ABSTRACT
On April 5, 1885, Horace Grant Underwood, Henry Gerhard Appenzeller, and Ella Dodge Appenzeller arrived in Incheon, an open port city on the western coast of Korea. The three Americans were among the earliest missionaries to set foot in the peninsular nation. Underwood was the second Presbyterian and the Appenzellers the first Methodists. Incheon was the site of a pivotal battle in the Korean War. On this cold and rainy April evening in 1885, the three Americans landed with little fanfare. Three miles from the port, they boarded a sampan (a small boat propelled by oars) to get ashore. As they stepped upon the bare rocks of the Korean shore, a horde of men rushed to their sampan to earn some money by carrying their luggage. Despite their uncertainties about Korea, the missionaries were eager to begin their work. For centuries, Korea largely remained secluded from the rest of the world. Western merchants and missionaries had entered other Asian countries from the sixteenth century, but Korea maintained an isolationist policy until signing its first foreign treaty with Japan in 1876 and Western powers in the 1880s. Thus, Korea was called “the hermit nation” and “the forbidden land.” 1 As Henry Appenzeller breathed the cool night air and gazed upon Incheon, he believed that he had “landed upon terra firma as yet untouched and unimproved by the hand of man.” 2
American Protestant missionaries imagined Korea as a religious tabula rasa for their making. They saw Korea’s weak geopolitical position and recent opening to foreigners as a unique opportunity for them to introduce their religion to a vulnerable indigenous population looking for new systems of meaning. Unlike other Asians, Koreans did not adhere to one or two dominant non-Christian religious traditions. To the missionaries, the Korean religious landscape represented a blank canvas for them to inscribe their religious visions upon. Appenzeller noted the date of his arrival: “We came here on Easter,” he wrote. “May He who on that day burst asunder under the bands of death break the bands that bind this people, and bring them to the light and liberty of God’s children.” 3
In Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor traces the development
ing to Taylor, each of these three social forms embodies a distinctive Western social imaginary centered on the fundamental notion of mutual benefit for equal participants. Taylor defines “social imaginary” as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” 4 As missionaries learned the Korean language, built new homes, evangelized to Koreans, and established modern schools and hospitals, they constructed a cross-cultural social imaginary that delineated their social existence in Korea, how they fit together with one another and Koreans, their religious expectations, and the normative notions and images that undergirded these expectations.
