Although modernization and urbanization led to a decline in religious participation in most developed nations, Don Baker argues that these forces had the opposite effect in Korea. Based on strong statistical evidence, Baker posits that because religious affiliation was associated with modernity, the ranks of the faithful swelled instead of declined as Korea become one of Asia's industrial giants.

Over the last few decades regular church attendance in much of the developed world has declined sharply. In nations such as Sweden and Denmark, only around 5% of the population now attends worship services on a weekly basis. The British tend to be more religious than most other Europeans, but even the most optimistic estimates say that three-quarters of the people in the United Kingdom do not participate in organized religious activity on a weekly basis. Americans often brag that they are much more religious than Europeans, but even the United States has experienced a sharp decline in regular church attendance, with some scholars estimating that only about 30% of the US population participates in religious rituals every week, down from as high as 50% only a couple of decades ago. We can see a similar trend in Canada.

In trying to explain this decline in organized religious activity in the developed world, some observers have suggested that secularization is the result of modernization. They suggest that modern science, technology and medicine have demystified the world, making life more predictable and controllable and as a result reduced both the number and types of situations in which human beings feel the need for supernatural assistance. In addition, they say, industrialization has a similar effect, since factory workers are less threatened than farmers are by drought or other vicissitudes of nature beyond human control. Urbanization is another feature of the modern world which many argue has promoted secularization, since, by pulling individuals from villages in which they were subject to the close scrutiny of their neighbors into the anonymity of urban life, it has eased the pressure on individuals to participate in community religious rituals. Moreover, in Western Europe, modernization has been associated with the rise of the secular state, shrinking the realm over which religious authorities held sway and creating nation-states in which religious organizations became just some of the many voluntary organizations which operated under the umbrella of state authority. The combined effect of these various defining features of the modernization process has been, we are told, a decline in the power and autonomy of religious organizations and in the frequency and intensity of individual religious activity. 

However, this attempt to equate modernization with secularization fails to take into account contrary examples from recently developed societies. For example, in the twentieth century, particularly in the decades following the Korean War, South Korea has experienced rapid modernization of both its economy and its society. Yet, as it modernized, South Korea also experienced an explosion of organized religious activity. Koreans are much more likely to attend worship services regularly now than they were fifty years ago, and religious structures are much more visible on the streets of Seoul today than they have ever been in Korea’s long history. 

MORE CLERICS, MORE WORSHIP HALLS, AND MORE BELIEVERS

This assertion that modernization in South Korea has meant increasing rather than decreasing religiosity is supported by a number of quantitative measures, courtesy of data compiled by Gallup of Korea and the South Korean government. For example, according to figures Korean religious organizations have submitted to the Korean government over the last few decades, there were fewer than 34,000 religious professionals (such as monks, nuns, priests, and ministers) in South Korea in 1962. By 1993, that figure had risen to almost 180,000. Moreover, that figure does not include shamans of various types, from self-styled “bodhisattvas” and fortune-tellers to those who perform rituals in which they become possessed by spirits, who number at least 50,000 and probably a lot more. (There are at least a dozen such shamans with offices within a short walk of my home in a middle-class district of Seoul.) If we include shamans with other religious specialists, then according to government figures, in the last decade of the twentieth century at least one out of every 200 South Koreans earned their living as a professional religious practitioner.

The size of this increase in the number of clergy may be somewhat exaggerated, since much of that increase came from Korea’s new religions, which claimed a total of only 1,513 clergy in 1962 but reported a total of 37,135 in 1993. Many of the clergy in those new religions are not true religious professionals, since they earn their living from full-time secular occupations and serve as clergy only part-time. Nevertheless, the fact that the number of Buddhist monks and nuns tripled from less than 10,000 in 1962 to over 30,000 in 1993, the number of Catholic priests rose from 2,254 in 1963 to 8,561 in 1993, and the number of Protestant ministers quadrupled from a little more than 20,000 in 1963 to over 84,000 in 1993, indicate that the rise in the number of people who consider religion their primary occupation is no illusion. Such a substantial increase in the number of clergy could not have occurred without a corresponding increase in the religiously active population.

