Profiles of Contemporary Korean Religions: The Emergence of Neo-Ethnicity

Abstract

This paper describes the religious culture of contemporary Korea. It rejects both the causal-normative debate of a standard historical approach and the hegemonic-normative debate of a cultural approach, attempting instead to synthesize facts that are made apparent by the present state. Based on the premise that Korea’s religious culture is in a multireligious state, I conceptualize the types of extant religions into central religions, which are deeply rooted in tradition, and peak religions, which exercise direct influence on contemporary society, to examine these religions’ intersecting teachings on peak-oriented and center-oriented attitudes. Then, I examine how relationships with political authority are formed based on understandings of contemporariness. A religion’s perception of its relations with politics can change depending on whether it considers contemporariness as a monoreligious, multireligious, or multicultural condition. Presently, however, the strata of each religion’s situational perception have been significantly and chaotically convoluted. Finally, I point out that religions are showing qualities of new ethnicity. I highlight the resulting inevitable inabilities of religions to communicate and the exclusion they derive, as well as the dynamism of exclusion, upon which religions build their trade value through mega growth, extremity, and convenience in the current state of multicultural markets.