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Essay on Religion In Korea
Religious affairs bureaus have provided powerful administrative tools for East Asian governments to deal with the demands their relationship with the rest of the world has placed on their policy toward religious believers among their own citizens. In effect, they are national security organs, working to minimize the divisive impact religious loyalties could have on national unity while at the same time maximizing the image of those governments as conforming to the norms expected of a civilized nation and thus meriting the respect of other nations.
One set of practices they have adopted to pursue these twin imperatives is to fashion definitions of religions that allow more freedom to religious organizations the more they are visible overseas, and to permit a more public role for religious organizations that are hierarchically organized and thus more susceptible to centralized control. The definitions of religion employed are primarily Western in origin because Western religious organizations were, at first, the most visible internationally as well as the most hierarchical.
Consequently, in defining religion in such a way as to promote their own national security, East Asian governments have favored Western and other transnational religious regimes at the expense of less visible and less organized domestic expressions of religiosity.
Ironically, this is the opposite of the effect that Japan--which first coined the Chinese character translation for the word "religion" that is now used throughout East Asia--originally intended.
The builders of modern Japan looked at the West in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and saw shared faith in Christianity as supplying the cohesion that could undergird its power. They therefore decided to create a similar religious basis for Japanese power. Japan did not have a clearly definable Japanese religion, however, and so the builders of modern Japan decided to create one. They elevated....
