The Other Side of their Zeal

Abstract

This article tracks the harsh reality of homophobia in Korea, focusing on the homophobic rhetoric of Korean Christian fundamentalists. I suggest that the fundamentalists’ homophobic rhetoric can be looked at in line with their attempt to build up their bases of support. Facing the loss of their privileged social status in Korea, the fundamentalists have been seeking out a secure road through which they can survive and regain their influence. What they have found was, in addition to literal belief in the Bible, a political alliance with greater powers, namely, Korean right-wing politics and american Christian fundamentalism. Korean fundamentalists’ homophobic rhetoric reveals a crack through which we can observe how they have served as resident ministers of american Christian fundamentalists’ imperialistic vision of the world. This vision couples with the US government’s military deployments and its projects for global domination—whether it is to be proved as an unqualified failure or not.     

The Zeal of the Convert Revisited

Social scientists have long been interested in the effects of conversion on religiosity. Drawing on data from the 2014 Pew Religious Landscape Survey, I revisit the zeal of the convert thesis by comparing the religiosity of both converts and cradle members within the main American religious traditions. My findings reveal that converts are not more zealous than lifelong members, in fact, converts tend to have lower levels of religious commitment. Switchers raised in strict denominations do exhibit greater zeal than cradle members. The discussion argues that people create new, hybrid forms of religious engagement based on elements from both their current and childhood religious identities. Conversion is less a sudden rupture involving dramatic, wholesale change; rather, it is a process in which some prior religious norms are retained alongside new ones.     

Religious Zeal and the Uncertain Self

In two studies, personal uncertainty threats caused compensatory religious zeal. In Study 1 an academic uncertainty manipulation heightened conviction for religious beliefs and support for religious warfare. In Study 2 a relationship uncertainty manipulation caused non-Muslim's to derogate Islam. Together, these findings demonstrate that two aspects of religious zeal—conviction for one's own beliefs and derogation of others'—are caused by personal uncertainty.