The author explores the political rise of conservative Protestantism in the larger context of Protestant Christianity’s reconfiguration in Korea. The incorporation of East Asia into the modern world resulted not only in the failure to establish a single Korean state, but also in the rise of the category ‘religion’ in this region. The remarkable growth of Korean Protestantism was, in large part, due to its great contribution, as a model religion, to the building of Korea as a modern nation. Since the late 1980s, however, the public has lost confidence in it and there has been a rise in discourses of nation re-building that give great emphasis to indigenous cultures and regional resources. Meanwhile, Protestant Churches have emerged as a key opponent to nationalist aspirations and programmes for social reform. The re-politicization of Protestantism in post-Cold War South Korea reflects the extent of the insecurity stemming from of Korea’s shifting place in a newly globalized East Asia. Religion makes the re-entry of Korea into the late-modern world at once dynamic and unpredictable.

This paper presents an analysis of the birth and growth of scientific creationism in South Korea by focusing on the lives of four major contributors. After creationism arrived in Korea in 1980 through the global campaign of leading American creationists, including Henry Morris and Duane Gish, it steadily grew in the country, reflecting its historical and social conditions, and especially its developmental state with its structured mode of managing science and appropriating religion. We argue that while South Korea's creationism started with the state-centered conservative Christianity under the government that also vigilantly managed scientists, it subsequently constituted some technical experts' efforts to move away from the state and its religion and science through their negotiation of a new identity as Christian intellectuals ( chisigin). Our historical study will thus explain why South Korea became what Ronald Numbers has called "the creationist capital of the world."

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