The Anti-Communist Captivity of the Church

An historic battle is going on today among south Korea’s five million professed Christians.

It involves the vast majority of the south Korean Christians who have been provided a convenient half-gospel, and a small minority--remnant of the body of Christ--which discerns the times and dares to live the full risks of the whole gospel.

Today the half-gospel Christians are winning the battle; they have millions of supporters on their side, including the backing of private money, government power, and military might. But one trusts that the remnant church will win the war between truth and untruth; it has one supporter on its side--Jesus the crucified and risen Christ.

The remnant church chooses obedience to God over loyalty to the regime. It did so under Japanese colonial rule before 1945 and does so today. One of the marks of this obedience is great pain--the mental anguish of harassment and imprisonment, the physical scars of beatings and torture. But an equally important sign of obedience is the visible joy; for though the mind can be bent and the body beaten, the spirit is strengthened and continues to overflow its human vessels. When these people worship, they can know which two or three or five or six “worshippers” are really observers from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency: the men with the dry eyes when the service ends.

“I’m at peace with myself and my God.” This is the common refrain of Christians who have decided to die if necessary for their belief in God as the ruler of all creation. Their quiet words, their confident tone of voice, the spirit in their eyes--it communicates the difference between them and most Korean Christians. Most Christians live in relative peace and comfort but privately speak of fear and trembling; the remnant church experiences daily harassment and suffering but speaks of inner peace and outer joy. The demarcation line involves two visions of the cross: either the cross is a beautiful gold altar ornament commemorating an ancient event, or the cross is a splintery bulk of wooden beams borne for others today in knowledge of life tomorrow.

Every conceivable religious and secular force has been mobilized in south Korea today to insist that Christians choose the gold ornament and not the wooden beams. In the terms of the regime’s pervasive ideological propaganda, the choice is between the gaudy richness of capitalism and the wormy woodenness of “communism.”

To perpetuate its totalitarian rule, the Park regime dangles the ornate gold cross like a carrot while using incessant anti-communist rage as its stick. It warns of communist invasions, then promises salvation conditional upon giving one’s birthright to the dictatorship. Pumped with pride and filled with fear, most Korean Christians now breathe the same fires of self-righteous indignation that the communists return to them from the North. Elite liberals share the same passion.

The situation is best described as the anti-communist captivity of the church. In order to rally and unify the people, the Park dictatorship, with consider able American support, has spread its tentacles to embrace the church. What follows is a report on this captive church.

In south Korea and abroad, Campus Crusade for Christ is the staunchest supporter of the Park dictatorship and its repression. Kim Joon Gon, a Presbyterian director of the Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, is known as the most powerful Christian in Korea because of his long friendship with President Park and his easy access to the Blue House, (the Korean White House). Bill Bright, founder and president of Campus Crusade for Christ International, has been by far the most outspoken Christian voice defending Park’s repressive rule, including the imprisonment of Christians.

Kim lived in north Korea, where he states he saw his family killed by communists. This triggered his conversion to Christianity, and he fled to the South with a mission to preach to students. The gospel he preaches is simple: personal salvation and anti-communism.

Kim, 53, studied at Fuller Theological Seminary in the mid-fifties. He met Bill Bright there in 1957 and returned to Korea in 1958 to become the first director of Campus Crusade in Korea. He soon had a considerable amount of money, with which he expanded the Korea Campus Crusade national staff from two to 30. As the movement grew in the mid-sixties, his brand of fervently anti-communist Christianity began to win increasing admiration and respect from President Park. The two began meeting regularly, and mutually beneficial deals soon followed.

In 1968, one year before Park began his march to dictatorship, the president was concerned about energetic and politicized students who might try to duplicate the 1960 student revolution which toppled the Syngman Rhee dictatorship. Park turned to Kim, offering him carte blanche in exchange for campus student movements which would focus their political energies on the communist enemy in the North. Kim agreed and asked Park for land on which to build a Campus Crusade headquarters in downtown Seoul.

Over the objection of Seoul city government officials, President Park offered Campus Crusade--reportedly free of charge--part of the former site of the Russian Embassy in Seoul. The embassy compound, located near the U.S. Ambassador’s residence, had been occupied by squatters since the Republic of Korea (ROK) had broken relations with the U.S.S.R. In 1968 the police moved in and cleared the squatters in a bloody battle that lasted several hours. As soon as the blood had dried, construction began for a high-rise office building which today houses the Korea Campus Crusade national headquarters.