When the Japanese colonial government surveyed Koreans about their religious affiliation, most Koreans told them they had none. Out of a population of 23.5 million people at the time, less than a million told their Japanese questioners that they had any specific religious preference. However, when the government of the Republic of Korea in 1991, as part of a broader survey to obtain a statistical snapshot of its 44 million citizens, asked the people of South Korea what their religious beliefs were, it obtained a dramatically different result. In that 1991 survey, a majority of South Koreans proclaimed an allegiance to a specific religious tradition for the first time in the history of the Republic of Korea. The percentage of the South Korean population professing a religious affiliation declined slightly when Gallup polled them in 1997 (47% religious versus 53% with no religious affiliation). Nevertheless, it is clear that South Korea is a much more religious place today than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, before Korea began to modernize. 

As recently as 1964, only a little over 3.5 million South Koreans, out of a total population of almost 28.2 million, noted a religious affiliation on government census forms. In other words, less than four decades ago, only a little more than 12% of the South Korean people declared themselves to be Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, or a follower of one of Korea’s many other organized religions. By 1983 more than 15.5 million South Koreans, close to 40% of a population of over 39.6 million, responded in the affirmative when their government asked them if they professed faith in any particular religion. That was more than a four-fold increase over the number of believers two decades earlier. By the 1990s, those willing to identify themselves as members of a specific religious community had risen to between 47 (in 1997) to 54 (in 1991) percent of the total population of South Korea. The size of the self-proclaimed religious population had risen from less than 16 million to between 21 to 23 million in a little more than a decade. Moreover, according to the 1997 Gallup poll, almost half of those who said they had no religious affiliation at that time confessed that they had once considered themselves Buddhists, Catholics, or Protestants. In addition, many of those who say they are not now nor have ever been members of religious organizations nevertheless participate in religious activities such as shamanistic rituals or the activities of some of Korea’s new religions without considering their participation a signal of religious orientation. Clearly, by the end of the twentieth century, religious organizations and religious activities had become important features of the Korean cultural landscape.

However, it is difficult to determine precisely how many more Koreans are religious today than were religious before rapid modernization began in the 1960s. Figures reported by religious organizations are dubious. When religious organizations report that their total membership rose from 2.5 million in 1962 to over 66 million in 1993, it is obvious that they are exaggerating, since there are only about 46 million people living in South Korea. Furthermore, the figures compiled in surveys conducted by the government or by Gallup are not totally reliable either. For example, such surveys usually find at most only 60,000 or 70,000 or so admitted members of Daesoon Jilli-hoe, a new religion which has managed to build a modern university and two general hospitals with contributions from a membership which, judging from the size of the Daesoon Jilli-hoe budget, must be substantially larger than that. (Daesoon Jilli-hoe claims that every month it receives financial contributions from 1.5 million different households which include at least one believer each.)

This downward bias in the reported size of the new religions of South Korea is probably more than offset by the fact that a substantial percentage of people who tell Gallup or their government that they are Buddhists rarely if ever engage in organized Buddhist religious activity. For example, more than half of those who called themselves Buddhist confessed to Gallup pollsters that they had never read any Buddhist sutras. Moreover, almost one out of every four self-proclaimed Buddhists admitted that they had not attended any Buddhist rituals in at least a year. And one out of three Buddhists told Gallup that they never prayed to Buddhas or Boddhisatvas.

Given the uncertainty in the figures we have for the percentage of the South Korean population which is truly religious, we need more substantial evidence that in 2001 Koreans are participating in religious activities and identifying with specific religious traditions more than they did before the second half of the twentieth century. We find that evidence in architecture. 
Excluding shaman shrines, the government counted 10,366 buildings used for religious rituals in 1962 and 58,896 in 1993. For example, the number of Buddhist temples in South Korea rose from 2,306 in 1962 to 7,244 by 1980. By 1993 there were 10,632 registered Buddhist temples in South Korea, a more than four-fold increase in three decades. The figures are even more remarkable for Protestant churches. There were 42,598 Protestant churches in South Korea in 1993, more than six times as many as the 6,785 which existed in 1962. Catholics are not able to establish new churches as quickly, primarily because of a shortage of priests. Nevertheless, there were 844 Catholic churches in Korea in 1990 compared to only 313 in 1965. Even the small new indigenous religion of Won Buddhism expanded from 186 worship halls in 1972 to 404 in 1993. Daesoon Jilli-hoe grew as well, doubling the number of its proselytizing centers over the course of just one decade, from around 700 in 1983 to over 1,600 in 1994, indicating that the boom in organized religion has not been confined to those religious organizations with a long history and international connections. Supporting what we have inferred from the sharp rise in the number of clergy in Korea, such a substantial increase in the number of buildings serving a religiously-active population could not have occurred without a corresponding increase in the size of that population.

