냉전과 한국 개신교- 냉전 체제로 구조화된 한국 개신교에 대한 한 분석 -

Abstract

This study analyzes how Korean Protestant Churches had been structured by the cold war system during the era of the Cold War in 1945-1990. The Cold War was a conflict between two different thoughts, narratives, and discourses. It was a war between communism and liberalism, and in the context of Korea, between the Juche Ideology of North Korea and the Americanism of South Korea. South Korea employed the Korean Protestantism as the most efficient weapon in the cold warfare against its enemy. North Korea drew upon the Juche Ideology or Kim Ilsung-ism for the same purpose. The author claims that the anti-communist movement of the Korean Protestantism had found its cause in the idealized image of America (Americanism) during the Cold War period. A strong trust in the idealized America in Korean Protestants and people made America the Big Other that colonizes the soul of ordinary Koreans and Christians. Korean Christians consciously or unconsciously accepted the desire of America as their own and their souls were then colonized by it. This study argues that Americanized Korean Christianity during the Cold War period had been distorted in its faith. Korean Protestantism was characterized by its prosperity gospel, binary worldview, literalism and fundamentalism. In North Korea, Kim Ilsung’s Juche Ideology functioned as the Big Other for the ordinary North Koreans. This study employs the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan’s concepts of Big Other, symbolic order, and subject for its analysis of the way how the Church and the State in North and South Korea were structured by the cold war system. This study claims that Lacan provides important insights for the solution of the cold-war mentality of people and churches in both Koreas and for the creation of an alternative symbolic order that leads to peace and reconciliation in the Korean Peninsula. Such an emergence of an alternative symbolic order or Big Other depends on the emergence of new subjects in both Koreas. An alternative Big Other may emerge when new subjects courageously commit themselves to justice, and crumble and break down the old Big Other and its symbolic order including its language and communication. Importantly, their commitment must involve constant meetings and exchanges with North Korean Christians and conscientious people, so that this may contribute to the construction of an alternative Big Other (and signifier) that brings about the peace and reunification of Korea.