This panel explores the underexamined role of Korean religions in shaping the political discourse surrounding South Korea’s 2024 martial law decree and its aftermath. Amid mass protests, impeachment trials, and rising political polarization, religious groups have emerged as key actors in narratives of legitimacy, resistance, and reform. The panel investigates the intersections of Christian nationalism, anti-communism, xenophobia, and anti-feminist politics within pro-Yoon mobilizations, focusing on trans-Pacific networks influenced by Trumpism and the New Apostolic Reformation. By situating Korean religion within global right-wing populist currents, this panel highlights how religious ideologies and institutions shape both authoritarian and democratic imaginaries, providing critical insights into South Korea’s evolving political trends and the broader global struggle over democracy.
This paper argues that the rise of Sinophobia in South Korea, particularly following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s martial law declaration, is not merely reactionary but deeply rooted in religious and ideological discourse. Once limited to far-right circles, anti-China rhetoric now permeates mainstream politics, reinforcing Christian nationalism and pro-American sentiment while shaping domestic and foreign policy. The paper explores three dimensions of this phenomenon. First, it examines how the Chinese diaspora is framed as both economic and political threats. Second, it analyzes how Sinophobia underpins Yoon’s pro-U.S., anti-China stance, especially within the U.S.-South Korea-Japan security alliance, which Christian nationalists portray as divinely sanctioned. Third, it investigates how Sinophobia informs political reform narratives, particularly in the pro-martial law discourse of Kyeŏm intended for kyemong ("martial law for reform"). Ultimately, the paper reveals how Sinophobia is weaponized to justify authoritarian measures, reorient geopolitical alliances, and redefine South Korea’s nationalist and religious-political landscape.
This paper examines the role of gender discourse in contemporary South Korean politics and religion, focusing on the administration of Yoon Seok-yeol and the broader transnational anti-gender movement. While Yoon has not explicitly addressed LGBTQ policies, his statements on gender inequality reflect a broader effort to delegitimize feminist and queer activism by framing them as foreign impositions. His dismantling of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family aligns with global conservative narratives that seek to reinforce traditional heteropatriarchal norms. This study contextualizes gender discourse among Yoon’s evangelical supporters and juxtaposes the affective and aesthetic dimensions of protest cultures, analyzing both queer/feminist/progressive anti-Yoon movements and conservative pro-Yoon demonstrations. Drawing on Butler (2024) and Connolly (2008), this paper situates South Korea’s gender politics within transpacific networks of religion, militarism, economics, diaspora, race, and affect, highlighting the interconnected nature of political struggles across national boundaries.
To many conservative Christians in South Korea, the 2024 martial law decree was not only justified but righteous in the face of threats posed by “pro-North Korea” enemies to the nation. This paper situates the contemporary politics of enmity by returning to the Korean War (1950–53) and its aftermath to offer historical perspectives on the entwinement of anticommunist nation-building and Christian political imagination in the making of the Cold War South Korean nation and its place in the U.S.-led Free World. By focusing on two particular processes—the violent excision of (internal) enemies and rescuing of Christians (mass killings/rescue) and the incarceration and (re-)making of enemies into good anticommunist subjects (containment/rehabilitation)—this paper examines subject-making and enemy-making as mutually constitutive processes in the violent coherence of Christian anticommunism in wartime South Korea at the height of the US empire’s military power.
Moving beyond the domestic and secular frameworks that dominate mainstream narratives about Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed 2024 martial law decree in South Korea, this paper examines the politico-religious dynamics that unfolded across transnational networks of charismatic Christianity. The analysis begins by tracing the origins of the ‘Gwanghwamun Movement’ ? a Protestant-based far-right movement in South Korea that drew crucial inspiration from the rise of Trumpism and its charismatic Christian support base in the USA from 2017 onward. Looking at recent developments in 2024-2025, this study further investigates how the Gwanghwamun Movement prefigured the political mobilization of several Christian nationalist groups which rallied behind Yoon Suk-yeol’s continued presidency during impeachment proceedings under the influence of Trump-supporting charismatic Christianity in the USA. Despite this trans-Pacific religious alliance, mainstream Korean Christianity largely regards these charismatic Christian movements as ‘heretical’ and maintains distance from them. This situation serves as a seed of division latent within the anti-impeachment movement centered around the Korean Christian community.