Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In June 2025, South Korean president Lee Jae-myung ordered a joint investigation into private religious organizations including the Shincheonji Church of Jesus and the Unification Church. The news returned South Korea’s longstanding problem of nonmainstream faith organizations to public view.

We struggled with how to name and define such organizations. Some call them “cults,” but in many countries the term is difficult to define in law. In this chapter, we call a faith organization a “cult” when its home country has found it to have violated the law. For other similar groups, we use the sociological term “new religion,” as with Rajneesh’s Osho movement. In this program, “faith” is a neutral word, but we place it in quotation marks to avoid misunderstanding in the local context.

With those concepts clarified, let us return to the news:Why do such faith organizations appear so frequently in South Korea? How does a religious group move step by step toward worship of its leader and psychological control, ultimately becoming a social crisis?

Beginning with South Korea’s Providence movement, we describe the general characteristics of such groups and the social background to their development in South Korea, seeking to understand how a faith organization establishes authority, builds an organization, and affects believers’ lives and the operation of society.

 

- What is a “cult,” and what is a “new religion”?

- Providence: from proselytizing through university clubs to the “brides of God”

- The Providence sexual-assault case: exposure, international flight, and a long pursuit

- In the Name of God: why did the organization continue operating after its leader was imprisoned?

- Worship of the leader, miracles, and absolute interpretive authority

- Sex, power, and women’s place in the “passenger seat”

- Donations, profiteering, and believers’ unpaid labor

- How did Providence penetrate South Korea’s public institutions?

- Why does South Korea have so many cults?

 

- In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal (2023) (documentary)