INTRODUCTION

South Korea is a country with no official religion, and there is no religion considered to be the country’s dominant one (Kim, 2002). However, when you’re an ethnic Korean growing up outside of the homeland, this may not be obvious to you.

I myself grew up in Atlanta beginning in the early ’80s within a very Christian Korean-American community. I attended a Korean Methodist church every Sunday, but when I was around 13 or 14 years old, I – along with my two older brothers – started refusing to go to church because we knew in our hearts that we did not actually believe in the religion. Starting around that time, I pondered a lot about how – aside from my brothers – I had never met another Korean American who was not Christian even by the time I was in college in the early 2000s. I thought this was peculiar as I’d become aware of South Korea’s Buddhist history. I even asked my parents directly what the religious breakdown was back in the homeland, and they claimed that it was mostly Christian. However, when I moved to South Korea in 2007 and over the next five years that I lived there, I learned that this was far from true.

For years I’ve watched both ethnic Korean and non-Korean friends mistakenly assume that South Korea is a majority Christian country. I’ve seen ethnic Korean celebrities such as the drag performer Sang-Young Shin aka Kim Chi from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” season eight and Eugene Lee Yang of “The Try Guys” – in a conversation with each other – erroneously claim that Korea is mostly Christian (around 1:05) in a video that’s gotten over three-and-half million views. Shin says, “The entire country of Korea is, like, very religious and conservative, right?” and Eugene answers, “Yeah. I was Presbyterian growing up,” And Sang says, “Were you? Me, too!”

As a result, I wanted to illustrate the true data with visualizations. I also wanted to survey ethnic Korean friends who grew up outside of Korea and visualize their assumptions about South Korea’s religious breakdown.

INSPIRATION

My inspiration was this pie chart (Fig. 1) explaining the religious makeup of Korean Americans in the US from the Pew Research Center article “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths” (2012). One can see that the majority is Christian at 71% – 61% Protestant and 10% Catholic – with only 6% identifying as Buddhist and 23% saying they are “Unaffiliated” with any particular religion. I wanted to compare these statistics to the those of the population in South Korea nationally as well as take a look at different cities.

MATERIALS AND PROCESS

Finding Data on South Korea’s Religious Statistics

For South Korea’s religious statistics, I used the most recent Korean government official statistics (from 2015). I translated the spreadsheet into English and transformed the rows into columns in order to configure the CSV file for use in Tableau Public, a free software for creating interactive graphs, maps, and live dashboards using a variety of formats, including CSV, Excel, and Google Sheets.

Survey of Ethnic Korean Friends’ Perceptions of South Korea’s Religious Breakdown

For this project, I also surveyed 11 ethnic Korean friends, nine of whom grew up in North America, one in Fiji, and one in Indonesia (Fig. 2):

Now, nine live in the US, one in Canada, and one in Sweden (Fig. 3):

Six have never lived in Korea while five lived there as adults for between two and five years each.

First, I asked them, “Growing up, when you thought of South Korea, what did you assume was the situation there concerning religion? (And I mean what types of religions, what percentages of the population, etc.)” Then, I compiled all the survey results into a spreadsheet (Fig. 4).

Next, I shared the Korean government’s 2015 statistics referenced earlier and asked them, “What are your thoughts seeing those numbers compared to your perception of the religious breakdown?”

Then, I coded the answers so that I would be able to make visualizations out of them (Fig. 5):

Types of Visualizations

With my findings, I chose to visualize with pie charts when I there were just a few data points to show, such as in the “Nonreligious vs. Religious, Nationally” pie chart in Fig. 7, the “South Korea’s Religious Breakdown” pie chart in Fig. 8, and the “Growing Up, Did You Assume South Korea was Majority Christian?” pie chart in Fig. 9; otherwise, in Tableau – especially because you can only make the pie chart so large – smaller pie slices and details do not show up well.

I also chose to use treemaps such as for the main breakdown chart “South Korea’s Breakdown of Religions, Nationally” (Fig. 7) as well as showing treemaps of the two largest cities along with it for a quick overview. I think it looks clean and is easy to read; as a result, it’s easy to compare the different treemaps and see what proportions are smaller and larger immediately.

