of homegrown theocentric new religions can be seen as a form of religious nationalism. Other new religions, such as Won Buddhism and the Unification Church, agree that Korea has a special role to play because of discoveries by Koreans of how human beings can best live the moral lives they are meant to live. However, the non-Christian theocentric new religions go farther and claim that not only did the supreme lord of the universe choose to be incarnated among Koreans, but he taught religious and moral truths that reflect traditional Korean beliefs and values rather than those found in the Bible or other sacred texts with non-peninsula origins. Strengthening their claim that Korea has had privileged access to key religious truths, some of these new religions also promote sacred histories which give Korea a much larger role in world history than non-Korean historians are inclined to grant it.
The most active, and most visible, of these more nationalistic new religions are the group of new religions which believe that the Supreme Lord on High, whom they call by the ancient Sinitic term Sangjenim, came down from heaven and was incarnated as a Korean man with the name Kang Ilsun, later better known as Kang Chŭngsan (1871–1909).
Kang was religiously active for less than a decade. He did not start teaching followers and practicing his unique rituals until 1901. When he died in 1909 – his followers say he returned to heaven – he was only thirty-eight years old (Choi 2009, 131). Yet what he taught and did over those few short years stimulated the birth of several different religious communities which agree that Kang was the Supreme Lord on High dwelling on earth temporarily, but disagree over how best to follow his teachings. Of those many religions centered on the worship of Kang Chŭngsan as Sangjenim, the most visible in recent decades are Daesoon Jinrihoe (The Fellowship of Daesoon Truth) and JeungSanDo (The Dao of Chŭngsan).
Hastening Kaebybŏk
Kaebyŏk is a core element of Kang’s message, one all Chŭngsan religions take seriously. Kang may have learned about kaebyŏk during the Tonghak Uprising of 1894. His father is said to have joined that uprising, and kaebyŏk was one of its rallying cries. Though Kang Chŭngsan was in his early 20s at that time, he did not participate in that protest movement (Jorgensen 2018a, 361). However, it is likely that he heard something about kaebyŏk from either his father or from the rebels and their supporters. After the Tonghak Uprising was defeated, Kang met Kim Ilbu and may have learned from him that the old age of Former Heaven was drawing to a close and a new era was about to replace it (Choi 2009, 128–9).
When Kang began teaching about kaebyŏk in 1901, he went beyond what Tonghak and Kim Ilbu said about it. He offered a new explanation of why the world would soon undergo a Great Transformation, and how human beings should not just prepare for it but also hasten its arrival. A story Chŭngsan religions share is that the Supreme Lord on High was sitting on his throne in the ninth heaven when various sages, buddhas, bodhisattvas – and, according to some sources, the early seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary to China Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) – came to him to beg him to do something to save humanity from the miserable state people had fallen into (S. Yi 2001, 258; Choi 2009, 137).
According to Chŭngsan scriptures, after descending to earth to observe what was happening there, the Supreme Lord on High realized both unending conflicts within the human community and a lack of cooperative coordination between human beings and inhabitants of the spiritual realm were the reasons the situation had deteriorated so much. Conflicts were increasing because the universe as it was at that time – the Former Heaven – was dominated by sanggŭk 相剋, a condition of constant competition among the various components of heaven, earth, and humanity. This was causing those on the losing end of those competitions to feel aggrieved. As their resentment grew at what they felt was mistreatment, the universe grew more and more unstable. The only solution was a Great Transformation which would replace sanggŭk with sangsaeng 相生, mutual support and cooperation, in a Latter Heaven.
Sanggŭk and sangsaeng are terms with roots in ancient Chinese thought. They were traditionally used in the context of the Five Phases, which are given the names wood, soil, water, fire, and metal. Those Five Phases are seen as sometimes caught up in a circular relationship of “mutual contention,” a destructive series of relationships and interactions in which wood, by growing out of the ground, breaks up the soil; soil blocks the flow of water; water puts out fire; fire melts metal; and metal cuts wood. It then starts up again with wood breaking up the soil. The Five Phases are not actual wood, soil, water, fire, and metal, but instead are terms applied to the five different ways changes occur and influence each other in an endless cycle of interactive processes, including interactions within the human community. The Five Phases, sometimes called the Five Agents because of the active role they play in shaping how change unfolds, encompass all the stages in the transformations that create and re-create the universe, not just to what those five specific material entities do.
The interactive relationships of sanggŭk are sometimes referred to as interactions of mutual destruction. Fortunately, however, those Five Phases also can have more productive interactions called sangsaeng. This refers to another circular series of relationships and interactions. However, in the sangsaeng cycle, wood fuels fires; fires then produce soil (ash); metal then forms in that soil; water (dew) forms on that metal; that water then ensures that wood can grow; which then leads to fires; and leading in turn to creation rather than destruction (Graham 1986, 47–66).
Sangsaeng does not, of course, refer only to productive interactions among the Five Phases in nature. It also refers to human beings working together in fruitful harmony in order to create better lives for everyone. In a sangsaeng world, human beings will stop harming each other by putting their own selfish interests ahead of the common good. Instead, they will act in such a way as to ensure that those around them benefit and, as a result, they will also create a better world for themselves.
This is what the Supreme Lord on High knew humanity and the universe needed. He therefore decided to incarnate as a human being known as Kang Chŭngsan in order to inaugurate the Great Transformation to a sangsaeng world. He began kaebyŏk with his Ch’ŏnji kongsa (天地公事 ritual for the reconstruction of heaven and earth) (D. Kim 2020, 79–81).
Ch’ŏnji kongsa was not a single ritual. Instead, it was a series of rituals performed over the course of about eight years. Moreover, Kang taught that the work of reconstructing heaven and earth would not be completely accomplished while he was on earth. He was simply initiating the process that human beings had to carry on after he had returned to heaven. That process would take a long time because it had three key components: the creation of a paradise on earth, the improvement of relations between human beings and spirits by resolving the conflicts which were damaging both the human and spiritual realms, and, finally, helping human beings achieve the first goal by working with the spirit world to do so (K. Lee 1967, 51). Moreover, those goals could not be achieved until human beings not only had their own grievances resolved, but also no longer created grievances in others. The Great Transformation will therefore involve changes both in the universe and in individual human beings.
Daesoon Jinrihoe and Haewŏn: The Elimination of Grievances and Grudges
For Daesoon Jinrihoe, one of the major Chŭngsan NRMs, this Great Transformation must begin with the elimination of grievances. Eliminating grievances is known in Korean as haewŏn (解寃). Haewŏn sangsaeng (eliminating grievances in order to create a world of mutual support and cooperation) is one of the four key points in Daesoon Jinrihoe’s list of what it calls its Four Tenets (Daesoon Institute 2020, 27). However, the term “tenet” may be somewhat misleading in English. Tenet implies in English a belief in a specific fact.
However, the four tenets of Daesoon thought refer to the belief that four changes are in the process of emerging in the world in which we live and have been doing so since Kang Chŭngsan initiated chŏnji kongsa in the early twentieth century. One of those changes is that people who have been acting contrary to each other rather than cooperating as they should, will now begin to interact appropriately and complement each other. The way this tenet should be understood is much more active than is implied in the English label “tenet.” It means that the work of reordering heaven and earth, and human relations, is bringing human beings into harmonious cooperation. Tenet here, therefore, refers to a belief about what is emerging rather than a belief about what is a settled fact now.