How do we explain this increased religiosity? Have Koreans become more religious despite modernization, or might the modernization process itself be responsible for the rise in organized self-conscious religious activity on the southern half of the Korean peninsula? 

URBANIZATION AND RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

There is statistical evidence to suggest that the correct answer is the latter. In South Korea, modernization, and in particular urbanization, pushed Koreans into temples and churches.

Over the last four decades, South Korea has urbanized at a rate almost unprecedented in world history. In 1960, only slightly more than one out of four South Koreans lived in towns and cities with 50,000 or more inhabitants. By 1966, that percentage had risen to 37%. The urbanization rate rose to 41.1% in 1970, 48.4% in 1975, 57.3 % in 1980, 65.4% in 1985, 74.4% in 1990 , and reached 78.5% in 1995. Much of that growth has been in and around Seoul. There were fewer than 4 million people living in Seoul in 1966, compared to almost 11 million in the 1990s, plus another 4 million in the surrounding area. Seoul embraced only 13% of South Korea’s population in the mid-1960s. By 1975 almost one out of every five South Koreans was living in Seoul and by 1990 that rate had risen to one out of four. Moreover, that 25% of the entire South Korean population which lived within the city proper does not include the millions more who lived beyond the city limits in the urban sprawl which now surrounds Seoul. When we combine the population of Seoul with the population of Kyeonggi province which surrounds it, we discover that by 1995 over 45% of the entire population of South Korea lived in or around Seoul. That would be a remarkable concentration of population in any society, but it is even more remarkable in a society such as South Korea which was still overwhelmingly rural only four decades ago. With the population of Seoul growing 45.7% between 1966 and 1970, 24.5% between 1970 and 1975, 21.4% between 1975 and 1980, 15.3% between 1980 and 1985, and 10.1% between 1985 and 1990, its houses and condominiums are filled with people who have fond memories of the less sophisticated, less complicated, less impersonal rural atmosphere they only recently left behind. 

Any time people are uprooted and resettled in such vast numbers at such a dizzying rate, there will always be those who feel left out and left behind in the transformed environment. The villages and small towns those new urbanites immigrated from were usually close-knit communities in which many shared the same surnames and many families had lived side by side for generations. When the rush to the cities emptied those small towns and villages, community ties disintegrated, leaving millions of new urban residents feeling alone in a sea of strangers. Religious organizations stepped in to embrace those newcomers. The modern religions of Korea have recreated the old sense of community, allowing residents of Seoul, Pusan, and other large cities to escape the loneliness and anonymity of high-rise apartments and crowded subways. 

Evidence that the growth in the urban population is correlated with growth in church and temple membership is provided by surveys which contrast the rates of religious affiliation for the residents of cities and villages. According to government figures, the percentage of the rural population which called itself religious rose from 36% in 1985 to 46.7% in 1991. Over that same six-year period, however, the percentage of the urban population which called itself religious grew from 46.1% to 56.5%. An urban Korean, therefore, is more likely to proclaim a specific religious affiliation and engage in regular formal religious activities than a villager who maintains a more traditional lifestyle in one of Korea’s remaining villages or small towns. 

Moreover, the more modern the urban neighborhood and the higher the average level of education and household income for residents of that neighborhood, the higher the rate of regular participation in formal religious activities. For example, in the early 1990s a Seoul National University anthropologist examined a district in southern Seoul in which almost every household was headed by a husband with a college education and a professional occupation. He found that almost 85% of the residents he surveyed said they had a religious affiliation, compared to only around half of the national population. 

