In the past fifteen years, global evangelicalism has emerged as an important field of study. A key contributor to this study has been Paul Freston, who authored Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, a book Harvey Cox of Harvard describes as “utterly indispensable for scholars of religion, not just for students of Third World evangelicalism.”Footnote ¹ In the book, Freston discusses South Korea as a “regional Protestant ‘superpower’” and “a key centre of evangelicalism in the Third World, both in numerical strength and missionary-sending importance.” He then observes that Korean evangelicalism has not received sufficient treatment in Western-language scholarship, especially on its relationship with Korean nationalism. Thus, he states, “We need more nuanced analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and various versions of Korean nationalism in more recent times.”Footnote ²

This study addresses the lacuna Freston has pointed out. It examines political implications of global evangelicalism in Korea, evangelicalism having arrived in Korea as a globalizing force at a time when nationalism was emerging as the touchstone of Korean identity. It does so by examining the ways evangelicals have responded to a particular kind of nationalism that has held sway in Korea: ethnic nationalism. At the center of this ethnic nationalism stands Tan'gun, the mythical progenitor of the Korean people. Tan'gun is celebrated as the paramount icon of Korean nationalism, with his lore taught in schools and his devotees exalting him as the bond of all Koreans—north and south, domestic and overseas. Tan'gun, moreover, is enshrined as a deity by several religions of Korea—all indigenous in origin—and is prayed to by shamans. Largely owing to overtones of religiosity (if not idolatry) surrounding him, Tan'gun has emerged as a problem for Korean evangelicals and has aroused a response from them.

Evangelicalism has strong nationalist credentials in Korea. Unlike in China and Japan, where evangelicalism was seen as part and parcel of Western imperialism, in Korea it became positively associated with the nationalism of the land. Many a factor went into the making of such a positive association. As will be discussed below, one was that in Korea, Protestantism did not become identified with an imperialistic power, as it did in China and Japan. In Korea the chief imperialist power was the Japanese, the Shintoist nation. Another factor was that evangelicals played a crucial role in the formation of Korean nationalism, most notably by making key contributions to the 1919 March First Independence Movement, a turning point in modern Korean history.

Their nationalist credentials afforded evangelicals solid grounding in Korean society (that is, South Korea) and made their religion acceptable to the general populace. Such acceptance, in turn, has emboldened them to speak out whenever they deemed their religion to be under attack. Such outspokenness, if not vociferation, was all too evident with respect to the Tan'gun problem. On the other hand, a minority of them—those who appreciated Tan'gun's symbolic potency—was more accommodating. Consequently, as a community, evangelicals responded to the Tan'gun problem in two ways: by robustly resisting any attempt to confer official or sacral status on Tan'gun and by resorting to creative strategies to assimilate Tan'gun into Christian frames of reference.

I. Evangelicals and Korean Religions

Evangelical Protestantism began to disseminate in Korea in earnest in the 1880s.Footnote ³ Korea at the time was in the throes of profound upheaval and transition. About a decade earlier, in 1876, Chosŏn (the last Korean dynasty) succumbed to Japanese gunboat diplomacy and signed the Kanghwa Treaty, Korea's first modern treaty.Footnote ⁴ In so doing, Korea was rudely initiated into an emerging world system, one based on nation-states. For nearly five hundred years, Korea was part of a Sino-centric worldview that it then abandoned. Koreans were compelled to re-envision their society, and to do so under imperialistic pressures. From 1876 onward, well beyond 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, a variety of visions was proffered. These included constitutional monarchy advocated by the Enlightenment Party (kaehwapa) and populist traditionalism demanded by adherents of the indigenous religion Tonghak (Eastern Learning). There was also communism, which made inroads into Korea in the 1920s, as well as ethnic nationalism, which eventually became the most influential vision in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵ Along with these was the vision offered by evangelicals.

The evangelical vision was simple: turn Korea into a Christian nation by converting its inhabitants to evangelicalism. In so doing, multitudes of Korean souls would be saved. Just as important, argued Protestant leaders such as Yun Ch'iho, with born-again—self-reconstructed—leaders at its helm, Korea would be revitalized, modernized, and strengthened. It would come to approximate countries like Britain and the United States, both powerful and heavily shaped by Protestantism.Footnote ⁶ This vision captivated many, and a quest to Christianize Korea was launched. In this quest, Korean evangelicals were joined by missionaries from Australia, Europe, and, especially, North America.Footnote ⁷ This evangelical quest persisted despite harsh challenges from Japanese colonialism and communism, challenges that often resulted in violent conflicts.

Indeed, as a result of such conflicts, evangelicalism has often been identified with anti-colonialism and anti-communism. And after the Korean War (1950–1953), such identification helped evangelicalism become securely legitimated in South Korea, whose own political identity was constructed largely in opposition to these two “isms.”Footnote ⁸

Evangelicalism is defined broadly here—to include movements more specifically known as fundamentalism and pentecostalism—as a species of Protestantism whose hallmarks are a literalist bent in biblical interpretation, a high Christology grounded in the substitutionary theory of atonement, a soteriology that values the individual over society, and a fervent advocacy of evangelism. In evangelicalism, salvation is typically achieved through a conversion experience, wherein one accepts Jesus Christ as personal savior and resolves to live in accordance with the Gospel. It is this form of Protestantism that entered Korea in the 1880s and has since dominated Korean Christianity.Footnote ⁹

When evangelical missionaries arrived in Korea, the land, of course, was not a religious vacuum. By then, Koreans had internalized Buddhism and Confucianism, which had entered the country 1,500 years earlier; and shamanism, the most indigenous religion, was prevalent. There was also Tonghak (later renamed to Ch'ŏndokyo [Religion of the Heavenly Way]), a new religion founded in 1861 by Ch'oe Cheu, partly as a nativist reaction to Roman Catholicism, which had arrived in Korea in 1784.Footnote ¹⁰ A question springs to mind: how did evangelicals—missionaries and Korean converts—relate to these and other traditional religions of Korea?

In answering this question, a helpful resource is Paul F. Knitter's Introducing Theologies of Religion. In this book, the author discusses various models of Christian attitudes toward other religions. The model most appropriate to our discussion is what Knitter calls the replacement model—whose central axiom is that “no one can be saved unless they come into an explicit contact with Jesus and his Gospel.”Footnote ¹¹ This model has two versions. One is the total replacement version, which “looks upon other faith communities as so lacking, or so aberrant, that in the end Christianity must move in and take their place.”Footnote ¹² The other is the partial replacement version, which holds that “the [non-Christian] religions do prepare the way for the Gospel. But it's a negative preparation: they provide questions, or indicate directions, which only Jesus can answer and guide. The religions therefore can serve ‘as a base from which to start because Jesus fulfills the truth which the religions have sought in vain.’”Footnote ¹³

The missionaries gravitated toward one or the other of these two versions of the replacement model, and the same missionary often adopted a different version depending on the religion he or she was faced with. In general, they tended to assume the total replacement model when it came to shamanism or other forms of religion based in folk culture. Thus, in a 1907 article published in The Korea Mission Field, a missionary wrote, “When the Koreans become Christians they [have to] destroy the ‘devil house’ on the mountain sides and the booth for the evil spirits by their door-yard.”Footnote ¹⁴ More developed religions such as Buddhism and Confucianism fared somewhat better as their civilizing influence on Korea was grudgingly acknowledged. In the end, however, they too were seen as lacking. Thus, writing about Confucianism in Korea, a missionary stated, “I approach the subject with reverence. Whatever may be the weak points of Confucianism, it has given the Korean his conception of duty and his standard of morality.” He then went on to enumerate seven shortcomings of the religion, one of which is that

In 1889, in a journal titled Church at Home and Abroad, a missionary wrote:

The question, of course, was rhetorical: it was clear what the answer was: Christianity—evangelical Protestantism to be more specific.

