American Unexceptionalism: K-Pop Demon Hunters IRL Korea
Dan is off this week. So we are pleased to bring you a feature from our new limited series American Unexceptionalism: Global Lessons on Fighting Religious Nationalism with Dr. Matthew Taylor and Rev. Susan Hayward.
South Korea is a nation that is deeply entwined with the United States. From the Korean War (which never technically ended) to Korean pop culture to the deep ties between Korean and American evangelical communities, what happens in the US affects South Korea and vice versa. But most Americans weren’t paying attention to the fact that Korean democracy was startlingly challenged less than a year ago when the president at the time (President Yoon) declared martial law and tried to have his political enemies arrested. That attempt at autocratic takeover was unsuccessful, because Koreans took to the streets to protest and even Yoon’s own party helped overturn his martial law decision and then impeach him. What can we in the United States learn from Korean activists and religious communities about how to resist wannabe tyrants? We get help on this question from two of the foremost experts on the interchanges between Korean religion and American religion: Helen J. Kim and Ray Kim.
Additional Resources
https://helenjinkim.com/
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Helen J. Kim, Race for Revival: How Cold War South Korea Shaped the American Evangelical Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), https://global.oup.com/academic/product/race-for-revival-9780190062422.
Paul Y. Chang, Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea's Democracy Movement, 1970-1979 (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/protest-dialectics.
Chanhee Ho, “Charlie Kirk Memorial in Seoul Shows Power of Christian Nationalism for Young Korean Activists,” Religion Dispatches, September 30, 2025, https://religiondispatches.org/charlie-kirk-memorial-in-seoul-shows-power-of-christian-nationalism-for-young-korean-activists/.
Dr. Matthew D. Taylor is the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, where he specializes in American Christianity, American Islam, Christian extremism, and religious politics. His book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy (Broadleaf, 2024), tracks how a loose network of charismatic Christian leaders called the New Apostolic Reformation was a major instigating force for the January 6th Insurrection and is currently reshaping the culture of the religious right in the U.S. Taylor is also the creator of the audio docuseries Charismatic Revival Fury: The New Apostolic Reformation.
Rev. Susan Hayward: was until recently the lead on the US Institute of Peace’s efforts to understand religious dimensions of conflict and advance efforts engaging religious actors and organizations in peacebuilding. She has conducted political asylum and refugee work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Advocates for Human Rights. Rev. Hayward studied Buddhism in Nepal and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.
www.axismundi.us
Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi
Producer: Andrew Gill
Original Music and Mixing: Scott Okamoto
Production Assistance: Kari Onishi
Funded through generous contributions from ICJS, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the ICRD.
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The moment a year ago when South Korea's entire democratic system almost collapsed.
But it didn't.
If you're an American and it doesn't ring any bells, it's probably because it happened in December 2024.
And that was less than a month after our own hugely consequential election in which Trump rewon the presidency and Republicans secured a majority in Congress.
We were looking inward at the time.
Most news coverage in the United States, it was focused on what Elon Musk and Donald Trump were scheming for his second term.
It also happened within a day of the Luigi Mangioni shooting in New York City.
So yeah, you are forgiven if political events in South Korea weren't on your radar.
Another reason that this incident didn't burn up the headlines was that it was pretty short, and it proved the strength of South Korea's democracy.
The president of South Korea at the time, Yoon-suk-yeo, was a far-right figure who was very unpopular.
One opinion poll at the time had him around a 17% approval rating.
Then suddenly, on December 3rd, 2024, President Yoon declared martial law, essentially grinding Korean political life to a halt, including in the National Assembly.
He then ordered the arrest of some of his political opponents.
It looked scary for a minute, but Korean society mobilized.
Politicians of both parties convened at the assembly.
They overturned this martial law imposition the very next day.
And Koreans were in the streets en masse, showing their solidarity with the politicians who were resisting this attempt at autocratic takeover.
They actually impeached President Yoon about a week later.
They removed him from office.
And this is how democracy is supposed to work when a leader tries to turn the system inside out and install himself as the dictator.
Today, former President Yoon is in prison, awaiting trial for insurrection.
He could face life in prison.
In this episode, we want to step back to think broadly about the political and religious situation in South Korea.
What is going on with religious nationalism in South Korea today?
How is it similar to and different from what we see in the United States?
And what can Americans learn from a Korean society that reacted swiftly and effectively to stop an authoritarian power grab?
Welcome to American Unexceptionalism.
I'm Matthew Taylor.
And I'm Susie Hayward.
This is the show where we ask what Americans can learn from those who have resisted religious nationalism and authoritarianism around the globe.
We interview scholars and activists about the strategies they used, the lessons they learned in their fight against oppressive religious regimes.
The United States is facing a very serious Christian nationalist threat to democracy.
But we aren't alone in this fight.
It's time to put our American exceptionalism behind us to learn how to create a future for all of us.
Today we're going to travel to the whole other side of the world, to South Korea.
In some ways, a context that's very different from the U.S. culturally, historically, geographically, but in some ways similar.
The largest religious community in Korea is Christian and they're very influential.
And certainly our two contexts are very deeply connected.
And to illustrate that point, I want to invite Matt to talk quickly at the start here about someone who he follows pretty closely because he's actually someone who straddles American and Korean culture and politics.
This person comes up in the interview with our invited guests.
His name is Chae-An and he's an evangelical pastor in Southern California.
Yeah, for anyone who listened to my previous podcast series, Charismatic Revival Fury, you'll be very familiar with Chae-An.
We spent a whole episode on him.
I have a whole chapter about him in my book.
Chae-An might be one of the most influential Christians in the world, but he's never talked about in the news or written about in mainstream media.
Why?
Because he doesn't fit anyone's template for what a religious extremist should look like.
Let me make a few points.
First, Chae-An is a Korean-American immigrant.
He came to the U.S. as a child.
His father was a pastor during the Korean War and actually was persecuted and was arrested by the communists in Pyongyang and then escaped.
And then the whole Ahn family moved to the U.S. when Che was a child.
Second, Che-An is an apostle in a network called the New Apostolic Reformation.
In fact, I go so far as to say by the numbers that Che is the most effective and impressive apostle in the NAR.
He leads a network called Harvest International Ministry that claims more than 25,000 churches and NGOs in more than 65 countries.
