South Korea is often celebrated as one of Asia’s great modern success stories — a nation that rose from war and occupation into technological sophistication, democratic governance, and global cultural influence. Yet beneath this extraordinary transformation lies a deeply troubling and insufficiently examined religious conflict: the systematic persecution, desecration, and symbolic humiliation of Korean Buddhism by extremist currents within evangelical Protestantism over the last half-century.
The scale of this conflict is not a matter of interpretation. It is documented fact.
From 1982 through 2016, Korean media outlets reported over 120 instances of vandalism, arson, and harassment targeting Buddhist temples and facilities in South Korea. According to the landmark peer-reviewed study by Young-Hae Yoon and Sherwin Vincent Jones — published in Buddhist Studies Review in 2018 under the title “Broken Buddhas and Burning Temples: A Re-examination of Anti-Buddhist Violence and Harassment in South Korea” — these incidents included at least 63 cases of vandalism, 9 confirmed arsons, 27 suspicious fires, and 51 incidents of religiously motivated harassment targeting Buddhist facilities. Crucially, scholars note that this pattern of violence has been almost entirely one-sided, with no reports of similar attacks on Evangelical churches or of Korean Buddhists harassing or retaliating against Christians during the same period. This is not fringe grievance. It is documented historical record.
A Civilization Under Assault
For over 1,500 years, Buddhism was one of the central civilizational pillars of Korea. Introduced during the Three Kingdoms period and elevated to a state religion under the Unified Silla and Goryeo dynasties, it shaped royal courts, moral philosophy, funerary traditions, mountain worship, and artistic identity across centuries. Korea’s great temples — Bulguksa, Haeinsa, Tongdosa, Bongeunsa — were not fringe religious spaces. They were repositories of national memory, inscribed into the landscape and consciousness of the peninsula itself.
The arrival and rapid expansion of Protestant evangelicalism, initially through Western missionary structures in the late nineteenth century and accelerating dramatically through the twentieth, introduced a starkly different theological orientation. Foreign missionaries taught converts that native religions, including Buddhism, were “heathen superstitions” and “demon worship,” instructing them to burn shrines and religious paraphernalia. Inspired by missionary John Nevius’s accounts of demon possession and exorcism in China, itinerant evangelists toured the Korean countryside attacking “devil houses,” destroying fetishes, and publicly burning Buddhist icons and other instruments of what they called “devil worship.” This foundational framing — Buddhism as demonic rather than as an ancient civilizational inheritance — did not remain merely theological. It metastasized, across generations, into repeated physical assault.
State Power and Sacred Spaces
The anti-Buddhist pressure was not always extra-governmental. Under President Chun Doo-hwan, a military strongman who held power from 1980 to 1988, the Korean state itself became an instrument of Buddhist suppression. Chun adopted anti-Buddhist policies as president: historic temples were taken over by the government and converted into tourist attractions, and when monks of the Jogye Order of Seon Buddhism criticized him, the government raided Buddhist temples — including the main Jogye temple in Seoul — and arrested monks. Fifty-five monks were sent to detention camps without ever being convicted of anything. Other monks were subjected to torture; the abbot of one Jogye temple died as a result. Throughout Chun’s administration, Buddhist monks and nuns were kept under surveillance and frequently accused of being Communist sympathizers. LankaWeb
The scale of October 27, 1980 — known in Korean Buddhist memory as the “10.27 Law Incident” — was staggering. On that date, the Chun government mobilized the military and police to suppress the Korean Buddhist community on a large scale. Thousands of monks were forcibly taken away and their confessions coerced through torture; the Buddhist community was condemned in state media as a hotbed of crime. In the aftermath, millions of believers withdrew their membership, and the Jogye Order was unable to recover its status, falling to second place behind the Protestant Church.This was not vandalism. This was state-sponsored civilizational displacement.
A Chronicle of Desecration
The violence that accompanied and followed the Chun era was extensive and highly specific in its symbolism. Vandals painted red crosses on Buddhist art and smashed or decapitated Buddha statues. In a few cases, Christians — including clergy — were caught in the act but not charged.
Individual incidents reveal the texture of this ideological campaign:
In 1988, two Buddhist temples on Jeju Island were set on fire by members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
In 1990, two men broke into the studios of a new Buddhist radio station two days before it was to begin broadcasting. They smashed all of the station’s recording and transmission equipment, using the head of a Buddha statue to break into recording booths and destroy computers and equipment. No arrests were made. This attack was not random; it was aimed at silencing Buddhist public voice before it could speak. dha Grotto — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — on the grounds that it was “heretical” and promoted “idol worship.”
Also in 1991, teachers at a public high school directed their students — many of them Buddhist — to recite Biblical passages and sing Christian hymns in class. In the same month, a Buddha statue at a Buddhist student club at Cheongju University was vandalized.
In 1996, unknown vandals defaced a large topiary swastika — a traditional Buddhist symbol — on the campus of Dongguk University, Korea’s oldest Buddhist university, by cutting the shrubbery into the shape of a cross. The incident prompted university-wide protests and religious education campaigns.
In 2000, a Buddha statue at Dongguk University was vandalized in what Korean media described, with considerable shock, as a desecration of a major educational institution’s sacred property.
