Myung-Sahm Suh | Sogang University (original) (raw)

Books by Myung-Sahm Suh

Papers by Myung-Sahm Suh

Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions

American Journal of Sociology

American Journal of Sociology , 2017

This paper examines the contested legacy of the First Lausanne Congress in South Korean neo-evang... more This paper examines the contested legacy of the First Lausanne Congress in South Korean neo-evangelical communities. In response to growing political and social conflicts in the Global South during the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of evangelical leaders from more than 150 countries gathered at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1974 to discuss the proper relationship between evangelism and social action. The meeting culminated with the proclamation of the Lausanne Covenant, which affirmed both evangelism and public involvement as essential elements of the Christian faith. However, the absence of practical guidelines in the Covenant opened the door for all sorts of evangelical social activism, whether from the Evangelical Right or the Evangelical Left, for years to come. In light of such diverse ramifications of the Congress at both the global and local level, this paper explores the various ways in which the idea of " Christian social responsibility " has been interpreted and implemented by two distinct generations of neo-evangelical social activists in contemporary South Korea in relation to their respective socio-historical experiences of the Cold War and the 1980s democratic movement.

Published Articles by Myung-Sahm Suh

Korea Journal, 2021

Since the early 21st century, conservative evangelicals in South Korea have actively engaged in c... more Since the early 21st century, conservative evangelicals in South Korea have actively engaged in contentious politics, playing a central role in organizing the right-wing social movement in civil society. At first, such politicized evangelicals, who may be dubbed as the Korean version of the Evangelical Right, conjured up the old specter of the Korean War and stood against those who, in their minds, went against the Cold War dogmata of anticommunism and pro-Americanism. Over the last two decades, however, the Korean Evangelical Right has expanded its battle line to confront other types of perceived enemies on the Culture War front, especially Islam and LGBTQ persons. By tracing the genealogy of their social movement, this paper explores the ways in which the Korean Evangelical Right finds itself in the predicament of wavering between the geopolitics of the Cold War and the global politics of the Culture War, insofar as these two wars operate on different sets of the friend-foe distinctions.

Social Compass, 2019

This article examines the ways in which the emergence of the Seoul Capital Area offered both oppo... more This article examines the ways in which the emergence of the Seoul Capital Area offered both opportunities and challenges to religious actors in modernizing South Korea. South Korea rebuilt itself from the ruins of the Korean War through an accelerated process of urbanization and industrialization in accordance with a state-led modernization drive. This process, in turn, led to an unprecedented population concentration in Seoul and its surrounding area, where new political and economic centers emerged side-by-side with slums and shantytowns. Amid this turbulent social change, some of today's most well-known Protestant leaders-especially Pentecostal Cho Yong-gi and Calvinist Kim Chin-hong-joined the caravan of rural-to-urban migration and commenced their ministries in Seoul, adapting their religious messages and practices to address the social aspirations of the growing urban population. This article demonstrates that despite their shared concern for the problem of urban poverty, Cho Yong-gi and Kim Chin-hong faced successes and failures in different ways as they adopted ministerial programs of the gospel of prosperity and the theology of development, respectively.

Book Reviews by Myung-Sahm Suh