본문 바로가기
  • Home

Self-Help as Economic Ethics of Protestant Missionaries in Colonial Korea

  • The Korean Journal of Chiristian Social Ethics
  • Abbr : 기사윤
  • 2019, (44), pp.83-116
  • DOI : 10.21050/CSE.2019.44.03
  • Publisher : The Society Of Korean Christian Social Ethics
  • Research Area : Humanities > Christian Theology
  • Received : June 29, 2019
  • Accepted : August 12, 2019
  • Published : August 31, 2019

Byongsung Lee 1

1감리교신학대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article examines the Protestant missionaries’ view on capitalist values during the Japanese colonial period and analyzes their economic ethics ​ ​ that they taught and emphasized to Koreans. In the Japanese colonial era, the capitalist system in Korea slowly but incrementally expanded though the colonial economy of Korea was extremely subordinated to the Japanese Empire. Protestant missionaries believed that it was their “duty” and “responsibility” as Christian missionaries to help and train Koreans to adapt to the modern economic system. Self-help was central to the economic ethics of Protestant missionaries. Missionaries had played an important role in spreading modern economic norms and values and in creating capitalistic human beings ​ ​ by nurturing economic ethics, whose core element was self-help ethics. The self-help ethics of missionaries were closely related to the colonial self-help ethics expressed as “self-reliance,” a colonial policy carried out by the colonial government in the 1930s. Protestant missionaries played an important role in the formation of capitalist modernity in Korea by spreading self-help ethics. This is a feature of Christian modernity in colonial Korea.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.