In 1932 the missionary Charles Allen Clark published Religions of Old Korea, the most comprehensive survey of Korean religions to be published in a Western language up to that time. In its preface, Clark justifies his labor by stating, “The writer has not felt that his labour was in vain, for we must know the religions which have been in any country, and the way in which those religions psychologically appealed to the people, if we would know how to approach them with a higher religion today.”Footnote ¹⁷ Then after surveying Buddhism, Confucianism, “Miscellaneous Cults,” Ch'ŏndokyo, shamanism, and early contacts between Christianity and Koreans, he ends the treatise with a prediction: “The ‘Religions of Old Korea’ seem destined to pass away to make room for brighter things.”Footnote ¹⁸

The missionaries' condescension, if not hostility, toward non-Christian religions was transmitted to Korean evangelicals, and that attitude rings starkly in the following statement by Pak Hyŏngnyong, an influential theologian and churchman in the twentieth century: “Christianity's most appropriate relation to other religions is not compromise but conquest… . The attitude of the religion that bears the name of Jesus Christ [to other religions] is not compromise but clash and conquest.”Footnote ¹⁹ Pak's attitude was on the more extreme side. Even so, that the majority of the evangelicals looked askance at non-Christian religions was confirmed by a survey published in 1982 on the beliefs and practices of Korean Protestants. One of the questions in the survey was, “What do you think of other religions?” In response, 4.7 percent of the clergy and 8.8 percent of the laity gave a pluralistic response (their truth is just as valid as Christianity's); 20.7 percent of the clergy and 25 percent of the laity gave a more inclusive response (Christianity's truth is superior); and 70.9 percent of the clergy and 62.6 percent of the laity gave an exclusivistic response (only Christianity's truth is valid).Footnote ²⁰

Given such beliefs, it is not surprising that evangelicals looked askance at icons of East Asian religions like Confucius, Buddha, and shamans. When it came to one particular icon, however, evangelicals have showed a more nuanced—or at least a more ambivalent—attitude. This icon is Tan'gun, a figure worshiped by Korean nativists, invoked in shamanistic rituals, and deemed the founder of Old Chosŏn, putatively the earliest Korean kingdom. Granted, Tan'gun, too, never lacked evangelical critics who dismissed him as fictive or superstitious. Yet if the majority disparaged Tan'gun, there has always been a minority of evangelicals that has sought to give him special consideration—if only in the purview of the replacement model. Why such special consideration? One reason is that in the myth of Tan'gun, the central myth of the Korean nation, some evangelicals have seen an adumbration of a central doctrine of Christianity: the Trinity. Another was that, in the Korea of the twentieth century, ethnic nationalism emerged as the most influential touchstone of Korean identity, with Tan'gun embedded in its core. And in light of this development, disparaging him outright would have seemed unpatriotic, if not un-Korean, and would have incurred opprobrium. To the Korean evangelical community, therefore, Tan'gun became a problem.

To this problem, evangelicals showed two responses. One was to vigorously resist any attempt to valorize or officialize Tan'gun—an attitude characteristic of the total replacement model, an attitude that became conspicuous in the latter half of the twentieth century, with evangelicals up in arms against efforts to place Tan'gun images in public spaces. The other was to accommodate him—in the manner of the partial replacement model—whether by analogizing his myth to the Trinitarian doctrine, as some missionaries sought to do, or by inscribing him into a Christian narrative, as an evangelical novelist sought to do.

II. The Myth of Tan'gun

There are several versions of the Tan'gun myth, but the canonical one is that included in Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms), a compilation of fables and tales by the Buddhist monk Iryŏn. Completed about 1280, when Korea (then the Koryŏ dynasty) was under Mongol occupation, it is also the oldest account of the myth.Footnote ²¹ The myth is relatively short, so it is presented here in its entirety:

III. Tan'gun in Modern Korean History

In South Korea, since about 1960, a fierce and voluminous debate has raged over Tan'gun. Pundits have been divided over the historicity and significance of this figure. Different interpretations have pitted communities against one another, and the contestation has occurred in the national media and in schoolyards, as well as over the depiction of Tan'gun in history textbooks. Indeed, the passion, extraordinary arguments, and public significance of the debate would remind American religious scholars of the intense debate over creationism (or intelligent design) in their own country. Though the reliability of Iryŏn's account is one of the issues in contention, most scholars agree that since the late thirteenth century Tan'gun has deeply influenced how Koreans reckoned their collective identity.Footnote ²³

In 1392, when a new dynasty was established in Korea, it chose as its own the name of the ancient kingdom mentioned in the myth. Thereafter the ancient kingdom was called “Old [or Ancient] Chosŏn” (kojosŏn) to distinguish it from the new one. In its early years, leaders of the new kingdom saw themselves as successors of Tan'gun and venerated him at a shrine in P'yŏngyang. In time, however, this veneration was overshadowed by Chosŏn's engrossment in neo-Confucianism, the worldview that Koreans eagerly participated in throughout the dynasty. As a result, Tan'gun was eclipsed by the other culture hero mentioned in the myth, Kija, purportedly a Chinese nobleman of the Shang dynasty who migrated to Old Chosŏn in 1122 b.c.e. when the Shang fell to the Zhou and assimilated into the Korean populace.Footnote ²⁴ But when the Sino-centric world order collapsed in the late nineteenth century, Kija's Chinese origin caused him to fall into disfavor, and Tan'gun re-emerged as a national icon.

In his recent book, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea, Gi-Wook Shin argues that the collapse of the Sino-centric world order compelled Koreans to search for another kind of paramount collective identity.Footnote ²⁵ In such a search, he argues, ethnic nationalism was initially only one of several alternatives considered—ethnic nationalism defined here in the Durkheimian sense as the “‘mechanical [or organic] solidarity’ of Korean society,” which assumes that “Koreans' national identity [is] based on common blood and shared ancestry [originating in Tan'gun].”Footnote ²⁶ Other forms of collective identity considered included pan-Asianism, civic (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism, and international socialism.Footnote ²⁷ But when Japan imposed a protectorate over Korea in 1905 and annexed it in 1910, it cut the ground from under pan-Asianism and civic nationalism; it also thwarted the possibility of international socialism in Korea.

