Sex and the City of God: The Irony of Anti-Trafficking Work in Korean Diaspora Christianity

In the spring of 2015, the lead pastor of the largest English-speaking Christian ministry in South Korea – Eddie Byun – was asked to step down by the leadership of the Korean-speaking “mother church,” Onnuri Community Church. His dismissal had nothing to do with any misconduct or moral lapse. Instead, one of the key reasons was his putatively excessive commitment to eradicating human trafficking by switching all of his ministerial efforts, energy, and resources to this crucial – yet only partial – aspect of evangelical ministry.

This paper traces the blow-up over Byun’s anti-trafficking crusade and analyzes the larger thematic issues his activistic endeavors reveal. Byun’s experience at Onnuri English Ministry (OEM) from 2006-2015 and his “conversion” to a more explicitly social justice oriented pastoral ministry, particularly anti-sex trafficking work, reveals the changing trends in North American evangelical attitudes toward social justice. Furthermore, his work on anti-sex trafficking shows the increasing trend in Korean diaspora spirituality toward global justice, a trend that has not been part of the scholarly discussion on “religion and immigration.”

This paper also seeks to show why evangelical Christians’ anti-human trafficking work has focused on Sex-trafficking and not Labor-trafficking. A considerable part of Korea’s economy supported by foreign labor, some of which is attributable to trafficking of persons for bonded labor. Why hasn’t that captured the imagination of Korean and Korean ex-pat evangelicals? This paper contends that the Korean scenario reflects the global evangelical trend -- if not fascination -- to render “human trafficking” and “sex trafficking” as virtually coterminous. I will offer a historical suggestion regarding why American evangelicals have had such an uneasy relationship with sex, and how that aversion to sex has become, rather ironically, the reason for evangelicals’ incessant fascination with sex, including within Korean and Korean American evangelical communities.