Religion and History in South Korea

Korean religion is layered rather than sequential. Muism, the shamanic practice conducted by the mudang, is the oldest stratum and has never stopped; Buddhism arrived in the fourth century and became the state religion of Silla and Goryeo, building the mountain monasteries and commissioning the Tripitaka Koreana, whose more than eighty thousand printing blocks survive at Haeinsa; Confucianism was made the governing ideology of the Joseon dynasty from 1392, which suppressed Buddhism, expelled monasteries from the cities and organised the state, the family and the examination system on Confucian lines. Christianity entered by an unusual route.

Korean scholars encountered Catholic texts in Beijing in the 1770s and 1780s, formed a community, and only later requested priests, making Korea one of the very few countries where the church was established by laypeople before any missionary arrived. Persecution followed through the nineteenth century, and the Korean Martyrs number in the thousands. Protestantism arrived in the 1880s with schools and hospitals, aligned itself with Korean nationalism under Japanese occupation, and grew explosively after 1945 and again after the Korean War, so that within a single century Korea moved from a country with almost no Christians to one where they outnumber Buddhists.