Subsequently, in order to keep Korea alive as a culture, Korean intellectuals resorted to an ethnic-nationalist strategy. Shin cites approvingly Carter J. Eckert, who states that “before the late nineteenth century there was little, if any, feeling of loyalty [among the inhabitants of the peninsula] toward the abstract concept of ‘Korea’ as a nation-state, or toward fellow inhabitants of the peninsula as ‘Koreans.’”Footnote ²⁸ But this circumstance did not inhibit the intellectuals from constructing a primordial ethnic-nation—the minjok—of Korea out of Koreans' proto-national consciousness, defined as “various feelings of collective belonging which already existed [on the basis of commonalities such as geography, language, and a strong central state] and which could provide the foundations for modern nation-states.”Footnote ²⁹

This strategy was not novel in the context of the times. As the world system ascended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nationalization of large communities was paradoxically the most globalizing trend of the period—both Germany and Italy, after all, had become unified nation-states only in 1871.Footnote ³⁰ In East Asia, Japan was the first to partake in this globalizing trend, with China and Korea close on its heels. For these Asian nations, the concept of ethnic nation was new—indeed the word minjok (minjoku in Japanese and minzu in Chinese), composed of two Chinese characters (the lingua franca of East Asia), was not even a common word until about the 1890s.Footnote ³¹

Among Korean intellectuals, Sin Ch'aeho blazed the trail in envisioning the Korean nation. Well versed in classical learning, Sin was a self-taught journalist and historian, and a fierce independence fighter. He rejected Sino-centrism and the Kija-based historiography as a form of toadying (sadaejuŭi); in its stead, he developed the conception of a Korean minjok based mainly on Tan'gun and his descendants, regarding Tan'gun as a historical personage and his descendants as a people who once ruled not only the peninsula but also territories of Manchuria and northeastern China.Footnote ³² Sin's erudition and historical imagination had enormous influence over his compatriots, and in 1909, one of these, Na Ch'ŏl, took it upon himself to move the process a step further by founding Taejonggyo (Religion of the Great Ancestors) and apotheosizing Tan'gun.Footnote ³³

Japanese colonial historians sought to douse the nationalist ardor surrounding Tan'gun by arguing that his myth was fabricated by Iryŏn as a way to rally Koreans against the Mongol occupiers.Footnote ³⁴ They also contended that if Tan'gun was as ancient and venerable a figure as he was claimed to be, then he should have been mentioned in Chinese and Korean records produced before the writing of the Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, especially in Samguk sagi (Records of the Three Kingdoms). Samguk sagi, like Samguk yusa, focused on the three kingdoms of ancient Korea—Silla, Paekje, and Koguryŏ. But it differed from Iryŏn's account in that it was more historical—adopting the format of the Chinese dynastic history—and written by Kim Pusik, a Confucian scholar-statesman, on the orders of his king. Completed in 1145, the treatise remains the oldest extant book in Korea.Footnote ³⁵ And it indeed does not contain a Tan'gun story. The argument that Iryŏn fabricated the Tan'gun story remains controversial in the debate. Generally speaking, it is held plausible by the majority of Koreanists outside Korea (and by some inside); it is largely rejected by scholars inside Korea, who see it as another stratagem the colonialists used to demean Korean culture and control its people—a form of Orientalism.Footnote ³⁶

In the colonial period, the Japanese view on Tan'gun was fiercely rejected by Korean nationalist intellectuals. Among them, no one—perhaps save Sin Ch'aeho himself—rejected it with more panache than Ch'oe Namson, a prolific writer, publisher, and polymath. Affirming Iryŏn's account of Tan'gun, Ch'oe published a treatise in 1927 in which Tan'gun emerged as the “title for shaman-rulers of ancient Korea,” rulers who dominated an immense cultural realm that rivaled those of Chinese and Indo-European cultures—the realm of “Park culture,” park being the pure Korean word connoting light and the sun, representing a variant pronunciation of baek (white), which is the same as the second syllable in Mt. T'aebaek, the hoary mountain in Korea where, according to the myth, Tan'gun lived upon descending from heaven.Footnote ³⁷ Owing to the efforts of Ch'oe, Sin, and their ilk—and given Korea's political circumstances—Tan'gun's stature as a nationalist icon grew during the colonial period. Moreover, as Hyun-Key Kim Hogarth argues, “Tan'gun also plays an important role in Korean shamanism, as one of the most important shamanistic deities.”Footnote ³⁸

IV. Tan'gun and Evangelical Missionaries

The myth of Tan'gun drew considerable attention from evangelical missionaries in Korea. This was the case partly because the more influential among them, such as Homer Hulbert and Horace G. Underwood, were supportive of incipient nationalists like Yun Ch'iho and Sŏ Chaepil, who had converted to Protestantism and had sought to instill a sense of sovereignty among the Korean populace.Footnote ³⁹ They did so, for example, by dating their Independent (Tongnip sinmun), the first vernacular newspaper to be published in Korea, according to tan'gi (the founding date of Old Chosŏn, 2333 b.c.e.) rather than the regnant year of a Chinese emperor, which was the way dates had been reckoned by the Korean court traditionally. By doing so, the reformers sought to emphasize Korea's independence from China. But the missionaries also had their own reason for being attracted to the myth. In the myth, they saw a way to address a keen missiological concern: relating Korean religions to a cherished missiological theory, the fulfillment theory of world religions, and thereby establishing (or construing) a point of contact between Christianity and Korean religiosity.

The fulfillment theory of world religions accords with Knitter's partial replacement model. Christians who held this view did not dismiss other religions outright but believed they contained an adumbration of the truth that would be fully realized in Christianity, in which case the heathen religions would be supplanted.Footnote ⁴⁰ Implicit in this view were three premises: 1) all meaningful religions contained a kernel of the truth—that is, the monotheistic faith of Christianity—in their pristine state; 2) in the course of history, religions degenerated; and 3) as religions degenerated, whatever amount of truth they contained had become obscured, distorted, or lost. This theory had influenced a number of key Protestant missionaries to Korea, including Horace G. Underwood and Homer Hulbert.Footnote ⁴¹

Hulbert was noted for his efforts to interpret the Tan'gun myth as reflecting the pristine kernel postulated by the fulfillment theory. In the myth, Hulbert saw a primitive monotheism, elaborated in a sort of Trinitarian language. He therefore analogized Hwanin to the creator God, Hwanung to the Holy Spirit, and Tan'gun to the Incarnate Son, the Christ. Accepting the antiquity of this myth, Hulbert believed that Tan'gun was a semi-divine culture hero who worshiped the True Spirit. As history evolved, however, this primitive monotheism of Tan'gun degenerated, contaminated by crass beliefs in evil spirits and nature gods, not to mention baneful influences of Buddhism and Confucianism.Footnote ⁴²