That's 25,000 organizations, not 25,000 individuals.
And from what I can tell, HIM is huge in South Korea.
It really started out in the U.S. and South Korea, and then it grew globally from there.
Third, Che became semi-famous.
He got covered a little bit in the news in 2020 because he chose to resist California's COVID restrictions in his church.
And he fought with Governor Gavin Newsom and took this case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
And Che won.
And Gavin Newsom had to fork over like a million dollars to cover a bunch of Che's legal bills.
Now, for the last four years, I've watched as Che's Harvest International Ministry Network has merged with the American militia movement on the West Coast.
These are the guys with the guns and the big trucks who hate the government.
Well, on the West Coast, I've watched as more and more figures from the militia movement are hanging out with Che and joining his network and building these connections.
And that would be a whole podcast unto itself, but Che has become an icon of the religious far right in this country.
I even hear chatter from some white supremacists who are name-checking Che-An, a Korean-American immigrant pastor, as somebody that they're looking to, as a thought leader.
It is very strange.
Oh, and by the way, at this moment, Che-An is running to become the California governor.
So that's Che.
He is a fascinating and honestly frightening figure who I actually got to interview once.
But guess what?
I think I have talked to about a dozen reporters and mainstream media outlets over the past year about Che, and I can't get a single one of them to write a story about him.
It's like he so doesn't fit anyone's grid.
Korean-American immigrant pastor who's super Trumpy and is unifying far-right militia groups on the West Coast.
How does that all fit together?
Especially because a lot of these far-right militia groups are connected with white supremacist groups.
Exactly, right?
You would not think that they would be looking to a Korean-American immigrant as somebody who would be guiding them.
But Che comes up in the interview in this episode.
And so keep him in your back pocket for now because we'll talk more about him.
All right, we're going to dig in more to this really fascinating world of Korean politics and Christianity and its connection to what's happening in the U.S.
And to do that, we're joined by two of the foremost experts on that topic who are based in the United States.
I'm Helen Kim, and I teach American religious history at Emory University.
And I'm Ray Kim, Director of U.S. Programs and Partnerships at the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the Religious Studies Department.
We should note here that Helen and Ray have the same surname, Kim, but they are not related to each other.
We're eager to hear from the lessons that we might draw from the South Korean context.
I wonder if we could just start, Helen, maybe with you saying a little bit about the history of Christianity in South Korea and what it looks like today.
I do think there are some really important lessons here from the South Korean case study.
So just for background, American Protestant missionaries really gained ground in Korea in the late 19th, early 20th century.
And that's when we begin to see the formation of kind of a robust Korean Protestant tradition.
And during the Japanese imperial period in the early 20th century, you know, Korean Protestants used Protestantism to fight against Japanese colonialism.
So there's a long Korean Christian protest tradition that dates back to that era.
And I would like us to keep that long tradition in mind, even as we think about the contemporary moment, that women like freedom fighters like Yoo Gwon Sun, who was a Korean Methodist, she died at 17, tortured and executed by the Japanese colonial government for speaking out in protest for Korean sovereignty.
So there's a long tradition that dates back to it.
I want us to keep that in mind.
But Korean Christianity didn't really make up less than 5% in the early 20th century.
In the late 20th century, you have an expansion between 1950 to 1980, going from 5% to 20%.
Paul Freston called South Korea quote-unquote Protestant superpower in Asia.
Helen, I'd love to invite you to dig in a little further about the point you made about early forms of Protestant Christianity in Korea serving as a frame or a vehicle for the resistance to Japanese colonialism.
That seems really important.
In our next episode, we're going to be talking about Burma, and it's reminding me of the way in which Christianity offered a similar kind of frame to ethnic minority groups there to resist an oppressive ethno-religious state.
I think that the late 19th, early 20th century period, you can see some similar connections.
Why was Protestantism so powerful for a minority of Koreans, especially during the colonial period?
They're using Protestant theology and politics and rhetoric and kind of the global audience that it garners to make arguments against Japanese colonialism and thinking about what kind of religious troops does the Japanese Empire advance using its own religious frameworks that are in tension with a kind of Protestant worldview.
And so those early independence fighters in Korea did use a kind of political theology to fight for national sovereignty.
So Helen, one of the questions I have is, obviously, when we talk about Protestantism, that's a big category.
There's all kinds of forms of Protestantism.
So what particular denominations or associational groups historically have made inroads in South Korea?
Especially in the late 19th, early 20th century, you have a strong presence of American Presbyterian and Methodist missionaries.
And so even to this day, there's a long tradition of kind of Korean Presbyterianism and Methodism that's developed dating back to that era, where Koreans are hybridizing Korean indigenous traditions like shamanism and Taoism, Buddhism, with Protestant practices, and bringing those into their kind of expressions of Korean Presbyterianism or Korean Methodism.
But also starting in the 1930s and then definitely in the kind of post-World War II period, you have a major growth in what you might call Korean Pentecostalism and associations with denominations like Assemblies of God, the Full Gospel Church.
And so in, you know, by the late 20th century, you have the growth of the largest Pentecostal church in the world, which is the Yo-Yudo Full Gospel Church in South Korea.
Well, what accounts for the surge in Pentecostal practices and styles of Christianity?
When we think about Korean Protestantism, the early 20th century and then the late 20th century are important kind of chronological markers because there is such a shift in terms of the nation's history.
After Japanese colonialism ends in 1945, this is the beginnings of the early Cold War.
And you have the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 to 1953 and the nation's divided.
The history of the country changes.
And so we have the division of North and South Korea and the North taking a different kind of religio-political worldview than the South.
And the South really getting backed by this kind of democratic capitalist vision that is highly, highly intertwined with the U.S. and with the U.S. Empire.
And you have the U.S. military presence in Korea from the Korean War and even until now.
That also shapes the kind of religious possibilities, the religio-political possibilities of South Korea in particular and its diaspora.
But with outbreak of the war, Northern Christians migrated to the South.
And so you have South Korean Christians concentrating in the southern region of the nation.
And so there's a deep kind of anti-communism, not only politically and ideologically that's developing, but also how does anti-communism become kind of spiritually linked to the crucible of the Cold War and the Korean War in particular.
And for Koreans, obviously, this has a direct impact on their lives.
This isn't Billy Graham, you know, just preaching about anti-communism.
