UC Berkeley

“The Multisite Church Revolution: Technology and Religion in South Korea and the United States” examines technologies of religion in Korean multisite churches, and draws from two years of ethnographic field research, one in Seoul and one in Koreatown in Los Angeles. A multisite church is a single church that meets at multiple locations, often by recording the service in one sanctuary and broadcasting it to “satellite” churches. Although American churches often claim to have led the recent transformation of Western megachurches into franchise-like organizations, the first multisite churches in the world were in South Korea, beginning in the 1970s. Since the inception of the multisite church, the development and deployment of various bureaucratic and media technologies have been central to the church form. With close attention to the perspectives of both church leadership and congregants, I follow the imbrication of religious institutions, theological traditions, and technological innovation in the context of the ongoing creation of these transnational communities.

This dissertation explores the intersection of media, technology, and religion within Korean Christianity from two main angles. First, several chapters explore the development of technological instruments and their use in religious practice. For example, I detail how the practices of transnational video streaming undergird changing theological conceptions of contact and community, such that screens are said to transmit healing touches, and religious community becomes increasingly defined in terms of seeing and being seen. Second, my work reveals how the concept of “technology” helps to shape an understanding and experience of Christianity for both church management and those they serve. After the Korean War, Christianity came to be understood as a facet of modernity itself, and Protestantism’s rapid spread in the late 20th century seemed to confirm its place as a major complement to economic development. Since the early 2000s, however, that growth has stagnated and megachurches have increasingly come under public criticism. Now that the role of Christianity in the imagined future of the Korean people is less clear, I explore how these churches narrate South Korea’s tech economy and Protestant Christianity as co-dependent. Through multisited research in South Korea and North America—places where technological progressivism has a strong ideological presence—this dissertation traces how Christian communities seek to resolve perceived threats to social and religious authority through aligning themselves with technological futures in both word and practice.

Although South Korea has become a principle site of both Christianity and technological development, neither subject has been well attended in academic literature about Korea. Bringing recent discourses on religion and secularism together with media and technology studies, my research contributes to both fields, showing how conceptions of religion and technology are co-produced through everyday discussions about technology and the embodied use of media technologies in religious practice. This transnational, multisited research provides a comparative analysis of the materiality of religious practice, allowing a critical evaluation of the reception and utilization of church technologies across East Asian and North American contexts. Furthermore, as churches are foundational to the Korean diaspora in the United States, my research places these anchoring institutions within their transpacific context, indicating that these churches foster not only “local” Korean diasporic communities, but also enduring connections to South Korea. Finally, my research serves as a corrective to the “American exceptionalism” that can plague research on megachurch evangelicalism. My research confirms that the global congregational trend toward multisite churches began in South Korea—not the United States. In a period when many Western congregations are contemplating the ethical and theological implications of multisite churches, research in the 40-year-old Korean multisite churches can greatly inform broader understandings of such ecclesiological changes.

Field research for this project was supported by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Academy for Korean Studies. The writing of my dissertation has been supported by the Korea Foundation.