Haewŏn literally means untying the knots formed by grievances. Sangsaeng “means that one must think of the interests or benefits of other people first before our own” (G. Lee 2010, 113). Haewŏn sangsaeng is a promise to end the conflicts which have been increasingly tearing human society apart because of some people mistreating and taking advantage of others. An end to such conflicts will usher in a peaceful and harmonious society and universe. That promise of a Great Transformation is precisely what the Chŭngsan religions are all about (Cha 2024).
However, the other three tenets of Daesoon Jinrihoe are also important. They are to have yin and yang complement each other rather than compete, to have humans and spirits work together rather than at cross purposes, and, finally, to create a paradise on this earth through unification with the Dao – the Way all human beings should behave (D. Kim 2020, 194–205).
When yin and yang complement each other, men will no longer dominate women. Instead, men and women will be equal. Kang believed one of the reasons for the dire state humanity had fallen into was because women’s resentment at the way they had been mistreated over the centuries had accumulated to a dangerous level.
As far as having human beings and spirits work together harmoniously, that requires human beings to show their willingness to cooperate with spirits by paying proper ritual respect to their own family’s ancestral spirits. This echoes the Confucian emphasis on filial piety and respect for the elderly. Kang promised that as spirits and human beings began to cooperate more, humans would find that they have gained god-like characteristics.
Finally, when grievances have been eliminated because human beings have developed mutually supportive relationships with their fellow human beings and mutually cooperative relationships with spiritual beings, life on earth will become a paradise. There will be no more wars and no more disease. Nor will there be anyone living in poverty. As a result, people will live happily forever (D. Kim 2020, 204–8).
Differences between Daesoon Jinrihoe and JeungSanDo
The two largest and most visible Chŭngsan religions – Daesoon Jinrihoe and JeungSanDo – share the belief that Kang Chŭngsan is the Supreme Lord on High and that he descended to earth in order to show humanity how to hasten kaebyŏk. His teachings will end the troubles human beings are dealing with today and instead create a paradise on this earth. Nevertheless, there are significant differences between these two new religions.
The first major difference is their lineage. Daesoon Jinrihoe traces its lineage back to Cho Ch’ŏlje (1895–1958). Cho never met Kang when he was on this earth, but said he had a vision in 1917 in which Kang instructed him to assume responsibility for hastening kaebyŏk. He founded a religious community to carry out that task. After Cho’s death in 1958, the community began to fragment. One high-ranking member of that community, Pak Hangyŏng (1917– 1996), left that community’s headquarters in Pusan and, in 1968, established a new religious group in Seoul, which he called Daesoon Jinrihoe (Jorgensen 2018a, 363–5). That group has grown into the largest of the Chŭngsan groups. It runs a university north of Seoul, a general hospital south of Seoul, and several high schools throughout South Korea. The 2015 census found fewer than 42,000 people who said they were members of Daesoon Jinrihoe but, given the fact that they can support a university, three hospitals, several high schools, dozens of Fellowship Halls, and five major worship/retreat centers called Tojang, that appears to be a significant undercount (Statistics Korea 2017; Daesoon Jinrihoe 2025).
JeungSanDo is the other highly visible new religion focusing its spiritual gaze on Kang Chŭngsan (Flaherty 2021). Jeungsan is an alternative spelling of Chŭngsan. Though it doesn’t appear to have as many members as Daesoon Jinrihoe does, and doesn’t have its own university or general hospital, it nevertheless is quite well known because of its active proselytizing, especially on Korean university campuses and overseas.
JeungSanDo traces its lineage directly back to Kang Chŭngsan and those who knew him while he was on earth. They pay special attention to Ko P’allye (1880–1935) who lived with Kang during his last years and then was wed to him in a spirit wedding after his death (JeungSanDo DoJeon 1995, 585). As T’aemonim (the Great Mother), she is worshipped alongside Kang, marking a major difference from Daesoon Jinrihoe (Logie 2024). Established after World War II, JeungSanDo claims direct descent from Kang Chŭngsan through Ko P’allye.
Another distinctive feature of JeungSanDo is the emphasis it places on what it believes are 9,000 years of Korean history. The current leader of JeungSanDo not only claims that the ancient history of Korea, with its many accomplishments, has been suppressed. He also claims that Koreans founded the first civilization on earth and therefore all later human civilizations can trace their origins back to Hwanguk, an empire he asserts was founded by Koreans 9,000 years ago (G. Ahn 2016).
Taejonggyo
A new religion sharing a similarly grandiose view of Korean history, though worshipping a different Korean god, is Taejonggyo (the religion of the grand progenitor). The god of Taejonggyo goes back much farther than the god of the Chŭngsan religions. Taejonggyo worships Tan’gun, the legendary founder and first ruler of what they believe is an ancient Korean state of Old Chosŏn (2333 BCE–194 BCE). The oldest extant records mentioning Tan’gun are from a thirteenth-century collection of stories that include both legends and history (Jorgensen 2018b, 279). However, Taejonggyo teaches that the account of Tan’gun being the child of a union between the son of God in heaven above and a bear-turned-woman on earth below reflects an actual historical memory passed down orally before it was put into writing for the first time in the thirteenth century.
Taejonggyo teaches that Tan’gun is the incarnation of God in heaven, whom they call Hanŏllim. Hanŏllim is one god but also has three personalities, which Taejonggyo defines as “three gods in one body” (Jorgensen 2018b, 289). First, there is god as creator. Taejonggyo teaches that Hanŏllim created the first human beings, from whom the five races (yellow, white, black, red, and blue) are descended (Weon & Wu 2008, 58). Second, there is god as teacher, who also was the father of Tan’gun. Third, there is god as ruler, which is Tan’gun. Some scholars have suggested that this trinitarian theology suggests Christian influence (Jorgensen 2018b, 288–9). Those who believe Taejonggyo is the revival of an ancient Korean religion push back against this assertion, however, claiming instead that Christians have stolen the idea of three persons in one god and even the name of god from that original religion of the Korean people (Buswell 2007, 470–5).
As the first ruler of the Korean people, Tan’gun is said to have founded the first Korean religion. However, the religion faded from the consciousness of the Korean people when the Mongols conquered Korea in the thirteenth century (Weon & Wu 2008, 65). Fortunately, according to Taejonggyo, the original Korean religion was revived in 1909 – on the eve of the Japanese absorption of Korea into the Japanese empire – by Na Ch’ŏl (1863–1916). Na insisted that Taejonggyo is not a new religion. Instead, it is the revival of that ancient religion centered on the worship of the triune god Hanŏllim (Jorgensen 2018b, 281–3).
In its first couple of decades, Taejonggyo was more than just a religion. It was also a strong anti-Japanese political movement that created a small army that resisted Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s (Jorgensen 2018b, 285). Though it was defeated militarily, it survived underground as a religion and resurfaced once Korea regained its independence after 1945. The first minister of education for the ROK, Ahn Ho-sang (1902–1999), was a believer in Taejonggyo (H. Ahn 1963). Ahn is the reason South Koreans today celebrate October 3 as National Foundation Day, supposedly the day Tan’gun established his kingdom of Old Chosŏn. Ahn is also the reason that, during the first decade of the ROK, official documents were dated from the year of the founding of Old Chosŏn rather than from the year of the birth of Jesus Christ (Jorgensen 2018b, 286).
