1980년대 한국 개신교 민주화운동의 특성과 한계 - 6월 항쟁에서의 교회 공론장을 중심으로

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study the Korean Protestant church's Movement for Democratization in the 1980s from a perspective seeing church space as the public sphere of the June Mass Struggles in 1987. The critical problem with the Protestant Church's Movement was a lack of connections with the public from various classes and occupations, whether or not they were religious. Its role is in contrast with that of Myeongdong Cathedral done as the public sphere which made it possible for many people with quite different backgrounds to get together and to form the protest group against repressive regimes. The Cathedral has an open garden and a long hill in front of the main building. It was the vacant space to enable the evictees from Sanggye-dong to set up tents and the sit-down demonstration to continue. The space was good for raising emotional union among those people through their communication between inside and outside the Cathedral. It was the hill of ‘hope' that gave everyone there a bright prospect for the future. Thus the vacant space contributed to the emergence of public sphere by allowing the students, merchants, people of religion, office workers with Sanggyedong evictees together to mediate between their own issues and aspiration for democracy. They created true public opinion, sharing vernacular political discourse and street rhetoric through mutual responses. Unlike Myeongdong Cathedral, Protestant churches and United Christian Center were used as the places where the Protestant leaders often made declarations against the military regime besides offering prayer and worship service for democratization. They may be also considered as public sphere, but only for the Protestant leaders as well as a group of the dissidents. From the perspective of the construction structure, the Protestant church building is wholly for the explicit purpose for Christian worship completely separated from the outside world. And thus there is no vacant space in which sacredness and secularity meet. In this regard the vacant place has not only the meaning of physical space, but also symbolic implication necessary for understanding the problems that the Protestantism faces now.