Transnational Christianity and Right-Populist Mobilization in South Korea: Before and After Martial Law Crisis

• In Event: Religion and Populism (Co-sponsored by Political Sociology Section)

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between supporters of former South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and transnational conservative Christian networks, before and after Yoon’s December 2024 martial law declaration and impeachment. The post-crisis right should be understood not merely as a temporary pro-Yoon protest coalition but as an increasingly institutionalized transnational infrastructure—rooted in conservative Protestant organizational capacity and drawing on U.S.-aligned culture-war repertoires, yet shaped by South Korea’s domestic polarization and perceived progressive dominance in speech regulation and historical interpretation.
Drawing on personal interviews, participant-observation, and content analysis of Yoon’s supporters, the paper traces how Korean conservative Protestant networks selectively adopted American mobilization scripts, including election-fraud narratives, “Stop the Steal” rhetoric, and symbolic displays of U.S. flags as markers of civilizational alignment. Rather than direct coordination, these ties operate through ideological translation and cultural brokerage: transnational signals provide moral validation and portable interpretive frameworks that embed domestic grievances within a global narrative of institutional capture and civilizational decline.
The argument integrates four theoretical lenses: transnational social movement diffusion, religious nationalism and political theology, militant-democracy theory, and conservative factional realignment. Historically, anti-communist national security doctrines normalized restrictions on procedural rights in South Korea, establishing precedents that later became politically portable. Progressive coalitions’ use of legal mechanisms—such as expansive defamation enforcement and regulations targeting “fake news”—reinforced conservative perceptions of procedural asymmetry. Following impeachment, the mainstream media’s dominant framing of Yoon’s actions as an attempted self-coup intensified epistemic exit into alternative (bijulyu) digital ecosystems, strengthening militant and performative strands within the right.
South Korea thus approximates a repression–radicalization spiral in which procedural escalation and informational exit reinforce mutual distrust. Transnational conservative Christianity amplifies this dynamic by sacralizing political conflict and embedding local polarization within global civilizational narratives, reshaping factional alignments and democratic legitimacy in contemporary East Asia.

Author

• Joseph E. Yi, Hanyang University