It's actually losing their lives to this war in Korea where families are separated, a nation has been torn asunder, millions of people's lives have been lost, and a nation's history has fundamentally changed.
And so that religio-political atmosphere of the early Cold War and beyond has become such an important piece and kind of shaping, I think, South Korean Christianity.
Trying to summarize a little bit and reflect back to what I'm hearing.
And you can correct me if I'm wrong, because I think you're highlighting some really interesting stuff here, Helen.
There is this history of missionaries coming to Korea, Protestant missionaries, especially from the United States.
But then the Protestantism that is adopted by a small portion of the Korean population becomes actually a real bulwark for them in resisting Japanese imperialism in the 20th century.
And that becomes part of even the political theology against imperialism is coming out of these kind of Protestant missionary experiences.
But a lot of that was actually concentrated in North Korea, in the northern part of the peninsula.
And once they split, those northern folks move into the south and adopt this more strong kind of anti-communism over and against the north.
And so there's this kind of these different stages that Korean Protestantism goes through that are very much coordinated with the politics and the situation of the nation as it's developing.
One quick question of clarification, Helen.
Is it that those Christians who were in Pyongyang or in the northern part of the peninsula left of their own volition or were they pushed out by the North Koreans?
Both, you know, what you might call Korean Christian refugees, like Reverend Kyung Je-kan, who I write about.
He's from the north and, you know, he's fleeing communism in the north.
And in some cases, it's outright persecution and the north's anxieties around Christianity.
This is also just super fascinating for me because this is Che-An's.
Yeah, exactly.
So I was going to say, I was going to link this exactly to what you write about with Che-On, because Chae-An's father was from the North, migrated to the South, and then they immigrated to the U.S.
But they have this whole story two generations, three generations in being linked back to the war.
And so the anti-communist political and religious fervor is part of that religious lineage.
Yeah.
And well, and it's just, it makes sense of, I think, in what otherwise would seem like a very idiosyncratic perspective that Chaeon carries, at least from within kind of an American context.
It's like, oh, so he's with Trump and he's anti-communist, right?
But like, actually, it fits very well within the trajectory of his family and the story of his family, right?
I think if we think about Cheon, you know, transnationally and connected to this Cold War and kind of Korean War history, you see these kind of deep roots.
Where does this emerge from in the contemporary moment with this Korean-American man, you know, part of the new apostolic reformation?
And are there kind of deeper roots?
And I think they do go back to this Cold War era and like how the war becomes, how a political war becomes also like spiritually enchanted.
I mean, that history, that legacy, that kind of psychology still permeates now in terms of when people are trying to figure out what unification would look like in the future.
So even conversations around unification is strongly tinged with this kind of religious and theological underpinning, especially because some of the staunchest conservative movers and shakers in Korean politics do align with the church and the church in Korea being largely conservative leaning and many of them with pastors who are very much like Cheon.
They all have that story.
Like so many of them have that story.
So you'll have like 100 Cheons in South Korea.
And for them, resisting North Korea is not just like a geopolitical issue.
It is a existential theological issue.
And so the question of reconciliation before reunification, or is it more like we're supposed to subsume North Korea and make it a Christian nation that's always there?
And you can absolutely see how spiritual warfare frames and the kind of paradigms of kind of cosmic combat, like all of that can so easily map onto a real world conflict.
And it's not, it's not some sort of big leap.
It's not like somebody's making these wild kind of prophetic associations.
Like that kind of naturally, those images and kind of associations naturally flow out of the existing conversation.
And the Kim family like really reinforces that image because they are essentially demigods, like walking among mere mortals.
And so like the like the imagination doesn't have to go far to be like, yeah, North Koreans are like idol worshiping.
So obviously everything that you both have just been describing, I think highlights that Korea is a very unique and distinctive situation here, right?
It's going through these different kind of waves of colonialism and independence.
It's not colonized by Christians.
It's colonized by the Japanese Empire.
And so that kind of brings a particular angle to its approach.
So I'm curious, we've been talking a lot about Christian nationalism, Christian supremacy, Christian imperialism in this series when we're talking about Christian countries, but just religious nationalism in general.
Is Christian nationalism the right category or phrase to use in analyzing the intersection of politics and religion in Korea?
And if not, what might some alternatives be?
I would say there might even be room to argue that there are more than one versions of Christian nationalism if you look at Korean history, modern history.
Going backwards in time, maybe starting with the most recent, you have something like Build Up Korea, which was, which self-avowedly say like we are modeling ourselves after turning point in USA.
That's the thing.
And you had a lot of TP USA affiliates and Trump administration affiliates come and speak over the years.
Charlie Kirk was just there this past or the first week of September.
They had a whole prayer ceremony for him and everything.
Jack Pasovic is there as well at the same time as Charlie Kirk was there.
Then you have like Maureen Bannon, who is Steve Bannon's daughter, who's along, who's on the advisory board for Build Up Korea.
So you have a lot of kind of cross-pollinating elements of like what we would consider Christian nationalism in the U.S. being present in Korea now.
I think in the wake of the Yoon Song-yar Declaration of Martial Law last year, the paradigm of Christian nationalism can be helpful for us in thinking about transnational religion and politics in the sense that we did see after the Declaration of Martial Law,
a cadre of conservative activists, including evangelical Korean activists, create movements like Save Korea and use, appropriate the language of January 6th, quote-unquote stop the steal, to also advance arguments to defend Yoon.
So I do think we have to, there are other scholars who are studying this and we do have to investigate, you know, what do these Korean far-right evangelical leaders mean when they appropriate January 6th language to defend someone like Yoon.
As Ray talked about, we also do have transnational Christian movements like Build Up Korea.
So Mina Kim, that's an organization that's led by Mina Kim is a Korean transnational woman in her 30s.
And she helped invite Kirk, you know, the week before he was at Utah.
And there was a organization of conservative Korean activists that gathered to hear what Kirk had to say.
Mina interviewed him.
And, you know, they, again, kind of going back to the historical context, the first question that emerges is, what's the connection between, you know, our context and yours?
And they go back to the language of the enchanted language of the Cold War.
So like the religious, the political, the existential elements of the Cold War that has bound these nations together, that's where they began the interview.
And so that transnational connection, you know, I talk about it in my own work as a trans-Pacific Christian that I think continues to have resonance today.
