The Cults of South Korea

The 2014 Sewol ferry tragedy has added another chapter to the country’s disconcerting history with cults.



The Diplomat June 17, 2014

By John Power

For more than six weeks, an obscure Christian sect widely described as a cult has dominated the news in South Korea. The reason: its alleged connection to a ferry sinking in April that killed more than 300 people.

Yoo Byung-eun, the founder of the Salvation Sect and alleged de facto owner of the ferry’s operating firm, has become the country’s most wanted man, with the authorities offering a $500,000 reward for information leading to his arrest. He and his family stand accused of corruption, poor management and illegal modifications to the ferry Sewol that prosecutors say contributed to its sinking with hundreds of high school students onboard. Despite a massive manhunt across the country, Yoo has continued to elude capture since a court issued a warrant for his arrest on May 22.

“They (the Salvation Sect) began around the early 1970s. Their doctrine is influenced by the foreign missionaries,” Tark Ji-il, a professor at Busan Presbyterian University and expert on cults in Korea, told The Diplomat. “According to them, they don’t need to repent again and again. We need only one repentance. Right after realization of sin, there is no need to repent again. Because, according to them, righteous man is righteous man, even if they have committed a sin.”

While Yoo is regarded simply as a church leader by some members, more devoted followers see him as a messianic figure, according to Tark.

But while the Salvation Sect is currently the focus of national scrutiny, it is just one of many shadowy religious groups operating in South Korea, a country with one of Asia’s largest communities of Christians, divided among an incalculable number of churches. While it is difficult to determine an exact figure, perhaps hundreds of cults exist in Korea, according to Tark. Even without concrete figures, he believes that South Korea is unique among Asian and developing countries for the prevalence of such groups. In his book The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies, journalist Michael Breen reported that one church minister in the early 1960s identified some 70 Koreans who claimed to be the messiah and had followers.

The definition of a cult is not uncontroversial, in Korea and elsewhere, with followers typically rejecting the pejorative term. Timothy Lee, an expert in Evangelicalism in Korea at Brite Divinity School in Texas, said that contemporary historians typically avoid “value judgments on religious phenomena.” He did, however, offer several possible criteria for making the determination.

“I would say when seeking to determine whether a religious group is a cult or a legitimate church, one has to, among others, consider these three criteria: the freedom with which one can affiliate and disaffiliate with the group, the transparency in its leadership structure, and the group’s attitude toward larger society, with a cult assuming a much more exclusivist and condemnatory attitude toward society.”

Certainly Korean fringe churches to have attracted the label have been implicated in fraud, brainwashing, coercion, and other behavior associated with cults worldwide. The most sinister have been linked to criminality as serious as systematic rape and even murder.

In 1987, 33 members of the cult Odaeyang, of which the current fugitive Yoo was once a member, were found dead in a factory in Yongin, about 50 km south of Seoul. It has never been conclusively determined whether the cult members, whose bodies were found bound and gagged, had been murdered or committed mass suicide. Followers of the group’s leader Park Soon-ja, who was also among the dead, had believed that the world, irretrievably mired in decadence, was coming to an end.

Busan Presbyterian University professor Tark’s own father [Tahk Myeong-hwan 卓明煥 ] was murdered by a member of another cult in 1994.

In 2009, the leader of a South Korean cult known as Providence, or Jesus Morning Star [JMS], among other names, was convicted of the rape or sexual assault of four of his female followers.

In April of this year, a television documentary for Australian broadcaster SBS detailed how the church was continuing to groom women in the country as future “brides” for its head Jeong Myeong-Seok, who is reported to have told his followers that their sins could be cleansed by having sex with him. Two Australian former members of the cult claimed they had been encouraged to write sexually explicit letters to Jeong and were even taken to Seoul to visit him in prison.

[Jeong Myeong-Seok was a member of the Unification Church and is reported to have practised sexual cleansing of female followers, in the same way his former messiah, Sun Myung Moon, practised pikareum.]

Providence/JMS is also one of several groups based in Korea to have a notable presence abroad. Perhaps no controversial Korean church has had more impact outside of Korea than the Unification Church, commonly referred to as the “Moonies,” which saw modest recruitment in the U.S. during the 1970s. …

What most of Korea’s controversial religious groups have in common is that they can be traced back to one of three periods in the country’s modern history, according to Tark: the Japanese occupation, the Korean War, and the period of military dictatorships that reached the peak of its authoritarianism in the 1970s and 1980s.



In the case of the former two periods, Tark said, instability and hardship helped popularize religious organizations that offered solace and valorized suffering.

“Right after 1931, it looked very hard to be saved from the Japanese occupation so they focused on Jesus Christ, who suffered on the cross. So it is a kind of mysticism,” he said.

During the dictatorship period, meanwhile, many cult leaders could gain a foothold by supporting the government, unlike a lot of the anti-dictatorship mainline Protestant churches, according to Tark.

Various opinions exist as to the appeal of Korea’s fringe religious groups.

One longtime resident who has researched cults in Korea since 2003 when his roommate became a member of Providence/JSM, said that one reason may be the relative lack of ambiguity in their teachings.

