The Relationship between Religion and Society in the COVID-19 Era: The Case of Protestantism in South Korea

The relationship between Korean Protestantism and society at large can be divided into three parts in terms of the religion’s participation in society following the Korean Peninsula’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule: (1) conservative social non-participation, (2) far-right social participation, and (3) progressive social participation. In the COVID-19 era, conservative Protestants reluctantly followed the government’s quarantine guidelines but remained wary of state control over religion. Far-right Protestants placed a greater emphasis on religious values than on public safety and maintained face-to-face worship services against the government’s ban on religious and other largescale gatherings. Progressive Protestants participated in social movements to benefit the public good and were willing to forgo religious gatherings to that end. Overcoming COVID-19 requires many things, particularly material support for the marginalized, an establishment of an intimacy network beyond church-centered communities, ethics of respect for life, and the promotion of ecological justice, and with this in mind, the progressive Protestants’ participation in society can be considered an appropriate model.

How German Theologians Read and Edited Luther for the Public: Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider’s Luther for Our Time

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Entstehung und die Wirkung von Luther an unsere Zeit (1817), Karl Gottlieb Bretschneiders vielgelesenes Buch der Auszüge, als Fallstudie darüber, wie moderne wissenschaftliche Theologen und Herausgeber Luther gelesen, kommentiert und anderen Lesern vorgestellt haben: in diesem Beispiel als Rationalist. Das Buch war umstritten. Der Beitrag befasst sich auch mit zwei konkurrierenden Auswahlen von Luthers Schriften, die von den konservativeren Protestanten Friedrich Perthes und Hans Lorenz Andreas Vent sowie den ultramontanen Katholiken Nikolaus Weis und Andreas Räß als Antwort verfasst wurden. Es deutet darauf hin, dass eine stärkere Berücksichtigung solcher Zusammenstellungen und der Arbeitsmethoden der Compiler selbst – als Teil der kritischen Geschichte der Wissenschaft – sowohl unser Verständnis des tatsächlichen Einsatzes der Reformer und ihrer breiten Rezeption durch verschiedene Leser bereichern als auch neues Licht werfen wird über die Polemik des frühen neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. This article examines the creation and impact of Luther for Our Time (1817), Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider’s much-read book of excerpts, as a case study of how modern scientific theologians and editors read, annotated, and introduced Luther to other readers: in this instance as a rationalist. The book was controversial. The article also looks at two competing selections of Luther’s texts prepared in response by the more conservative Protestants Friedrich Perthes and Hans Lorenz Andreas Vent and the ultramontane Catholics Nikolaus Weis and Andreas Räß. It suggests that greater consideration of such compilations and the working methods of the compilers themselves – part of the critical history of scholarship – will both enrich our understanding of the actual use of reformers and their broad reception by various readers, as well as shed new light on the polemics of the early nineteenth century.

Global Contexts: How Countries Shape the COVID-19 Experience of Amish and Mennonite Missionaries Abroad

Across the globe, governments restricted social life to slow the spread of COVID-19. Several conservative Protestant sects resisted these policies in the United States. We do not yet know if theology shaped the resistance or if it was more a product of a polarized national political context. We argue that the country context likely shapes how conservative Protestants’ moral worldview affects their perceptions of the pandemic and government restrictions. Countries implementing more regulations, those with limited access to healthcare, food, and other essential services, and those with past histories of epidemics may all shape residents’ perceptions. Drawing on the case of American Amish and Mennonite missionaries stationed abroad, we content-analyzed accounts of the pandemic from an international Amish and Mennonite correspondence newspaper. We found that the missionaries’ perceptions of the pandemic and governmental restrictions differ from those of their U.S. counterparts, which suggests that context likely shapes how religious moral worldviews express themselves concerning public health interventions.

Imagining Ireland's Pasts

The book describes how various authors addressed the history of early modern Ireland over four centuries, and explains why they could not settle on an agreed narrative. It shows how conflicting interpretations broke frequently along denominational lines, but that authors were also influenced by ethnic, cultural, and political considerations, and by whether they were resident in Ireland or living in exile. The book details how each set of authors extolled the merits of their progenitors, offered hope and guidance to the particular audience they addressed, and disputed opposing narratives. The author shows how competing scholars, whether contributing to vernacular histories or empirical studies, became transfixed by the traumatic events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they sought to explain either how stability had finally been achieved, or how the descendants of those who had been wronged might secure redress. Humanist, Apocalyptic and Enlightenment authors are treated separately. Greatest attention is given to the nineteenth century when some Protestant authors adopted a nationalist perspective inspired by European liberal ideology. It is explained how this was spurned by Catholic Church leaders no less than by conservative Protestants, and how each set their minds to composing an alternative grand narrative. The publications of Lecky and Froude are given special consideration before attention shifts to authors who, in the late nineteenth century, permitted happenings from the early modern past to flow into the present to produce an outpouring of historical publications that has not been fully appreciated by scholars of Ireland’s literary renaissance.

The Use of Faith in Legislative Decision-Making

In recent decades, same-sex marriage has emerged as a national political issue. As a result, state legislators have sponsored and passed statutes on an array of issues directly related to this topic. This chapter investigates how faith influences an individual legislator's political judgment in the early-stages of decision making related to sponsored bills. At this stage in the legislative process, influences are minimized. The findings indicate that even while legislator's partisanship and ideology largely structure decision-making, legislators as conservative Protestants are more likely to responds when issues involve morality.

Politics and Public Schools

Chapter 2 examines how the four schools distinguished themselves from public schools, a distinction that helped them establish what was essential (or fundamental to their identity) about their own communities and their politics. The chapter also establishes some of the debates about what was “accidental” (or not fundamental to their identity) in the schools. It then turns to how the schools engaged broader questions of politics, especially how both conservative Protestants and Muslims felt excluded by the United States, with Protestants feeling the rest of the nation had forgotten America’s “Christian identity” and Muslims feeling a mix of hope and discouragement that they might be accepted as just another American religion. In discussions of both public schools and politics, community members described essential differences between themselves and the rest of the world, and they expressed frustrations that outsiders disagreed with them about which differences were essential and which were accidental.

Conclusion

The resignation of Richard M. Nixon as president of the United States on August 8, 1974, brought immediate reactions from liberal to moderate to conservative Protestants that paralleled one another more than at any other time during the Watergate crisis. To be sure, differences persisted in how they viewed Christian moral and ethical participation in politics, as is revealed by the close look provided in this chapter. But the actual moment of resignation brought a sigh of relief, as well as a desire to move the nation beyond this divisive episode. But August 8 lacked a sense of finality because many unresolved issues continued to trouble Christians, the solutions to which divided conservatives and liberals. Protestants thus decided not to exit the political stage in their commentary despite Nixon’s departure, and they remain enmeshed in it to this day.

Getting Rights ‘Right’

This chapter examines how human rights language is deployed at Christ Church. Although Christianity and human rights are sometimes genealogically linked, English law's replacement of the 'passive accommodation' of religion with the more robust 'prescriptive regulation' of a positive right to freedom of religion is experienced by some conservative Protestants as a dilution of their religious liberty. Drawing on comparative Melanesian ethnography, the chapter discusses the values of individualism and relationalism in global Christianities to argue that, for those at Christ Church, the perceived egocentrism of rights-based claims is thought to undermine the relationality necessary for a successful gospel encounter. For this reason, Christ Churchites encourage one another to forgo their rights for the sake of the gospel. This suggests that, even among those who embrace the interior, conscience-driven understanding of religion privileged by Euro-American law, there is little faith in the state's ability to protect religious liberty, with positive rights seen to privilege secular norms over Christian morality.