Transnational Politics and Korean Evangelicalism: Affective Infrastructure and History

Abstract

This essay examines the political resonance of contemporary Korean evangelicalism through the case of Rev. Jun Kwang-hun, whose rallies in the last decade, including the COVID-19 pandemic period, exemplify how religion functions as an affective infrastructure in South Korea’s public sphere. Jun’s spectacles, marked by the display of U.S. and Korean flags, anti-communist rhetoric, and charismatic bodily performance, condense Cold War memory, nationalist sentiment, and transnational evangelical alliances into a visceral present. These events mobilize publics not simply through doctrine but by organizing sensation, conviction, and action into durable attachments. Jun’s sermons and YouTube broadcasts extend this affective infrastructure digitally, blurring the boundaries between religious authenticity and political emergency, weaving alternative political narrative. The analysis situates Jun’s activism within a longer genealogy of Korean evangelicalism, which diverges from U.S. models by emerging directly in the crucible of authoritarian nation-building rather than from conflicts with fundamentalism. Its selective reception of the Lausanne Covenant, delayed by censorship and refracted through democratization struggles, further embedded conservative political alignments. Korean evangelicalism’s conservative formation is not reducible to American influence but reflects a transnational resonance machine shaped by U.S.–Korea ties, Cold War geopolitics, and local nationalist configurations. Through the frameworks of William Connolly’s “resonance machine” and Lauren Berlant’s “affective infrastructure,” this essay argues that Korean evangelicalism operates as a political religion: one that continually repurposes history for the present, weaponizing belief through embodied affect and transnational networks. By tracing both synchronic spectacle and long-accumulated history, the study illuminates how a religious minority exerts outsized influence in South Korea’s contested political landscape.