A Religious Liberty Crisis in Korea. 2. The Korean Anti-Cult Movement
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The opposition to “cults” in the country is mostly a fundamentalist Protestant affair focused on preventing “sheep stealing” and competition.
August 27, 2025
Article 2 of 4. Read article 1.
The intensity of the Christian anti-cult movement in South Korea is unheard of in other countries. Weekly, if not daily, Christian groups organize street protests against various “cults,” including the Unification Church, Shincheonji, the World Mission Society Church of God, Falun Gong, Providence, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and The Church of Almighty God—along with Christian supporters of LGBTQ rights and Muslims, whose beliefs are also labeled as “heretical.” Organized by Christian ministers, deprogramming remains common, with hundreds of cases reported yearly. Anti-cult activists also involve the secular authorities and regularly request government action against heretical “cults,” with some politicians sympathetic to their claims. As we will see in the final article of this series, while anti-Communist in theory, fundamentalist Korean anti-cultists are often willing to collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party against “cults” as a shared enemy.
Although South Korea’s anti-cultism has sometimes adopted Western secular critiques of “cults” from figures like Margaret Singer and Steven Hassan, its most vigorous opposition to new religious movements is rooted in a fundamentalist Protestant tradition. Compared to other nations, missionaries from fundamentalist American and European churches have achieved greater and more enduring success in South Korea.
These churches were based on the idea that “heathen” Korean culture and religion were demonic and immoral. It should be eradicated, and local Christian communities should be constantly purged to eliminate any trace of it. “The growth of Korean Protestantism did not derive from compromise with local cultures,” states Korean scholar Kim Chang Han; instead, “it resulted from the total rejection of indigenous religious cultures.” This required strict discipline. American missionary Charles Allen Clark, whose contribution was crucial in shaping Korean Presbyterianism, wrote in 1937, “Discipline is far more severe [in Korea] than in American churches, but it nearly always seems to have had a salutary effect.”
One result of strict discipline and constant vigilance against “pagan” remnants was the frequent occurrence of heresy trials, excommunications, and schisms. As Canadian missionary Harvie Maitland Conn observed, in a fundamentalist environment, even “higher criticism and liberal theology were considered dangerous heresies.”
Before the Korean War, Pyongyang was the central hub for Presbyterians in present-day North Korea. The war resulted in Communist forces destroying over a thousand Protestant churches and killing more than two hundred pastors. Over one million Protestant refugees escaped from North to South Korea, many believing that Christians could only survive by supporting those in power, including an authoritarian, non-democratic regime. These events are key to understanding the link between fundamentalist Korean Protestants and politics, a connection that persisted into democratic South Korea, along with their hostile stance against “heresies.”
In the 1950s, Park Hyung Nyong became the leading figure in Korean fundamentalist Presbyterianism. He condemned several theologians and pastors for being either too liberal or influenced by elements from Korean non-Christian religions and culture. They were expelled by the Presbyterian Church and, in some cases, silenced by political authorities who valued the support of fundamentalist Christians. This caused multiple schisms within Korean Presbyterianism. Aware of debates about fundamentalism in the US, Park increasingly identified as a fundamentalist himself. He stated that “Fundamentalism is Christianity itself.”
Park and his supporters may claim that divisions did not hinder the steady expansion of fundamentalist Protestantism in South Korea. However, they were caught off guard by what they saw as a rapid rise of Christian “cults” in the country. Their initial focus was Reverend Moon’s Unification Church. Fundamentalist Christian anti-cult activists argued that their efforts and resources have effectively slowed the growth of the Unification Church and fostered a hostile media environment against it.
Soon, the fundamentalists faced another challenge from a Christian new religious movement, the Olive Tree, founded by Park Tae Son in 1956, which initially achieved remarkable success. Although figures are debated, it may have had around two million followers by the mid-1960s, mostly converted from various Presbyterian groups. The mainline Presbyterian Church initially saw Pak as a talented revivalist and healer. However, once it labeled him a “heretic” and expelled him in 1956, it was too late. While still a Presbyterian, Pak had established his own organization, prepared to become a separate church.
The original Korean Christian anti-cult movement was mainly driven by Presbyterians. It emerged in response to a significant loss of members—up to 20% in Korean Presbyterian churches—to groups like the Olive Tree and the Unification Church. Within a few years, Presbyterians and other fundamentalist Christians built an effective anti-cult network, partnering with mainstream media and politicians eager to gain support from disciplined Christian groups. The rise of these “cults” was also portrayed as “a sign of the anti-Christ.”
Park, the founder of the Olive Tree, was harshly criticized in the media as “sexually abusive, politically corrupt, and religiously fraudulent,” and he faced multiple arrests from 1958 to 1961. In a typical case of deviance amplification—where groups labeled as deviant become more deviant in response—Park responded to these campaigns by highlighting the unconventional aspects of his message. He shifted from criticizing Presbyterians as corrupt to attacking the Bible and Jesus Christ directly. By 1980, he declared that “ninety-eight percent of the Bible was false” and that Jesus was “the son of Satan.” Meanwhile, he claimed to be both the creator of the universe and the judge for the Final Judgment, asserting his physical immortality and offering to grant it to loyal followers.
Park’s extreme reaction benefited the anti-cult movement. With his new assertions, he forfeited any claim to being part of Christianity, leading the Olive Tree to lose most of its followers. Yet, even after Park’s supposed immortality ended with his death in 1990, a few thousand followers still persisted, split into various rival denominations.
The anti-cult campaign against the Olive Tree had been effective. However, some people who left the Olive Tree went on to establish new religious groups that still converted members from Presbyterian and other fundamentalist churches. For instance, the Victory Altar is part of a family of movements directly or indirectly connected to the Olive Tree. Over time, many former supporters of the Olive Tree also became members of Shincheonji.
Although the Olive Tree was nearly destroyed, other Christian new religious movements in Korea thrived, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Unification Church, and the World Mission Society Church of God, a group with more than a million members originating from Adventism. Large non-Christian new religions like Daesoon Jinrihoe and Won Buddhism also exist. While anti-cult groups sometimes target them as well, since Korea’s anti-cult movement mainly comprises fundamentalist Christians, their primary focus remains on Christian new religious movements “stealing sheep” from fundamentalist churches.
These Christian fundamentalists also made connections with the mostly secular American anti-cult movements and, as we will see later in this series, with China. American scholar Jacques Parker discovered a letter, likely from 1982, from Robert Lenz, a chemistry professor who was an international ambassador for the U.S. anti-cult organization Cult Awareness Network (CAN). The letter mentioned his contacts with Reverend Tak Myeonghwan (1937-1994), the most well-known anti-cultist in Korean history and a notable opponent of the Unification Church (to which he had to apologize in 1978 after he had falsely accused it of immorality and secret complicity with communism; he later tried to retract the apology).
According to Korean scholar Kim Chang-An, Tak was his generation’s most prominent anti-cult figure in Korea. Since Tak’s time, “the Unification Church has never been dropped from the cult blacklists produced by Christians.” A posthumous result of his efforts was, Kim reports, “a document issued [in 2002] by the Christian Council of Korea (CCK), the largest evangelical association in the country. It claims that without rooting out cults and heresies, Korean churches will not survive. The association not only urges the government to promote ‘sound’ religious activities, but encourages it to punish ‘evil’ religions that shake the foundations of the family and social order.” These Christians were willing to work with any politicians who would crack down on the Unification Church and other “cults,” regardless of their political affiliations.
Similar contacts between local anti-cultists and the American anti-cult organizations were made in Japan.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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