Too Bad to Keep, Too Good to Throw Away: Negotiating the Boundary Between Religion and Superstition in Korean Protestantism’s Encounter with Kibok Sinang

Abstract

While Korean Protestantism prides itself on being the driving force of the nation’s modernization, it has also been criticized for promoting kibok sinang (祈福信仰), or fortune-seeking faith, allegedly rooted in the superstitious tradition of shamanism. Drawing on Robert Merton’s notion of sociological ambivalence and the East Asian literary trope of kyerŭk (鷄肋; chicken rib), something ‘too bad to keep, yet too good to throw away,’ this article argues that the wavering between condemnation and silent retention of kibok sinang in Korean Protestantism is not a sign of inconsistency but its structural feature. Such strategic ambivalence, I argue, has given the churches a double advantage: periodic condemnation of kibok sinang demonstrates their modernizing respectability, while its silent accommodation appeals to the popular demand that sustains their growth. In doing so, it recasts the continuity-versus-discontinuity debate in the anthropology of Christianity, treating the two not as rival descriptions but as poles between which Korean Christians and their churches waver. I explore three historical episodes: the heresy charges against Cho Yong-gi and their reversal in the 1980s and ’90s; Yu Tong-sik’s ambivalent appraisal of shamanism in the 1960s; and Western missionaries’ critique and appropriation of Korean folk belief at the turn of the 20th century. These cases show that claims of religious continuity and rupture have long served as internal political instruments for negotiating the boundary between ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ in modern Korea, one instance of a boundary contested across East Asia wherever religious traditions met.