The 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters exposed many fans to elements of Korean religion which the film draws upon. This film is just one recent example of how popular culture, from or based on Korea, intersects with Korean religion. In response to this growing phenomenon, this session features three papers that address the representation of Korean religion within popular culture media. The first paper examines KPop Demon Hunters as a hybridized example of musical exorcisms in Korea, referencing elements of shamanism, Christianity, and Buddhism together with K-pop and appealing diverse audiences. The second paper argues that the “Jesus Birthday Cafe” (Jesus Saeng-ca), organized by Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, refashions Christian devotion through the affective and participatory grammar of K-pop fandom. The final paper approaches KPop Demon Hunters as a tool for education about Korean religion, taking advantage of the film’s broad popularity and its heavy reliance on Korean religious influences.
This paper addresses the Future/s theme by interpreting KPop Demon Hunters (KDH) as a meditation on Korea’s contested religious past that imagines a global future in which shared musical experiences exorcise literal and metaphorical demons by uniting religiously and culturally diverse audiences. KDH celebrates but does not merely represent Korean “shamanism,” creating a hybrid cosmology that cross-references elements from Christianity, Buddhism, and popular culture. Specifically, the film’s conceit of music as exorcism connects centuries-old kut (musical rituals to appease spirits) to pre-Pentecostal Protestant uses of hymn-singing and modern Pentecostal megachurch worship as techniques deployed first to demonize indigenous religions and then to exorcise spirits identified as demons. KDH is sufficiently non-specific about this religious history to attract diverse audiences, bringing together established fan bases for Hallyu (Korean wave) and exorcism media. Mobilizing ambiguous meanings of “idol,” KDH idealizes a global spiritual community fueled by fan devotion to popular cultural artists.
This paper argues that the “Jesus Birthday Cafe” (Jesus Saeng-ca), organized by Korea Campus Crusade for Christ, refashions Christian devotion through the affective and participatory grammar of K-pop fandom. Modeled on the K-pop “Idol Birthday Cafe,” the event transforms Christmas into an Instagrammable pop-up devotional space structured around Jesus photo cards, a photo zone, and limited-edition goods. These material forms make faith tangible, emotionally resonant, and culturally legible for a digital-native generation. Yet they also mediate encounter with the divine through commodified signs shaped by a white, Eurocentric, male image of Jesus. The paper contends that the Jesus Birthday Cafe does more than popularize Christianity; it reveals how evangelical belonging is increasingly produced through consumer aesthetics, affective participation, and visual mediation, while simultaneously reproducing colonial Christian visuality. In doing so, it exposes tensions among accessibility, devotion, commodification, and postcolonial critique in contemporary South Korean evangelical culture and practice today.
The US-made animated film KPop Demon Hunters, released on Netflix in 2025, has broken viewership records and won milestone awards. Its breakout popularity has meant greater attention by American and global audiences to Korean culture and religion. This presents a challenge, but also an opportunity to use the current popularity of that film, and the interest it generates, to teach wider audiences about Korean religious culture. This paper explains and argues that KPop Demon Hunters can and should be used as an effective teaching tool. I explain ways in which Korean religion and culture are used in the film. Then I describe examples of the pedagogical application of KPop Demon Hunters, including an account of my public lecture on the History Behind KPop Demon Hunters given at the Ann Arbor District Library and incorporation into other lessons and works on Korean religion by myself and other scholars.
| Minjung Noh | min223@lehigh.edu | View |