Promoting Liberty of North Koreans: Competing Evangelical Approaches

• In Event: Faith, Law, and Liberty: Christianity in Global Politics

Abstract

How do western evangelicals (who embrace evangelical Christian and liberal-democratic values) personally engage citizens of the world’s most repressive regime (North Korea, DPRK)? We discuss two competing approaches: humanitarian and human-rights (rescue). Humanitarian evangelicals (HEs) offer (solely) legal humanitarian and developmental assistance inside the DPRK; human-rights evangelicals (HREs) both legal and non-legal assistance, mainly with Korean migrants in China and Russia. Preliminary data indicate that more than three years (2000-03) of pandemic-induced border closures caused diverging outcomes for HEs and HREs: blocking the former from legal-formal activities inside DPRK, but enabling the latter to informally work with legal and non-legal migrants, with less interference from DPRK officials. This project updates the literatures on Christian missionaries and liberty promotion in areas where rights are tightly restricted (e.g., Woodberry 2012) and specifically in North Korea. It examines HEs and HREs during era of ongoing, enhanced sanctions (2017-) and pandemic (2020-) that have sharply isolated North Koreans; and the complex relations between the two groups of evangelicals. We conduct a multi-year study of FBO workers and their interactions with constituents, governments, and media in China, North Korea, South Korea, and US.

Author

• Joseph Yi, Hanyang University