One year later, as President Park considered changing the constitution to permit himself a third term, Kim visited the Blue House and advised Park that such a move was “God’s will for the country.” In 1971 and 1972, as repression mounted and the response of the Christian churches began to polarize between acquiescence and confrontation, Park again turned to confidant Kim.

Four plans reportedly emerged from their meetings: (1) to lend full government support to plans of conservative, pro-government churches and mission agencies to Christianize the ROK Army; (2) to strongly support plans for a series of presidential prayer breakfasts, modeled after those then being held with President Nixon (Kim helped organize these breakfasts, inviting a wide range of church leaders, and he was the featured speaker at some of them.); (3) to encourage the Billy Graham Crusade to come to Korea as soon as possible after the new constitution was rammed through; and (4) to follow up the Graham crusade with Campus Crusade’s own pro-government extravaganza in Seoul.

This overall planning had two purposes: to build up the politically acquiescent church while isolating Christian dissidents, and to “prove” to the world that the Park regime supported freedom of religion. By openly supporting Christian evangelism, the government also sought to neutralize charges in the U.S. press of persecution of Korean Christians--that growing number of Christians who were being tortured and marched off to prison for witnessing to a God larger than the state.

Each of the four plans was enormously successful in wedding traditional evangelism with modern-day military totalitarianism. Bill Bright, one of the most vocal foreign champions of the campaign to evangelize the ROK Army, was proudly exclaiming by 1975 that one-half of south Korea’s 600,000 soldiers had been “brought to Christ.” The prayer breakfasts were a big hit with conservative church leaders, many of whom thanked Park by beginning to openly praise the dictatorship in the national media as well as from their pulpits.

And more than praying seems to have been involved. John E. Nideckor, President Nixon’s personal envoy to a 1974 presidential prayer breakfast in Seoul, was given $10,000 in cash by President Park’s security chief after the event. Nideckor returned the money and reported it to the U.S. embassy. Other Korean officials active in the prayer breakfast groups there have been among those implicated in current scandal and bribery charges that have emerged in the U.S. press and are now under investigation.

Doug Coe, a leading facilitator of the international prayer breakfast movement explained that the Korean presidential prayer breakfast had its origin with a fellowship group of Christians, including Kim. Coe confirmed that Kim had played a major role in the breakfasts and underscored Kim’s close relationship to President Park. Coe stated that the prayer breakfast organizers “wanted to bring the President in at any cost,” and that “Park’s stamp of approval and influence on everything, and his lack of comprehension, didn’t help.”

“The prayer breakfast movement in Korea struggled to walk the fine line between bringing leaders together around Christ, and becoming politicized, and part of a civil religion,” Coe further explained. “The majority of evangelical Christians were naive, and were sucked in without recognizing what was happening.”

Because of its past politicization no Korean presidential prayer breakfast has been held in the past year and those involved are said to be sorting out these conflicts. Other prayer breakfasts with government officials continue.

In terms of both size and international publicity, the May, 1973, Billy Graham Crusade in Korea was an especially large feather in the government’s helmet. An estimated 3,600,000 persons attended the five-day rally in Seoul’s Yoido (May 16th) Plaza. Kim and Bright, whose turn was to come a year later, played only indirect roles in this success. Most of the organizing credit went to Han Kyung Chik, the Billy Graham leader in Korea and pastor emeritus of Yongnak Presbyterian Church in Seoul. Han and Graham are known in Korea as “moderates” compared to Kim and Bright.

Commenting on the Graham crusade, the Korean Overseas Information Service proudly used it as an example of how the Park regime “extends all available support and assistance to gospel-preaching programs.” It specifically mentioned government provision of lamps, telephones, rostrum, medicine and potable water for the crusade. Apparently government funds were also offered but weren’t needed or taken, as trucks had to be hired to haul away the daily donations.

Billy Graham told Sojourners that he was not conscious of any attempt by the Park government to invite his crusade Korea or to give it official support. But he added that he “wouldn’t be surprised if the government tried to use it once they saw the size of the crowds.”

