Religious Violence and Its Absence in South Korea - Texas A&M University (TAMU) Scholar

In this chapter, we contrast the peaceful displacement of formerly dominant Buddhism in South Korea with the role of Buddhism in initiating violence against religious contenders in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. We then address the puzzle presented by South Korean religious exceptionalism. Religious dominants typically have not acceded peacefully to challenge. The European Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the more recent Sunni-Shia conflicts, especially in the Middle East, are cases in point. Yet Christianity, which in 1945 claimed 2 percent of the South Korean population, rose to nearly 28 percent in 2015. That was

Religious Violence and Its Absence in South Korea Chapter