Jin-Heon Jung

North Korean refugees and the politics of evangelical mission in the Sino-Korean border area

This article examines evangelical missionary work intimately tied with humanitarian aid for North Korean refugees in the Sino-North Korean border area as an emblem of South Korean churches’ North Korean mission. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, with limited access to certain field sites due to local security concerns, I shed light on refugees’ religious conversion as a complex cultural project and process in which ideas of and practices for religious freedom and salvation become immensely contested in the very logic of “saving,” in both humanitarian and biblical terms. My primary concerns in this Chinese context are twofold: the problems of evangelical missionary works associated with universal human rights discourses and the church as an intra-ethnic contact space where refugees’ religious and social lives are pre-figured. Based on fieldwork in the Yanbian area, this ethnography discusses empirical questions about religious conversion, intra-ethnic interactions, and salvation.

Building Noah's ark for migrants, refugees, and religious communities

Introduction: Refugees and Religion Alexander Horstmann and Jin-Heon Jung PART I 1. What is a Refugee Religion? Exile, Exodus and Emigration in the Vietnamese Diaspora Janet Hoskins 2. Religious Imaginary as an Alternative Social and Moral Order: Karen Buddhism across the Thai-Burma Border Mikael Gravers 3. Refugee and Religious Narratives: The Conversion of North Koreans from Refugees to Gods Warriors Jin-Heon Jung 4. Ritual Practice, Material Culture, and Wellbeing in Displacement: Ka-thow-bow in a Karenni Refugee Camp in Thailand Sandra Dudley PART II 5. Secular and Religious Sanctuaries: Interfaces of Humanitarianism and Self-Government of Karen Refugee-Migrants in Thai Burmese Border Spaces Alexander Horstmann 6. Conflicting Missions? The Politics of Evangelical Humanitarianism in the Sahrawi and Palestinian Protracted Refugee Situations Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 7. Humanitarian Adhocracy, Transnational New Apostolic Missions, and Evangelical Anti-Dependency in a Haitian Refugee Camp Elizabeth McAlister PART III 8. Palestinian Steadfastness as a Mission Leonardo Schiocchet 9. Conversion and Community among Iu Mien Refugee Immigrants in the United States Hjorleifur Jonsson 10. Faith in Ethnicity: The Homeland Ties and Diasporic Formation of Vietnamese Caodaists in the United States and Cambodia Thien-Huong Ninh

Urban aspirations in Seoul: Guest editors’ introduction

This special issue invites readers to examine dynamic religious aspirations in the urban contexts of South Korea. Focusing on religious practices, adaptations, and material constructions in the making of Seoul, these articles contribute to the growing scholarly discussion on the relationship between the urban and the religious/sacred in the context of Asian cities and beyond (e.g., van der Veer 2015, Goh and van der Veer 2016). This special issue is the culmination of an interdisciplinary research team—the Seoul Lab—which contributed to the larger comparative urban research project of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity undertaken in Mumbai, Shanghai, and Singapore. In these introductory remarks we share some key concerns of the project in order to invite further scholarly discussion.

The religious-political aspirations of North Korean migrants and protestant churches in Seoul

This article highlights an aspiration specific to Seoul that is projected onto, experienced, and contested by North Korean refugee-migrants who have recently arrived by way of China in this capitalist city of a divided Korea. I pay particular attention to the role of the evangelical Protestant Church in the process of subjectification of these migrant individuals and the performative rituals by which they negotiate religious-political aspirations toward the future. The bodily-spiritual transformation of individual North Korean migrants into Christians is not strictly teleological and is more complicated, ambivalent, and diversified. By comparing two distinctive North Korean migrant activities—the balloon leaflet campaigns and the With-U music concerts and activities—this article discusses the efficacies of the performative rituals of violence and peace that contest and constitute the particular religious-political aspirations in the context of late-Cold War Seoul.

The Freedom School

“I am the future of the nation!” This is the motto of the Freedom School (FS), which sounds decisive, heroic, and definitely nationalistic. The school’s name suggests that “freedom” is what the refugees didn’t have in North Korea. The dean of the school, Mr Song, a 46-year-old gentle Christian and former college instructor of North Korean politics, stresses with great conviction that the motto is given by God to empower these “brethren” to be born-again national leaders. The motto is a sacred message hung on the wall, interestingly printed in a “cute” font on a square cloth on which there is also a map of the Korean peninsula. The motto is attached to a pink heart with wings, and smaller pink hearts are embroidered here and there (see Figure 5.1). It was made several years earlier, to represent that the future of a unified Korea must be carried out not by masculine warriors of God, but by love, big and small. On the wall on the other side, “Love and bless you!” (sarang-hago ch’ukbok-hapnida) is written in various colors on another cloth, and is attached to the wall right above a bulletin board panel. The appearance of the wall and ceiling decorations make the FS look like a Sunday school classroom for children. In a sense, it is. “What we are doing for them is simple. That is, just like fixing a necktie if it is not put on in the right way, we assist them to make up for some minor shortcomings,” stated a deacon of the FS advisory board.