The Campus Crusade rally held in Yoido Plaza August 13-18 1974 was called EXPLO ‘74, after EXPLO ‘72 in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. From the government’s point of view, the Bright Kim crusade was more successful than Graham’s because it was more unabashedly pro-dictatorship. From a numerical point of view, EXPLO’ 74 was less successful. Some Korean churches urged their members to keep a distance from Kim and Bright because of their well-known intimacy with the regime. Kim, the director of EXPLO ‘74, claims that 1.3 million persons attended one rally--"the largest Christian gathering in history." Published accounts say 650,000 attended, including some 2,000 Americans and 1,000 Japanese. There are doubts as to how Campus Crusade raised the reported $1.5 million in crusade set-up costs. Though Kim denies them, rumors persist that the Park government provided cash in addition to the normal full services.

The EXPLO ‘74 handbook told the story of Kim’s life, reviving the horrors of communism and thus serving to justify the string of emergency measures decreed by Park in the first half of 1974. The handbook referred to the gifts which created the Korean Campus Crusade’s headquarter simply as “the answer to prayer.”

Jessica Alexander, a British journalist who covered EXPLO ‘74, called the participants “lively, sincere, and terrible naive politically.” “None of the participants are aware of helping the government by taking the social and political sting out of Christianity,” wrote Alexander. “The foreign participants had little time to absorb the situation in their host country or to understand the real, silent explosion which has been uniting the south Korean Christians in opposition to the Park regime. When I mentioned to one American Campus Crusade official that there had been some conflict between Christians and the government in south Korea, she replied, ‘Oh really? I haven’t heard about it.’”

Bill Bright used the EXPLO ‘74 occasion to wax eloquent in the defense of Park’s harsh crackdown on Christians and students that spring. “There is no religious repression here. It is only political, and I believe it is for good cause,” said Bright. “Those in prison are involved in things they shouldn’t be involved in. In no country of the world, including the U.S., is there more freedom to talk about Jesus Christ than in south Korea.” Bright went on to accuse not only the jailed pastors and laity but also the American press of “slandering the Park regime.” “Those who oppose the regime are militant in their attack of anything that speaks of God,” he said.

Statements like the above lead one to believe that dictator Park Chung Hee sits at the right-wing of God the Father as the judge not-to-be-judged. As a result, Bright’s Korea statements have offended even other evangelicals. Billy Graham last year publicly criticized some of Bright’s statements on Korea. Bright responded to such criticism by claiming that he “never praised or criticized the south Korean political leadership, or the regime, or the administration of any other country, for that matter.”

“In fact,” says Bright, “we have a very strict, written policy that no [ Crusade ] staff member is to become involved in partisan political efforts in any country.” If Bright believes he has followed this policy in Korea, then he exposes a massive ignorance of the meaning of partisan politics. His working definition is that anything opposing Park Chung Hee is “political” and anything supporting him is “non political” and “non-partisan.”

In two telephone interviews with Bill Bright, the Campus Crusade president said he was “not close” to the facts regarding the land under the Korea Campus Crusade building. He said that he understood, however, that Korea Campus Crusade had “paid a handsome sum for the land; I believe it ran into several hundred thousand dollars. In any case, it was not a gift by any stretch of the imagination, though I wish it was. Besides, if there was such a gift to us, there are hundreds of other organizations in Korea which would bring down the house.” In further discussion, Bright volunteered that Campus Crusade International provides 30 percent of the Korea Campus Crusade budget.

When asked about Kim Joon Gon’s ties to President Park, Bright said “Kim is a prophet of God who ministers fearlessly to all with whom he has contact, no matter how high or low their position. He has not only spoken at presidential prayer breakfasts, but he has spoken more powerfully than any other speaker. He’s no compromiser.”

There have been rumors to the effect that Bright has spoken with members of Congress about his strong convictions concerning the Park regime. Swede Anderson, a Bright assistant in Washington’s Christian Embassy, categorically denied that Bright has ever used his relationships with people on the hill in this manner. When asked directly about this use, however, Bright’s reply was more circumspect. “If I have talked to congressmen about Korea, it has only been informally, as we’re talking now.”

Bright, Kim and Campus Crusade have no monopoly on the half-gospel that equates anti-communism with godliness. They are simply some of the key movers and shakers in a much larger, integrated matrix which is the anti-communist captivity of the church today. The situation has its historic roots in 90 years of Western missionary involvement in Korea. Christianity was brought to Korea, as elsewhere, in a package deal with Western culture, technology and capitalism. Christian mission accompanied and served as the sugar-coating for colonialism, then neo-colonialism.