It's deeply tied to Cold War logic.
And, but it's interesting in their interview, then they were starting to talk about the importance of the heterosexual nuclear family, the common defense of the heterosexual nuclear family.
One of the pieces that I think connects these transnational Christian nationalist movements is actually an anti-LGBTQ agenda.
And so how do we think about the family across nations and how are Christian nationalist movements actually getting animated and finding allies across national borders because of common commitments around a traditional idea of the family, for instance, or traditional ideas around gender sexuality?
And that's definitely something that we have been seeing, and not only among the Christian ones or movements, but that's definitely another theme that we are seeing just across these interviews is just how much kind of family issues and sexuality and this kind of traditional reappropriation of kind of normative frames, especially, I mean, not just sexuality, but also gender and gender identity and masculinity.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Because in South Korea right now, they're seeing a decline in the fertility rates.
And so that's changing the kind of the gendered ideas of gender roles.
It's changing the ideas around, you know, how to construct a family, norms around family, children, all of that.
Japan's also experiencing decline in fertility rates.
It does have to do with these critiques of patriarchal institutions in South Korea.
And then there's also a resistance to that, right?
This desire for going back to something more traditional.
And I think movements, transnational, Christian nationalist movements are places where that conservatism is getting shored up.
I think that's about just the competing visions of modernity that are happening in Korea and competing visions of what Korea is supposed to be in this contemporary day and age as a globalized country on the world stage, not just in terms of geopolitical influence, but also pop culture influence.
So there are big question marks that I think Korean citizens are wrestling with in terms of, yeah, like, who are we on the world stage?
For many Christians, they used to be known for the leading country sending the most missionaries around the world worldwide.
And, you know, there's still pride there.
I think per capita, they still are.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there were some big scandals that rocked the evangelical church landscape in Korea and a lot of trust lost in the church as an institution.
COVID didn't really help too much.
There were, you know, unfortunately certain fringe churches that kind of refused to adopt some of the mandates.
And in Korea, like that was essentially social and political suicide if you wanted to do that.
Unlike here, where there are many churches in the U.S. that boomed in numbers by refusing to comply with public health protocols, religious institutions that tried to push back against that did not fare so well in Korea.
So I find this so interesting what translates across these different situations of religious nationalism and what does not translate.
So in the U.S., with the people I study, when they resisted COVID restrictions, they were in the kind of tradition of the wild west and that the kind of strong Western person who was kind of resisting government, a little kind of libertarianism.
But then in a more communal society like Korea, these churches that maybe even tried to play off have some success of American churches in resisting COVID restrictions found that there was actually that was actually to their great social disadvantage to do that as opposed to that drawing in new followers that actually drove people away.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I would say that's a fair assessment.
I think also it wasn't simply driving people away from the churches.
I think they were faced with harsh political repercussions and legal repercussions for doing that.
So there was that too.
One last thing I think on the point about like just touching back on Helen's point about like some of the economic disruptions and anxieties and frustrations that are kind of there, especially among some of the younger men.
I feel like there is some common similarities there between the U.S. and Korea in that sense, where stagnating economies or at least this perception that we're not doing as well as we used to is definitely there.
And certain demographics are experiencing that more acutely than others and are responding more acutely than others.
And so you will see kind of a similar conservative resurgence among men in Korea who are in their 20s and 30s, very much frustrated about the very things that Helen just kind of outlined, marriage, dating prospects, job prospects, things like that.
Because arguably, this is a society where you teach your kids to do everything, like study, study hard and get that job and then you get married.
And they're busting their butts to do that.
And there's really nothing to show for it on their end.
And so also kind of, you know, connected to some of the high suicidality rates and kind of low-grade depression and alcoholism throughout the country.
What are the fracture lines within Christianity and Korea with respect to these movements?
Does your form of Christianity support authoritarianism or does it denounce it?
And I think you see that also bubbling to the surface in the wake of Yoon as well, because we did have Save Korea movement led by someone like Chung Gwon-hoon, who's a far-right activist.
But you also had South Korean Christians, the majority of them, say they agreed to impeach Yoon.
And they also came out into the public square and 123 of them signed up to shave their heads in protest of Yoon.
Right.
To impeach, to make the argument, to make the public argument that we will not stand for this as Christians.
And so that's part of the long Korean Christian protest tradition that is also still alive today.
We talked about this actually a little bit in our last episode about Brazil, Helen, where we observed that many times it's the nations that have had recent experiences with authoritarianism that have the best immune systems, right?
The best responses when there's a new attempt at authoritarianism, immediately you start to see protests or they already have policies in place that are protecting their democracy from this new power grab.
Is that kind of what we see happening here?
Yeah, I think the example of the South Korean people having lived under decades of South Korean autocracy, they have that history and they've embodied that history and they've also embodied the protests and the kind of religious commitments that were also required to make those democratic gains.
There are very hard-won lessons in South Korean democracy that I think that you see that contemporary pushback against a declaration of martial law.
We're not going back to 1972 Yushin regime martial law declared by Pak Jong-hee, you know, is what I think contemporary Koreans in the diaspora are saying.
And I might posit that like that kind of experience colors the way one has a relationship to political power or envisions is the right relationship to political power where yeah, you have a lot of Christian pastors and leaders and politicians who are praying that they will one day hold the keys to the government.
I just read that quote by Reverend Kim Huan Tan.
There is a certain level of humility and, I don't know, like they understand the gravity of like having that kind of responsibility.
And it also reminds me of just because of the lived experience of oppression, like the black church in America has always been politically active.
They could not afford to be like quietists about their politics.
And yet their relationship to political power in this country is also markedly different from broadly like white evangelicalism.
And I would say it is because of black folks' experience in this country where they're like, yeah, political power is nice, but it is not our friend.
So we're coming up soon on the one-year anniversary of this attempted coup approach to martial law, however we want to kind of describe it.
Could you just kind of give us the brief version of what transpired?
Yeah, well, Yoon expresses fear of communism, North Korean spies who may have infiltrated South Korean politics.
How do we oust this potential subversion?
And those who are most supportive of him in the far right, and including the Christians, share that fear of the North Korean infiltration of South Korean politics.
So that's one of the dimensions that I want to highlight in terms of what happened there with the Declaration of Martial Law.
I think it's generally this kind of specter.
