2009/09/01 by Danielle Kane, Jung Mee Park · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Religion and Society Interactions #Chinese history and philosophy #Japanese History and Culture #Geopolitics #Nationalism #Protestantism #Christianity #China #East Asia #Power (physics) #Explanatory power #Sociology #Religious conversion #Political economy #Political science #Development economics #Religious studies #Economics #Law #Philosophy #Epistemology
paper · doi:10.1086/599246
openalex publication_date 2009/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
This article uses the puzzle of Christian success in Korea to develop a model for understanding religious diffusion beyond national borders. The authors argue that the microlevel network explanations that dominate the research on conversion cannot by themselves account for the unusual success of Protestantism in Korea. Instead, events in East Asia in macrolevel, geopolitical networks provoked nationalist rituals that altered the stakes of conversion to either promote or retard conversion network growth. At the turn of the 20th century, unequal treaties both opened this region to missionaries and provoked nationalist rituals. In China and Japan, these rituals generated patriotic identities by attacking Christianity, and network growth slowed or reversed. In Korea, Christianity became compatible with these rituals, and conversion networks grew. This example highlights the greater explanatory power of nested networks for understanding international religious diffusion, relative to microlevel accounts alone.