Unveiling Transnational Ties: Minjung Noh Explores Korean Women Missionaries in Haiti
Through the lenses of race, gender, and religion, Noh reveals the complex impacts of colonialism and evangelical missions linking Korea, the U.S., and Haiti
Minjung Noh has a surprising answer when you ask how she began studying Korean women missionaries.
It began with a K-Pop star, the assistant professor of religion, culture and society, explains.
Noh, a native of South Korea, is a fan of the Korean popular music known as K-Pop. When a member of one of her favorite bands, The Wonder Girls, left the group a decade ago, Noh found a connection between the performer – a born-again evangelical Christian -- and Haiti, a country Noh was studying in her academic research.
“She was at the top of the Korean K-Pop industry, and she just left and got married to a Korean Canadian pastor. That was 10 years ago, and that was shocking,” Noh recalls. “And then she was doing missions in Haiti. I thought, ‘What is happening?’”
An interest in studying the Haitian Vodou religion (also known as voodoo), led her to work with Terry Rey, a professor at Temple University who specializes in Haiti. The role of Korean women missionaries in Haiti would become the focus of her doctoral dissertation.
"What I'm trying to show in my work and in my book, is that we have this history of different colonizations in South Korea and Haiti, and it has been propelled by religious missions and also by the colonial powers, the political powers."
Her current book project, Transnational Salvations: Korean Women Missionaries in Haiti, expands her dissertation’s focus. Noh uses historical and anthropological data in three areas – race, religion, and gender -- to examine the impacts on Haitian culture from both the United States and Korea. “I am showing unprecedented connections between Korea, the U.S., and Haiti,” she says. “What I'm trying to show in my work and in my book, is that we have this history of different colonizations in South Korea and Haiti, and it has been propelled by religious missions and also by the colonial powers, the political powers.”
Noh explains that her transnational focus stresses examining the differences among the three countries she has studied. It’s a different approach than globalism, which emphasizes shared identities and experiences. A transnational focus respects cultural differences. “There should be something different that helps us to make more experience-based policies or more accurate descriptions of other people,” she says.
Noh’s research reveals that the influence of the United States is reflected both in religion and in myriad policy changes introduced during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934 and of Korea from 1945-1948. “By connecting Haitian history and Korean religious history, they’re very well connected by U.S. colonialism,” Noh says. “When the U.S. occupied those countries, their constitution was changed. So, it was not just a military occupation, it was an ideological occupation.” Noh notes that the U.S. introduced what she calls a “one-size-fits-all constitution” that mandated separation of church and state. Previously, she explained, Haiti was a Catholic country, and Japanese colonialism had forced Koreans to practice Shinto.
The work of Korean missionaries – including Korean American evangelicals – is another example of U.S. influence. The missionaries are heavily influenced by U.S. evangelicals and the anti-Communist focus of the Cold War era. “Up until the mid-20th Century, until the end of the Cold War, [American] evangelical leaders and churches claimed their religious identity as [being] opposed to communism,” Noh says, adding that U.S. involvement in the Korean War from 1950-1953 further cemented that link. “South Korea became a symbol of this bulwark against communism.”
In focusing on women missionaries, her work also examines roles women could assume in society. The prevalence of women missionaries coming to Haiti from Korean and Korean American Protestant churches can be traced to 19th century gender norms which limited what jobs women could hold.
“They could be teachers or mothers,” says Noh. Unmarried women in England and the United States particularly struggled under such restrictions. Becoming a missionary offered a different path. “When they become a missionary without being married, they can be independent women who have a job and salary overseas,” Noh says. Although such restrictions no longer exist in western cultures, misogynistic attitudes persist in Korean society, she says. To be a single or divorced woman still carries a stigma, so becoming a missionary continues to be a a valued career path for conservative Korean evangelical women.
Attitudes about race are a third focus of her research. Growing up in Seoul, Noh did not experience racism because her country is 98 percent Korean. She later experienced racial bias during the time she studied in France. Tracing historical attitudes toward Asians in different cultures has led her to examine how the issue of race might be reflected in the Korean missionary experience.
“I wondered, how do Korean American Evangelical Christians in the U.S. think of themselves when they go to Haiti? Are they assuming whiteness, or are they Korean Asians?” Noh says.
Although Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries continue to evangelize in Haiti, missionaries have a new focus. As Protestant churches in the U.S. have become more secularized, embracing liberal practices such as performing same-sex marriages, Korea has undertaken a reverse mission. More and more, Korean American churches recruit pastors from Korea. “Just as they were evangelized by the U.S.in the 20th Century, now it’s their turn to pay forward the gospel. They have to save the U.S.,” Noh says. “Such patterns of conservative evangelical missions from the global south to the Anglo-European world are significant contemporary religious phenomena that need more scholarly attention."