That's part of what makes it such a kind of daunting kind of politics to face is like, who is the real, who's the real red communist here?
And that's why it's, you know, is it actual North Koreans?
Is it South Koreans who have been, who are quote-unquote traitors?
Is it Chinese communists?
Is it the Chinese presence also in South Korea?
So it's, I think, the specter of communism haunts the politics.
And it's sort of an amoeba that shifts and shape shifts based on the current context and who is the convenient.
I think these are like floating signifiers almost where they're just so easily, you can just grab onto them and then like deploy them or weaponize them on any position that you just like don't like.
And it can stick sometimes and do a lot of harm.
So that one's one.
Being very pro-Japanese is another.
Like, so there are these handful of like derogatory labels you can just kind of pick from and throw at your political opponents.
So was there a particular incident that led to President Yoon to declare martial law?
I don't know.
I mean, from what I've seen, I think there are a lot of speculations at what his motivations and intentions were, because this was something that really caught his own party by surprise.
Like this wasn't planned.
This wasn't like a, oh, let's workshop this idea, you know, to consolidate power.
And then this is going to how we're going to do this.
Like his own party was like, could have used the memo.
But so this really came really out of left field, I think.
What does resistance to Korean Christian nationals or Korean Christian supremacy look like?
Why was it successfully resisted?
And what were the forces within South Korean culture or religion that participated in that resistance?
We have a whole tradition of politicians who in South Korea who have defended democracy because of their hard-worn lessons under South Korean autocracy.
So that's those that history is kind of is part of this deep DNA now of resistance in the contemporary moment.
So they have the embodied experience of knowing what real autocracy is like.
And Koreans, if they want to protest something, they will gather in very large numbers.
And is it this rising up that happens, is it spontaneous as a result of that sort of personal and collective embodied experience?
Or is it being organized by some entity, some organization, some institution?
The energy is going to be there in the grassroots.
It's probably going to need a little directing from organizations and institutions.
But then if you look at the protests and who was represented there, like it's every like civil society organization was there.
It wasn't like one leader or one umbrella organization just saying like we're going to have this march.
It was like all the various labor unions, just random clubs, like moms that read books or something, you know, like they're there, like little like social networks and pockets all showed up and quite frankly had a great time.
Like the protests were, if you look at the videos and the photos, like sure, there's a lot of frustration, but there was a lot of fun happening too.
And Korean protests can be pretty fun as long as there's no militarized police or anything like that, throwing tear gas and stuff, which does tend to happen sometimes.
But for the most part, especially I think because the protests were happening during December, there was a lot of singing and there was even a concert.
So it's a wide range of different civil society actors showing up.
Those little umbrellas are probably mobilizing their networks, but it's a lot of different networks mobilizing together too.
Just a plug for protest ingenuity in Korea.
There are systems now you can do where a lot of the cafes that are running businesses around these major protest sites like Kwangun Square, for example, you can order ahead for somebody for a protester.
So you can just order 15 ICE Americanos on ICE Americanos and then people will just pick it up.
So even if you can't be there, you feel like a solidarity and you're like, I'm stuck in this office cubicle all day, but like I'm doing my part of civil disobedience by like providing ice Americanos to these bold, young 20-year-olds.
Like it's such an ingenious way of like cultivating civil society like activism at all different levels.
Yeah, I love that.
The Soros sponsored lattes there.
Helen, I wonder if we can go back to one anecdote that you shared earlier, which was the, was it 123 Christian identified protesters who agreed to shave their heads.
Can you say a little bit more about what that incident was and what it symbolically represented for them to shave their heads?
So the news covered this in March 2025.
Korean Christians associated with Tsor Kidoko Yanapwe, which is kind of loosely translated to like the Seoul Christian Council, and also the Sochuchan Kidoe, which is loosely translated as Seoul Christian Prayer Council.
They came together to organize public protests.
And you could see images of Koreans volunteering to get their hair shaved in protests of this declaration of martial law.
And it dates back to a longer Korean tradition of protests.
Using, you know, when you protest in Korean, there's a whole history of that, using the shaved head as a way to declare your kind of political commitments.
And students in the 1960s and 70s often shaved their head in a tradition to protest a South Korean autocracy.
They're drawing on that longer tradition of kind of embodying protest, not only verbally, but also embodying the protest.
And you saw also, I would love this image in some of the Korean news that, you know, there were kind of middle-aged men, but also these older women.
There was an image of this wonderful older woman.
It looks like she's in her 60s or 70s getting her hair shaved.
And I just am thinking about for her, you know, women like her who lived through autocracy.
So again, again, re-embodying what it means to protest that and for the next generation so that they don't have to live through it.
And it does also, you know, make me think about just the long history of women, Korean women, who have engaged in this kind of Christian protests.
These older women who are just, let me just shave my hair off to declare my commitment to South Korean democracy as a Christian.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's interesting that these forms of protests provide women an opportunity to take on a leadership role in a Christian sense in these non-institutional spaces and to bring in Christian symbolism and language and rituals in the protest space.
Yes, absolutely.
And Korean Christianity has a tradition of that, you know, dating all the way back to the Japanese colonial period.
You know, thinking about back to, for instance, the 1970s when Korean Christians were protesting the Pak Jong-hee regime, they did use theological language.
Some of the sermons and leaflets that were distributed by these Christian dissenters in the 1970s using the language of repentance.
Some of his leaflets wrote, the resurrection of democracy is the liberation of the people.
So using, again, language of resurrection, also language of liberation.
And this is really the time period where you do have the creation of Korean Minjong theology, Korean liberation theology.
So an indigenous form of liberation theology in the Korean context that is making arguments that, you know, salvation and holiness have to do with the liberation of Korean people from and release from actual oppression by state authority.
One thing I might add is alongside repentance, there seems to be a general theme of lament that comes through, at least for me, the repentance part goes hand in hand because they're lamenting the state of affairs, whether it is the fact that they're subjugated, whether by Japanese forces or they're living under a military autocracy.
They're lamenting a state of affairs.
And inherent in a lament, that kind of posture is that the power is not in their hands.
And so they're quick to kind of be self-critical, which maybe comes from a very new Confucian kind of remnant of that.
But the repentance and the lament go hand in hand.
And I wonder if that's also part of the reason why there isn't this like triumphalist seize power kind of attitude that we do see in some of American evangelicalism.
