A Religious Economic Interpretation of Korean Overseas Missionary Movements

• In Event: Religious-Based Mobilization

Abstract

Missionary movements can be thought of as a populist expression of organized religions, since missionaries are often presented to congregations as being just like the laity, being from the laity. Indeed, they may be drawn from the laity. Why do South Korean churches dispatch almost 26,000 missionaries all over the world, including to politically dangerous states? How were South Korean Protestant churches able to expand their overseas missionary movements within a short period of time? In the 1980s, Korean churches legitimized authoritarian regimes as well as political elites. In return, churches achieved political privilege, increasing the material capacity to expand the number of churches in Korea. However, starting in the 1990s, the number of church-goers has been decreasing even though overseas missionary movements are still growing. I argue that the continued growth is caused by religious market saturation in Korea. Enthusiastic overseas missionary movements of Korean Protestant churches can be understood as the strategic rational choices pursued by church leaders to gain more believers overseas. Using a religious economics framework, I first show that market saturation has occurred, as the number of believers has been decreasing starting from 1990s, indicating that the level of religious demand is declining. On the supply side, the oversupply of seminary graduates (ordained ministers) saturated the market for church leaders, and led to the increase of overseas mission activities and missionaries. In addition, missionary activity is not just a way of "consuming" the excess supply of seminary graduates: the expansion of mission target states from geographically close states to remote, culturally diverse and even hostile states in recent years also signals to potential church members that a particular church has strongly committed members. The paper tests the rival hypothesis that economic growth is the explanatory factor. Data on the religious market and overseas missionary movements is from data sets hosted in the Association of Religion Data Archives (the ARDA), from the World Bank and The Korea World Mission Association (the KWMA). As missionary movements have the potential of being a populist expression of religion, this study aims to probe under what socioeconomic conditions religion is associated with its political privilege and populism.

Author

• Jihye Jung, Arizona State University