Similarly, that’s why I also used bubble charts when comparing the religious breakdown of South Korea’s six largest cities (Fig. 11); the proportions are easily discernible.

I also created a TimelineJS timeline (Fig. 6) showing when each religion mentioned in this report emerged in Korea.

One thing I struggled with while initially making the visualizations was whether I should combine all the religions with less followers – Won Buddhism, Confucianism, Cheondoism, Daesoon Jinrihoe, and Daejongism – into the “Other” category. However, because of their historical importance within Korean society, I wanted to keep them each in their own separate category rather than effectively erase them from view. I did combine them all into the “Other” category just for the “South Korea’s Religious Breakdown” pie chart (Fig. 8) since its purpose is to compare against the “Korean Americans” pie chart in Fig. 1. But in the treemaps and bubble charts, I have kept them all separated.

Colors

Because there were up to 10 religions being referenced at any given time depending on the type of visualization I’d created, I was mainly using categorical colors, which I let Tableau automatically assign. The treemaps are the only ones that used sequential colors since how light or dark a rectangle was appearing was related to the percentage/population count.

And, then, just for the “South Korea’s Religious Breakdown” pie chart (Fig. 8), I matched the colors to the the Pew Research Center’s “Korean Americans” chart (Fig. 1) so that viewers could easily make the comparisons when they’re side by side.

I also changed the color for “Religious” to light purple in the “Nonreligious vs. Religious, Nationally” pie chart in Fig. 7 because it originally was too similar to the colors in the treemaps in the same dashboard, which I felt could be misleading.

I also had to carefully reassign colors to the “Growing Up, Did You Assume South Korea was Majority Christian?” pie chart (Fig. 9) because on my Tableau Public page, it sits on a dashboard next to the “Surprised by 2015 Statistics?” chart, and both have their own legends. And, originally, there were some orange and blue pie slices in the first chart which I was afraid could be mistakenly misinterpreted to pull meaning from the other legend. Therefore, I changed the colors in the pie chart altogether, assigning green to mean “yes” and purple to mean “no.”

I also avoided using red and green together in case any viewers are colorblind. I did use green but used it alone – in the two maps showing where my survey participants grew up and currently reside (Fig. 2, Fig. 3) – since it only represents shaded areas in those two visualizations and does not reflect any type of numerical data.

FINDINGS

Timeline of the Emergence of Religions in Korea

Korea’s indigenous and oldest religion is considered Shamanism starting in the Neolithic age around 3000 BC (Lew, 2000). However, it’s considered to be “primitive” and even embarrassing by some (Kuhn, 2021). As a result, it is not one of the official categories listed in the Korean government’s statistics.

All the other religions that appear in the government’s official statistics and discussed in this report – Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Won Buddhism, Confucianism, Cheondoism, Daesoon Jinrihoe, Daejongism, and “Other” religions – were introduced to Korea much more recently between the fourth and 20th centuries. The chronology of when each of these religions appeared in Korea as well as a brief explanation of each can be found in the following timeline (Fig. 6):

South Korea’s Religious Breakdown

The Korean government data shows (Fig. 7) that 56% of the population of nearly 50 million actually identifies as “nonreligious” while just under 44% consider themselves “religious.” Nationally, Christianity makes up only around 28% of the population (with Protestantism at almost 20% and Catholicism at almost 8%), Buddhism just under 16%, and less than 1% is made up of the minority religions of Won Buddhism, Confucianism, Cheondoism, Daesoon Jinrihoe, Daejongism, and “Other” (KOSIS, 2017). However, there are differences by city, which I will go into in detail further down (Fig. 11), but at a glance, one can see that while the capital and largest city of Seoul has more Protestants than Buddhists, the second largest city of Busan has more Buddhists than Protestants.

The Religious Breakdown of Korean Americans in the US

As mentioned earlier, according to Pew Research Center, (Fig. 1) in the US, Korean Americans are 61% Protestant, 10% Catholic, 6% Buddhist, and 23% say they have no particular religious affiliation (2012).

This contrasts significantly against South Korea’s figures (Fig. 8) in which only about 28% of South Koreans are Christian – almost 20% Protestant, almost 8% Catholic.