There are only a few thousand members of the Taejonggyo community today. However, Taejonggyo has influenced Koreans more than that small number would suggest. Not only is October 3 a national holiday in South Korea, but many nationalistic groups have adopted the broad outlines of the history of Korea Taejonggyo continues to promote. Taejonggyo does not push Korean history as far back as the 9,000 years JeungSanDo proposes, but it has created a calendar of Korean history starting more than 4,000 years in the past – in 2333 BCE, when Taejonggyo says Tan’gun ascended the throne of Old Chosŏn (Taejonggyo yogam 1992, 366–9). That date is the basis for the popular saying in Korea that Korea has a 5,000-year history.
Dahn World
The influence of Taejonggyo is clear in another group which says it is not a religion but often teaches and acts like one. That group is called Dahn World in Korea and both Body and Brain and Tao Fellowship outside of Korea.
Founded in 1985 by Yi Sŭnghŏn (a.k.a. Ilchi Lee, b. 1950), Dahn World presents itself to outsiders as concerned primarily with physical and mental health rather than religious matters. It attracts newcomers to its many practice halls in Korea and abroad by promising to teach longevity-enhancing breathing practices and physical exercises. However, those who look more deeply into Dahn World see signs that it is an offshoot of Taejonggyo. First of all, though Dahn World does not say Tan’gun is a god, it nonetheless elevates him to almost divine status. There are large statues of Tan’gun both in the North American headquarters of the Tao Fellowship in Sedona, Arizona as well as in a Park of the History and Culture of the Korean People which Yi has established near his University of Brain Education in Ch’ŏnan, South Korea (Baker 2018, 384).
Moreover, in the late 1990s, an organization founded by Yi led a controversial campaign to erect statues of Tan’gun in public places across South Korea (N.
Kim 2017, 314–15).
Even stronger evidence of Dahnhak being influenced by Taejonggyo is its respect for one of the scriptures of Taejonggyo, the Ch’ŏnbugyŏng (the Celestial Amulet Sutra). Only eighty-one Sino-Korean characters long and almost indecipherable, it is presented as written in Tan’gun’s time or even earlier (M. Kim 2000, 78). Yi Sŭnghŏn has gone on to claim that it provides guidance for meditating in such a way that we unite with the energy (ki) of the cosmos (S. Yi 2023). The Ch’ŏnbugyŏng hangs on the walls of Dahn World’s practice halls both in Korea and elsewhere and is also inscribed on a stone next to the large statue of Tan’gun in Sedona.
In recent decades, Yi Sŏnghŏn has moved beyond Taejonggyo to push Korean history, and Korean gods, even farther back in time. He now also promotes the story of Mago, a goddess who supposedly ruled over humanity in a castle paradise somewhere in northeast Asia (Buswell 2007, 511–13). While in 2010 local authorities ordered The Tao Fellowship to tear down a thirty-nine-foot-high statue of Mago they had erected in Cottonwood, Arizona, Yi Sŏnghŏn continues to promote Mago as the goddess Mother Earth (Lemons 2010). The retreat center his Tao Fellowship runs in Sedona, Arizona, is called the Sedona Mago Center for Well-being and Retreat (Sedona Mago Retreat 2024).
Daesoon Jinrihoe, JeungSanDo, Taejonggyo, and Dahn World are all examples of Korean new religions that reject the anthropocentric spirituality of Ch’ŏndogyo, Won Buddhism and Confucianism but also reject the theocentric worship of the Christian God as incompatible with Korea’s ancient Indigenous culture. They are expressions in religious form of Korean nationalism and pride in Korean heritage (Ro 2002, 59–60). All of the new religions of Korea discussed in this Element are manifestations of religious nationalism in that they all assert that Korea has special spiritual insights to offer the world. However, the religions discussed in this section are more nationalistic than the others. They focus their spiritual gaze on a distinctly Korean supreme deity as well as on a distinctive sacred Korean history. They are even more Koreacentric than the other new religions of Korea and therefore draw attention to the interplay of religion and ethnic identity in modern Korean culture.
7 Religions and the State
New religions are often pushed to the margins of their societies and dismissed as not authentic religions. The terms used to deny new religions legitimacy are cult, pseudo-religion, and, when they are attacked by those from the same religious tradition, heresy. These new religions are typically marginalized not just by older religions but also by society at large. They are marginalized because they lack the legitimacy age and longevity can provide, even though some of them claim to be revivals of older religious traditions. They are also marginalized because their beliefs and practices are not shared by a substantial percentage of the members of the society in which they live and therefore appear “weird.”
Not all new religions in Korea have been denied acceptance. In the ROK, Won Buddhism is granted the same respectability as the three mainstream religious communities (Buddhist, Protestant, and Catholic). It provides clerics for state funerals for deceased presidents. And it provides official chaplains to Korea’s military. However, that is not the case with the many other new religions in Korea. Those groups do not enjoy the respect from the government and the general public Won Buddhism enjoys.
Such marginalization of new religions is not unique to Korea, of course. It happens all over the world when a new religion gains visibility. However, the history of how new religions have been treated in Korea in recent centuries has some distinct characteristics. Korea had a long history, before the second half of the twentieth century, of religious organizations lacking the autonomy and power to challenge the government, even on matters concerning how, where, and when they could perform their own rituals. Instead, religious activity was only allowed within parameters established by the state. Moreover, in the last century, changes in the way Koreans classified religious activity and the way the state dealt with religious communities was significantly influenced by foreign examples and even foreign pressure.
Both South Korea and North Korea treat religion in very different ways than the Chosŏn dynasty did several centuries ago. Nevertheless, the legacy of the past remains strong enough to influence how religions are treated today in both North and South Korea.
Religious Persecution under the Chosŏn Dynasty
Even though the word “religion” was not used until the last decades of the Chosŏn dynasty in the late nineteenth century, there was plenty of activity we today can deem religious throughout the five centuries of Chosŏn (Baker 2022, 4). The one religion granted full acceptance was Confucianism. Its ancestral memorial rituals, for example, were not only welcomed by the government, but they were also mandated. On the other hand, Buddhism and the folk religion, including its shamans, were tolerated but operated under severe restrictions. The Chosŏn government limited, to a relatively small number, the Buddhist temples and the monks residing in them who were granted exemption from the land taxes and military service – requirements imposed on the rest of the population who were not members of the ruling elite. Shamans were treated even worse. They were taxed on the income from their religious activity and could even face legal punishment if their rituals offended government officials.
Ritual activity was most likely to encounter hostility from Chosŏn’s Confucian state if it violated the ritual hegemony of the government. Ritual hegemony allowed the state to decide which rituals were legal and which were illegal. In broader terms, it meant the state reserved to itself the power to specify which spirits could be worshipped, by whom they could be worshipped, when and where they could be worshipped, and how they could be worshipped. It was important for the state to wield control over ritual since one way the state maintained its claim to legitimate authority was to control access to supernatural entities and forces.
