North Korean Crossing and Christian Encounters

Abstract

We have observed lately that, amid escalating military tensions between North Korea and the United States and South Korea, some Protestant missionaries have been detained on entering North Korean territory without documentation, with some subsequently being released. In early May 2013, the news media discovered that a Korean-American detainee in North Korea, who is currently sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, is also a missionary.1 Christian missionary work aimed at North Korea varies in form and effects; both Catholic and Protestant churches, ecumenical and evangelical alike, operate their missions following what they believe to be “God’s calling,” sometimes differing vastly from and often contradicting one another. This chapter examines the evangelical missionary work that is intimately tied with humanitarian aid for North Korean refugees in the Sino-North Korean border area as an emblem of South Korean churches’ North Korean mission. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in regions wherein certain field sites had limited access due to local security concerns, this chapter sheds light on refugees’ religious conversion as a complex cultural project and process in which ideas of and practices for religious freedom and salvation become immensely contested in the very logic of “saving” in both humanitarian and Biblical terms.