Religion and American Power in Transnational Korea

Religion and American Power in Transnational Korea Minjung Noh Helen Jin Kim, Race For Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire, ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2022). Heonik Kwon & Jun Hwan Park, Spirit Power: Politics and Religion in Korea's American Century, ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2022). Helen Jin Kim's Race for Revival and Heonik Kwon and Jun Hwan Park's Spirit Power provide scholars of modern Korea and US empire with compelling reasons to take religion seriously. They illuminate the intricate relationships between religion and politics in the transpacific Korea-US network—enmeshed with the transnational history of Japanese occupation, the Cold War, and neoliberal globalization—in the latter half of the century. They achieve this by narrating the interwoven histories of twentieth-century politics, religions, and human and nonhuman agencies amid the neocolonial conditions. These books challenge readers to revise any previous assumptions about a simplistic power imbalance between the transpacific regimes of Korea and the United States. Lastly, with ample historical evidence and decolonial theorizations, they cross the boundaries between what has been conventionally perceived as Korean studies and American history. In Race for Revival, Kim claims that US evangelicalism and its global identity formation were profoundly shaped by interaction with rapidly growing Korean [End Page 232] evangelical Christianity. Hence, echoing and expanding Melani McAlister's influential global history of evangelicalism, Kim argues that the history of American evangelicalism is not complete without attention to its transpacific ties, particularly to South Korea. In Spirit Power, Kwon and Park focus on the same time and place, but on a different tradition: Korean Hwanghae shamanism. Here, too, we find complex American entanglements. For example, Kwon and Park show how the spirit of US General Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964), the first commander of Far East Command after World War II, entered the spirit world. This inclusion, they argue, is a "testimony to this world's capability to guard its sovereign integrity and autonomy" rather than the "corruption of national religious culture by encounter with a foreign power" (Kwon and Park, 164). That is, an American, foreign symbol did not invade Korean shamanism's spirit world; rather, its spirit world absorbed it in its own terms, where the foreign spirit is only given an equal amount of power to indigenous spirits. In this review, I will first introduce the key aspects of each book and discuss how they enhance our comprehension of the relationship between religion and US empire in twentieth-century Korean-US history. Subsequently, I will briefly discuss how these aspects connect with recent developments in the field of post-colonial religious studies and with my own research on transnational Korean Christianity. Race for Revival is a riveting history of US evangelical Christianity, which is inextricable from its Korean counterpart. The main actors of the transnational narrative are Korean and American evangelicals who intimately cooperated across the Pacific against the backdrop of Cold War politics in East Asia. Kim uses rich archival and oral history sources to uncover the history of Korean influence on and involvement with renowned US evangelical parachurch organizations such as World Vision, Campus Crusade, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Fully embracing the broader transnational turn in American history, Kim writes, "the story I tell is not a history of US-South Korean religions, but a transpacific history of American religion" (19). Race for Revival convincingly buttresses its argument through a wide array of sources from both the US and South Korea in its five dynamic and organically aligned chapters: Martyrs, Students, Orphans, Revival, and Explosion. The story begins from the martyrs of the Korean War (1950–1953), the traumatic event that paved the "militarized transpacific highway" (9). Chapter one, "Martyrs," explains how the transnational political condition contributed to the identity formation of white evangelicalism in tandem with the appropriation and erasure of Korean evangelicals. That is, while Korean evangelicals who died in the Korean War were glorified as martyrs in the US evangelical imagination, their stories were appropriated to solidify the US-centric narratives whose main [End Page 233] characters were white soldiers, pastors, and the white Jesus. Such deployment and erasure of Korean evangelicals is demonstrated through the foundation...