Having interpreted the Tan'gun myth in terms of the Trinitarian doctrine, Hulbert then linked the myth to a concept that was universally familiar to Koreans: Hananim. Hananim—synonymously referred to as Hanŭnim or Hanŭlnim—was the Korean word for what anthropologists called a high god, the deity atop a hierarchy of gods; the word also connoted oneness and the sky. Despite its henotheistic connotation, already by 1882 (about two decades before Hulbert was developing his Trinitarian notion about Tan'gun) this term had been used in a Korean translation of Luke and John, the first two books of the Bible to be translated into Korean, translated by the Scottish missionary to Manchuria John Ross and his Korean collaborators.Footnote ⁴³

Initially the term did not enjoy universal acceptance among Korea missionaries. One of its opposers was Horace G. Underwood, who resisted it on the suspicion that it might have been tainted with polytheistic connotations. Underwood himself preferred Sangju (“Lord of Heaven”), a Sinitic-sounding neologism he himself coined. To Hulbert, however, as Godhead was to the Trinitarian doctrine, Hananim was to the Tan'gun myth. This exegesis was convincing to other missionaries, since, in the light of the fulfillment theory, the kernel of truth embodied in the word Hananim could be seen as having been fulfilled in the God of Christianity. Moreover, the exegesis seemed to be corroborated by the fact that Koreans of all echelons regarded Hananim as a high god and by the alacrity with which many of them responded to the Gospel message.Footnote ⁴⁴ By 1910, Hulbert's analysis became widely accepted among Korea missionaries, including Underwood, who conceded that further study had led him to agree with Hulbert.Footnote ⁴⁵

Consequently, since 1910, Hananim has been the term the evangelicals have used to refer to God.Footnote ⁴⁶ This fact—and the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity has been a sine qua non for evangelical orthodoxy—might lead one to infer that Tan'gun, too, would have been incorporated into the working theology of the evangelical church during the colonial period. But that has not happened. Several reasons may account for this fact. For one thing, theologizing about Tan'gun was limited to missionaries and scholars of religions, their discussion carried out mainly in English in conferences and in journals and treatises—making them inaccessible to all but a few Koreans. It was important for the missionaries to interpret Tan'gun, but sharing that interpretation with Koreans was not necessary. It was only since the early 1950s that Koreans themselves began theologizing about Tan'gun, especially with the publication of Yun Sŏngbŏm's “Hwanin-hwanung-hwangŏm ŭn kot hananim ita” [Hwanin-hwanung-hwan'gŏm is Very God] in Sasanggye [Thought World] in May 1963—and then only by a handful of the more progressive theologians who operated outside the evangelicals' circles.Footnote ⁴⁷ Secondly, Tan'gun was just an adumbration of Christ—an old wineskin capable of holding only the most tepid version of the truth, deserving to fade out now that the Gospel had arrived in its evangelical form. After all, there could only be one historical—revealed—Christ, Jesus of Nazareth. Finally, there was the danger of persecution from the Japanese Government General, which had always been wary of the linkage between Tan'gun and Korean nationalism. Indeed, such persecution had fallen on Taejonggyoists, who were harried out of the country, with their founder Na Chǒl committing suicide in 1916.

V. Evangelicals' Contribution to Korean Nationalism: The 1919 March First Independence Movement

That the evangelicals did not incorporate Tan'gun into their theology did not mean that they lacked sympathy for Korean nationalism or that they did not play a significant role in its development. Indeed, evangelicals played a key role in the rise of Korean nationalism during the colonial period, enabling their religion to become positively associated with it.

Early converts to evangelicalism were mostly lower-class Koreans from northern parts of the country, but by the late 1890s, evangelicalism was also making inroads into the ranks of the politically minded upper class, or yangban. Like commoners, yangban, too, started to join the church in the 1880s when the country was still under Korean sovereignty. Most of them, like Yun Ch'iho and Sŏ Chaepil (also known as Philip Jaisohn), were from the disaffected portion of their class. In their adoption and support of the religion, politics played a role. And believing that evangelicalism could help reform their people and nation, they encouraged their countrymen to embrace it.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–1905, Korean officials who had discountenanced the religion earlier also endorsed it, perhaps out of a sense of desperation for the reformation of their society.

In part influenced by such endorsements, many Korean nationalists turned to evangelicalism to find ways to ameliorate their nation's woes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Faced with politically motivated seekers, the missionaries, on the one hand, did not quibble over such motives. They were simply glad to have as much raw material as they could for evangelism.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the other hand, with the nation's politics becoming increasingly volatile, they were leery of the church turning into a hotbed of the independence movement. As a result, they began to emphasize to the Koreans, especially to the converts, a policy of disallowing political activities within the church.Footnote ⁵¹

By disallowing political activities within the church, the missionaries believed they were taking a nonpartisan stance.Footnote ⁵² In actual fact, in Korea at the time achieving such a stance was extremely difficult, if not impossible. Indeed, except in the minds of certain Koreans whom later generations stigmatized as collaborators between Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism, there was little (if any) middle ground.Footnote ⁵³

Moreover, though espousing political neutrality, the missionaries did more than disallow political activities within the church. They discouraged their flock from harboring nationalistic sentiments. And from 1910, when Japanese rule over Korea began in earnest, the missionaries made it clear they were willing not only to accept the status quo but also to regard the Japanese as a partner in their self-appointed task to enlighten Koreans. Thus, in 1918, the editorial of the Korea Mission Field stated the following as it welcomed the arrival of the second governor-general of Korea, Hasegawa Yoshimichi:

The missionaries, to be sure, had good reasons to discountenance Korean nationalism. For after 1905, to safeguard and continue their evangelistic work in Korea, it was crucial for them to win Japanese toleration. But having led the church to accept the status quo—the Japanese rule—they could not help but disappoint Korean nationalists within the church and alienate those outside it. Inevitably, many Koreans left the church—at least the church as institutionally conceived.Footnote ⁵⁵

Had the evangelical church maintained its apolitical stance throughout the colonial period, the Korean church might have taken the path taken by the Protestant churches of Japan and China, where Protestantism was seen as part and parcel of Western imperialism. It might not have become positively associated with Korean national interests; it might not have developed any differently than it did in China or Japan.Footnote ⁵⁶ Evangelicalism in Korea, as it turned out, did not follow that path. Unlike its Japanese and Chinese counterparts, the evangelical church deeply shared in and contributed to Koreans' collective aspiration. And this happened despite the missionaries' effort to depoliticize the church. For though the missionaries succeeded in depoliticizing the church qua an institution, they failed to depoliticize it qua Korean men and women. That this was the case was attested by the 1919 March First Independence Movement.