Ritual hegemony of the state is not unique to Korea. We can find a statement about the state’s ritual hegemony in the ancient Chinese history the Zuo Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. In a commentary on the events of the spring of the thirteenth year of Lord Cheng, we can read “The great affairs of the domain lie with sacrifice and warfare” (Confucius 2016, 803). “Sacrifice” here refers to ritual sacrifice. The East Asian world avoided the split between secular and religious authority that we see in modern Europe. In East Asia, government authority was supported by two pillars, the control of force and the control of ritual. Any group that challenged either one of those two pillars was viewed as a threat to the state and treated accordingly. This was as true of Chosŏn Korea as it was of other governments in traditional East Asia.
The law code of Ming Dynasty China (1368–1644), which also served as the law code of the Chosŏn dynasty, made clear that the ritual hegemony of the state could be enforced with capital punishment. That punishment was rarely imposed on Buddhists or shamans in Chosŏn, however. It was reserved for the new religions of Catholicism and Tonghak.
Catholicism was, of course, not a new religion in the usual sense of that term. When the first Catholic community in Korea emerged in the 1780s, global Catholicism already had a history of almost two millennia. However, it was new to Korea and was denied the toleration granted religions such as Buddhism and shamanism which had already been active in Korea for well over a millennium. It might have managed to escape notice, and escape persecution, except for its challenge to the state’s ritual hegemony.
The first Catholic community in Korea was formed by Confucian scholars who had been converted not by missionaries in Korea but by books written by missionaries in China which had been imported into Korea. They began corresponding with Catholic authorities in Beijing and learned in 1790 that Catholics were not allowed to erect a spirit table for a deceased ancestor or bow before that tablet in a Confucian mourning ritual. The pope in Rome had ruled that such a ritual show of filial piety was a form of idolatry. Unfortunately for those Catholics, Chosŏn’s Confucian government required the eldest sons in Confucian scholar families to show their love for departed parents and grandparents by performing the ritual the pope had condemned.
In 1791 the mother of one of Korea’s first Catholics died. He held a memorial service for her but did not erect a spirit tablet. His violation of Confucian ritual requirements was reported to the government and he was executed. That was the beginning of almost a century of off-and-on-again deadly persecution of Catholics in Korea which cost hundreds – some say thousands – of lives. The persecution was wide-ranging, even taking the lives of younger sons as well as women and children who were not expected to erect spirit tablets. Their crime was being part of a religious community that had threatened the ritual dominion of the government (Baker 2022).
Ch’ŏndogyo, then known as Tonghak, suffered a similar fate. It was clearly a new religion, but some of its features reminded the Chosŏn government of Catholicism. Among the names Ch’oe Cheu, the founder, used for God was Ch’ŏnju (Lord of Heaven), the Catholic word for God. Borrowing the Catholic name for God was not the only reason Ch’oe met with hostility from his government. He also gathered followers around him, forming the sort of congregations Catholics had formed. In addition, he taught them various rituals and religious practices that were different enough from traditional shamanic and Buddhist rituals and practices to attract official attention. This was a clear challenge to the ritual authority of the government.
After only four years of preaching the efficacy of incantations invoking the Lord of Heaven, as well as sword dances and other novel rituals, Ch’oe was arrested and executed. The reports to the throne that led to the decision to execute him and exile his followers emphasized his use of the Catholic term for God as well as the many novel ritual practices he and his followers engaged in (Kojong sillok 2024, accession year 12. 20 Imjin and yr 1. 2.29 Kyŏngja). However, the official charge for which he was executed was “forming a band for immoral purposes” (Kojong sillok 2024, yr. 1. 3.2 Imin). Immoral purposes meant, among other things, performing and teaching illicit rituals. Ch’oe was decapitated because he formed a new religion that challenged the ritual hegemony of the state.
That ritual impropriety was a prime concern of the Chosŏn state is even clearer in the way the government dealt with Ch’oe Sihyŏng, who assumed leadership of the Tonghak movement after Ch’oe Cheu’s execution. Ch’oe managed to stay alive for more than three decades by hiding from government officials, but the peasant uprising of 1894, the largest such uprising in Korean history up to that point, had used the Tonghak organization to mobilize peasants across the peninsula. That association of Tonghak with a serious armed threat to the government convinced the government to intensify its search for Ch’oe Sihyŏng. He was captured in spring, 1898, and executed a few weeks later.
Even though Ch’oe Sihyŏng was the head of the religious community that lent its name and some of its organization to an uprising that almost toppled the government, he was not charged with treason. Instead, he was sentenced to death by strangulation for “departing from the Way [Dao] and creating a disturbance.” In other words, he was executed because he had challenged the ritual hegemony of the Chosŏn state. That reason was made explicit in the official call for his execution in which it is stated that, though he did not take direct command of the Tonghak uprising, nevertheless he was responsible for the violence that occurred because he had misled the people with his incantations, talismans, and other unacceptable religious practices (Kojong sillok, yr 35.7.18 yangnyŏk).
Colonial Rule
When Japan absorbed Chosŏn into its colonial empire in 1910, it imposed on Korea a new understanding of the role of religion in society. Wanting to appear respectable and modern in Western eyes, near the end of the nineteenth century Japan had officially adopted a policy of religious freedom. However, that did not mean that all religions were granted equal legal status. Japan granted religious freedom to the imported Western religion of Christianity as well as to local Buddhism but reserved the right to determine which other religious communities constituted genuine religions deserving religious freedom. Japan also defined State Shinto as nonreligious because, even though State Shinto shrines were sites for interactions with spirits, State Shinto was seen as cultural rather than religious and therefore embracing all Japanese, unlike religions which embraced only a subset of believers within the overall population. Participation in State Shinto rituals was a mandatory civic duty. No freedom of religion exemption was allowed. Freedom of religion in Japan was therefore limited, with the government exercising the authority to determine what was and was not legitimate religious activity and to determine the limits of religious freedom (Hardacre 1989, 114–32).
When Korea was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945, the same understanding of both religion as well as religious freedom was applied to Korea as well. In 1915, the colonial government of Korea promulgated an ordinance which declared that only three religious groups would be allowed to proselytize in Korea: Christianity (in its Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox forms), Buddhism, and Shinto (I. Yun 2007, 43–5). Shinto in that ordinance is defined as “denominational Shinto,” which refers to new religions of Japan that had Shinto roots but were not part of the official apparatus of State Shinto. Since it had already been declared to not fall under the “religion” category, State Shinto did not fall under the purview of that ordinance (I. Yun 2007, 137). The new religions in Korea at that time, such as Ch’ŏndogyo, Taejonggyo, and the Chŭngsan religions, were tolerated unless their language became too political and nationalistic. They were denied legal status as officially recognized religions, however. Instead, they were called “quasi-religions” (Murayama 1991). Even Won Buddhism – though at that time it went under the name of “the society for the study of Buddhist teachings” – was not granted full recognition as a respectable religion (Sørensen 1993, 63–5).