In Korea since 1945, Christian mission has also been inextricably tied to militarism, and the militarism to right-wing--and usually Christian--dictators. Syngman Rhee in south Korea, like Chiang Kai Shek in Taiwan, knew how to pull both the heart-strings of Christian America and the purse-strings of the Pentagon. So the Korean War became much more than a civil war; it became a Christian crusade. God was beating plowshares into swords to kill the communist Antichrist and save the world for freedom and democracy.

The Christianization and militarization of south Korea is symbolized by the campaign to bring half-a-gospel to the Korean military. But the connections go deeper, so deep in fact that today many Christian liberals are as handicapped as the conservatives in trying to separate Christian mission from military power. Many liberals anguish over the issue of U.S. troop withdrawal from south Korea. Consciously or unconsciously, they know that the massive U.S. military force have provided both an entre and a protective cover for large American missionary forces. Despite their sometimes great theological differences, the two forces agree on the overarching ideological imperative: rabid anti-communism.

Anti-communist fervor has also brought Korean Christians into close cooperation with the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL). Inaugurated by Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai Shek, the APACL held its first general meeting in Chinhae, south Korea, in June, 1954. From its founding the APACL, like its parent the World Anti-Communist League, had ties to the American CIA as well as to the churches. In recent years the Korean section of the APACL has organized a number of large rallies modeled after-- and to the same political end as--the Christian crusades. The Christian Anti-Communist League of Korea has co-operated in these ventures. One of the larger rallies was held on May 8, 1975, ten days after the fall of Saigon. Thirty- eight organizations, including church groups, helped the anti-communist league to mobilize 1.4 million persons for the pro-Park rally.

The Christian anti-communist crusaders come from many sectors of the Korean church (see inset). Two groups which have gained international prominence in the past few years are the Christian Business Men’s Committee and the Korean Christian Leaders’ Association.

The Christian Business Men’s Committee is a group of wealthy Korean Christians which funnels donations to key churches and has helped to organize prayer breakfasts for government officials. One of its leaders, Kim In Duk, is president of a major industrial group and reportedly an in-law of Kim Jong Pil who, until December, 1975 was the number two man in the Park dictatorship. The committee is scheduled to host the International Convention of Christian Businessmen in Seoul in October.

The Korean Christian Leaders’ Association is a group of arch-conservative heads of some 19 Protestant denominations and organizations which has released several anti-communist, pro-government statements. Very misleadingly, the individuals claim that their statements “speak for south Korea’s five million Christians.” The group’s not-so-hidden agenda is to undermine the credibility of the Korean National Council of Churches (KNCC). The convener-chairman of the group is Chi Won Sang, president of the Lutheran Church in Korea.

The Christian Business Men’s Committee and the Korean Christian Leader’s Association have combined their energies in the past two years in an attempt to thwart the human right emphasis of some churches, especially those related to the KNCC. The businessmen have raised the funds and Christian leaders have mobilized the people for several large public displays of Christian acquiescence to the government’s “national security” line, thereby endorsing Park’s repression. The events have included an Easter sunrise service in 1975 and a mass rally involving one million persons last June.

The Christian Business Men’s Committee is part of a larger government campaign to organize wealthy Korean businessmen for purposes of buying influence among the churches. The campaign was outlined in a Blue House meeting in late 1974 attended by officials from the KCIA and the Ministry of Culture and Information. Much of the campaign coordination has been carried out by the KCIA’s sixth bureau (devoted to “dirty tricks” including sabotage and assassination) arid second bureau (the propaganda unit). Their responsibility is to locate potentially “troublesome” local churches, then to match them with Christian businessmen in or close to those churches. The businessmen are asked to contribute money for new building programs and other church projects.

The campaign represents a shift in government tactics with the churches. The pre-1974 tactic was strictly to harass dissident pastors, intimidating them personally or threatening to raise taxes on church-owned secular property. The tactic was based on the old policy of divide and conquer. The tactic more common today is based on the new policy of provide and conquer. Rather than feed church insecurity, the new line is to foster security through government-inspired but indirect financial assistance. According to Letters From South Korea (IDO America, 1976), one Korean pastor who received $62,500 from a department store president was then invited to a presidential prayer breakfast where he offered a prayer of thanksgiving for President Park: “We give thanks, O Lord, for sending us this great and wise leader.”