Whereas Korean evangelicalism, because they're very firmly rooted in that repentance and lament kind of posture, some of that gets tempered as well, perhaps.
Ray, I wanted to ask you a question in particular.
I know these days you're working with the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, and you're working in the U.S. on issues of polarization and with religious clergy who are attempting to depolarize and de-escalate some of this political violence.
I wonder how you think about, as you have one foot in each context, and as you think about some of these strategies and tactics that worked or some of the theological approaches and themes that seem to have been effective in bringing folks together in Korea to protect democracy in these crises moments.
What lessons are there for the American pastors with whom you're working or civil society activists?
I would say here in our own backyard, we do need a clearer and more explicit public discourse, perhaps, around this question of what is like, how should devout Christians show up in the public space and what should their engagement in politics look like?
I think the kinds of kind of Christian nationalisms or Christian supremacy or hegemony that we're seeing in the US is an attempt or a version of an answer to that question.
And it is the loudest one.
And quite frankly, it might be the only one that's gaining any traction.
The black church has their answer, but it's being spoken and it's only being heard by black folk in this country.
And so is there an opportunity to have that lesson translated into other pockets of America?
Who knows?
I think, I don't know, like in the from Korea, like I don't think there was any one intentional kind of decision that was made to push back against Christian nationalism or like that was even an explicit conversation being had.
But it was the lived experiences and the circumstances of the people that really just kind of created an organic buffer to a lot of this.
So in some ways, I feel like Korea almost got lucky, perhaps.
But that also means for how much longer.
Like, will that buffer stand?
Will the buffer get eroded?
Right.
There's nothing that's promised.
There's nothing.
There's no guarantee that this will be permanent, right?
But the flip side of that is just because this is what we're undergoing and we're experiencing in America, this doesn't also have to be permanent either.
And so I feel like there's hope there.
Can I pose the same question to Helen?
You're also Korean-American and studying the kind of interchanges and relationships between this kind of American culture, particularly American evangelicalism and Korea.
What lessons do you draw from your study of the Korean church and study of these kind of Korean resistance to authoritarianism that you would want us to apply here in the United States?
How has it inspired your own kind of participation in American democracy?
For me, actually, in writing, doing the research, you know, in the Cold War era, one of my key takeaways is actually that the U.S. kind of military presence in Korea was really significant in shaping kind of religious political possibilities, expressions in the late 20th century.
And I do think that that Cold War militarized context where war, evangelicalism, and military got intertwined is part of how we got to a kind of conservative or maybe even Christian nationalist term in the South Korean and diasporic context.
So for me, I have a real firm commitment after doing this historical research to argue for the end of the Korean War and for the demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula.
I do think that the actual end of war, because it's still going on, the Korean War is still technically going on 75 years in.
I do think when we declare the end of that war and the demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula, that can be one of the levers that helps to kind of alleviate some of these tensions that we're seeing where Christian nationalism, Christian nationalist rhetoric gets animated by Cold War rhetoric, gets animated by actual wars, right?
I do think the South Korea case study shows us how culture wars can get animated and tied up in real wars.
What would it look like for Korea to be a nation that is sovereign, that claims national sovereignty and is not militarized, does not have a U.S. military presence?
I do think as a historian that this can change political but also religious expressions.
Well, and it's an important reminder to us Americans that our foreign policy, as much as it is not often the thing that we are voting about, unfortunately, has a real impact on the world and shapes how others respond to sometimes even the crises within the United States.
Ray, Helen, thank you for sharing so much knowledge and insight with us.
Your ability to connect the dots is just phenomenal.
Helen J. Kim is a professor of religious history at Emory University.
You can find her online at helenjinkim.com.
That's j-i-n-k-i-m.com.
And she's also on Instagram at HelenJenKim.
Her most recent book is Race for Revival, came out in 2022.
It's about the deep connections between Korean evangelicalism and American evangelicalism in the 20th century.
Ray Kim is on LinkedIn.
You can just search Ray Kim ICRD.
He works at the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy in Washington, D.C. They're a really cool and interesting organization that is doing great work using religion for peace building around the world.
icrd.org.
Thank you, Helen and Ray.
Okay, there's so much we could dig into from this conversation and from the broader South Korean context.
But I want to start by just naming how grateful I am to hear these examples of successful clapbacks, the swift mobilization of the people in South Korea, the way politicians join together across party lines literally overnight based on a shared commitment to democracy as a principle.
It can be done.
It's amazing to think about.
South Koreans, like the Brazilians are demonstrating to us Americans a way to do it, and it inspires me.
Yeah, it inspires me too.
All it takes in South Korea is one little presidential declaration.
We get those all the time in the U.S., right?
One little anti-democratic declaration, bam, people are in the streets protesting.
And you also have that intergenerational solidarity, right?
With office workers sending Americanos for protesters to pick up, right?
It really is an impressive case study in how you build that kind of immune system to resist this stuff.
Okay, I'm going to be a little bit of a downer because I actually want to talk about the ties that hold together these far-right movements and the networking that goes on here, because I think that's a really important piece here.
So especially when we're talking about Korea and the U.S., a lot of the infrastructure of that relationship is religious.
You have missionary ties, missionaries between the two communities.
And really, I mean, especially the case of Korea, you have missionaries going both ways here.
I went to the University of California, Irvine as an undergraduate.
There were a number of Korean Christian groups.
There was a large Korean population at UCI.
A number of Korean Christian groups that were being led by missionaries from Korea on campus at the time.
And so there's these relational ties, there's movement ties, right?
People might have seen this shortly after Charlie Kirk's assassination, there are these videos of crowds of Christians in Korea chanting, we are Charlie Kirk, right?
And on some level, that's understandable, right?
It was a huge news event.
People felt a sense of attachment to him as a Christian.
But at the same time, if you looked at the signs those crowds were carrying, they said things like, why are you left-wing?
Are you a feminist?
Are you a communist?
Are you an ethnic Chinese?
Are you a sexual minority?
Are you a drug addict?
So the messages that are being carried across these transnational transoms are not merely, hey, solidarity or connection or a celebrity identification.
They're also these more far-right Christian talking points and agenda items that are being politicized, right?
Yeah.
And you also have a shared enemy across those borders.
Exactly, right?
With this ambiguity, right?
Of like they're communists, they're leftists.
