This book presents a nuanced study of middle-class women's involvement in evangelical Protestant churches in contemporary South Korea. In particular, it probes how middle-class housewives come to embrace their church's conservative gender ideology, paradoxically in the process of trying to alleviate their suffering from domestic troubles caused by rigid gender hierarchy in their marriages and family lives. The study is based on sixteen months of field work in two typical churches in Seoul—one Presbyterian and one Methodist—during the period between 1996 and 1999. The inquiry is compelling because there has been hardly a monograph on this subject despite two significant sociological facts: (1) theologically and culturally conservative Protestantism grew explosively in Korea during the 1960s and 1970s, the decades of rapid industrialization and urbanization; (2) adult women have been a numerical majority of evangelical Christianity in Korea, representing between 60 percent and 75 percent of the Protestant population. While the book focuses on married women ages thirty-five to fifty-five who came of age during the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s, its analysis illuminates larger theoretical issues of resistance and consent to domination that are central to the working of women's agency (and human agency in general).

The author conveys solid discussion in addressing her central question: “Why are so many women, across classes and cultures, enthusiastically joining and supporting religions that advocate patriarchal structures of authority and morality, and therefore, seem designed to perpetuate their subordination?” (p. 3). Reading against the grain of existing studies of women and religion that highlight women's ability to negotiate and subvert patriarchal religion, Kelly H. Chung identifies strong motivation and desire among her subjects to maintain their patriarchal families. In explaining this apparently puzzling conservatism, she strikes a delicate balance between recognizing women's agency without romanticizing it and paying attention to the subsequent containment of women's resistance by the patriarchal church. She argues that these evangelical women find consolation and healing in their intensely devotional involvement in church activities, and the centrality of the church to their lives after their conversions allows them to develop autonomy from their husbands and mothers-in-law; their churches also provide them with significant social space away from their families where they can develop their nondomestic skills to a limited degree. At the same time, she maintains, when the evangelical women embrace the ideology of obedience and submission to masculine authorities (God, the pastor, and the husband), actively promoted by multiple institutional channels in their churches, to modify their husbands' behavior, these women's subjectivities are reconstituted as “a highly dependent self that must rely on the will of God, and others in authority positions, to realize things in life” (p. 174).

In the detailed discussion of this complex process of resistance, submission, and the subsequent remaking of their subjectivities in chapters 3 through 6, Chong shows deep empathy and understanding despite her identity as a feminist scholar with secular and critical consciousness. Although the management of her identity during her fieldwork was so stressful that she experienced senses of “inauthenticity” and “opportunism” (p. 45), her empathy toward her subjects enables her to capture the specific social and cultural context in which they choose to accept the conservative gender ideology as “a practical strategy for bringing about positive domestic changes” (p. 155).

There are some minor weaknesses in the book. The study of these evangelical women could benefit from a more precise contextualization of these women in relation to other Korean women, who have become diverse. While Chung briefly mentions this in the conclusion, this is not adequately discussed in the chapters that deal with the larger social context. The evangelical women she studies are not only of a particular generation of the middle class, but also a segment of the urban middle-class women of that generation. While conservative churches have provided major social space for urban housewives, there are other venues that urban housewives have used for nondomestic social activities, including rotating credit associations, women's organizations, commercial cultural centers offering classes on practical and intellectual subjects, and informal yet significant income-generating activities through tutoring and real estate investment. It seems that the evangelical women are those who could not utilize these secular mechanisms for the complex reasons of their circumstances and personalities. Attention to these differences among middle-class women would help readers who are unfamiliar with South Korea understand the complexities of women's lives beyond those of the housewives caught in rigid patriarchal families.

The conclusion could be also sharpened in light of more current data on social and economic change in Korea. The rapid pace of social change there has generated much more dramatic change in the gender and family system in the 2000s than what Chong portrays in her conclusion. (See, e.g., Seungsook Moon, “Cambio social y situación de las mujeres en Corea del Sur: Familia, trabajo y politica” [Social change and women's position in South Korea: Family, work, and politics], in Mujeres asiáticas: Cambio social y modernidad [Asian women: Social change and modernity], ed. Amelia Sááiz López [Barcelona: Fundación CIDOB, 2006], 24–48). To identify just a major force of change, (economic) globalization, especially in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis (1997–98), has undermined the economic base of the modern patriarchy by eliminating stable lifetime employment for middle-class men. The aggregate number of marriages has been on the decline since 1995, whereas that of divorces has rapidly risen. In 2002, the divorce rate was 47.4 percent.

Overall, this is a valuable book for scholars and students of religion and its role in shaping women's agency and subjectivity in the ever-globalizing world. Its focus on religious faith and conversion process as “an emotional and psychological resource for women” (p. 83) complements existing studies that tend to employ macro approaches.