North Korean Crossing and Christian Encounters

We have observed lately that, amid escalating military tensions between North Korea and the United States and South Korea, some Protestant missionaries have been detained on entering North Korean territory without documentation, with some subsequently being released. In early May 2013, the news media discovered that a Korean-American detainee in North Korea, who is currently sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, is also a missionary.1 Christian missionary work aimed at North Korea varies in form and effects; both Catholic and Protestant churches, ecumenical and evangelical alike, operate their missions following what they believe to be “God’s calling,” sometimes differing vastly from and often contradicting one another. This chapter examines the evangelical missionary work that is intimately tied with humanitarian aid for North Korean refugees in the Sino-North Korean border area as an emblem of South Korean churches’ North Korean mission. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in regions wherein certain field sites had limited access due to local security concerns, this chapter sheds light on refugees’ religious conversion as a complex cultural project and process in which ideas of and practices for religious freedom and salvation become immensely contested in the very logic of “saving” in both humanitarian and Biblical terms.

Conclusion: Free to Be

Toward the end of the FS program, North Korean trainees take part in what the South Korean church calls P’asongsik, a ceremony that churches or missionary organizations hold for commissioning short- or long-term missionaries. P’asongsik signals the end of their ten-month-long training at the FS, and consequently the beginning of a new life journey as a model citizen. This much was expressed by the manager of the FS, and I consider this commissioning ceremony literally and metaphorically sufficient to allow for an open-ended discussion with which to conclude this book. The ceremony was, for the FS, the final stage of a rite of passage (van Gennep 1960), proclaiming a quality shift in the trainees’ status and identity into future missionaries and first unifiers. This is believed to be the ultimate condition of freedom in faith. The idea relates to the primary concerns of this book, namely, the transcendence and reconciliation that are aspired to through human-divine interactions in contact zones. In this vein, Webb Keane stresses that “transcendence haunts modernity in three unrealizable desires: for a self freed of its body, for meanings freed of semiotic mediation, and for agency freed of the press of other people” (2006: 310). As a key characteristic of Christianity, this mode of transcendence is premised on a state of separation and yet it is unrealizable.

Introduction: North Korean Migrants and Contact Zones

This book examines the life trajectories of North Korean migrants as they interact with South Korean transnational missionary networks along the Sino-North Korean border in China and in South Korea. I investigate the meanings and processes of individual migrants’ conversion to Christianity through interactional frameworks, namely those through which North Korean migrants interact with South Korean and Korean-Chinese (朝鲜族) missionaries, and with state powers, and with God. Churches, including related institutions, communities, and networks, serve as cultural “contact zones” (Pratt 1992) for the human-divine interactions upon which this book is based. Since the mid-1990s, when a famine took approximately one million North Korean lives, escalating numbers of people have crossed the Tumen river in search of food resources, job opportunities, and refuge, risking their lives to make their way to South Korea in hope of a “better life” (Suh 2002; Yoon 2003; Chung 2008). Statistics show that a startling 80–90 percent of North Korean migrants identified themselves as Christian when they arrived in South Korea and around 70 percent continued to rely on church services after they arrived (Jeon 2007). The church then emerges as a primary contact zone in which North Korean migrants are incorporated into the South Korean Christian system of values.

Refugee and Religious Narratives: The Conversion of North Koreans from Refugees to God’s Warriors

The significance and advantages of incorporating the life histories and personal narratives of individual refugees are consistently emphasized in anthropological contributions to refugee studies (e.g., Malkki 1996; Powles 2004; Rajaram 2002; Black 2001). The narrative perspective is vital because it can manifest the lived experiences of individual refugees over the course of, to use Michel Agier’s notion (2008), the destruction of their established life (confinement in camps or life on urban margins) and the actions taken to establish a new life.

Narrativization of Christian Passage

The significance and advantages of incorporating the life histories and personal narratives of individual refugees and migrants are consistently emphasized in anthropological contributions to refugee and migration studies (e.g., Malkki 1996; Black 2001; Rajaram 2002; Powles 2004). The narrative perspective is vital because it can demonstrate the lived experiences of individual refugee-migrants over the course of, to use Michel Agier’s (2008) notion, the destruction of their established life (confinement in camps or life on urban margins) and the actions taken to establish a new life. Individuals express their experiences in socio-culturally shared forms; narratives are forms of expression that are “socially constructed units of meaning,” according to Edward Bruner (1986: 7). In this spirit, this chapter examines the conversion narratives of North Korean migrants—narratives that construe suffering, perilous migration, and the development of a new self in the evangelical language of what I term “Christian passage.”