South Korea: A country that has taken speed to an extreme—the world's lowest fertility and one of its highest suicide rates appear on the same report card. Keys to the culture: 정 · 한 · 빨리빨리 · 선배 · 후배. Geography and history, the church, films and books, and prayer for this land.
A country that has taken speed to an extreme—the world's lowest fertility and one of its highest suicide rates appear on the same report card.
South Korea occupies the southern half of the Korean Peninsula, with more than 51 million people in roughly 100,000 square kilometers.
The first key to understanding the country is a geographical sentence: sea on three sides and an uncrossable line on the fourth. To the north lie the Military Demarcation Line and the Demilitarized Zone, closed since the 1953 armistice. South Korea therefore has no open land border: everything enters or leaves through ports and airports. It functions like an island, making exports a lifeline. The urgency that “without going out, there is no way to live” underlies the nation's pace. On the far side of the line lies both a threat and family.
Mountains cover seventy percent of the land, pressing people into western and southern plains. The Seoul metropolitan area contains nearly half the entire population. This concentration exceeds even Tokyo's. In Korean speech, “the provinces” can carry a sense of loss: once young people leave, schools and hospitals follow them into closure.
The climate is temperate monsoon, with sharply distinct seasons. Siberian high pressure brings dry, cold winters, and Seoul in January often reaches around −10°C. Summers are humid and hot, with the jangma rainy season in June and July and typhoons common in August. Cherry blossoms in spring and autumn foliage both bring the country outdoors. A people who mark the seasons so attentively have learned from the severity of winter.
The history of Korean states is often begun with the Three Kingdoms—Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla—unified by Silla in the seventh century. Goryeo followed from 918 to 1392, producing celadon and metal movable type while enduring repeated Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. Yi Seong-gye founded the Joseon dynasty in 1392 as a Confucian state whose civil-service examinations and yangban scholar-official class formed the social frame. In the mid-fifteenth century, King Sejong created an alphabet for the Korean language. Previously, writing meant Chinese characters that required years of study. Ordinary people could not record their words or grievances; Sejong's preface to the new script said as much. The alphabet contained only a little more than twenty letters. An early explanatory text said an intelligent person could learn it in a morning and even a slow learner in ten days. Scholars despised it and called it eonmun, “vernacular script,” a term preserved in Chinese usage but avoided by Koreans today. More than four centuries later, the first translators of the Bible into Korean deliberately chose this alphabet, entwining its history with the church; see “The Church in This Land.”
Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded in 1592, beginning seven years of war known as the Imjin War. Admiral Yi Sun-sin's naval campaigns remain among South Korea's central national memories. Under great-power pressure in the late nineteenth century, the country was forced open. It became a Japanese protectorate in 1905 and was formally annexed in 1910, beginning thirty-five years of colonial rule. The facts require plain speech: Korean-language education was suppressed, people were compelled to adopt Japanese-style names, and wartime systems conscripted great numbers as laborers and “comfort women.” The March First Movement of 1919 was a nationwide independence struggle in which Christians participated far beyond their proportion of the population.
Liberation in 1945 brought immediate division. Separate states formed north and south in 1948. Around the same time, the Jeju April 3 Incident unfolded: repression beginning in April 1948 continued until 1954. More than 14,000 victims are officially registered, with estimates of the total ranging from twenty to thirty thousand—over a tenth of the island's population at the time. The official truth commission attributed about eighty-five percent of deaths to security forces. For half a century the event could not be discussed openly. A special law opened an investigation in 2000, and a president first apologized publicly in 2003. It preceded Gwangju by thirty-two years and remained silent much longer. War began in 1950 and killed about three million people in three years, most of them Koreans. The parties signed an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, in 1953; legally, the war has never ended. Hundreds of thousands of divided family members never saw one another again.
After the war South Korea was as poor as much of sub-Saharan Africa. Beginning in the 1960s, military governments drove industrialization through coercive measures. Economic growth became their claim to legitimacy while labor, speech, and opposition were suppressed. The “Miracle on the Han River” was real, and so was its cost. Gwangju in 1980 and the June Democratic Struggle of 1987 purchased direct presidential elections. The 1988 Seoul Olympics announced South Korea's return to the world. During the 1997 financial crisis, ordinary people queued to donate household gold to repay foreign debt. Semiconductors, shipbuilding, and the Korean Wave followed as a formerly impoverished country sold its culture across the world.
This country's deepest experience is endurance, rather than victory. The present bill has another form: the total fertility rate has fallen to the world's lowest, suicide has long ranked among the highest in developed countries, and old-age poverty is also among the most severe. History leaves a question: how does a country that survived through speed face people who can no longer endure?
The Korean church began in a way rare in church history: missionaries did not bring it in; Koreans carried it home themselves. In 1784 the scholar Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing and returned home. Without priests, he and several other scholars formed a believing community and spread the faith. Nearly a century of persecution followed, with thousands martyred in major waves in 1801, 1839, and 1866. In Seoul in 1984, Pope John Paul II canonized 103 of them.
Protestantism arrived later and grew quickly. On Easter Day 1885, Presbyterian Horace Underwood and Methodist Henry Appenzeller landed at Incheon on the same day. The key lay less in numbers than in method. Early Korean Presbyterians adopted the Nevius Plan, calling local churches to be self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing. Believers funded their own buildings, led Bible studies, and became elders and deacons. From the first day it was a Korean church, rather than a branch office of a foreign institution. This structure helped make later growth possible. Missionaries and Korean believers also chose Hangul, then dismissed as vernacular, instead of classical Chinese for Bible translation and schools. The alphabet entered household after household, and literacy grew with it.
The Pyongyang Revival of 1907 brought public confession and all-night prayer. Pyongyang became known as the “Jerusalem of the East,” a city now on the other side of the line. During Japanese colonial rule the church occupied two positions. Christians made up about half the signatories of the March First Declaration of Independence. Yet when Japan compelled shrine worship in the 1930s, the Presbyterian General Assembly approved participation in 1938, while pastors such as Ju Gi-cheol refused until death; see “Their Voices.” After the war, the church confessed that decision publicly. A church capable of public confession is not without hope.
The church expanded explosively from the 1960s through the 1980s alongside urbanization, and Seoul developed what was then the world's largest congregation. From the 1980s South Korea sent missionaries in great numbers and is often listed today as the world's second-largest missionary-sending country. During democratization, some churches and theologians marched in the streets while others stood with the government. Both are true.
The present must be described honestly. In the 2015 census, Protestants accounted for about twenty percent, Catholics eight percent, and Buddhists sixteen percent, while those reporting no religion exceeded fifty percent for the first time. Growth stopped and began to reverse, with young people leaving fastest. The inheritance of senior pastoral positions by sons in megachurches has produced years of denominational litigation. Financial and sexual scandals recur, and derogatory internet terms for Protestants have entered common usage. Another issue reaches beyond Korea: groups such as Shincheonji, regarded as heretical by mainstream Korean churches, commonly recruit by infiltrating orthodox congregations, and their activity extends into Chinese-speaking communities. Understanding the Korean church includes this reality.
Treating the Korean church as either model or warning is too easy. It is more like a mirror: in a hundred years it traveled a road that took others centuries, committing in compressed time mistakes other churches made over centuries. It shows what a rapidly growing church can gain and lose.