The Exodus from North Korea: Christian Refugees and the Making of “Free” South Korea during the Korean War

Between the 20th and 24th of December 1950, 98,100 North Korean refugees fled the return of Communist forces to the North through a gargantuan US military evacuation by sea. To the Christians aboard these refugee ships, the Hŭngnam evacuation revealed God’s intervention in human history, and their biblical narrativization of this flight as an exodus christened wartime South Korea as a promised land for those fleeing communist governments. This paper examines the Christian refugee passage during the Korean War (1950–53) as an enduring, poetic script for Christian nation building in Cold War South Korea, one that also moralizes the “benevolent” intervention of the US military in a war against communism that sanctioned holocaustic violence against Korean civilians. By reading the Christian exodus from wartime North Korea as a narrative strategy, this paper measures the expansive reach of wartime Christian imagination in constructing public narratives of the Korean War as a prophetic war for the Christian Church in Cold War South Korea, where the unending Korean War continues to generate urgency for espousing anticommunism and supporting US troops in politically conservative Christian churches.