Since this 1915 ordinance is called the ordinance on regulating proselytizing, we can assume that colonial authorities felt the need for a legal tool for distinguishing between legitimate religions and those they deemed illegitimate. One useful distinction was successful proselytizing among members of ethnic groups that were not the ethnic group out of which that religion emerged. Respectable religions demonstrated their respectability by attracting followers from different ethnic communities and countries. That was true of Buddhism, Christianity, and some of Japan’s new religions, which the government at the time classified as sect Shinto. Korean new religions, however, did not try to gain any non-Korean followers at that time and therefore they were not respectable. Instead, they were deemed quasi-religions. When Korean new religions tried to gain official permission to proselytize, they were told that they were not real religions and therefore could not be legally permitted to proselytize (Aono 2010).
New Religions in the Republic of Korea
When Japan lost the Pacific War and was forced to relinquish its colonial holdings, Koreans in the southern part of the peninsula gained religious freedom. (North Korea has a different approach to dealing with religion, which will be dealt with in Section 8.) In South Korea today, the government no longer claims ritual hegemony. That does not mean no traces of the oversight of religious communities under the Chosŏn dynasty and during colonial rule remain. Within the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism in Seoul, there is a Religious Affairs Office (MCST 2024). However, it is not tasked with determining whether a particular religion is legitimate or not. Instead, the Religious Affairs Office is supposed to protect civil servants from religious discrimination, promote interreligious cooperation, and support the activities of various religious organizations. In 2022, the office provided over eleven million dollars to support the religious and cultural activities of various religious communities, including Ch’ŏndogyo (US State Department 2023a, 8). There is even one official given responsibility for working with new religions. Clearly, as far as the government is concerned, new religions are no longer considered quasi-religions.
In society at large, however, some new religions still face dismissal as unworthy of the name religion. They are sometimes labeled cults or, in the case of new religions with Christian origins, heresies. Not all new religions today have such labels applied to them. Won Buddhism is as respected as the major mainstream religions are. Very few Koreans realize that Ch’ŏndogyo still exists, so it is not subject to disparagement, either. The same is true of the very small new religions built on a Confucian foundation. They don’t attract enough attention to suffer disdain. However, the Chŭngsan family of religions, especially Daesoon Jinrihoe and JeungSanDo which are the largest religions centered on the worship of Kang Chŭngsan as the Lord on High, are sometimes criticized in the press and in popular discourse. That is probably because unlike Won Buddhism and Ch’ŏndogyo, they encourage active proselytization, and that bothers Koreans who are devout members of other religious communities or who do not want to think about gods, spirits, or other supernatural entities.
The new religions which have encountered the most negative attention are those religions which originated in Protestant Christianity: the Unification Church, the Church of the Heavenly Father, Shincheonji, Victory Altar, and the Kuwon Sect. Moreover, critics tend to be representatives of mainstream Protestant denominations. Those critics, of course, do not have the authority to bring legal action against people or groups promoting what they consider heresy, though they sometimes try to forcibly “deprogram” people who have joined those groups (Introvigne et al. 2020, 12–13). The religious leaders of those so-called heretical groups only run into legal trouble when they are suspected of violating secular laws rather than religious doctrines or ritual demands.
For example, as noted in Section 5, Shincheonji ran into trouble in 2020 when half of the early cases of Covid-19 in Korea appeared among its members. Its founder, Lee Manhee, was falsely accused of refusing to comply with a government order to provide a list of all its members so the spread of that disease could be traced, and measures could be taken to prevent the further spread of that disease. That accusation pushed Shincheonji farther to the margins of society than new religions usually have been in Korea (Grisafi 2021). Lee was arrested and, though the government failed to convict him of violating a government demand, he was convicted of embezzlement (Grisafi 2021, 53).
A similar charge was made against Moon Sun Myung when he was living in the United States. In the 1980s, he was convicted, and imprisoned, on a charge of failing to pay taxes on the interest accrued by church funds he held in his own personal bank account (Sherwood 1991). Failing to maintain a clear distinction between a pastor’s personal income and the financial resources of his church is not an unusual practice even in mainstream Korean Protestant denominations, so his conviction did not have as great an impact on Moon’s reputation in Korea as it did in the United States.
In Korea, Cho Hee-sung (1931–2004), the leader of a group that split offfrom the Olive Tree Movement, Victory Altar, was arrested in 1994 on much more serious charges. In 1994 he was sent to prison for six years for committing fraud. Three years after he was released, he was arrested again. This time the charge was murder. He was sentenced to death but died of natural causes before that sentence was carried out (Introvigne 2017).
Earlier, Park T’aesŏn, the founder of the Olive Tree Movement who later became known as the Heavenly Father, had been arrested, and jailed on similarly serious charges. In the late 1950s he was thrown in jail on charges of injuring people, some mortally, with his overenthusiastic ritual massage – believed to grant salvation – as well as for defrauding people by promising to heal the sick in exchange for offerings given to him or his church. He spent fifteen months behind bars at that time and was again jailed in the early 1960s for allegedly aiding Syngman Rhee (1875–1965) to rig the presidential election in 1960. He was released in 1962. He was then able to stay out of legal trouble for the rest of his life, although his claims starting in 1980 that he, not Jesus, was God caused him to be severely criticized as a heretic by many mainstream Christian leaders (Baker & Kim 2020).
More recently Yu Pyŏngŭn (1941–2014) – usually spelled Yoo Byung-eun – provided another example of a religious leader who was accused of crimes against secular laws rather than being persecuted for his religious beliefs. Yu was a leader of one of Korea’s Kuwonp’a (Salvationists) groups, an offshoot of a Baptism denomination. He was also a businessman. One company he had been deeply involved with owned a ship which, because of neglect of safety requirements, sank in 2014, costing the lives of more than 300 people, most of whom were high school students on a school trip. Though it was never conclusively proven that Yu was in charge of the company that owned the ship, popular opinion assumed that he was. Moreover, authorities investigating the ownership of the ship charged Yu with embezzlement – including embezzlement of church funds – and dangerous negligence. He went into hiding to avoid arrest but was found lying dead in a field a few days later (Choe et al. 2014; Choe 2022).
The vast majority of founders of Korean new religions had not had to deal with the sorts of legal problems these five faced. Moreover, most of those new religions whose founders encountered legal problems have overcome those bumps in the road. They continue to attract believers today, though usually under new and less controversial leadership. Many of Korea’s new religions suffer from public disdain even if their leaders have not engaged in questionable activity. Such discrimination results from the popular expectation that nonmainstream religions, in order to be accepted as respectable, should hew closely to the mainstream traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, or Christianity in their beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, in South Korea today both old and new religions enjoy the legal religious freedom new religions in particular were denied during the Chosŏn dynasty and under Japanese colonial rule. That is not the case, however, in the northern part of the peninsula for both traditional religions and almost all of Korea’s new religions. In the North, the customary relationship between religions and the state remains.
8 North Korea and Juche
All of the new religions discussed so far emerged in what is now the territory of the ROK, commonly known as South Korea. That includes even those new religions which appeared before 1945 when the entire Korean peninsula was unified under a single government. It also includes the Unification Church. Though its founder Moon Sun Myung was born in what is now North Korea before 1945, he and his followers did not coalesce into an organized new religion called the Unification Church until they were in the southern part of the peninsula.
