Underground Railroads of Christian Conversion: North Korean Migrants and Evangelical Missionary Networks in Northeast Asia / 皈依基督教的地下通道: 北朝鲜1移民与东北亚的 新教传教

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the processes by which North Korean migrants encounter and convert to Christianity in the Sino-Korean border area and en route to South Korea. Since the mid-1990s when North Korea began suffering from severe famine, many North Koreans began crossing the border into China in search of food. It is the Korean Protestant Church that not only established the Underground Railroad through which many of the border crossers travel via China to South Korea, but that also provides various religious and non-religious services for North Koreans when they settle in South Korea. With this “Christian passage,” as I call it, and settlement, a startling 80–90 percent of the migrants identify themselves as Protestant after reaching South Korea. My ethnography asserts that their conversion should not be considered as merely a matter of a liberal individual’s ontological transformation without also considering both institutional interventions (missionary networks) and specific geopolitical conditions (the Cold War, famine, and globalization). I argue that Christianity serves as a window through which we can better understand how the complex ideological, political, and cultural tensions (i.e., nationalism, imperialism, freedom, human rights, etc.) all meet in the reconfiguration of the migrants’ identities. More precisely, through an examination of conversion as a cultural project joined with citizen making, this article sheds light on the ways in which religion both creates and demolishes North Korean-ness in favor of a national future—a Christianized reunified nation.