10: Hope for South Korea
a VERY surprising trend.
Last month I visited a congregation from a very high-tension Christian religious tradition.
They asked me not to write about them directly, so I won’t mention their name or offer details that might identify them.
Its members live together in large communities of several dozen families in the same location, make lifelong commitments, share all their resources (nobody has their own money), and submit themselves to the directives of leadership for where they live and what job they do.
Leaders do not volunteer or apply, but are nominated by others and chosen through consensus. “Charisma” is not considered a desirable quality in a leader. In fact, leadership is not a sought-after role at all, as it involves a lot of work and frustration with no measurable benefits.
They do expect compliance with some formal and informal gender roles, but less than most mainstream Christian churches and certainly less than most other high-tension religious groups.
Many things surprised me about the experience.
For one, people that grew up in this tradition (adult converts had more trouble with this) are profoundly non-individualistic. Their goals are communal goals. When I asked about the future, nobody said anything like “I hope to become a writer” or “I want to live in France.” They all responded with some version of “I want what’s best for our community and I trust our leadership to decide what’s needed” or “I’d like for us to be more involved in homeless ministry and I hope they’ll give me a chance to participate in that.”
But what surprised me even more is that they’re attracting (relative to their size) large numbers of South Koreans.
I asked several church members for their take on this phenomenon, including South Koreans themselves as well as non South-Koreans. All gave similar responses. They all agreed that South Korea’s culture is obsessed with status: in order to go about your day, you must constantly measure yourself against everyone else. This measurement includes age, income, job title, number of social media “friends” and many other tangible and intangible metrics. This results in a persistent and often debilitating anxiety about whether you’re “measuring up.”
Years ago, my friend Carl shared his experience of studying economics at the University of Wisconsin with many South Korean students who became his friends. According to those friends, the language itself (how you address another person) requires you to know who holds higher status. When Carl asked how they’d handle a conversation where both participants had exactly the same status, they responded “We wouldn’t talk to each-other. It would be too awkward.”
I’ve written in greater detail about this phenomenon with South Korea in this post, explaining why South Korea is the least hopeful country on Earth.
According to church members, the reason South Koreans join their high-tension church is to escape from this status-centric lifestyle. Because the church’s rule of life completely removes the concept of status from their life experience, a South Korean convert can set down this heavy weight they’ve carried all their lives.
Through the centuries, the Christian Church has demonstrated a remarkable ability to thrive amidst persecution and suffering. But it has also demonstrated a similarly remarkable inability to handle wealth, power, and comfort without becoming decadent, corrupted, and hungry for power and status.
As we read in C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, wealth, power, and comfort offer the greatest danger to the spiritual health of a Christian, far worse than suffering. Wealth, power, and status are all measurable objectives, unlike spiritual growth. In The Technological Society—his masterwork of sociology—Jacques Ellul attributes our danger specifically to the temptation to focus our lives on measurable objectives, like status.
While monks and nuns have always followed a different path, we have precious few Christian historical examples for how to resist this effectively as families and communities.
But now we have one.
For now, let us note that South Koreans—the people furthest along the path of obsessing about measurable outcomes—are joining this anti-individualistic, anti-status, high-tension religious tradition in droves.
We are in the coal mine, and they are the canary.
Keep watching.
