When Yoon Suk Yeol addressed the nation to declare the 2024 martial law, he cited North Korea’s subterfuge and pro-North Korean forces within the government as justifications for imposing an emergency martial law. While evocative of the repressive violence of South Korea’s authoritarian past, the language of Communist enemies from without and within sounded absurd to many in the post-democratization landscape of South Korea. Yet, to many conservative Christians in the country, the 2024 decree was not only justified but righteous in the face of what they see as threats to the nation—and the “free world” which they see as guarded by a benevolent US empire—posed by “pro-North Korea” enemies. Building on earlier movements through which they engaged in similar enemy-making discourse during the liberal Moon administration, conservative Christians have rallied around Yoon during this unfolding impeachment drama, in sharp contrast to statements of unequivocal condemnation from the liberal and ecumenical Christian bodies in the country.
This paper returns to the Korean War (1950–53) and its aftermath to examine subject-making and enemy-making as mutually constitutive processes in the violent coherence of Christian anticommunism as a distinct yet amorphous mode of imagining and constructing the South body politic during the Cold War. While the violent politics of enmity that characterized Cold War violence in South Korea have been examined by scholars, this paper draws special attention to the particular ways through which Christian claims on the nation significantly shaped the larger anticommunist subject- and enemy-making discourses and processes in wartime South Korea at the height of American military power over the peninsula and region.
Focusing on two particular processes—the violent excision of (internal) enemies and benevolent evacuation of “innocents” (mass killings and rescue) and the incarceration and (re-)making of enemies into good anticommunist subjects (containment to rehabilitation)—this paper returns to the early Cold War in Korea to offer historical perspectives on the intertwinement of anticommunist nation-building and Christian political imagination, as well as its afterlife today.
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.