Revisiting Religious Power: The Korean Evangelical Church as a Disciplinary Institution

Abstract

AbstractDrawing upon an ethnographic study of South Korean evangelicalism and women's religious practices conducted between 1996 and 2006, this chapter revisits the important question of religious power. By showing the complex ways in which Korean evangelical women practice and appropriate their faiths, it highlights the dimensions and operations of religious power that often remain underexplored in discussions of lived religion—its disciplinary dimensions. In so doing, it addresses in particular two of the “edges” with which this volume is concerned: pursuing critical engagement with religion and exploring religious experiences outside of the US context. The observations and analyses presented in the chapter are based largely on ethnographic data and interviews gathered from a study of two large, middle-class evangelical churches in Seoul—one Presbyterian and the other Methodist—which incorporate observations and studies of more than twenty evangelical churches in Seoul.