It's Soros, right?
I mean, you also have media that is shared.
And especially when we're talking about South Korea, I mean, I have younger children and K-pop demon hunters has been the soundtrack of my summer.
And so we are so interconnected in our global media.
And that's not just secular media.
Christian media, especially charismatic Christian media, is not just about local televangelism shows that you happen to stumble across when you're flipping through all the weird channels or not even just national televangelism channels.
Today, a lot of these media networks are transnational, international, and global.
And so the celebrities in the U.S. are impacting celebrities elsewhere.
I mean, you also have networks of activists who see themselves being involved across these cultural lines.
So there's another new Apostolic Reformation leader named Lance Walnell, maybe Donald Trump's most effective Christian propagandist today.
And Lance Walnow, who's a very close associate of Che-An, helps out with his network a lot of times.
Lance Walnell is watching as after the 2024 election, Lance Walno was making all these trips down to Mar-a-Lago to try to lobby the incoming Trump administration and push his agenda items.
But then when this crisis happens in Korea, he makes a beeline for South Korea because he says, I'm going to go and help support the Christians there.
Well, what was he actually doing there?
He was trying to bolster the case of President Yoon.
And this was in the kind of aftermath as they're kind of adjudicating whether Yoon would be arrested and actually convicted.
And so he was trying to go and support the far-right Christians there who were supporting this attempted overthrow of the government.
Kind of like what was happening with Bolsonaro in Brazil again.
Exactly.
I mean, while this was going on, I was texting Ray and saying like, hey, help me figure this out.
What is going on?
I mean, I watch Chae-On traveling to South Korea all the time and then all the way around the world.
He's going all over the place.
I mean, not less so today.
Now that he's running for California governor, but he's been building these networks for decades.
Even Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, and this doesn't get covered in most of the mainstream media biographies and all these things that they do of him.
He was a part of this emerging transnational far-right networking, right?
Less than a week before he was assassinated, Charlie Kirk was in Seoul, Korea, and he was working with this group, Build Up Korea there, this Christian nationalist organization that is kind of a parallel organization to TPUSA.
And even TPUSA is building franchises in other countries, building up these lateral networks around the globe.
Yeah.
And I just want to say a word about Kirk for a moment because I think the appeal that Kirk was having in Korea, it illustrates the angst of younger men in particular in both societies.
Ray spoke to this in the interview.
And what Kirk and his movement was offering, it touches on that sense of alienation and frustration that they're feeling with the current system and that's being exacerbated.
That bruise is being pushed on by these far-right entrepreneurs to pull them into their movement.
And then that sense of victimhood that gets channeled and pushed to support the movement to dismantle gender rights or LGBT rights or feminism and this reassertion of heteronormativity and patriarchy.
It's offered as the solution to what ails them, to the solution to their sense of alienation.
Yeah, honestly, when you track a lot of these leaders like I do and kind of try to keep an eye on what they're doing on a day-to-day basis, it is crazy how often they are taking transnational flights.
I mean, right, like, I thought these people were nationalists.
Why are they spending so much time overseas trying to promote other nationalists?
They're connecting.
They're building these bridges that are actually enabling some of these far-right takeovers.
But that can also galvanize us because just like with Brazil, once we start to realize how connected our situations are, how connected our countries are, we can network too.
And I think figures like Ray and Helen, who are scholars, who are kind of conversant in both of these cultures and can kind of do some of that translating for us, they can be real help in this bridge building.
Yeah.
And we have to.
It's essential because you can't push back on what's happening here in the U.S. in a vacuum.
Once you see and understand all of these transnational connections and how our fates are tied to one another, it's so clear that we have to think and act both locally and globally because we're in this together, like it or not.
Okay, I want to go back to what you were saying about media and the transnational influences there, Matt, because I want to think a little bit about what opportunities therein lie as well.
So I have a kid who is a huge K-pop fan, and they're going to hate that I'm outing them in this way, but honestly, they're probably never going to listen to this.
So I will.
But my point is that probably, you know, like you and your kids who are listening to K-pop demon hunters and like other parents in the U.S. who are listening to this podcast episode, I have a sense of how powerful Korean pop culture is, both here and there, and globally.
And we've heard about the ways in which this pop culture was kind of intersecting with some of the protest actions and movements on the ground there in Seoul.
I've read in other sources about how lightsticks that are associated with various K-pop groups were showing up in the protests on the streets.
Some K-pop songs were serving simultaneously as protest anthems, like Into the New World by Girls Generation, which I just have to note is a title and a protest song with some great biblical resonance.
So it can operate at two registers, both a secular and a religious one, simultaneously.
But this all leads me to wonder how and whether that vehicle of Korean pop culture can serve in this effort to protect democracy right now and to mobilize folks, especially as we seek to build some of these transnational solidarity movements.
And this is, you know, not this is with notwithstanding the huge commercialization of K-pop.
Obviously, that's an industry that was not created by and for political resistance, not in the least.
But is there a way that we could use it in that way, recognizing its power and its reach and its influence and its just saturation within younger generations, especially as a means to galvanize those generations and to help foster some of those transnational solidarity and the intergenerational alliances here in the U.S., like you saw in Korea.
But I also want to talk about other uses of symbolism that we heard about that were grounded in history and theology in the Korean protest movements.
I loved that anecdote that Helen shared with us about the older women who were shaving their heads in the midst of the protest.
It's such a dramatic act, especially in a world in which long hair on women is associated with traditional modes of femininity.
You never see trad wives with short hair, and there's a reason for that.
And it's one, as Helen shared with us, that conjures up a whole world of meaning and power.
It nods to history.
So it kind of collapses history and the present.
And while these women were Christian, I'm also conscious of the fact that this is a country with a Buddhist history and a significant Buddhist population as well.
And the shaved head has a particular resonance within the Buddhist world of monasticism and asceticism.
So I think that's just a great example of how these public acts of ritual, these really dramatic ones, can have this kind of tremendous evocative power.
It summons a whole world of meaning and becomes a really potent ingredient.
That's something that I really, really want to drive home really throughout this series is the potency, the power of religious language, religious symbolism, religious theologies for fueling resistance movements.
And I'm not just talking about Christianity here.
We'll see as we go along.
A lot of times the resistance movements to religious nationalisms are themselves religious.
