• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.29
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• pp.241-278
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• 2017

This study aims to classify broadscale anti-religious movements in Korea based on critical public sentiment and analyze the meanings of these movements. To carry out the research, global religious changes that have occurred in modern times were closely looked into first. The world religions have had an influence on the world's religious awareness. As a result, they intend to acquire universality on their own individual grounds while keeping consistency with the past. This phenomenon used to appear to retain the identity, recreate tradition, transform itself to fit in the present times, pursue innovation, or even become overshadowed by other forms of thought such as when religions have collided with nationalism. How does Korean society perceive the changes that emerged in world religions? In general, the circumstances that Korea faces in this era tend to manifest themselves via the Internet, multimedia, and Youtube wherein they sound off on religion and this includes criticism of Christianity, demand for reformation, attack on minor religions, pro-reform academic circles and media, and the propagation of anti-theism. Criticism of religion is interpreted as an anti-religious movement. The secularism and anti-theism brought up by some Western scholars and critical theories of religion from scientific or historical perspectives are being spread through bookstores. Christianity is prone to reflecting on itself and trying to emphasizing a meta-religious spirituality. This in short, characterizes anti-religious movements in Korea. Indeed, criticism against particular religions has also emerged in the past. However, anti-religious movements that have recently come into existence in Korea are in some regards unprecedented when compared to that of the past in terms of their patterns and context. Especially, the active anti-Christianity movement in general is definitely a new phenomenon. This research mainly focused on Christianity, but on-going anti-religious movements will be a major topic for further research that aims to understand the religious changes unfolding in Korea.

• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.33
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• pp.179-218
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• 2019

This article examines some important issues in films about new religious movements (NRMs) that express and represent NRMs in sensationalistic ways and criticize them as immoral and antisocial cults. I presented a typology to analyze films about NRMs from the perspective of marginalized religions separated from established religions and also as alternative religions that replace the established religions. In recent times, films about NRMs have changed from being social criticisms that represents NRMs as perpetrators of brainwashing and the need for deprogramming to that of faithful participation and empathetic reflection. Films about NRMs that utilize empathetic reflection, including Wild Wild Country (2018), go beyond the normative, single-perspective formula to enable insiders to conduct self-reflection and outsiders to empathize through openness, varied perspectives with multi-faceted composition and polyphony. In contrast, films about NRMs that adopt the perspective of faithful participation, including The Road to Peace (1984), present a new visual way to unravel the voices of silenced subalterns with alternative religious visions and those who needed relief from the marginalization due to alienation or exclusion from established religions. In the Korean context, these visions are expressed as 'the great transformation into the creation of a paradise of the Later World (後天開闢)' or as 'the resolution of grievances for mutual beneficence (解冤相生).'

• Journal of the Daesoon Academy of Sciences
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• v.37
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• pp.141-190
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• 2021

In early modern Korea, the founders of three main-stream indigenous new religions, Choi Je-woo (崔濟愚), Kang Il-sun (姜一淳), and Park Jungbin (朴重彬), were all ruined yangban, who could no longer maintain the social dignity of yangban. Prior to their regular religious activities, they earned livings as rural teachers, peasants, merchants, and fortune-tellers. They were marginalized for having declined from upper-class nobles to lower-class people. Due to their subalternal status, they religiously represented the inexpressible aspirations and resentments held by various subalterns. The millennial movements of marginal religions in the late Joseon Dynasty exposed and deviated from the fetters of the established order, but they did not propose a new alternative order to replace it. Unlike these millennial movements, Choi Je-woo, Kang Il-sun, and Park Jungbin all proposed utopian visions of post-subalternal alternative religions that systematically presented and practiced new alternative worldviews characterized by the "Great Opening of the Later World (後天開闢)." The world they longed for was one wherein anti-subalternal social regulation were overthrown, the oppression of various subalterns end, and the established social order was replaced. In this article, I have argued that three main-stream indigenous Korean new religions, Donghak (Eastern Learning), the Jeungsan-inspired religious movements, and Wonbulgyo (Won Buddhism) are utopian alternative religions. I made this argument by analyzing some aspects by which they represented subalterns and offered subalterns a new religio-social status.