In addition, although the percentage of the surveyed population that was Buddhist (21%) is comparable to the figures reported in nationwide surveys taken in the 1990s (which range from 27.6% in a 1991 government census to 18% in a 1997 Gallup survey), a much higher percentage of this upper-class community is Protestant or Catholic than is the general population. Over 30% of his respondents told him they were Protestant, compared to around 20% of the national population. In an even greater departure from the national norm, almost 22% of the residents of this district in Seoul said they were Catholic, compared to a national figure at that time of only around 6%.

This is quite a different situation from that which prevails in the rural areas of South Korea. A 1997 Gallup Poll found that almost 25% of the residents of Seoul, and 28% of those in Seoul’s suburbs, professed belief in one of Korea’s many Protestant denominations. Another 9% of the people of Seoul, and almost 13% of those in its suburbs, said they were Catholics. Only around 16% of those living in rural villages called themselves Protestants, below the national average in 1997 of 20%. Catholics claimed only another 6% of those living in South Korea’s villages and small towns. That means that the percentage of the population of Seoul metropolitan area which is Catholic or Protestant is over 20% higher than the national average, and well over 50% higher than the percentage found in rural areas. These figures and others suggest that Korean city-dwellers, particularly those in the more modern and affluent sections of Seoul, are not only more likely than other Koreans to be religious, but they are more likely, when they are religious, to be Christian rather than Buddhist.

CHRISTIANITY AND MODERNITY

Why is religion, particularly Christianity, both in its Protestant and its Catholic varieties, so strong in Seoul and its suburbs? Seoul is the political, financial, cultural and educational capital of South Korea and as such has led modernization on the Korean peninsula. Since Christianity has been linked with modernization in Korea for well over a century, Seoul has also been at the center of the resurgence in religiosity that was sparked, I argue, by the introduction of Christianity into Korean culture. 
One indicator of the rise in religiosity in Korea, as noted earlier, has been the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population that proclaims a specific religious affiliation. Until the second half of the twentieth century, most lay Koreans did not identify themselves as Buddhists rather than Confucians, or conceive of Buddhism and shamanism as mutually exclusive religions. Christianity introduced into Korea the notion of separate and distinct communities of faith in which belief in one religion prohibits belief in another religion or even participation in its rituals. When Koreans heard Christians proudly announcing that they are Christians, many non-Christians began imitating them, declaring that they too were proud followers of a specific religious tradition. What was once almost exclusively a Christian practice has spread to become the badge of a modern Korean regardless of religious orientation.

Why would a Christian practice signify modernity? The vast majority of the first modern institutions on the Korean peninsula, including the first modern schools, medical clinics, and newspapers, were established at the end of the nineteenth century by Christian missionaries or by their Korean converts. Christians, though small in number in those early years, quickly became among the best educated on the peninsula and took the lead in fighting to modernize Korea and protect it from Japanese imperialism. When those efforts to preserve Korean independence failed and Korea was absorbed into the Japanese empire in 1910, Christians continued to promote the modernization of education and medical care. Moreover, because Christians, more than other Koreans, resisted the pressure from the Japanese colonial government to honor the Japanese emperor through public ritual, Christianity became identified with nationalism, another defining characteristic of modernity.

When Japan was forced out of Korea by its defeat in World War II, Korean Christians reestablished their close ties with Christian organizations in North America, Europe, and Australia. Much of the rebuilding of Korea along modern lines, particularly after the devastation of the Korean War, was done by Koreans working closely with Christian organizations from overseas who supplied both funding and personnel. Thus, from the final decades of the Joseon dynasty through the difficult years of Japanese colonial rule and recovery from fratricidal war, Christianity has been identified with modernization. 

Urbanization has also been identified with modernization and it is among those expanding urban populations that modern institutions and values have first taken root. Therefore it seemed only natural to Koreans who moved to the burgeoning cities that, along with Western-style housing and clothing, they would adopt Western-style religion. Besides, Christians were more accustomed than Buddhists or shamans to operating in an urban environment, and were able to address the needs of urban residents for new forms of community ties faster than the traditional religions were. It is this identification of Christianity with modernization and urbanization which has made Christianity such a powerful presence in contemporary South Korea that even non-Christian religions have had to partially reshape themselves in its image in order to survive.