The March First Movement marked a turning point in modern Korean history.Footnote ⁵⁷ It was a nation-wide uprising in which Koreans of different backgrounds came together en masse to defy their Japanese colonizers and to regain their national independence. In the end, the movement failed to achieve its objective of Korean independence; however, it succeeded in galvanizing and uniting Koreans. And as Michael E. Robinson states, “The memory of this uprising plays a significant role in the narrative of modern Korea and the evolution of Korean nationalism.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In the background of the March First Movement was Japan's harsh rule over Korea and Koreans' persistent desire for independence. But the more immediate factor was the Fourteen Points speech made by President Woodrow Wilson of the United States. First delivered in January 1918, nine months after he had persuaded Americans to join the Allies in World War I, Wilson's speech seemed to promise the right of self-determination to colonized people everywhere.Footnote ⁵⁹ Later, this ideal would turn hollow, as it was not applied to the colonies held by Allies such as Japan. But when the speech was first aired, Korean nationalists embraced it as a clarion call to action.

This clarion call was embraced by the evangelicals and adherents of Ch'ŏndokyo (Heavenly Way), and to a lesser extent by the Buddhists. Initially the evangelicals and the Ch'ŏndyoists planned on holding separate rallies in response to Wilson's proclamation to demand Korea's independence from Japan. But, realizing that they shared much in common, the two camps combined their efforts. Later the Buddhists joined them, completing the triumvirate of the religious leadership at the helm of the movement.Footnote ⁶⁰ As the last preparatory step, thirty-three of the top leaders of the triumvirate inscribed their names on a Declaration of Independence, copies of which were to be distributed to people on the eventful day.

On March 1, 1919, evangelicalism's most potent encounter with Korean nationalism took place. On that day, in Seoul's Pagoda Park, thousands of Koreans—men and women, young and old—had been gathering since the morning for a rally. Then, at two o'clock in the afternoon, a young Protestant man mounted the platform in the middle of the park and stirred the crowd by reading the Declaration of Independence. As soon as he was finished, the crowd burst into deliriously resounding cheers: “Taehan Tongnip Manse!” (Long Live Korean Independence!).

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was read in Pagoda Park, Koreans elsewhere in the city and in the country at large staged similar demonstrations. Within days, the movement for independence erupted in virtually every corner of the country, in nearly all segments of the Korean society, with about two million people directly participating in more than fifteen hundred gatherings, occurring in all but seven of Korea's 281 country administrations.Footnote ⁶¹

The March First Independence Movement was meant to be nonviolent. It started out that way, but in the end it failed to remain so. The leaders intended to appeal to the conscience of the Japanese colonizers and, more important, to the Wilson-led victors at the Paris Peace Conference, by using peaceful demonstrations.Footnote ⁶² But instead of affecting the Japanese conscience, the demonstrations only galled the gendarmes, who, assisted by Japanese residents in Korea, indiscriminately beat and shot at the demonstrators. In the face of such reaction, the peaceful demonstrations soon turned into riots, which continued sporadically through the summer. The situation came under full control only with the arrival of additional troops. By that time a great many casualties had been suffered by the Koreans: 7,645 killed and 15,961 injured—with 715 houses, 47 churches, and 2 schools destroyed and burned.Footnote ⁶³

Despite their espousal of neutrality, the missionaries could not stand aloof when innocent people—especially their converts—were brutalized by the police and gendarmes. They became actively involved in caring for the injured. Moreover, insisting on “no neutrality for brutality,” they urged Japanese authorities to desist from using brutal tactics against the demonstrators.Footnote ⁶⁴ Failing to make much impact by a direct appeal, they drew on the resources of their overseas contacts. They documented clear cases of Japanese atrocities and, using unofficial channels, reported to mission boards and influential friends in Europe and America.Footnote ⁶⁵

The uprising and the publicizing of it proved to be a public relations nightmare for the Japanese government, as it provoked international outcries and, in the United States, provided ammunition to senatorial critics of Japan.Footnote ⁶⁶ Consequently, the Japanese government was compelled not only to renounce using brutal tactics against the demonstrators but also to overhaul its colonial policy in Korea.

The evangelicals' contribution to the 1919 March First Movement was significant. Granted, the movement was a pan-Korean phenomenon to which no single group could lay an exclusive claim. Nevertheless, it must be noted that, once the movement got under way, the contributions rendered by Korean evangelicals—roles played and sufferings borne by them—stood out. For example, of the thirty-three signers of the Declaration of Independence, nearly half (sixteen) were evangelicals (as opposed to two Buddhists and fifteen Ch'ŏndokyoists).Footnote ⁶⁷ For the movement to have spread so quickly and cohesively, communication and organization were key. Here the evangelical church's national network and local leadership played crucial roles.

How significantly evangelicalism contributed to the March First Movement could be gauged also by analyzing figures concerning those arrested during the demonstrations. According to a report issued by the Japanese military police near the end of 1919, 19,525 persons were arrested in connection with the demonstrations. Of these, 3,371 were evangelicals—more than 17 percent of the arrested—an impressive figure considering that, by 1919, the evangelicals comprised only about 1 percent of the total population.Footnote ⁶⁸ Of the arrested, 6,310 were religionists; among them, evangelicals predominated, accounting for 53 percent (3,376). Furthermore, of the arrested, 489 were clergy; among them, evangelicals comprised nearly half (244)—more than twice the Buddhists (120) and almost twice the Ch'ŏndokyoists (125). Finally, of the 471 women arrested, evangelicals accounted for more than 65 percent (309), attesting to the empowering effect the religion had on Korean women.Footnote ⁶⁹

By taking a leading role in the March First Movement, evangelicalism stood to gain greatly. It recouped the appeal it had lost among the Korean populace. A new upturn in its membership enrollment concretely reflected this gain: “Since 1910 the curve representing the total number of Southern Methodist members and probationers had been steadily going downward; in 1920 the curve turned sharply upward again, and within five years there was a net gain of 102 percent. In each of the other churches in Korea also the year 1920 marks the beginning of a period of growth… . This period of rapid growth was ushered in by the Independence Movement.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition, evangelicalism gained something much more enduring—its right to be considered a legitimate religion of Korea. By virtue of its participation in Korea's struggle for political freedom, evangelicalism acquired nationalist credentials few Koreans could gainsay. During the remainder of the colonial period, the evangelicals underwent further trials; but when liberation finally came, the nationalist credentials they had gained in the Movement stood them in good stead. In the latter half of the century, it gave them a backbone as they spoke up in behalf of their faith vis-à-vis Tan'gunism.

VI. The Shinto Rites Controversy and the Affirmation of Conservative Orientation in Korean Evangelicalism

With Japan's defeat in 1945, Korea was liberated—and then divided along the 38th parallel. In the North, communism became the basis of its distinct society, brooking no competition.Footnote ⁷¹ There, Christians were persecuted. By the end of 1953 when the Korean War ended, a great many evangelicals had fled to the South, where they became ardent anti-communists and supported (and were supported by) the dictatorial regimes whose only platform was anti-communism.Footnote ⁷² In the South, homegrown socialists and communists were rooted out, such that by the war's end they had either been eliminated or fled to the North.Footnote ⁷³ In the North, Tan'gun was now deemed a primitive relic, unworthy of a society that had advanced so far in history—a tune that would change in the 1990s. In the South, it was a different story.