In 2012, an arsonist attempted to burn down the Gakhwangjeon Hall of Hwaomsa Temple in Gurye County. CCTV footage captured a man pouring a flammable substance across the hall before igniting it. Only quick action by monks and prior fire prevention restorations limited the damage. These are not isolated incidents. They are the recurring grammar of a specific ideological project: to mark Buddhist sacred space as enemy territory.
Public Rhetoric as Incitement
Physical violence was reinforced by a parallel campaign in public rhetoric. A video from the “Again 1907” revival in Pusan sparked national controversy when it recorded a worship leader leading attendees in repeated prayers for Buddhist temples in various Busan neighborhoods to “collapse.” The rally had received a personal video message from Lee Myung-bak — then mayor of Seoul, later president of South Korea — a detail that elevated the incident from fringe extremism to uncomfortable proximity to mainstream political power. A nation in shouts calling for the collapse of Buddhist temples, and another in which a prominent Protestant minister stated that Buddhist monks were “wasting their time” and should convert to Christianity.
In 2010, a video made by a Christian student group documenting their visit and prayer session inside Bongeunsa Temple — one of Seoul’s most ancient and significant Buddhist sites, founded in 794 CE — provoked widespread outrage. Korean media covered the video’s circulation as emblematic of an evangelical subculture willing to treat active Buddhist sanctuaries as mission fields rather than places of worship deserving of respect.
Scholar Kang-nam Oh, writing in the University of Hawai’i Press volume Christianity in Korea, characterized relations between the two communities as “gloomy” and “even ugly,” while Dr. Sŏn-hwan Pyŏn, late dean of the Korean Methodist Theological University, directly attributed inter-religious hostilities to “aggressive” and “militant proselytization” by “fanatical Christian believers.” These were not Buddhist polemicists speaking. They were Christian academics and clergy acknowledging a crisis within their own tradition.
The Response and Its Limits
Korean Buddhism did not absorb these assaults passively. In 1997, following vandalism of the Dharma hall at a military academy near Seoul, twenty-one Buddhist organizations joined together to form the Committee to Counter Religious Discrimination, to oppose religious violence and discrimination targeting Buddhists.
In August 2008, an estimated 60,000 people — including approximately 7,000 monks — rallied in front of Seoul City Hall to protest religious discrimination. Tensions partially subsided when several high-level officials accused of favoritism toward Christianity visited Buddhist temples to offer apologies.
Yet the structural conditions enabling this violence — a theological framework that codes Korean Buddhism as paganism, political environments that periodically signal tolerance for anti-Buddhist hostility, and institutional reluctance to prosecute desecrators — have never been fully dismantled.
Memory, Civilization, and the Stakes of Pluralism
To understand why this conflict matters beyond the religious, one must understand what Korean Buddhism actually represents. Bongeunsa Temple in Seoul was not merely a house of worship; it was founded in 794 CE during the reign of King Wonseong, served as the headquarters of 80 smaller Buddhist temples under Japanese colonial rule, and houses 3,479 Buddhist scriptures of 13 types, including works of the great Korean calligrapher Kim Jeong-hee. To desecrate it is not to challenge a rival faith. It is to attack Korea’s own civilizational archive. A smashed Buddha is not merely vandalism. It is an ideological statement about whose history counts. A burned temple is not merely arson. It is an assault on collective memory — an attempt to make a people strangers to their own past.
The broader lesson is sobering, and extends well beyond Korea. Whenever missionary absolutism — rooted in doctrines of spiritual warfare, dominionism, and exclusivist revelation — shifts from persuasion to civilizational negation, persecution rarely begins with total destruction. It begins with desecration: broken statues, burned sanctuaries, humiliation, symbolic conquest. The physical violence tracks the rhetorical violence. Where one flourishes unchecked, the other follows.
South Korea’s democratic and pluralistic maturity ultimately depends not only on its economic power or its global cultural reach, but on whether it fully honors the entirety of its civilizational inheritance — including Buddhism, which helped shape the Korean moral imagination for over sixteen centuries before modern evangelical institutions rose to prominence. To defend Korean Buddhism is therefore not merely to defend one religion among many.
It is to defend history against erasure. Memory against desecration. Plural civilization against the arrogance of any movement that mistakes conquest for truth.
References
- Yoon, Young-Hae and Sherwin Vincent Jones. “Broken Buddhas and Burning Temples: A Re-examination of Anti-Buddhist Violence and Harassment in South Korea.” Buddhist Studies Review 34, no. 2 (2018): 239–258.
- Oh, Kang-nam. “The Christian-Buddhist Encounter in Korea.” In Christianity in Korea, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Timothy S. Lee. University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.
- Lee, Timothy S. Born Again: Evangelicalism in Korea. University of Hawai’i Press, 2010.
- Oak, Seung-Deuk. The Making of Korean Christianity: Protestant Encounters with Korean Religions, 1876–1915. Baylor University Press, 2013.
- O’Brien, Barbara. “Christian-Buddhist Tension in South Korea.” About.com Buddhism (republished in LankaWeb, 2016).
- Welsh, Tom. “Vandalized Temples Reveal Religious Intolerance.” Korea Herald, July 31, 1998.
- Oh, Dong-sic. “Jehovah’s Witnesses Committed Arson at Two Buddhist Temples at Jeju Island.” Donga Ilbo, January 5, 1988.