“With these groups, there’re no shades of grey, everything is absolutely, ‘yes, this guy is the messiah, yes, if you follow him you’ll go to heaven,’” he said. “Some people feel that the … more mainstream groups sometimes don’t make these grandiose claims. So when a group comes along with all the answers to ‘a,’ ‘b,’ and ‘c,’ that can be appealing to some people.”

Peer pressure and the deference toward one’s elders present in Korea society also work to the advantage of cult leaders, he said.

“Then you get these older Korean guys dressed up in suits; it can be hard for a younger Korean person to question that, especially when a new member is thrust into an environment where there are a lot of current members.”

Many groups are also highly Korea-centric, basing their beliefs around the idea that the country and Koreans themselves are somehow favored by God or otherwise special.

“Because they believe the new messiah is a Korean, the new revelation is written in Korean, the new nation (of people) who are going to be saved – 144,000 people – are Koreans, or the kingdom of God will be established in Korea (they can have many loyal Korea followers),” said Tark.

A cultural aspect of another sort may also be at play, according to Lee, the Brite Divinity School professor.

“I am not sure whether the number of cult-like organizations in Korea is, proportionally speaking, larger than in, say, Japan or the United States. But compared to Westerners, Koreans tend to be less individualistic and more communal, disposing them to affiliate with some organizations, which will typically assume some familial shape,” he said.

“And if leaders of such organizations develop a sense of religious calling that is looked askance by the larger society, gather followers around them, and insist on their practicing exclusivism, you have the beginnings of cults.”

John Power is a Seoul-based journalist. Follow him on Twitter @John_F_Power.

Update: A PR rep for Ahae Press, Inc., which “markets and exhibits the work of the photographer AHAE (Mr. Yoo Byung-eun),” has contacted The Diplomat to deny a number of the assertions made about Yoo in this article, specifically his links to the Sewol and the Odaeyang cult. The Diplomat stands by its reporting. Yoo remains wanted by Korean police.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/the-cults-of-south-korea/

Since the missionaries came to Korea at the end of the 19th century, Christianity has blended with local religions and beliefs and has often been used to promote a strong sense of nationalism. The Unification Church was founded in the 1950s by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah. This was during the Cold War, and the sect thrived in the economic and political climate of the time. It spread a message of anti-communism, which was very popular with political leaders and justified the presence of the U.S. military in South Korea. It further showed the country’s superiority over North Korea. It success was based on a mixture of politics and religion.



In 1980, Jesus Morning Star (Jeong Myeong-Seok) founded a dissident group, the Church of Providence, which in the place of promoting anti-communism, glorifies and celebrates the game of football (soccer). Its religious celebrations are held in university football stadiums and are centered on a match which takes on a character of sacredness. The Church of Providence won the support of government officials, since its message was in line with the image they wanted to project of South Korea: industrial superiority, readiness for the 1988 Olympic Games, etc.

https://www.culteducation.com/group/939-global-association-of-culture-and-peace/7610-guru-said-to-have-raped-prospective-brides-before-mass-weddings.html

Guru said to have raped prospective brides before mass weddings

The Asahi Shimbun August 3, 2006



A cult led by a fugitive former Moonie wanted on rape charges coerced more than 300 Japanese members to wed in mass ceremonies modeled on South Korea’s Unification Church, say former cultists.

They said cult founder Jung Myung Seok would interview prospective brides and sometimes sexually assaulted them. Jung, 61, apparently viewed mass weddings as a means of increasing the cult membership.

Jung founded the Setsuri (providence) cult around 1980 after breaking away from the Unification Church led by Sun Myung Moon.

Former Setsuri members said they were not allowed to date each other. Instead, Jung would give them a few days to choose life partners and then decide which couples could marry in a mass ceremony.

Six such events have been held since 1996, the same year that the Supreme Court ruled mass weddings performed by the Unification Church were invalid.

Hiroshi Watanabe, a lawyer who helps Setsuri members leave the cult, noted there are slight differences in the two group’s approaches to mass weddings, but said it was obvious Jung just copied what Moon did.

Between 2000 and this spring, Setsuri organized five mass weddings.

According to former members, cult rules say that each bride or groom must be aged 27 or over and have recruited at least three new members.

Members are required to submit the results of health checks. Women are personally interviewed by Jung and asked about past romances.

Jung sometimes sexually assaulted the women during those interviews, former cultists said.

Members who pass the checks are allowed to join in parties where they must choose a marriage partner.

Once couples are formed, they are interviewed again by Jung. He sometimes told couples to separate based on what he heard from God, sources said.

At a July 2003 mass wedding, Jung was not there in person. Via a big-screen Internet connection, he urged the couples to have babies to increase the number of Setsuri members. He was wanted by South Korean authorities on rape charges at the time.

A man in his 30s who married in the 2003 ceremony has since left the cult and is now living in eastern Japan. He described the events leading up to the event.

In late December 2001, about 150 people gathered at a hotel near Mount Fuji.

Attending that party, Jung instructed the participants: “Choose your partner from among the people here. Converse with 10 people.”

The deadline to choose was three days later, at midnight, Dec. 31, 2001.

Desperate to find a partner before the deadline, some members wept when they were unable to do so. Others collapsed from exhaustion.

The man found a wife and lived with her after the ceremony. He soon discovered they held different values.

After learning about the rape charges against Jung, the man left the cult and divorced his wife.

The Diplomat

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