Korean carries one of the most successful modern national bodies of Christian religious literature anywhere, reflecting South Korea's twentieth-century transformation into one of the world's most heavily Christianized East Asian societies, with Protestant, particularly Presbyterian and Pentecostal, growth producing some of the world's largest single congregations and an enormous body of Korean-language hymnody, devotional writing and theological scholarship exported internationally through Korean missionary organizations now among the world's largest missionary-sending networks.
The Korean Bible, first substantially translated in the late nineteenth century before Western missionaries gained full access to Korea itself, played a documented role in spreading literacy in Hangul script among ordinary Koreans, since church-run schools using Korean-language scripture provided rare accessible education under both the late Joseon dynasty and subsequent Japanese colonial rule.
Korean also carries the doctrinal writings of the Unification Church, founded by Sun Myung Moon in Korea in 1954, whose Korean-language Divine Principle text remains the movement's foundational scripture, and of Won Buddhism, a modern Korean Buddhist reform movement founded in 1916 with its own distinct Korean canonical literature.