There is, however, one organized community defined by its beliefs and its rituals which originated in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), commonly known as North Korea. That system of beliefs and values is called Juche (主體). Whether or not Juche should be classified as a religion is a matter of debate among scholars (H. Park 1996, 10–11; Leverton 2020, 188). North Koreans themselves insist that it is not a religion, since it is atheistic. They prefer to label it a philosophy or a way of thought (US State Department 2023b, 13). Nevertheless, a close examination of Juche reveals that it shares many of the characteristics seen in other new religions. Juche has its own set of ritual practices, its own sacred sites, its own set of infallible writings, its own concept of life after death, and even has its own object of a spiritual gaze, Kim Il Sung (1912–1994), who is viewed as so extraordinary that he appears almost divine.
Non-Juche Religion in North Korea
Before Juche, North Korea was not a spiritual desert. As part of a unified Korea, it had the same religious culture as the southern part of the peninsula. There were shamans in the north as well as Buddhists and Confucians. Moreover, when Christianity entered the peninsula, it gained adherents in both the north and the south. In fact, by 1945 around 60 percent of all of Korea’s Protestants lived in what is now North Korea, as did the majority of members of Ch’ŏndogyo, and almost 40 percent of Korea’s Catholics (Kim & Chŏng 1964, 340; Baker 2006, 296; Beirne & Young 2018, 264).
That changed when Korea was split in two after Japan was defeated in World War II. Taking advantage of their roles in the defeat of Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States divided the Korean peninsula into two zones of occupation, with the Soviet Union claiming responsibility for governing the north in place of the colonial Japanese government, and the United States claiming the same responsibility in the south. In 1948 those occupations ended, and were replaced by two separate independent Korean governments, a communist DPRK in the north and a pro-Western ROK in the south.
Because of the anti-religious and anti-Western policies of the DPRK government, most Protestants and Catholics had moved south by 1950. Many of the Ch’ŏndogyo believers stayed, however. Those with a religious identity who remained in the north found their religious activities, especially proselytizing, severely restricted. The DPRK government allows a Buddhist League, a Ch’ŏndogyo Central Committee, a Christian Federation (for Protestants), and a Catholic Association to exist and to use a small number of buildings for their services but, since they are not allowed to proselytize, they have few members (Wells 2008, 251). In recent years, a Russian Orthodox church was allowed to open in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, though it is for Russian diplomats rather than ordinary North Koreans. Most North Koreans do not even realize religious organizations exist in their country (Wells 2008, 250).
Buddhism, because it was seen as premodern, and Christianity in both its Catholic and Protestant versions, because they were seen as pro-Western, faced more discrimination in the north than did Ch’ŏndogyo. Because Ch’ŏndogyo was seen as an Indigenous religion and also because of its association with the Tonghak peasant uprising of 1894, it was allowed to form a political party, called the Ch’ŏndogyo ch’ŏngudang (Young Friends Party), which has been given a token presence in the North Korean parliament. That official recognition attracted a couple of Ch’ŏndogyo leaders in the south to defect to the north in the late 1980s and 1990s (Beirne & Young 2018, 275). However, even though there are said to be as many as fifty-two sites in North Korea set aside for Ch’ŏndogyo members to gather, Ch’ŏndogyo has had little influence on either the politics or the religious culture of North Korea (US State Department 2023b, 16).
Juche – Evolution of a Religion
These small state-controlled religious organizations do not represent the primary manifestation of religion in North Korea. That position is held by Juche. The religiosity of Juche is sometimes challenged because it began as, and is still grounded in, a political ideology. However, over the decades since it began to emerge in the 1960s, it has grown to serve as a functional equivalent of a religion for most North Koreans (Leverton 2020).
The term “Juche” was first used in a public address by the founding leader of the DPRK, Kim Il Sung, in 1955, when North Korea was trying to find an ideological justification for staying neutral in the emerging split in the Communist camp between China and the USSR. At that time, the idea of Juche – which literally means “self-reliance” – was used to assert that the DPRK should be self-reliant politically, economically, and culturally and should not rely on any other country, even a Communist one, for support or guidance (H. Park 1996, 21). It has not yet been designated the guiding philosophy of DPRK or applied to the everyday life of the people of the DPRK.
However, starting in the 1960s, the meaning of Juche expanded to embrace much more than economic and political autonomy for the DPRK. It came to mean autonomy for human beings in everything they do. Juche doctrine proclaims that human beings should break free of any dependency on God or other supernatural beings and realize that men and women, working together, can achieve all of their goals without any supernatural assistance. As Kim Jong-Il (1941–2011) explained, “the Juche idea is based on the philosophical principle that the human being is the master of everything and decides everything” (Buswell 2007, 526). Despite Kim Il Sung’s Christian background, this is an adamant rejection of theism in favor of anthropocentrism (Y. Ch’oe 1986).
The Juche rejection of reliance on, or even belief in, spiritual beings does not mean that Juche cannot be called religious. After all, Ch’ŏndogyo, with its spiritual gaze focused on Ultimate Energy, and Won Buddhism, with its spiritual gaze focused on ilwŏnsang, are considered religions, so nontheism alone cannot disqualify a belief-and-ritual system from being deemed religious. Moreover, there are elements that emerged in Juche writings that resemble ideas commonly found in both old and new religions.
First of all, Juche offers a solution to a problem all human beings face: What happens to us when we die? It promises adherents that, through membership in the Juche community, they can overcome death and gain immortality. According to Juche teachings, human beings can live as human beings only as members of societies. There is no living human being who is totally alone, with absolutely no relationships and no interactions with any other human beings. Human beings, as human beings, exist as social beings rather than as isolated individuals. According to Kim Jong-Il, “The human being is a social being who lives and acts in social relationships. The fact that man/woman is a social being is the major quality that distinguishes him from other biological beings” (Buswell 2007, 530). A logical deduction from this assumption, according to Juche logic, is that human beings will continue to exist even after their individual physical lives end, as long as the society that defined their existence continues to exist.
Juche was created in Korea by Koreans. Therefore, it could not avoid being influenced by ideas and assumptions which preceded it in Korea. One of the more powerful components of traditional Korean beliefs and values was Confucianism. Confucians, just as Juche proponents do, defined human beings as social beings who have a meaningful existence only as members of a family and a society. However, Confucians argued that the only form of immortality available to individuals was being remembered by their descendants and disciples after their physical death. Juche offers a different way to overcome death. Juche promoters say that Juche’s philosophy will last until the end of time – they call it “eternal truth” (Oh & Hassig 2000, 16). Therefore, all those who hold fast to Juche philosophy and unite around a Juche-led organization under the guidance of a leader who embodies Juche will enjoy an eternal sociopolitical life even after their body has died (H. Park 1996, 15–16). Since Juche defines human existence as sociopolitical existence, as long as the community of which they are a member continues to exist, so will they (Buswell 2007, 531).
This promise of immortality, albeit in sociopolitical rather than physical form, is one aspect of Juche that gives it some of the features of a religion. So is its insistence that the teachings of Juche are eternal truth. However, the strongest evidence that what began as a political philosophy has evolved into a religion is the respect shown to the Kim family which has ruled Korea since 1948, particularly the respect shown to Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current leader Kim Jong Un (b. 1984?). The attitude toward Kim Il Sung promoted by Juche, which presents him as an extraordinary human being who embodies Juche in all its aspects, resembles the spiritual gaze found in religions.
