Contesting Obligations: American Missionaries, Korean Christians, and the State(s), 1884--1919.

摘要

This dissertation demonstrates the need to reconsider the roles missionaries played in shaping the development of Christianity in Korea. This project takes as its departure point the conventional scholarship's practice of limiting the attention paid to missionaries because they challenge the notion of an indigenous origin of Christianity in Korea and because of their supposed support of the Japanese colonial enterprise. In contrast, I advance two related arguments. First, utilizing missionary writings, official documents, and periodicals, I show how missionaries manipulated rules, regulations, and rituals to dominate their relationships with both the Korean government and converts. They used their influence to define what constituted Christian orthodoxy and proper behavior. Many of the practices they outlined are present in Korean churches today. Thus, scholars must give these "foreigners" a more prominent place in the study of "Korean Christianity." Secondly, my research details how the colonization of the peninsula altered the power dynamics between missionaries, converts, and the state. In stark contrast to the Korean government, Japanese officials were successfully able to regulate the movement and activities of missionaries. Rather than using the threat of violence, the Government-General appropriated and redefined the discourse on "separation of church and state" as they claimed sole control over the political realm. While missionaries complained, waning support for missions in the United States and their embassy's withdrawal from Korea meant that they lacked the means to mount an effective protest. Thus, as a corrective to conventional interpretations that have argued that missionaries "cooperated" with the Japanese only in order to protect religious gains, this project highlights the process by which colonial officials extracted a contested compliance. Missionaries remained on the defensive until the outbreak of the March First Independence Movement of 1919, when a combination of Korean Christian activity plus missionary reports of police violence led to a change in colonial policy. In highlighting this last point, this dissertation shows that the relations between missionaries, converts, and the state(s) were never a matter of simple one-way domination. There existed room for individual agency and resistance. Through a continual process of cooperation and contestation, Christianity in Korea has developed and become the religion of many.