There Tan'gun continued to be esteemed as a national icon. This development was attested in 1948, when the national assembly passed legislation that made tan'gi the official dating system of the country, though in the end it proved impractical and was abandoned in 1961 in favor of the Western system.Footnote ⁷⁴ In 1949 another law was passed to establish the National Founding Day (kaech'ŏnjŏl) to celebrate the founding of Kojosŏn by Tan'gun—it remains a national holiday, celebrated on October 3. This legislation was accepted by the evangelicals without protest. Indeed, the laws were passed when the sitting president, Syngman Rhee, was Protestant and when evangelicals wielded considerable clout in the government, far disproportionate to their number. In 1949, the South Korean population was about 20 million. Of this number, Christians constituted about 600,000 (3 percent). Among them, Catholics numbered about 260,000 (1.3 percent), the rest, 340,000 (1.7 percent), were Protestants.Footnote ⁷⁵ In light of these figures, the following observation is noteworthy:

This state of affairs, however, did not signal that evangelicals were ready to theologize about Tan'gun after 1945—that they would seek to fuse the horizons between the Tan'gun myth and their theology, continuing the task started by Hulbert and Underwood. Such theologizing did not occur for two reasons. For one, it was preempted by a Shinto obeisance controversy that traced its roots to the colonial period. For another, such theologizing was out of place in the post-war churches where conservatism in theology was in ascendance.

During the last ten years of its rule in Korea, Japan sought to integrate Korea more closely into its empire by imposing Shinto rites on its inhabitants. Beginning in 1935, the Government General compelled all civic and private assemblies to begin their activities with a brief Shinto ritual. Many evangelicals saw this ritual to be idolatrous and resisted it—especially the Presbyterians who chose to close all their mission schools and the seminary rather than submit to the rites. By 1938, all denominations had been forced to comply with the rites. Resistance continued, however. When liberation came, more than fifty evangelicals had died as martyrs to the cause, more than two thousand were languishing in prison, and multitudes were engaged in clandestine resistance in and outside Korea.Footnote ⁷⁷ Now in a development reminiscent of what occurred in North Africa in the aftermath of the Decian and Diocletian persecutions, the surviving resisters—the confessors—insisted on a purification of the church.Footnote ⁷⁸ They demanded that the “lapsed” clergy undergo a period of atonement before continuing their pastoral roles. The compliers, however, rebuffed them, insisting that they had endured hardships to keep the church open under the oppressive regime. In the end this issue failed to achieve a satisfactory resolution, partly due to the eruption of the Korean War. As a result the South Korean Protestant church—like other institutions of the society—remains conflicted over the colonial legacy of collaboration.Footnote ⁷⁹

Among the former resisters in the Presbyterian church, many refused to associate with the compliers. These Presbyterians, who tended to be vociferous opponents of communism and liberal theology, eventually formed a separate denomination in 1952 known as the Kosin ch'onghoe (The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Korea) or simply Kosin, after the name of its seminary (Koryŏ sinhak taehakwŏn [Korea Theological Seminary]). It became a redoubt of conservatism in Korean evangelicalism. Kosin's emergence signaled a further conservative turn in Korean evangelicalism—a development filliped by the Korean War, which forced multitudes of northern evangelicals to relocate to the South, where they built churches steeped in anti-communism and conservative theology.Footnote ⁸⁰

Theological conservatism also characterized many missionaries who came to Korea after 1945. Historically, the Korea missionaries tended to be more conservative than their counterparts in China or Japan.Footnote ⁸¹ Now their conservatism was even more pronounced, partly owing to the arrival of numerous fundamentalist missionaries from the United States. Among them, for example, was Bruce F. Hunt, a second-generation Korea missionary, who returned to Korea in 1946. Originally he was a missionary of the Northern Presbyterian Church. In 1936, however, he left that denomination to go to Manchuria to join Koreans resisting Shinto worship—for a while suffering imprisonment for it. When he returned to Korea, he did so as a missionary of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, which he had helped found in collaboration with J. Gresham Machen, the preeminent leader of the fundamentalist camp. In Korea, Hunt contributed to the founding of the Korea Theological Seminary, helping to burnish its conservative identity.Footnote ⁸² In 1954 Kosin's conservative reputation was strengthened when it joined the International Council of Christian Churches, led by Carl McIntire, whose reputation as a militant conservative was even stronger than Machen's.

Since its founding, the Kosin Presbyterian church has represented a smaller and the rightmost end of the evangelical spectrum in Korean Presbyterianism, but, theologically speaking, the spectrum has not been wide. To the left of Kosin, in the center, has been the much larger Yejang hapdong (The General Council of the Presbyterian Church of Korea), the mainstay of Han'guk kidokkyo ch'ong yŏnhaphoe (Christian Council of Korea), the largest evangelical umbrella organization in Korea, composed of sixty-two Protestant denominations at the turn of the twenty-first century. To the left of the center has been Yejang t'onghap (The Presbyterian Church of Korea)—nearly as large as Hapdong and a member of both the CCK and the Korean National Council of Church (KNCC), which is affiliated with the World Council of Churches. Despite its embrace of ecumenism, T'onghap has remained solidly evangelical in its theology, thanks in part to the guidance given it by Han Kyŏngjik (Han Kyung Chik), founder of the Yŏngnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul, who may have been the most influential Protestant in Korea in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸³

Conservatism, to be sure, prevailed in the other denominations as well—in Methodist, Baptist, pentecostal, and Holiness churches, for example—but the focus on the Presbyterians is warranted given that they constituted the bulk of the Protestant population in Korea.Footnote ⁸⁴ An important exception here is Han'guk kidokkyo changnohoe (or simply Kichang), the Presbyterian Church of the Republic of Korea—the only denomination that has avowed progressive theology.Footnote ⁸⁵ Since the late 1940s, aside from Kichang and pockets in the Methodist church and the T'onghap Presbyterian church, evangelicals have shown little interest in theologizing about the Tan'gun myth using indigenous idioms.Footnote ⁸⁶ This conservative tendency left them few options when attempts were made to officialize Tan'gun—to sacralize an ethnic nationalism.

