The Shifting Moral Authority of the Conservative Evangelicals’ Anti-LGBT Movement in South Korea

This paper reports on content analysis of the Korean Christian newspaper Kidok Sinmun (1998-2020) with regard to how conservative evangelical elites (CEs) change their discursive resources to construct persuasive appeals against the global LGBT movement. Our findings demonstrate that the CEs focus on different sources of moral authority in response to changing political ideologies of the Korean government or regardless of such ideologies (scientific research, family value). During the progressive Roh Moo-hyun and Moon Jae-in administrations, discursive tactics linked LGBT rights with the existential threat to liberal democracy or constitutional value, while the key words such as national security or military discipline were more frequently employed under the conservative Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye governments. Moreover, experiences shared by the transnational network of Christian activists appear to influence the construction of local perceptions on homosexuality.