Don Baker's book, lucid and extremely valuable, focuses on the first twenty-seven years of the Catholic church in Korea, during its Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910), from its distinctive beginning in 1784 to its first large-scale persecution in 1801—distinctive in that the church was founded not on the initiative of missionaries but of a group of Neo-Confucian Korean scholars who had learned about the faith through tracts emanating from Beijing. In the first half of the book, Baker analyzes this formative history; in the other half, he offers an annotated English translation of two key documents that emerged in this period: Ahn Chŏngbok's A Conversation on Catholicism (1785) and Hwang Sayŏng's Silk Letter (1801), the second with assistance from Franklin Rausch. Along the way, Baker argues that during this period Catholicism had met three distinct responses from Neo-Confucians of Korea: rejection, both polemical and violent; selective appropriation; and embracement.

During the 1801 persecution, 300 or more Catholics were killed. Before this persecution, there had been smaller persecutions and polemical efforts to dissuade the scholarly class from taking interest in Catholicism. An example of the latter was A Conversation on Catholicism, a dialogical treatise by Ahn, a respected Neo-Confucian scholar, who offers several criticisms of Catholic writings, such as those by Matteo Ricci (1551–1610). One of his criticisms is that Catholics are obsessed with the afterlife at the expense of living virtuously in the here and now. This perceived obsession struck Ahn as inherently selfish, prompting him to assert: “All they really care about is what will benefit them personally. How can this compare with our Confucian focus on what is the right thing to do, which we define as what is best for the common good?” (150). Ahn also criticizes Catholics for their take on human frailty. Having noted that Catholics contend that it is difficult, if not impossible, for humans to live virtuously by their own efforts, he retorts: “All we have to do is use the mind-and-heart that heaven endowed us with at birth, our untainted human nature, to control the desires of the flesh so that they are properly channeled and don't get out of control” (135). From just these two quotes we can glimpse a deep sense of otherness Ahn must have felt about Catholic beliefs, about their ethics and anthropology, perhaps the way a Roman philosopher like Celsus might have felt about beliefs of early church Christians.

Ahn's latter criticism relates to the second reception Baker claims Catholicism received from Korean Neo-Confucians: selective appropriation. Conceding that explicit evidence is limited, Baker adduces the discourse of Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836), a renowned Neo-Confucian scholar and one-time member of the Catholic community. Baker embeds a fragment of Chŏng's discourse, translated into English, in the first part of the book. In it, Chŏng makes it clear his main motive for acknowledging a God Above, as Baker appropriately translates Sangje, was selective—not to embrace a foreign deity but to become a better Confucian. In this vein, he argues if a “superior person” was aware he was always being watched over by an omnipresent deity, he, as Baker puts it, would be “shamed into being moral all the time” (13). Living as a virtuous Confucian entailed, among other things, earnestly observing rites of ancestors; and when the bishop from Beijing prohibited Korean Catholics from doing so in 1791, on the grounds of idolatry, selective appropriators like Chŏng left the church.

The third reception was embracement. Who had truly embraced Catholicism became clear after 1791: the true converts were those who accepted the bishop's prohibition and resigned themselves to the consequences. And the consequences were severe: vicious backlashes from a Neo-Confucian state deeply invested in ancestral rites—regarding sons' and daughters' honoring their parents and ancestors as the linchpin of human society—that equated the disavowal of the rites with treason. As Baker rightly argues, it was the Catholics' refusal to participate in ancestral rites, more than anything else, that triggered the persecutions against them.

One of the true converts was Hwang Sayŏng (1775–1801). He was a promising Neo-Confucian scholar that converted in 1791. In the white heat of the 1801 persecution, hiding but defiant, Hwang composed the Silk Letter, which consists of more than 13,300 Sino-Korean characters written on a stretch of silk cloth about two feet long and one foot wide. The letter was intended for the bishop of Bejing, but before it could be sent, Hwang was arrested with it. Upon reading the Silk Letter, the authorities were scandalized and incensed. For, in addition to providing a detailed history of the Catholic community and short bios of numerous Korean Catholics, it contained a proposal for Catholic nations of the West to militarily invade Korea, to force the king of Korea to grant religious freedom to the Catholics. “Our Country's military has long been weak and is in fact weaker than any other country,” states Hwang, before adding, “Therefore, we can use military power to force Korea to leave Catholics alone” (198). Needless to say, the Silk Letter confirmed the worst suspicions Neo-Confucian authorities had about the Catholics. Hwang was dismembered, and the Silk Letter has ever since been a matter of controversy. In his analysis, Baker strains to exonerate Hwang from charges of treason: “When viewed through twenty-first century eyes, Hwang looks like a traitor” (111). Baker's argument is that Hwang could not have been a betrayer of the Korean nation because the Korean nation had not yet existed in Hwang's time, a nation being a modern construct. But Hwang did betray his king, his kingdom, and his culture—that certainly would have been the verdict of anti-Catholic Neo-Confucians like Ahn and even of selective appropriators like Chŏng.

All in all, Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Chosŏn Korea is an extremely valuable book, not only for understanding Korean Christian history but also for understanding the dynamics involved in one high culture seeking to root itself in the soil of another high culture.