This response of non-Christian religions to the identification of Christianity with modernity, along with the proselytizing of Christian churches, has been responsible for the dramatic increase both in the percentage of the South Korean population which claims a specific religious orientation, and in the percentage of the South Korean population which participates regularly in activities which they recognize as religious.

THE BUDDHIST RESPONSE TO THE CHRISTIAN CHALLENGE 

In the 1920s and the 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese rule, less that 200,000 Koreans on the entire peninsula were willing to identify themselves publicly as Buddhists. In fact, Japanese statistics show more Christians than adherents of Buddhism or any other religion in Korea during the colonial period. After the Korean War, as the number of self-proclaimed Christians in the independent Republic of Korea rose dramatically, the number of those who called themselves Buddhists rose dramatically as well. In 1962 Buddhist denominations claimed almost 700,000 followers in South Korea, three times as many as were found on the entire peninsula when it was ruled by the Japanese. Nevertheless, Korea’s Buddhist population at that time was only a little more than half the size of the more than 1.3 million-strong Christian population. 

As the numbers of Christians in Korea grew, the number of self-identified Buddhists grew even faster, as Buddhists adopted the Christian practice of identifying with a specific religious community. By 1985, the percentage of the population calling itself Buddhist had reached rough parity with the percentage of the population calling itself Christian. The census in 1995, for example, found 10.3 million Buddhists in South Korea, compared to 8.7 million Protestants and slightly less than 3 million Roman Catholics. 
Although Christianity is identified with modernity, no one has to convert to Christianity to be seen as modern. As long as a Korean adopts the modern notion of a specific religious orientation, and the specific religion that he or she follows resembles in some aspects the modern concept of religion which Christianity brought to Korea, then that person can also claim to be a full participating member of modern society.

For some, membership in one of the modern Buddhist temples in urban areas – temples which run kindergartens, publish glossy magazines, and sing hymns at Sunday worship services, just as Christian churches do – is just as much a mark of modernity as is baptism in a Christian church. In fact, in Pusan, South Korea’s second largest city and the only potential rival to Seoul for cultural domination of the southern half of the Korean peninsula, it appears that it is Buddhism rather than Christianity which is the mark of urban modernity. According to the 1997 Gallup poll, almost 35% of the population in Pusan and the surrounding Kyeongnam province calls itself Buddhist, compared to less than 12% who say they are Protestant and around 3% who say they are Catholic. 

A MORE COMPETITIVE RELIGIOUS MARKETPLACE

The increase in the number of the self-consciously religious is not the only contribution of Christianity to the increasing visibility of organized religion in South Korea. The increase in the number of the religious organizations to which people can affiliate and the fragmentation of religious communities into competing denominations can also be at least partially attributed to Christian influence. 
After the turmoil which followed liberation from Japanese rule in 1945 and which intensified during the three years of the Korean War, Protestant Christianity fragmented into a number of sub-denominations. For example, there are now over 70 different Presbyterian denominations in South Korea, as well as seven Methodist denominations and six Baptist denominations. Koreans claim to have a proud tradition of religious inclusiveness, citing the fact that for most of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) one Buddhist denomination embraced all of Korea’s Buddhists and coexisted with shamanism, welcoming shrines to mountain gods within the grounds of Buddhist temples. If such tolerance of religious differences was once a significant characteristic of Korean religiosity, it clearly no longer is. Many of Korea’s Protestant sub-denominations insist on establishing their own seminaries so that their clergy will not be contaminated by the theological and politico-religious views of other Presbyterians, Methodists, or Baptists. Moreover, it is not unusual in Korea to see a seminary professor, or a pastor, dismissed from his post and even condemned as a heretic for straying outside the boundaries of Christian doctrine as defined by the sub-denomination which hired him. 

Such doctrinal intolerance, though it may have roots in the Christian insistence that correct belief is essential to salvation, is no longer confined to intramural Christian struggles. Some fundamentalist Christians have also turned their insistence that everyone accept their vision of religious truth against Buddhists. Buddhist sacred works of art have been destroyed by Christian radicals, and some Christians have even tried to set Buddhist temples on fire. Radical Christians have also attacked statues of Tan’gun, the legendary founder of the Korean nation whom some of Korea’s new religions worship as a god. A nationalist organization with roots in Tan’gun worship has donated statues of the legendary father of the Korean people to elementary schools throughout Korea. Several of those statues, however, have been beheaded. When the police have been able to determine who is responsible, in every case it has been a radical Christian. 

