South Korea

Korean religion is layered rather than sequential. Muism, the shamanic practice conducted by the mudang, is the oldest stratum and has never stopped; Buddhism arrived in the fourth century and became the state religion of Silla and Goryeo, building the mountain monasteries and commissioning the Tripitaka Koreana, whose more than eighty thousand printing blocks survive at Haeinsa; Confucianism was made the governing ideology of the Joseon dynasty from 1392, which suppressed Buddhism, expelled monasteries from the cities and organised the state, the family and the examination system on Confucian lines. Christianity entered by an unusual route.

Korean scholars encountered Catholic texts in Beijing in the 1770s and 1780s, formed a community, and only later requested priests, making Korea one of the very few countries where the church was established by laypeople before any missionary arrived. Persecution followed through the nineteenth century, and the Korean Martyrs number in the thousands. Protestantism arrived in the 1880s with schools and hospitals, aligned itself with Korean nationalism under Japanese occupation, and grew explosively after 1945 and again after the Korean War, so that within a single century Korea moved from a country with almost no Christians to one where they outnumber Buddhists.

The speed of Korean Christian growth invites explanation, and several converge. Christianity arrived without a colonial sponsor: the occupying power was Japan, not a Christian empire, so the churches could be nationalist rather than foreign, and Protestant leaders were prominent in the independence declaration of 1919. Missionaries adopted the Nevius method, which made congregations self supporting, self governing and self propagating from the outset, and translated scripture into the vernacular Hangul script at a time when the elite still wrote in classical Chinese, which tied literacy to the church.

The disruption of the Korean War, mass migration to the cities and rapid industrialisation dissolved the village and lineage structures that Confucian practice depended on, and urban churches supplied community to arriving migrants. The result includes some of the largest congregations in the world, Yoido Full Gospel Church among them, and a Korean missionary force second in size only to that of the United States. Growth has now stopped. Protestant numbers have plateaued and church credibility has been damaged by disputes over hereditary succession in large churches, by financial scandals, and by the visibility of a politically aggressive conservative Protestantism. Catholicism, associated in public memory with the democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s, has held its reputation better while remaining smaller.