Description

Praise for South Korea’s transformation from a “mission-receiving” country to the second largest “mission-sending” country in the world is typically accompanied by applause for Korea’s economic growth and advancement in the capitalist world order. Optimistic observers forecast that Korean Protestant missions will soon eclipse centuries of European and American-led missions and herald a new era of South-to-South mission flows. In such triumphant evangelical narratives, Korea is seen as having successfully progressed from poverty to prosperity as a result of Christianization and capitalist development. How do Christians missions nurture faith in capitalist deliverance, and what is at stake in this evangelical-capitalist assemblage in the era of neoliberal globalization? This talk draws from ethnographic research of missions in Tanzania and Uganda where Korean missionaries organized a month-long series of events including economic development seminars based explicitly on Korea’s model of state-led modernization and rural development. I will discuss how the missionaries presented Saemaul Undong from the 1970s—with its authoritarian roots trimmed and foundations recast in Christian terms—as a wellspring for a distinctly Korean/American political theology of development, and offered it as a blueprint for both economic and spiritual progress..

Ju Hui Judy Han is a doctoral candidate in geography with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at the University of Berkeley, California. Her dissertation concerns the geography of contemporary Korean/American evangelical Christian missions. Her research interests include the political economy of global English; perceptions of distance/proximity, stranger/neighbor; illegal aliens; and the narrative structures of class mobility and achievement.