해방 후 한국교회와 국가의 관계, 1945-1979 : 최근 극우화의 뿌리 탐색을 겸하여 = Relations between the Korean Church and the State after Liberation, 1945-1979: Exploring the Roots of Recent Right-Wing Extremism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The recent rightward shift in Protestantism has created a third wave of research on church-state relations in Korea. Traditional approaches to church- state relations focus on “relationships with the state”(cooperation-resistance) and “attitudes toward political participation”(participation-nonparticipation). The core characteristics of the church-state relationship after liberation can be summarized as two things: (1) religious privilege and (2) collusion between politics and religion. Mainstream Protestantism, having become part of the established order, embodied political conservatism. It is highly likely that the “extremization of Protestantism” was a result of a defensive response to two events that had a dismantling effect on the “privileged system of collusion between politics and government” that emerged after democratization: inter-Korean reconciliation and regime change.
Meanwhile, the traditional approach, which prioritizes the interests of the church, only considers the “distance from or close relationship with state power” and does not ask what kind of political system the church is dealing with. Furthermore, the traditional approach cannot explain the actions of religious figures who transcend self-interest, go against self-interest, and willingly accept disadvantage. An alternative approach, which could be called a “critical church history,” focuses on the core manifestations of the church’s right-wing extremism and its facilitating factors. The essence of the alternative approach was to rigorously reexamine the entire history of the Korean church through the keywords of democracy, violence/war, and militarism. In this article, I propose that we focus on the “time-spaces of reflexivity” as a starting point for a new approach, that is, the times-spaces of interruption and discontinuity where the existing order is shaken to its very foundations.