Transcending the Boundary Between the Religious and the Secular: The Sacralization of the Person in Korea’s 1970s Protestant Democratization Movement

This study examines how South Korea’s 1970s Protestant democratization movement embodied Hans Joas’s concept of the “sacralization of the person” during the authoritarian Yushin regime. Challenging binary narratives of human rights origins as exclusively secular or religious, the research analyzes how Korean Protestant activists created institutions, rituals, and theological frameworks that infused human dignity with sacred character. The study demonstrates how religious actors effectively bridged religious and secular boundaries in human rights advocacy through historical analysis of the National Council of Churches in Korea’s Human Rights Committee, Thursday Prayer Meetings, and the development of Minjung theology. The findings reveal a distinctive process of sacralization that evolved from individual to collective understandings of human dignity, culminating in the radical Minjung Messiah theory. This case study illustrates how Joas’s affirmative genealogy operates in non-Western contexts, showing that sacralization emerges through dynamic interactions between religious conviction, historical events, and cultural transformation rather than through abstract reasoning alone. The Korean experience demonstrates that universal human rights gain moral force when diverse traditions collaborate to uphold human dignity across ideological divides.