Abstract
Civil religion refers to a country’s beliefs, symbols, and rituals that bolster national unity and strengthen its citizens’ sense of identity and belonging. However, the literature on civil religion is divided between those who attribute it to bottom-up cultural spontaneity and those who see it as an ideological top-down construction. Moreover, there has been a relative lack of scholarly attention to Korean civil religion. This paper addresses both issues by arguing that a strong civil religion indeed exists in the country and that it has been an important part of the “nation-building” process since the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948. The paper highlights how a succession of authoritarian regimes (1948–1987) successfully mobilized a strong civil religion for political purposes. The resulting civil religion targeted economic growth as the national goal to overcome all social ills, focused on the country’s ethnic and cultural homogeneity to boost national confidence and pride, exalted its traditional religions, especially Confucianism, as repositories of Korean traditional culture, and rendered sacred meanings to national symbols such as the flag and national anthem. Even after democratization, Korean civil religion remains largely ideological, as the Korean government is heavily involved in framing, planning, sponsoring, and promoting the country’s civil religion. Nevertheless, the paper concludes by observing that this civil religion is entering a period of crisis due to political fragmentation among Korean elites and deeply rooted cultural and societal change.
Highlights
Coined by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his seminal book The Social Contract (Rousseau [1762] 1968), the term civil religion can be said to be a set of beliefs that are intentionally created, and imposed on the public, by the state to uphold social order (Aldridge 2007, pp. 142–44)
Rousseau first used the term civil religion, the basis of this concept is akin to the idea of Emile Durkheim (1965), who argued that religion reaffirms societal norms and values, as well as social relationships, and that it serves as a source of social harmony and unity
This paper argues that a strong civil religion exists in the country and that it has been an important part of the “nation-building” process since the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948
Summary
Coined by Jean Jacques Rousseau in his seminal book The Social Contract (Rousseau [1762] 1968), the term civil religion can be said to be a set of beliefs that are intentionally created, and imposed on the public, by the state to uphold social order (Aldridge 2007, pp. 142–44). In drawing upon the above characterizations, a working definition of civil religion for this paper is as follows: Civil religion refers to the beliefs, values, symbols, public ceremonies, national heroes, and places of a particular country that are endowed with religious or sacred qualities to reinforce the national identity and promote unity for a common national purpose. Scholars who have published works on civil religion all have recognized the difficulty of making the distinction between the two They point out that it is important to identify civil religion as a meaningful concept and research issue in its own right, because it may explain how, when, and why people’s national identity, their sense of belonging to the nation, and their feeling of unity for national purposes exhibit religious-like intensities
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