McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion Series. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. xiv, 298 pp. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$37.95, paper. ISBN 9780228010852.
When it comes to exploring the relationship between a group of Western missionaries and a non-Western population to which they were sent, the usual question asked is, what impact did the missionaries have on the population and its institutions? In this book, the tables are turned, and the main question David Kim-Cragg asks instead is, what impact did Korean Christians have on the missionaries sent from Canada and the institutions that sent them?
By Korean Christians, Kim-Cragg means almost exclusively those who came to be identified with the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea (PROK), the most progressive but one of the smaller noteworthy Protestant denominations in South Korea. And by Canadian missionaries, he means those who served among Koreans under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (PCC), beginning in 1898, and since 1925, the United Church of Canada (UCC), when the majority of the PCC merged with other denominations to form the Union Church. And by the affected institutions, he means both the PCC and, especially, the UCC, Canada’s largest Protestant denomination. In response to the question, Kim-Cragg advances a twofold thesis: that Korean Christians had a transformative effect on the missionaries and their establishment in Korea owing to their spirited and resolute assertion of agency for themselves and their society, vigorously resisting the missionaries’ paternalistic attitudes and policies, and eventually leading them to forgo their superior attitudes and merge their cause, properties, and personnel with those of the PROK. Kim-Cragg’s second point is that the PROK Koreans who immigrated to Canada after 1965 and joined the UCC helped the church abandon its white-centric identity and embrace a multicultural one. The thesis, in the main, is well researched, well developed, and significant.
Kim-Cragg unfolds his argument in eight chapters, divided into three parts. The first part, comprising two chapters, is titled, “Nationalist Missions and Migrating Christians: The Beginning of a Korean-Canadian Church Relationship, 1898 to 1959,” and addresses the formative years of the relationship. The initial scene is Kando, Manchuria, where hundreds of thousands of Koreans migrated, in part to seek relief from harsh Japanese rule. Among them were people who later became leaders of progressive Protestantism in Korea, such as the couple Moon Chai Rin and Kim Shin Mook, their sons Moon Ik Hwan and Moon Dong Hwan, as well as Ahn Byung Mu, Kim Chai Choon, and Lee Sang Chul. In their midst were missionaries sent from the PCC, beginning in 1898, such as William Scott and Robert Grierson. These six decades, Kim-Cragg shows, were fraught yet generative: fraught insofar as Koreans identified the gospel with their nationalistic aspirations and sought to leverage their Christian connections to resist Japanese colonialism, while the missionaries, imbued with notions of settler colonialism born of their own country’s westward expansion, looked askance, at least initially, at the Koreans’ aspirations and prioritized discharging their white man’s burden. It was generative in that despite the tensions, the missionaries came around to cooperating with the Koreans, and to lending their hands when the Koreans parted ways with their conservative evangelical counterparts to found the liberal Joseon (later Hanshin) Theological Seminary in 1939 and the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea in 1952.
The second part, comprising four chapters, is titled “Democratization and Decolonizations: How the Korean Church Changed the UCC Korea Mission and Transformed the Lives of Canadian Missionaries, 1960 to 1979.” The setting here is the tumultuous two decades that saw the demise of two dictatorships, Syngman Rhee’s in 1960 and Park Chung Hee’s in 1979. It was also the period when the PROK, led by the Moon brothers and others such as the woman leader Lee Oo Chung, took centre stage in South Korea’s democratization movement, in alliance with the Catholic dissident leader Kim Dae-jung. Ecclesiastically, in 1974, the PROK and the UCC established a new relationship, owing partly to the PROK’s insistence. This led to the formal end of the UCC mission in Korea as well as the UCC’s sustained financial support of the PROK. It also transferred UCC missionary personnel and properties under PROK oversight, an unprecedented development in the history of Christian missions in Korea. As a result, an unusually large former missionary residence was repurposed as a centre for creating, teaching, and propagating the liberative Minjung theology, led by An Byung Mu and Suh Nam Dong. The arrangement also afforded the erstwhile missionaries the opportunity to wholeheartedly participate in Koreans’ struggles for social justice, exemplified in their support of dissidents through Thursday Prayer Meetings and in the 1976 Declaration for National Salvation.
The third and final part comprises two chapters and is titled “Mission from the East: Korean Christians Engage Canadian Society and the United Church of Canada, 1965 to 1988.” The scene shifts to Canada, to the second half of the twentieth century, when race was dropped as a factor in immigration policy and multiculturalism was adopted as a federal policy. Among the large number of Asians who immigrated to Canada were Koreans associated with the PROK. Many of them joined the UCC, unwittingly becoming “reverse missionaries,” helping the UCC to wrestle with its systemic white privilege. One of them was Sang Chul Lee, who in 1988 became the moderator of the UCC, the first Asian to take on the role.
The book’s persuasiveness rests in no small measure on the solid and plentiful sources, both in English and Korean, that Kim-Cragg deploys: primary documents from multiple archives and interviews he himself conducted. The author also shows impressive familiarity with relevant secondary sources, though he apparently missed Elizabeth Underwood’s Challenged Identities: North American Missionaries in Korea, 1884–1934 (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, 2003), whose insights, had they been incorporated into the book, may have resulted in the American Presbyterian missionaries to Korea being depicted more realistically, rather than as two-dimensional foils to their Canadian counterparts. All things considered, this is a significant book, using a trans-Pacific framework for the first credible exploration of the entire history of the relationship between a major Canadian Protestant mission and Korean Protestants.
Timothy S. Lee
Brite Divinity School (Texas Christian University), Fort Worth