The Korean Christian Leaders’ Association drafted a letter to President elect Carter in late November in which it openly expressed its concern over Carter’s campaign promise to withdraw U.S. military personnel from Korean and barely hid its concern over Carter’s professed interest in human rights and prisoners of conscience abroad. The letter erroneously began, "On behalf of five million Korean Christians . . ." when in fact only 26 individuals signed the letter. The letter went on to say: “We look forward to your prudent measures on the problem of American forces stationed in Korea which are requisite in curbing the communist threat in this country.” On August 15, 1975, the Korean Christian Leaders’ Association had released a “Declaration of the Korean Churches” to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Korea’s “liberation.” The declaration focused on two challenges to the church in Korea: “the serious threat of communism from the outside and the renewed appeal of pseudo-religions from the inside.” Noting that “national security is our primary task at the present time,”, the signers asked that “all churches in the world give close attention to the threat of communism which threatens the freedom of Christian faith and denies basic human rights.”

What about the gamut of basic human rights denied under Park’s fascism? The signers pooh-poohed repression in south Korea, simply saying that the government had proclaimed some emergency measures “because of such an insecure political situation.” The declaration says that “if there has been any restriction” on the church’s full witness to Jesus Christ “this is an unavoidable temporary measure, and we anticipate that the situation will be restored to normalcy before too long.”

That was two years ago.

As for the Korean Christian Leader’s Association’s concern about “pseudo-religions,” the prime target was and is the Unification Church of Moon Sun Myung. Other targets are a variety of small Christian sects which incorporate traditional Korean religious forms-- Shamanist, Confucianist, or Buddhist. Although the Korean Christian Leaders’ Association has not publicly called the Korean National Council of Churches (still in operation) or the Korean Student Christian Federation (now effectively obliterated by repression) “pseudo-religions,” individual association members are known to consider the two groups more “political” than “Christian” because of their strong public stands on human rights and civil liberties. The association, of course, considers its holy alliance with the dictatorship strictly “non-political.”

Another apparent target of the Christian Leaders’ campaign is the new religion Chundo Kwan (literally, “Evangelism Hall”) which peaked in the sixties but which remains one of the largest autonomous religious bodies in south Korea. It is headed by Park Tae Sun, a millionaire businessman who call himself the “olive tree.” Park is somewhat unique among powerful religious figures in Korea because he appears to have no close ties to present top government officials. In fact, the government indicted Park’s son several years ago on charges of financial misdeeds.

The Korean Christian Leaders’ Association’s efforts to discredit the “pseudo-religions” have theological as well as political motives. The theological argument is that these religions are not really Christian and that those who pretend to be--the Unification Church in particular--have been giving Christianity a bad name at home and abroad. The political argument is that the leaders of the new religions--especially Moon and Park--may be building their own power bases, ultimately account able to neither the established churches nor the Park government.

The suggestion that Rev. Moon is not ultimately accountable to President Park may surprise some. But for at least two years government officials have privately expressed concern about Moon’s possible political aspirations in Korea. In the thinking of the Park Cabinet, Moon was growing “out of control.” Therefore the government encouraged religious leaders who were very much under its control--namely the Korean Christian Leaders’ Association--to discredit the “pseudo-religions.” Last month, the Park regime broadened its attack on the Unification Church, charging six executives of Reverend Moon’s Korean business empire with evading six million dollars in taxes.

The Park dictatorship clearly prefers conventional, anti-communist Christianity. The regime has long and close ties with the established churches. Their familiarity and common goals make it easy for the regime to manipulate the churches for its pacification programs. In the process of buying off the churches, the government gets an added bonus abroad: the government’s embrace of the churches ironically has served to put a friendly face on the dictatorship in the conventionally anti-communist, Christian West.

The Park regime has driven a wedge into the churches. The Christian community is polarized between two options: to give total support to the regime, as the majority does, or to be branded “communist,” as the remnant church is branded today.

As the regime pounds this wedge into the churches, one hears the nails being pounded through Christ’s body. The Korean churches are not merely on trial today; the trial appears over, and now the crosses have been chosen--the gold crosses worn as jewelry around the necks of many, and the wooden cross borne as hope on the shoulders of a few.

Jim Stenzel was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.