The dismal situation of rural populations suffering decreasing returns—material, cultural, and spiritual—in the face of imposed modernization aimed at strengthening the Japanese empire features in the first sections of Albert Park's Building a Heaven on Earth. But the focus of Park's book is the constructive and creative responses this situation inspired on the part of three religious groups: the YMCA, the Presbyterian Church, and Ch’ŏndogyo, an indigenous religion birthed in the nineteenth century. Drawing on the writings of the movements’ leaders and on numerous colonial-era journals and newspapers, Park's detailed and comprehensive exposition highlights efforts that positively impacted rural areas during the middle decades of the Japanese occupation.

As Park narrates, Japan's colonization of Korea (1910–45) brought about the shift from a subsistence to a profit-based economy that transferred control away from local entities to colonial authorities and global market forces. This disrupted the traditional rural economy, contributed to labor exploitation and rising debt, and forced villagers to migrate to cities. Responding to this crisis, leftist and bourgeois nationalist movements promoted modernizing efforts that discounted the value of a rural economy, while agrarianist movements pursued the restoration of an ideal agrarian past. In distinction to these approaches, the rural movements of Ch’ŏndogyo, the YMCA, and the Presbyterian Church shared a “vision of modernity based on religion and agriculture” (p. 13). This vision integrated a valuation of the rural economy with modernization conceived as constructive adaptation to the present, rather than a normative goal.

Each of the three faith-based movements was undergirded by the religious and social ideology of seminal leaders. In the case of Ch’ŏndogyo, Yi Ton-hwa adapted Tonghak teaching, according to which the sacred resides in each person, to inspire confidence in the face of change and trust in the ability to transform circumstances. Accordingly, the movement's rural campaigns emphasized cooperation to build wealth that would give peasants control over their lives. YMCA leaders such as Hong Pyŏng-sŏn emphasized the spiritual meaning and value of the quotidian “because God as the ultimate creator of the universe gave everything meaning and value” (p. 104). Their movement promoted cooperation that would enable freedom from the wage-labor system, and creative work that would meet material needs and facilitate spiritual experience. Similarly, Pae Min-su collaborated with Presbyterian leaders to address the rural crisis through the Presbyterian Church Rural Movement (PCRM), and “framed farming as the connective tissue between humanity and God” (p. 136). PCRM leaders envisioned communities that would facilitate economic independence and spiritual fulfillment.

For implementation, all three movements turned to the Danish cooperative system that was at the center of global discourse on social alternatives to industrial capitalism, socialism, and fascism during the 1920s and 1930s. These movements adapted the Danish model by creating cooperatives through which peasants were able to access resources, create capital, gather information, and develop better marketing strategies that would improve their competitiveness. Park cites the example of a YMCA-supported apple-growing cooperative in Hamhŭng that reported significantly increased incomes and improved overall well-being. The PCRM focused on cooperatives that would keep wealth and resources in the countryside, protecting rural communities from control by urban markets. Ch’ŏndogyo leaders applied the cooperative model directly to cultivation, creating farming collectives. Unlike the collective farms of the Soviet Union, these collectives were governed through a local democratic process.

Park also discusses the movements’ educational campaigns, which were focused largely on the youth, whose growing disaffection with traditional ways of life had contributed to the rural crisis. These programs emphasized knowledge and skills that would facilitate the material and spiritual growth of rural communities and equip them to take on the challenges of changing times. Here Park also makes the critique that the Presbyterian and YMCA educational campaigns were flawed by their attempts to control the lifestyles of the youth, and by their perpetuation of restrictive gender roles. Park does not discuss how the issues of gender discrimination and lifestyle control played out in the Ch’ŏndogyo movement.

Park concludes by recounting the demise of these movements under the restrictions imposed by the colonial government from 1937 on. As to the lack of attention these movements have received in historiography, Park points to controversial issues such as Ch’ŏndogyo's connection to the post-liberation North Korean regime and Protestant criticisms of the liberal theology leaders like Pae and Hong, which limited their influence. But he maintains that the movements have influenced postwar South Korean cooperative movements, and that the “vision statements of two of the largest cooperatives in South Korea, Hansalim (1986) and Ture (2003), use the language of the YMCA, Presbyterian, and Ch’ŏndogyo rural movements” (p. 226).

A topic that begs further exposition is the role of missionaries. In his account of the period leading up to the rural crisis, Park mentions the Western missionaries’ promotion of a spirituality that neglected the real-world needs of Koreans. But he does not discuss them again, despite stating that the 1928 meeting of the International Missionary Conference promoted a more socially engaged gospel that impacted Christians in Korea. Aside from a few individuals mentioned in relation to the YMCA, missionaries are absent from Park's examination of the rural movements, and one wonders if they were simply uninvolved, a matter that would have merited further discussion, considering the stated impact of the 1928 meeting.

By highlighting a creative and constructive rural enterprise from one of Korea's darkest periods, Building a Heaven on Earth offers a more nuanced picture of the forces active in the colonial landscape, and draws attention to important innovations in early twentieth-century Korean religion. This examination is especially valuable for its relevance to current situations in which modern economic forces have created new burdens for rural populations—forces that will likely generate formidable challenges in the event of the opening of North Korea. This book is recommended for anyone interested in the history of colonialism, religion, and rural development in Korea.