Kim Il Sung died in 1994, but the North Korean Constitution states that he is still and will forever be the president of his country. Three years after his death – three years is the traditional mourning period in Confucianism – an Immortality Tower was erected in Pyongyang with an inscription reading “The Great Comrade Kim Il Sung will always be with us.” After his son and successor Kim Jong-Il died in 2011, that inscription was changed to “The Great Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong-Il will be with us forever” (Melvin 2013). That additional inscription reminds North Koreans that Kim Jong-Il has joined his father in an eternal leadership position. He is the eternal General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea (CNBC 2021).
There are some indications that this elevation of the first two Kims to almost god-like status may be fading, however. Kim Il Sung’s birthday, April 15, was celebrated as the Day of the Sun from 1997 until 2024. (Kim Il Sung had been described as the sun which sheds light on the human race.) April 15 no longer bears that distinction (S. Chung 2024). The same demotion occurred with the use of the Juche calendar, which dated years not from the supposed year Jesus Christ was bornbut fromthe yearKim IlSungwasborn. Thatmeant 1997becameJuche 86. The DPRK began using that Juche calendar the very same year the Immortality Tower was erected in Pyongyang. However, the government announced in 2024 that it would return to the way years are numbered in the rest of the world and no longer date years fromKim Il Sung’s birth (J. Park 2024).
Nevertheless, there is still plenty of evidence in Pyongyang that Juche continues to play an important role in North Korean society, and Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il are still objects of a spiritual gaze. The Juche Tower, erected in 1982, still rises 170 meters above the streets of Pyongyang (Young Pioneers Tours 2024). And, as of this writing, the massive mausoleum that houses the embalmed bodies of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il is still called the Kŭmsusan Palace of the Sun, and is also referred to as the “Supreme Temple of Juche” (Rodong Sinmun 2025). Also elsewhere in Pyongyang is Mansudae, where can be found twenty-meter tall statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il outdoors. On important holidays, such as the anniversary of the founding of the DPRK, school children will be brought there to lay bouquets of flowers at the feet of those statues. Just as the case at the Kŭmsusan Palace of the Sun, those visiting those statues must dress and behave in a dignified manner, as they are also considered sacred sites (Palin 2019, 43–7).
Juche Rituals
Sacred monuments and belief in immortality may not be enough to declare Juche a religion. A religion should also have ways of expressing its beliefs and values through rituals. Though the DPRK doesn’t use the word “ritual” to describe the way it expects its citizens to behave, to outsiders much of the way North Koreans behave appears ritualistic.
For example, North Korean households are required to hang portraits of both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il on a wall in the main room of their home. The school children in those households bow to the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il every morning, before they greet their parents. Their mothers also clean those portraits every day to ensure their dignity is not diminished by dust on them. Every household has a special white cloth for cleaning those portraits (Kwon & Chung 2012, 143).
Religions provide ways of both sanctifying marriages and honoring and mourning the dead. Juche provides rituals for those important events as well. When young people marry, they do not go to church. Instead, they visit a statue of Kim Il Sung – there are thousands of those statues spread across North Korea – and vow their fidelity both to each other and to the Juche revolution. As part of this marriage ritual, they bow and lay a bouquet of flowers at the foot of the statue. This ensures that their marriage is blessed by Kim Il Sung (Demick 2009, 50).
For centuries, Koreans have held ancestral memorial services in their homes to honor deceased parents and grandparents on the anniversaries of their deaths. Such rites are still practiced in the DPRK, but now families are expected to make ritual offerings to the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il – even when the latter was still alive – before they pay ritual respect to their own ancestors (Kwon & Chung 2012, 143).
Another sign of the religiosity of Juche is the badges North Koreans wear on their left breast, above their heart. In 1972 the government began distributing badges with a picture of Kim Il Sung on them. After Kim Jong-Il died in 2011, they added an additional badge, this one with a picture of Kim Jong-Il on it. People in the DPRK have been expected to wear those badges any time they are in public ever since (Demick 2009, 46). Those badges serve as a sign that those who wear them are loyal citizens of the DPRK who respect both the teachings of Juche as well as revere the two men who, they are taught, are embodiments of Juche ideals. In that respect, they resemble the crosses Christians wear to show their faith in Christianity and in Jesus Christ.
One scholar has noted another feature of Juche which resembles Christianity. The citizens of the DPRK are expected to meet at least weekly to study the writings of the Kims and to examine their own behavior to see what they need to do to come closer to approaching the behavioral ideals outlined in the texts. In those meetings, they treat the writings of the Kims with the same reverence we see Christians displaying toward the Bible (P. Kim 2002, 136–9).
There is one noticeable way, however, in addition to its rejection of theism, in which Juche differs sharply from Christianity. In its insistence that there is no heaven above but human beings can build a paradise on this earth, Juche resembles some of Korea’s other new religions. It promises terrestrial salvation through fidelity to the sacred Juche teachings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il.
Though Juche does not fit neatly within the traditional Western understanding of what a religion should look like, when we compare it to the other new religions on the Korean peninsula, it does appear to qualify for that label. At the least, we can agree with one scholar who spent a lifetime studying North Korea, Han S. Park, that Juche appears to be a “surrogate religion” (H. Park 1996, 28). Even if we can concede that it does not meet all the criteria we normally use in defining religion, we can assert that Juche serves as the functional equivalent of a religion. It offers an explanation for what happens to us when our physical body dies, it tells us what it means to be a human being, and it provides directions for ways to affirm that we accept as trustworthy the beliefs and values it teaches. It also promises that we can transcend the limitations of our existence as mortal separate and distinct beings through membership in the Juche community. Moreover, Juche offers an object for a spiritual gaze: the Eternal President Kim Il Sung and the Eternal General Secretary Kim Jong-Il. All of these are features we look for in trying to decide if a system of beliefs and values should be called a religion. Juche, therefore, merits inclusion in a study of the new religions of Korea.
9 Conclusion
Of the many new religions that have emerged on the Korean peninsula since the mid-eighteen hundreds, only a few representative examples have been discussed here. It would be impossible to discuss all of Korea’s new religions primarily because scholars do not agree on how many new religions Korea has produced (Pokorny 2018b, 233–4). Even though only a small sample has been examined in this Element, introducing those few Korean new religions is useful for illustrating the diversity seen in Korea’s religious culture.
As noted in the introduction, South Korea is unusual in that, unlike most countries, it does not have one dominant religious community. According to a government census in 2015, that year 19.7 percent of South Koreans said they were Protestants, 15.5 percent said they were Buddhists, and 7.9 percent said they were Roman Catholics. Those who said they had no religious affiliation made up 56 percent of the population, leaving little room for the many new religions. The only groups large enough to show up in the census figures were Won Buddhism at 0.2 percent and Ch’ŏndogyo at 0.1 percent. There was also a catch-all category of “other,” into which 0.3 percent of the population was placed (Statistics Korea 2016, 17).
Gallup Korea also regularly surveys the religious landscape of South Korea and, in 2021, found numbers similar to what the earlier census found. However, it did not even bother to list adherents of religions others than the mainstream religions of Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Gallup did note that in 1984, 3 percent of those it surveyed said they belonged to a religion other than those three but by 2004 that percentage had dropped below 1 percent and has remained below 1 percent ever since. Neither the census nor Gallup provided membership figures for the new religions discussed here which emerged from a Christian or Confucian background or worshipped indigenous gods (Gallup Korea 2021, 3).