And in fact, I think the most effective ones often are religious because they are using the same vocabulary.
They're having the same argument.
So much of the time, I worry that the center and the left, and I'm speaking very broadly and very globally here, but we tend to default to the language of the Enlightenment, to the language of process.
We talk about rule of law.
We talk about separation of powers.
Those are abstractions.
Yeah, human rights, those are abstractions.
Great ideas, great principles, really important ones about all of those things.
But for many, many people in the world, those phrases don't conjure anything.
Those are not what they have attached emotional resonance to.
What they have attached emotional resonance to is religion and symbolism and ritual and theology.
And so the more that we can integrate those things in, the more we're tapping into the vocabulary and the mother tongue of people in a way that I think can ground these movements in much more depth.
You know, when we're talking about theology, though, like I want to note, because I thought Helen was so insightful about this, right?
That the Cold War, this kind of global war between quote unquote democracy and quote unquote communism, and we can all recognize how complicated it was, right?
But that frame for decades, many, many people in our world were shaped theologically by that frame, right?
The godly nations versus the secular communist nations.
And the far right has learned to leverage that.
They've re-enchanted the Cold War in a particular way to say, well, it's Soros and the communists and the socialists who are against us, and we are the normal ones.
And this is an old trope, but it taps into people's theological imaginations.
And they're just remixing.
And it's just in the religious versus the communists and those on the side of democracy and God.
Exactly.
But that doesn't mean that we are locked into that frame or that narrative.
We can come up with other frames.
I thought, especially when we talked with Helen about what is that dividing line in the Korean church, and she said, does your form of Christianity support authoritarianism or denounce it?
And that is so perfect.
That is the choice.
Yes.
That is the choice we need to pose to American Christians.
And it's a wedge question that really forces the issue.
Because I'm sure I study these people.
There are many Christians in America who would say, yeah, I support authoritarianism.
But most people still have an allergy to authoritarianism built up by years and decades of living in democracies.
And they were going to resist that.
And I think most Christians in America, if you posed it that baldly to them, would say, no, I don't support authoritarianism.
And then you could have a more of a conversation about the consequences of the MAGA movement, what supporting Donald Trump, for whatever reason they're supporting him for, what is actually happening under his watch.
I think we need to cut through this kind of namby-pamby dodging around political questions and go right to the heart of the matter and kind of print this head on.
I mean, and Helen also pointed to this, Protestant theology from the start was rooted in protest.
It's there in the name, right?
It was a resistance movement.
And Protestant theologies have also been very useful to many of these groups that have opposed colonialism and have resisted it, including in the U.S. In our history, there were all these Protestant voices arguing against the divine right of kings under George III because we have rights from God that are given to us from God.
That is theological language.
So we're going to keep coming back to this because I think it's a really important question.
And I think the U.S. is in some ways kind of stuck.
The Christians in the U.S. are kind of stuck on this question of our history with colonialism.
So, I'm going to just kind of put a bug in people's ear.
We're going to come back to that in future episodes as well.
Yeah.
And we're going to come back to it also in recognizing how these theologies of resistance operate in post-colonial contexts in particular, where some of these religious narratives, Christian and otherwise, get caught up in these forms of nationalism as about resisting the colonial state and the authoritarianism or the oppression that's a part of that.
And then, these contexts of the religious colonizers or imperialists and how theologies are operating in sync with these far-right movements and nationalisms in those contexts in slightly different textured ways.
And to what you were saying, Matt, I think some of the stuckness in the U.S. is that we have both.
We have both histories and we have both forms of theologies operating of both being a post-founded as a both a post-colonial state seeking independence from tyranny, from religious persecution and the divine right of kings in England, and also being a country that has operated in an imperial way and has colonized other places and having theologies that are driving that or legitimating it as well.
And I think just more broadly, these explicitly religious theologies that we're exploring, they're an important aspect of understanding nationalisms worldwide, especially if you recognize that nationalism itself is something of a theological project.
And I'm not just trying to make an academic point here, but I suppose it is a little bit of an academic point, speaking specifically about this scholar, Anthony Smith, and some of his work that has shown the ways in which nationalisms operate like a religion.
They define a community, a sense of a shared history and a shared doctrine.
They create an allegiance to a body politic and its laws and order.
And so they operate theologically in this sense.
It's a secular modern form of theology or religion.
So it's not surprising that nationalism and theologies can be aligned or can be made to align to serve the nation's interests, to serve a religious community's interests, to serve both in some places and in some moments.
And that theology of resistance, we have a little bit in our DNA as we were talking about, right, with the fight against tyranny back in Europe and the fleeing of religious oppression and persecution.
We also have a lot of it within the black church and African-American liberation theology, as Ray noted in the interview.
And so how do we pull on those forms of theologies of resistance, but also connect them to, again, what we heard in Korea, like we heard in Brazil.
It's such a distant memory, this experience of authoritarianism and tyranny and the historical memory of the U.S., especially for white Americans.
So that need to understand the vulnerability of democracy isn't as intimate.
And we have to connect these theologies of resistance with that kind of haunting.
For white Americans, tyranny is, oh no, there's a deadly pathogen spreading.
You're asking me to wear a mask.
That's tyranny.
So I think, yeah, we need to help people recognize what is really tyranny and then how to resist it because the instinct to resist it is already there.
I think we need to activate them and really recognize what's threatening them.
So we're going to stay in Asia for our next episode, but we're turning to a different religious form of nationalism.
So we've spent the last two episodes thinking about Christian or dominantly Christian contexts.
We're going to turn to Buddhist nationalism next, especially as it manifests in two countries that are very closely connected, Sri Lanka and Burma, or Myanmar, as it's sometimes known.
This is the episode I'm personally the most excited about because it's two contexts in which I've worked a lot and I have been so inspired by the moxie and the creativity of the activists in both places.
We have a lot to learn from them, including about these questions of symbolism and religion as part of the protest.
So I hope that you'll come back next week, folks, to join us on our next stop on this global tour.
That's it for this episode of American on Exceptionalism.
Thanks for joining us.
Please hit subscribe and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.
You can keep up with this show and all the other great series from AccessMundi Media at www.axismundie.us.
This show is produced by Andrew Gill and engineered by Scott Okamoto.
Funding provided by the Institute for Islamic Christian and Jewish Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the International Center on Religion and Diplomacy.