VII. Evangelicals and Controversies over Tan'gun Shrines and Statues

Despite their conservative theology, most evangelicals did not object when their government valorized Tan'gun by enacting tan'gi and kaech'ŏnjŏl. This was because, despite the trappings of civil religion, Tan'gun's official status was left ambiguous. No attempt was made to create a civic cult around him, and a wide spectrum of interpretations about him was allowed to exist. At one end of this spectrum was the view that Tan'gun was not only historic but also deific; the middle view regarded Tan'gun as not so much a person as a religio-political office; and at the other end was the view that Tan'gun was a mythic figure, fictive but important as a symbol of the Korean nation. The first view was favored by Tan'gunists, such as adherents of Taejonggyoist; the middle view, by scholars and others influenced by Ch'oe Namson; and the last, by evangelicals and others who harbored skepticism toward the figure's historicity. These different interpretations, so long as they coexisted on equal footing, did not cause a problem for the evangelicals. Problems—and conflict—arose when attempts were made to elevate one of them as official.Footnote ⁸⁷

The first public conflict over Tan'gun occurred on January 31, 1966, a year after Park Chung Hee's regime had normalized relations between Korea and Japan. On that date, Park issued a presidential directive—that a giant statue of Tan'gun be built, largely at public expense, at the site in Namsan Park (the largest park in the capital) where during the colonial period a Shinto shrine had stood. Park used to be a lieutenant in the Japanese Imperial Army and had come into power by coup d'etat in 1961. He had been seeking means to legitimize his power, especially after the unpopular normalization treaty. Building this statue was a move toward securing such legitimization. Park's directive, however, was vigorously contested by evangelicals, most of whom were loyal supporters of his anti-communist policy. The evangelicals insisted that Tan'gun was merely a mythic figure, not worthy of an official status as national progenitor. Their adamancy was recognized by Park, who was probably unwilling to jeopardize the evangelical support. So Park rescinded the directive; and in 1968 his government, in lieu of erecting the statue, allowed a private organization called hyŏnjŏnghoe (Association for Manifesting True Law) to build a modest shrine dedicated to Tan'gun in the smaller Sajik Park. In the remainder of his rule, Park refrained from antagonizing the evangelicals over Tan'gun.Footnote ⁸⁸

The matter flared up again after Park's assassination in 1979, during the regime of his protégé Chun Doo Hwan, who also came into power by military coup. In February 1985, a newspaper reported that Chun's government planned to enlarge the Tan'gun shrine at Sajik Park. The construction was set to be completed in 1987 so that it could be showcased during the Seoul Olympics in the following year. This report once again galvanized the evangelical community against the government, especially when it was exposed that, in addition to Seoul, other large cities and even provinces had been planning to construct Tan'gun shrines. The evangelicals decried such plans, protesting that they violated the constitutional guarantee of separation between religion and state. The Kosin Presbyterian denomination, in particular, saw it as its calling to undermine the plan. Its leaders led in the protests, staging an outdoor demonstration in November 1985.Footnote ⁸⁹ Others followed suit with further rallies, prayer meetings, and petition drives to press the government into abandoning all such plans.Footnote ⁹⁰ Finally, in December 1985, Prime Minister No Sinyŏng invited twenty-four leaders of the Protestant church to the Shilla Hotel to discuss the matter. There he denied the government had ever planned to expand the Tan'gun shrine at Sajik Park, or that it had plans to do so in the future.

After the 1985 incident, evangelicals were ever more vigilant of the way the government treated Tan'gun, becoming alarmed at the slightest hint of valorizing him. Such hypersensitivity was displayed in 1987. That year, newspapers reported on a synopsis of the new national history textbooks planned to be released in 1989 and 1990 for secondary and high school students, written by the Committee for the Compilation of National History (Kuksa py'ŏnch'an wiwŏnhoe).Footnote ⁹¹ Included in the synopsis was the following statement about Old Chosŏn: “The Tan'gun myth will be understood as reflecting historical facts; the establishment of Kojosŏn will be stressed as the first instance of our nation's state formation on the basis of bronze culture, and that its political and cultural levels have reached a developed stage will be specified (it will be made definite that Kojosŏn's starting point was the Bronze Age).”Footnote ⁹²

Having almost allowed the government to stealthily build shrines and statues dedicated to Tan'gun, evangelicals took exception to the first part of this synopsis. That is, they—perhaps willfully—misread “the Tan'gun myth will be understood as reflecting historical facts” to mean that the committee was conceding Tan'gun's historicity. In response to this alleged error, the evangelicals issued the following declaration: “Factualization of the Tan'gun myth is idolatry. If mythical figures are factualized into historical figures, Tan'gun will not only become a national god, but also there is a concern that idolatrous religions may be established as state religions. Myths exist in every nation, but there is no instance of their being made into facts. If the Tan'gun myth is factualized, our nation would become descendants of a bear. How could humans created by God become descendants of a bear?”Footnote ⁹³ The evangelicals demanded that the part about Tan'gun be rewritten in the history textbooks. They reinforced this demand with the usual demonstrations, prayer meetings, and petition drives, paralyzing the committee's operation at times. It is worth noting that their demonstrations were part of a larger, frenzied protest scene in South Korea at the time—the scene that included student-led minjungjuŭi (People Movement) demonstrations aimed at overthrowing Chun's autocratic government, where shamanistic trappings were sported as autochthonous symbols of Korea.Footnote ⁹⁴ The evangelicals' demand compelled not only the committee but also the Ministry of Education to go out of its way to explain the intended meaning of the disputed phrases. By the year's end, the evangelicals relented, but only after indelibly imprinting in the minds of the officials exactly where they stood on Tan'gun.

After this textbook incident, for about a decade, no Tan'gun controversy erupted in Korea. Then it flared up again in 1999. This time, however, it was not the government that was at the receiving end of evangelical ire: it was the Korean Cultural Campaigns Association (Hanmunhwa undonghoe), a coalition of religious and semi-religious organizations with a nativistic agenda. Between November 1998 and November 1999, this group had quietly erected, at its own expense, 369 statues of Tan'gun, made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, on the grounds of secondary schools and other public institutions after securing permission from the principals or other local authorities. Their eventual aim was to erect a Tan'gun statue in every public school ground in Korea.Footnote ⁹⁵ KCCA's rationale was that since all Koreans recognize (or should recognize) Tan'gun as their national founder, children who grow up paying honor to his statue in their schools will ensure Korea of future generations being surefooted in their national identity. This, in turn, would contribute to national unity, a desideratum at a time when baneful influences of globalization permeated South Korea.

The statutes, however, infuriated evangelicals. They denounced them as idols, pointing to the explanatory plaque, affixed to each pedestal, that specifically mentions Tan'gun in connection with the scripture of a nativist religion, once again reminding the Korean public of the link between Tan'gun and indigenous religions. The evangelicals also questioned the constitutionality of KCCA's action, since the schools' requiring students to pay respect before the statues, they argued, amounted to infringing on their religious freedom. They countered the Tan'gunists' contention that due process was observed because the statues were placed in the schools with the principals' permission with the retort that an endeavor as grave as KCCA's should not have been left to the principals' discretion. On June 14, 1999, a joint statement was issued by several evangelical organizations in Korea, including the Christian Council of Korea. The statement asserted 1) that it was inappropriate to recognize a mythical figure as a national progenitor worthy of homage when his true identity was being debated by scholars; 2) that it contravened the constitution to erect a structure belonging to a specific religious organization (to be placed in public spaces); and 3) that the educators were remiss when they condoned the placement in their school grounds of a structure that looked like an image kept in the Tan'gun shrine (Tan'gun samyo).Footnote ⁹⁶ In 1999, a Christian Committee to Oppose Tan'gun Statues was established and housed in the Christian Council of Korea. The committee called on the government to have the statues removed immediately. The government, however, responded indecisively, stating that each case should be handled by local authorities. Not satisfied, some evangelicals took the matter into their own hands. Already in April 1999, the first instance of damage to a Tan'gun statue had been reported, though it was unclear who the culprit was. By April 2000, thirty-seven more Tan'gun statues were either removed or damaged, with some of the culprits identified as evangelicals.Footnote ⁹⁷

