Unruly Rites

When Western missionaries first introduced Protestant Christianity to Korea in 1884, Korean converts adopted beliefs and practices that defied prevailing Confucian norms, including distinct faith-based rituals. By the turn of the twentieth century, during the final years of the Chosŏn dynasty, competing cultural and religious viewpoints soon began to roil Korean society with frenzied—even life-and-death—controversies over ritual practice. But this was just the beginning. After Japan annexed Korea in 1910, such controversies grew to command the very forefront of public attention, as Koreans and Japanese officials advanced conflicting aspirations for ritual transformation against the backdrop of colonial politics.

New Protestant rites revealed religion to be a source of perpetual division at a time when disparate groups, including Confucian intellectuals, Korean cultural nationalists, and Japanese colonial authorities, each sought to unify rites—and the Korean people—in service of their competing cultural, social, and political agendas. Hajin Jun argues that Protestant Christianity triggered a public reckoning over the place of religious difference in Korean society. Fast-proliferating ritual reforms not only sought to restrain unruly faith-based rites but religious difference itself, efforts that turned increasingly coercive as the Japanese empire shifted towards war. By tracing this story of ritual change, Unruly Rites sheds new light on the fraught intersection of religion and political power in colonial Korea.