Ontological Culture and the Divergent Trajectories of Christianity in Modern East Asia: A Comparative Historical Analysis of China and Korea

This article offers a comparative historical analysis of the transmission of Christianity in China and Korea from the nineteenth century to the formation of modern nation-states. Although the two societies were incorporated into the global order under broadly similar conditions of Western imperial expansion and modernization, Christianity followed markedly different trajectories in each context. This study examines how Christianity interacted with dominant ideological traditions in China and Korea and how these interactions shaped distinct patterns of religious localization. To explain these divergent outcomes, the article introduces the analytical concepts of ontological culture and cultural inertia and employs them as a culturally grounded framework for comparison. It argues that differences in the sources of normative legitimacy and the strength of cultural inertia played a decisive role in conditioning whether Christianity remained marginal or became socially embedded. While Christianity in China was largely contained and selectively absorbed within a resilient indigenous ontological culture, its development in Korea was facilitated by a weakening cultural order that allowed Christianity to function as an alternative source of moral authority. By foregrounding cultural structure as a mediating mechanism in religious transmission, this study moves beyond institution-centered or missionary-centered explanations and contributes a comparative East Asian perspective to broader debates on religious diffusion, localization, and globalization. It also highlights the value of non-Western historical experiences for developing more generalizable theories of religious change.