Welcome to the Project Website for Pacific Voicings
The dissemination and practice of Christianity were strictly banned in Korea until the late nineteenth century, but by the end of the twentieth century Protestant Christianity was the most popular religion in this country. The seeds of what has been dubbed “the Korean miracle” were planted by Anglo-American missionaries from the United States, who took on months-long voyages to reach Korea from the 1880s to the 1920s. As historians have demonstrated in recent years, American missionaries in Korea emblematised and contributed to the Pacific expansionism of the United States. They aimed not only to convert the “natives” but also to enforce the moral, cultural, and economic transformation of the human as part of a “civilising mission.” However, my research proposes that such characterisations of the mission fail to capture the complex workings of the transnational diffusion of religion and minimise the opportunity for locating agency in local actors. While the mission had considerable success in sanctioning a range of US interests and ideologies in Korea, the religious and secular practices that formed among the early local converts were also framed by local experiences of Pacific colonialisms and existing socio-cultural heterogeneity.
Using the Website
This website is a resource for those interested in early Christianity and Western missionary work in Korea. We have collected a variety of different sources into different themes. Each show how American missionaries converted native Koreans to Christianity, and enforced western moral standards on Korean converts. These sources also show Christianity’s contentious relationship with other dominant powers in the region, and how Christianity became central in many areas of contemporary history on the Korean Peninsula.
Each page in the themes tab contains various sources in different formats. These include summaries of relevant sources, as well as transcriptions of these sources when available. Where a transcription is unavailable it is linked to an online source where it may be available to view in full. We cannot guarantee the functionality of any external links from this site.
Any transcriptions that are available you can find on the right hand side of any page under the themes tab.
We hope to introduce you to these different areas, and provide you with a starting point for any further research into missionary work, Korean Christianity or any relevant research area.
Pacific Voicings 