This controversy between the evangelicals and Tan'gunists entered a new phase in 2003 as the result of a decision rendered in a Seoul district court. The decision stemmed from an injunction filed in September 2003 by Hongik munhwa yŏnhap (The Association for [Promoting] the Culture of Great Benefit), a coalition of pro-Tan'gun groups, including KCCA, and Uri yŏksa paro argi siminyŏndae (Citizens' Coalition for Correctly Understanding Our History). The injunction was directed against the Christian Council of Korea, aimed at preventing it from publishing and distributing a set of Sunday-school lessons called Tan'gun munje t'onghap konggwa: yŏksa rŭl parŭge somang ŭl chunim'kke (Integrated Lessons on the Tan'gun Problem: To Correct the History and to Place Hope in the Lord). These lessons were published in August 2003 and copies sent to CCK's member denominations to be used in their churches in order to expose the fallacies and dangers of the Tan'gun myth. The lessons were targeted at various age levels—from elementary and middle schoolers to high schoolers and adults. “Claiming that Tan'gun was a mythical figure,” the injunction charged, “is a distortion of history and an unpatriotic act, and since it [the alleged distortion] is like the Japanese colonialists' policy aimed at eradicating Korea's historical spirit, it affords ground for defamation.”Footnote ⁹⁸ In December 2003, however, the court dismissed the suit, stating that it had no cause. What is more, in the course of its ruling, the court recognized that the statutes did indeed possess religious attributes, notwithstanding Hongik munhwa yŏnhaps's claim to the contrary. This recognition strengthened the evangelicals' hands; they now ratcheted up their campaign from simply stopping the erection of the statues to dismantling them. The Tan'gunists, however, have not relented in their quest to Tan'gunize Korea in this generation, as they continue to appeal to their compatriots' nationalist sentiments to offset their setback. So the controversy continues.

VIII. Tan'gun as Noah's Descendant

In December 1999, as controversy swirled over Tan'gun statues, Kim Sŏngil, a well-known evangelical author, made an observation that was somewhat at odds with the views of both Tan'gunists and his co-religionists. His observation bespoke yet another way in which evangelicals could assimilate Tan'gun into a Christian framework—this time in the form of an epic novel. Kim observed that it was wrong to regard “Tan'gun” as a proper noun referring to a particular person, for the term is actually a title referring to a lineage of high priest-chieftains who used to offer sacrifices to Hananim, or God.Footnote ⁹⁹ If any pronoun is to be brought to bear on the issue, it should be wanggŏm, the one mentioned in the myth itself, since, Kim contended, it is the name of the very first individual who occupied the office of Tan'gun. Kim's observation was not entirely novel. That Tan'gun was probably the title of a (shamanic) priestly office had already been proposed by Ch'oe Namsŏn during the colonial period, and it remains a favored hypothesis among Korean historians and anthropologists. But unlike Kim, these scholars do not typically hold that wanggŏm was the name of an individual, their preferred interpretation being that it too was a title, perhaps of chieftaincy.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Be that as it may, for Kim, it was important that wanggŏm be the name of an individual and Tan'gun the title of a priesthood, if only for the interest of his two huge and successful epic novels: the four-volume Hongsu ihu (After the Flood) and the five-volume Tongbang (The East).Footnote ¹⁰¹ There is no need to expatiate on these novels here. But this much should be stated: After the Flood centers on a character from the family of Shem, one of Noah's three sons, called hanus or Hwanŭng, who migrates from Mesopotamia to the East at the head of three thousand followers. He marries a young maiden who was raised by a she-bear and reigns as high priest and chieftain to his people, called tongi, which was actually what the Han Chinese called peoples of Northeast Asia in ancient times. Hanus/Hwangŭng also teaches his people the ways of Hananim, including the principle of hongik in'gan (devotion to the welfare of humankind), the signature doctrine of Tangunism. This epic ends with the birth of his son, called kun or wanggŏm. The sequel The East then picks up the story and carries it forward to about the 670s—that is, to the end of the Three Kingdoms period in Korean history, when Buddhism's rise eclipsed the religion of Hananim. Throughout the narrative, the plot centers on the lives of individuals who serve as Tan'gun (later changed to ch'ŏngun, Lord of Heaven). Their lives intersect with various junctures in ancient Korean history, and the tongi's piety toward Hananim deteriorates over time.

In these two epics, what Kim attempts is to Christianize the Tan'gun myth in a narrative that is a version of the “lost tribes of Israel,” only in this case it is one of Noah's tribe that is lost. Evident in these narratives is the assumption of the fulfillment theory of religions: primitive monotheism is represented by the faith of Hwanung; that faith's degeneration in history is illustrated by the deterioration of the faith in Hananim among Hwanung's descendents; and the obscuring and distorting of the true religion is conveyed by the eclipse of Hananim by Buddha.

Kim's epics may be seen as a creative retort to an accusation a Tan'gunist might level at evangelicals—that Christianity is utterly foreign and has no place in the land of Tan'gun. To this, Kim's epical retort amounts to this: quite the contrary, Christianity does indeed belong in Korea; for Tan'guns themselves descended from Noah, the chosen one of Hananim, very God. For Kim, a devout evangelical, such a retort is more than a creative apologetic. He, after all, is a literalist when it comes to biblical hermeneutics. He accepts Noah as a historical personage, just as he accepts Tan'gun as historical. This means Kim must assume a connection between the two at some point in the past. Lacking conventional sources to attest to such a connection, he has espoused a strategy like the one he demonstrated in After the Flood and The East. He has called it one of “creative history” (ch'angjak yŏksa), raising quite a few eyebrows in the process.Footnote ¹⁰² Despite such espousal, Kim would not embrace what he deems to be “mythological” elements in the Tan'gun story, such as the idea that Tan'gun was an actual person or that he was the offspring of a bear-woman. Consequently, Kim ends up demythologizing the Tan'gun story only to re-mythologize it in evangelical garb.

Kim's narrative strategy to accommodate the Tan'gun myth is redolent of Hulbert's exegetical strategy to accommodate the myth. Neither strategy is in the mainstream of Korean evangelicalism, yet each reflects a serious and civil effort by evangelicals to come to terms with a central narrative of Korea in the context of their faith. In contrast, the response of mainstream evangelicals has been much more confrontational—at times uncivil. At a deeper level, though, both the accommodationists and iconoclasts share the basic spirit of the replacement model: all religions of Korea at best adumbrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ and wait to be fulfilled and superseded by it.