Despite the small footprint of Korea’s new religions on South Korea’s religious landscape, studying them can nevertheless shed much light on not only the diversity of religion on the peninsula but also on how Koreans have responded to the dramatic changes their country has undergone starting in the nineteenth century. Both Koreas in the twenty-first century are very different from the unified Korea of two centuries ago. The two Koreas have not only been transformed from agrarian societies into industrial societies but also from societies in which most people were illiterate into societies with well over 98 percent literacy (World Population Review 2024). Even more important for Korea’s religious history is that over the last two centuries, Korea has been pulled out of its relative isolation from most of the world’s peoples and cultures into an interconnected world in which the Korean people cannot avoid being exposed to a much broader range of challenges to what their ancestors believed and did. The new religions of Korea are one of the ways Koreans have responded to those challenges to their centuries-old traditions.
Korea’s many new religions, whether they emerged from Buddhism, from Confucianism, from indigenous folk beliefs and practices, or even from Christianity, represent attempts to maintain pride in Korea’s cultural identity even while Korean culture is being rapidly transformed. That pride is revealed in the nationalist claims many of those new religions make. Some put forward more grandiose claims such as that God is Korean, as seen in the Chŭngsan group of religions, or that a messiah has appeared in Korea to help human beings across the globe overcome the otherwise intractable problems they confront in the modern world. Others make the more modest claim that the rest of the world should learn from Korea’s unique religious techniques which can help them more effectively cope with the rapid pace of change in the world around them. Either way, whether grandiose or more modest, these new religions are examples of Koreans saying that, though there is much they are learning from the rest of the world, there is also much that the rest of the world should learn from them.
Nationalistic pride is also revealed in the persistence of more traditional beliefs and values at the core of those new religions. Those beliefs and values are encased in the trappings of a modern religion, such as a concise volume of vernacular scriptures, regular congregational worship services, participatory rituals, and so on. In this way, they can meet the expectations of what a religion should look like in the modern world. Nevertheless, they retain their premodern salience. The traditional elements at the core of Korea’s new religions include the anthropocentric ethics of Confucianism. Even the new religions which emerged from Christianity continue to emphasize filial piety and the family in ways reminiscent of Confucianism in centuries past. Moreover, in most of those new religions, we can see echoes of
Confucianism’s strong emphasis on interpersonal relations within the human community, which contrasts with the priority given to worship of, and obedience to, God in Christianity and other religions without a long history on the peninsula.
Another traditional feature we see in some new religions is the possibility of religiosity without theism. Ch’ŏndogyo, Won Buddhism, and the Confucian new religions are recognized as religions by Koreans though none of them have a supernatural personality as the focus of their spiritual gaze.
A fourth feature is a this-worldly orientation, manifest in the belief that paradise will be created on this planet rather than somewhere beyond this material realm. This resembles the Confucian assumption that human beings can build an ideal society on this earth. However, one aspect of the new religions which is not traditional is the expectation of kaebyŏk, of a rapid comprehensive transformation of life on earth. Koreans generally did not anticipate an earthly paradise to arrive quickly. Nor in the past did they expect Koreans to experience that transformation before the rest of humanity did. The idea that kaebyŏk will originate in Korea is another manifestation of the nationalism at the heart of Korea’s new religions, something not seen in earlier expressions of religiosity on the peninsula.
The new religions of Korea are best understood as modernized traditions. They are the result of Koreans resisting the homogenizing impact of globalization and Western-led modernization by creating religions which preserve Korea’s distinctive culture and its distinctive beliefs and values even as the nation changes economically, politically, and culturally to meet the demands of the modern world. Koreans reacted to the challenge of modernity by borrowing the outward forms of a modern religion, often drawn from Christianity, to protect certain elements of their tradition which they can use to assert with pride their distinctly Korean identity. These new religions should not be viewed as rejections of the modern world, however. They are both Korean and modern. They allow Koreans to keep one foot in the past while participating in the construction of the modern world (Baker 2008).
Koreans are not unique in wanting to preserve some cultural markers of their distinctiveness despite the homogenizing impact of modernization. Modernized traditions can be found in China, in Japan, and in many other countries as well. When we examine new religions in Korea, we are also learning how human beings in general, across the globe, have responded to globalization and modernization, how they have held on to their distinctive cultural identities and their unique beliefs and values while at the same time adopting ideas and practices from the West which they find useful and attractive. The story of Korea’s new religions is a story of recent human history, with Korean characteristics.
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New Religious Movements
Founding Editor †James R. Lewis
Wuhan University
The late James R. Lewis was a Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan University, China. He was the author or co-author of 128 articles and reference book entries, and editor or co-editor of 50 books. He was also the general editor for the Alternative Spirituality and Religion
Review and served as the associate editor for the Journal of Religion and Violence. His prolific publications include The Cambridge Companion to Religion and Terrorism (Cambridge University Press 2017) and Falun Gong: Spiritual Warfare and Martyrdom (Cambridge University Press 2018).
Series Editor
Rebecca Moore
San Diego State University
Rebecca Moore is Emerita Professor of Religious Studies at San Diego State
University. She has written and edited numerous books and articles on Peoples Temple and the Jonestown tragedy. Publications include Beyond Brainwashing:
Perspectives on Cultic Violence (Cambridge University Press 2018) and Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press 2022).
She is reviews editor for Nova Religio, the quarterly journal on new and emergent religions published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
About the Series
Elements in New Religious Movements go beyond cult stereotypes and popular prejudices to present new religions and their adherents in a scholarly and engaging manner. Case studies of individual groups, such as Transcendental Meditation and
Scientology, provide in-depth consideration of some of the most well known, and controversial, groups. Thematic examinations of women, children, science,
technology, and other topics focus on specific issues unique to these groups.
Historical analyses locate new religions in specific religious, social, political, and cultural contexts. These examinations demonstrate why some groups exist in
tension with the wider society and why others live peaceably in the mainstream. The series highlights the differences, as well as the similarities, within this great variety of religious expressions.
New Religious Movements
Elements in the Series
Anticultism in France: Scientology, Religious Freedom, and the Future of New and Minority Religions Donald A. Westbrook
The Production of Entheogenic Communities in the United States
Brad Stoddard
Managing Religion and Religious Changes in Iran: A Socio-Legal Analysis Sajjad Adeliyan Tous and James T. Richardson
Children in New Religious Movements
Sanja Nilsson
The Sacred Force of Star Wars Jedi William Sims Bainbridge
Mormonism
Matthew Bowman
Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jolene Chu and Ollimatti Peltonen
Wearing Their Faith: New Religious Movements, Dress, and Fashion in America Lynn S. Neal
Santa Muerte Devotion: Vulnerability, Protection, Intimacy
Wil G. Pansters
J. Krishnamurti: Self-Inquiry, Awakening, and Transformation Constance A. Jones
Making Places Sacred: New Articulations of Place and Power Matt Tomlinson and Yujie Zhu
Korean New Religions
Don Baker
A full series listing is available at: www.cambridge.org/ENRM
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