This research project aims to provide a fuller account of early Christian life in Korea. It not only examines the cultural projects of North American missionaries in Korea, but it also seeks to explore the ways in which Koreans experienced, appropriated, and renegotiated the ‘new’ religion by reassessing Korean Christianity through the lens of singing and praying. The missionary community in Korea sought to recreate Western-style songs (e.g., hymns, children’s songs, choral music) and improvised prayers as everyday religious practice among Koreans. For them, hymn singing and audible prayers were signs of personal authenticity and social intimacy, privileged values within late-nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. Missionary and Korean Christian writings from the 1890s to the 1940s tell us that many Korean Christians embraced these vocal practices as they participated in an expanding range of religious and para-religious meetings, including tent revivals, bible studies, school rallies, music concerts, Sunday school sessions, and mutual aid gatherings. My research project will provide a comprehensive documentation of singing and praying at these activities. And more importantly, it will explore how the new vocal forms practised in these activities interacted with particular conceptions of modernity that circulated in early-twentieth-century Korea.

There are good reasons to suggest that praying and singing in early-twentieth-century Korea were connected to broader ideologies. Since the late nineteenth century, Korea was undergoing radical social reorganisation due to the incursion of two Pacific empires – the United States and Japan. The United States operated religious, medical, and humanitarian projects in Korea and opened Korea for trade. Japan fought expansionist wars on Korean land (the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-5; the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5) and formally colonised Korea in 1910, an occupation that lasted until 1945. As these empires exerted more influence on Korea (and elsewhere in the Asia Pacific region), local discourse and practice surrounding what it means to be a person and a community also changed. Thus, I will explore relationships among everyday rituals of religion, local experiences of modern Pacific empires, and discourses of modernity.