Rethinking Women's Oppression in the Korean Church: Christianity's Complicity and Confucianism’s Possibility:

It has been frequently argued that the Korean Church was incorporated into the Confucian social order that validates male domination based on patrilineage and the gendered spheres of nei (內) and wai (外). This male-centered social order is reflected in Korean churches, such as the scarcity of female lead pastors, and the gender-based division of church works, e.g., men in charge of finance and women in charge of kitchen. Women in the Korean Church are subjugated to male leadership and their presence is marginalized. In this regard, the remaining Confucian influence has been considered as a main cause of Korean churches’ oppression of women. In some degree, the accusation of Confucianism is just given the liberative practices done by early Christian missionaries in Korea, whereas Confucianism was regarded as an obstacle to their endeavors. (For example, when a Methodist missionary, Mary Scranton, founded Korea’s first girls school, Ewha School, to educate Korean women who were not allowed to participate in the public activities and deprived of educational opportunities, there were few students from the noble class that more strictly followed the Confucian order.) 

While such description of Christianity’s encounter with Confucianism in Korea tends to present Christianity as a passive contributor, this presentation reveals the active role of Christianity in women’s oppression in the Korean Church. Women’s marginalized status was justified by the traditional Christian understandings of agape as self-sacrifice and as the antithesis of self-centeredness. Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee presents “nameless nature of women’s personhood” who were refined to the private sphere of nei since ethical and political accomplishment is recognized only in the public sphere of wai (Confucianism and Women, 10). Agape as self-sacrifice provides the moral and theological ground to justify women’s nameless contributions to the church. In addition, the voluntary death of Christ as an exemplar of Christian love intensifies the oppression by requiring women to practice voluntary subjugation, although it is unilateral. Agape, in this sense, is not a proper corrective to women, as Barbara Andolsen provocatively challenges, whose sin is not self-love but selflessness. 

Furthermore, this presentation attempts to challenge criticism upon Confucianism by examining the liberative potential in Confucianism, focusing on the Confucian virtue of ren. Robert Bellah illuminates a post-conventional feature of ren in his voluminous book, Religion in Human Evolution (Belknap Press, 2011). While Confucianism has been criticized for its conservatism, this aspect of ren implies a potential in Confucianism to transcend a particular convention and the existing social order. In this sense, this presentation explores how ren as a post-conventional virtue can resist the gendered convention in the Korean Church and suggests a reinterpretation of Confucianism that enables the Korean Church to cherish their Confucian tradition rather than entirely throw it away.