When non-Christian Koreans began adopting the Christian practice of identifying with a specific religious community, some also adopted the common Christian belief that the road to salvation is a narrow one, and is doctrinally defined. This had led to fragmentation into sub-denominations among Buddhists and among some of Korea’s new religions. For example the Chogye denomination, which has its headquarters in downtown Seoul, claims to represent the vast majority of Korean Buddhists, but that claim is challenged by at least 53 other Buddhist organizations, some of which report that they have hundreds of thousands of members. South Korea now has nine Pure Land sub-denominations, five Esoteric sub-denominations, and eight Maitreyan sub-denominations, as well as several other Buddhist organizations which insist that they offer a better path to salvation and enlightenment than that offered by Chogye. 

Similar fragmentation can be found in the Jeungsan-kyo family of new religions. There are close to fifty different religious organizations which worship Kang Jeungsan as the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. One of the larger of those Jeungsan religions, Jeungsan-do, has attacked another, Daesoon Jilli-hoe, as a false and corrupt religion which distorts the teachings of Kang Jeungsan and therefore leads people away from the path to salvation. Some of the language Jeungsan-do hurls at Daesoon Jilli-hoe resembles the charges of heresy some Christian groups in Korea have used against each other when arguing over doctrinal differences.

This fragmentation within both Buddhism and new religions in Korea suggests that Koreans now are more sensitive to doctrinal and sectarian differences than they were in the past. Adherents of various religious faiths in Korea today are much more likely to assert that their way is the only path to salvation than they were before Christianity introduced the notion of sectarian exclusiveness into Korean religious culture. 


CONCLUSION

Ironically, this fragmentation of religious denominations into competing sub-denominations may be one factor in the rapid rise in the percentage of the South Korean population which professes a religious affiliation. Competition among various religious organizations has meant increased proselytizing, which means that more people are exposed to religious messages and more people are invited to join worship groups meeting in their neighborhoods.

Rapid urbanization since 1960 has fueled a dramatic rise in the membership of South Korea’s religious organizations. However, the shape that increased religiosity has taken - the increase in sectarian affiliation and in religious conflict - may be due to the important role Christianity has played in defining religiosity in modern Korea. Before Korea encountered Christianity, there was already religious competition and conflict on the peninsula. Buddhists, Confucians, and shamans all vied to have their beliefs and rituals deemed the most efficacious. However, the intensity of inter-religious competition today, both in terms of the numbers of combatants involved and in terms of the rigidity of the doctrinal walls dividing them, is unprecedented. Korea’s turbulent history over the last century has forged a link between modernization and Christianity which has forever altered religion in what was once the Land of the Morning Calm. 


ENDNOTES

The statistics in this article are taken from statistical reports and census figures published by the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Korea, as well as the report by Gallup Korea, Han’guk-in ui jonggyo wa jonggyo uisik: ’84 nyeon, ’89 nyeon, ’97 nyeon josa gyeolgwa wa bigyohan jonggyo yeon’guseo [The religions and religious beliefs of the Korean people: A comparison of dates from surveys taken in 1984, 1989, and 1997] (Seoul: Gallup Korea, 1998). More information on membership in religious organizations over the course of the twentieth century can be found in Han’guk jonggyo sahoe yeon’guso, ed, Han’guk jonggyo yeon’gam, 1994 [Yearbook of Religion in Korea] (Seoul: Koryeo hallim weon, 1994) The study of the religious beliefs of upper-middle class Koreans can be found in Kim Kwang-ok, “The Religious Life of the Urban Middle Class,” Korea Journal, vol. 33, no. 4 (Winter 1993), p.5-33. Information on religious activity outside of Korea comes from a December 10, 1997 press release from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, from Andre Walsh, “Church, Lies, and Polling Dates,” in Religion in the News Vol. 1, No. 2 (Fall 1998), and Joe Couto, “Canadian Church Attendance Declines,” in Christian Week Online, vol. 14, no. 18 (January 9, 2001).