The Place of Religion: Catholicism and Politics in South Korea, 1974-1987

This dissertation is a study of the spatialities in the role of dissident Catholic figures and organisations in South Korea’s democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Its thesis is that the religious spatial dynamics of Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul enabled the South Korean Catholic Church, through providing a sacred, immune, and thus strategic site of opposition, to play a salient role in the democracy movement that is distinctive compare with other dissident Christian denominations and religious organisations. The spatial politics of Myeongdong Cathedral further shaped critical junctures of South Korea’s democratisation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. By the agency of dissenting South Korean Catholic figures and organisations, and their coordination with other movement actors, the effect of the spatial politics of Myeongdong Catholic Church constituted significant phases of South Korea’s democracy movement through mobilising, sustaining, and networking the movement. The scholarship of the history and sociology of the South Korean democracy movement, while mainly focusing on temporal progress of contentious politics, has noted on particular actors that have made important contribution to South Korea’s democratic transition such as students and workers. This study asks to move beyond this actor-oriented perspective that is limited to account for the multi-layered dynamics of how protesting actors are mobilised, connected, and diffused which is the core aspect of achievability of a social movement, and suggest a religious spatial analysis that can securely explicate the relational dynamics between movement actors for the developments of pro-democracy movement in the South Korean context. This dissertation speaks further to the linkage between spatialities of religious contentious politics and developments of social movements in respects to durability and effectiveness of collective actions through exploring a constituting role of the religious spatial dynamics of Myeongdong Cathedral in South Korea’s democracy movement.