The substantially larger proportion of Korean Christians found in the US may explain why I mistakenly believed South Korea to be majority Christian while growing up and why I keep meeting other ethnic Koreans who incorrectly believe this to this day.

Most Surveyed Ethnic Korean Friends Assumed South Korea Was Majority Christian

In response to the question, “Growing up, when you thought of South Korea, what did you assume was the situation there concerning religion?”, the majority, eight out of the 11, responded that they’d assumed that most South Koreans were Christians (Fig. 9).

One respondent said he’d guessed the percentages to be, “80% Christian, 15% Buddhist, 5% Other.” Another said, “As a kid, I thought a majority was Christian because that’s what they are here but turns out that’s not true.”

Most Surveyed Ethnic Korean Friends Were Surprised by South Korea’s Actual Religious Statistics

In response to the question, “What are your thoughts seeing [the Korean government’s] numbers compared to your perception of the religious breakdown?”, seven out of the 11 said they were surprised by the statistics, three said they were not, and one didn’t answer (Fig. 10):

Misperceptions Lingered in Some Friends Who’d Lived in Seoul

Interestingly, three out of the five respondents who’d lived in Korea told me that they still incorrectly thought the population was majority Christian (Fig. 10) even after returning to North America. One respondent who’d lived in Korea said, “I would’ve guessed [it was] more like 40% Protestantism, 36% nonreligious” while another said, “I’m surprised that more than half are nonreligious.”

This misperception may partly be due to the fact that all the respondents who lived in Korea lived in Seoul, which has the highest proportion of Christians in the country at almost 35% with 24% being Protestant and 11% Catholic (Fig. 11).

As one can see, various cities have different proportions of religious affiliations. For example, in contrast to Seoul, in Busan, there are more than twice the amount of Buddhists (almost 29% or 958,683 people) than Protestants (12% or 407,659 people). The fourth largest city of Daegu also has almost double the amount of Buddhists (almost 24% or 571,511 people) compared to Protestants (12% or 288,540 people).

UX Research

To carry out UX research while finalizing my visualizations, I asked one friend who’s a modern Korean history professor and another friend who’s a PhD candidate studying an endangered regional dialect of Jeju Island, South Korea, about my visualizations. I gave the context of this report and asked whether they made sense and if they had any critiques, suggestions, and observations overall.

One asked questions about my Tableau dashboards that I found to be peculiar as I looked them over on my desktop computer, which is when we both realized she was viewing them on a mobile device. I hadn’t known previously – and learned in that moment – that Tableau auto-generates a mobile layout for each dashboard, which can look quite disastrous if the author doesn’t configure everything into a cohesive narrative. So I fixed the mobile versions of the dashboards after that.

The other friend recommended that I make a pie chart to compare to the Pew Research Center’s “Korean Americans” one (Fig. 1), which I did not initially have and thought was a good idea.

REFLECTION

Why There are a Disproportionately Higher Amount of Christian Koreans in the US

When analyzing why there are a disproportionately higher number of ethnically Korean Christians in the US compared to in South Korea, one reason is the urban middle-class pre-immigration background of most of the Koreans who immigrated to the US beginning in 1965 – due to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which dismantled the racist National Origins Formula and led to a huge influx of Asians into the US (Chishti et al., 2015). In addition, amongst the Christians, there was an interest in Westernization and, specifically, Americanization that drove their desire to come to the US. According to the researchers Hurh and Kim, “Christianity in Korea has appealed mostly to urban classes through its Western ideas of progress and advanced science and technology (Kim 1981). Often, to become a Christian in Korea meant to become Westernized or Americanized. This would explain why more Christians than non-Christians have immigrated to the United States, and why the majority of the former were urban dwellers. …  It was mainly the middle-class who had access to and resources for immigration and who were in a position to take advantage of the US Immigration Act of 1965” (1990).

Future Directions

The group of 11 friends I surveyed was by no means representative of an unbiased, scientific sample. In the future, it would be interesting to carry out a research survey of a larger Korean-American population sampled correctly. I would be quite curious to know what the answers would be.

I would also be interested in looking into the implications of misunderstanding your background from a sociological standpoint. While I did read a few academic papers related to the formation of identity, none of the ones I read really spoke to my particular project.

REFERENCES

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