Family as a Model for a Religious Community: An Intercultural Conversation between North Koreas Juche and US Evangelical Christianity La familia como modelo de comunidad religiosa: una conversación intercultural entre el juche norcoreano y el cristianismo evangélico estadounidense

Abstract

This essay compares North Koreas Juche ideology and US evangelical Christianity in their respective appropriations of familial imaginings of the divine in the shaping of religiosity and the faith community. In both belief systems, the family operates as a model, simultaneously, for the human-divine union and for human sociality. Juche and Christianity both utilize the family as a psychody-namic source of religiosity on the one hand, and as a prototype of the community on the other hand, in a way that conjoins and mutually reinforces these two aspects of the family model. The conjoining is made by a dialogic transformation between parental love and fraternal love, or between the gods scale of immensity and the human scale of relatedness. One outcome of the dual family model is a particular zeal for proselytizing, common to the two belief systems: hence it shapes an ideological outlook for Christianity and a religious outlook for Juche.