A Korean Faith Born Out of Resistance

This entry records that Cheondoism, a Korean new religious movement originating from the nineteenth-century Donghak, Eastern Learning, movement founded by Choe Je-u partly as a deliberate ideological and religious response to the spread of Western influence and Catholicism in Korea, centers prayer and practice on the concept that divinity, Hanulnim, resides within every person, expressed through specific chants and ritual formulas recorded in Cheondoist scripture, without reproducing that specific liturgical content here.

The movement played a historically significant role in the Donghak Peasant Revolution of the 1890s and later in Korean resistance to Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, giving Cheondoism a documented historical identity closely intertwined with Korean national political history in a way that distinguishes it from most other new religious movements catalogued in this atlas. Donghak, the movement's original name meaning Eastern Learning, was explicitly chosen in contrast to Seohak, Western Learning, the contemporary Korean term for Catholicism, underscoring how directly the movement's founding identity was framed in opposition to encroaching Western religious and political influence in nineteenth-century Korea.