This study pays attention to the anti-protestant phenomenon in Korean society and attempts a historical and comprehensive interpretation of the causes of this phenomenon. In order to set the anti-protestant phenomenon as an accurate subject of study, it is conceptually defined as a structural emotional habitus emerging from the Korean religious field and attempted to find out what kind of process and structure this in-depth inner form is forming. This study attempts to overcome the reduction theory of various fundamentalist paradigms related to Protestantism. First of all, I would like to derive the ideological concept of ''expansionary absoluteness'' as the historical character of Korean Protestantism. This is a concept derived from the fundamentalism of the conceptual aspects of Korean Protestantism, the materialistic coordination of Korean Protestantism, and the accelerating external expansion that emerged in the process of historical reality after the 1960s. This ideal type means an absoluteness that is constantly outwardly expressed and outwardly oriented in terms of material economic dimension, physical space dimension, and ideological religious doctrine.
This study aims to combine this expansionary absoluteness with the modernization process of Korean society. To this end, we want to explore the modern self of Korean society. Basically, for the analysis of modernity and modern self, I would like to review Giddens'' self-concept as a reflexive self and use it as the basis for analysis. However, due to the epistemological and analytical limitations to explain the phenomenon of anti-Protestant in Korea, we try to combine Giddens'' reflexive self-concept with Bourdieu''s sense of practice. Through Giddens'' ontological anxiety concept, the concept of ''self-sense'' was presented, the external reference aspect of the self was the concept of ''collective self-sense'', and the internal reference aspect was the concept of ''individual self-sense''. Self-sense is developed to cope with the ontological anxiety of modernity, and the modern self is a self-structure that combines these collective and individual self-sense, and plays a very important role in specifying the character of the self.
I would like to explain the characteristics of expansionary absoluteness of Korean Protestantism and how it conflicts with the modern self. The expanding absoluteness of Korean Protestantism invades the individual sense of the modern self, which can be said to trespasses on the boundaries of the inner criterion of the modern self. In other words, an individual who has been coping with ontological anxiety through internal reference formed through individual self-sense is exposed to the anxiety problem once again by losing its internal reference. This regression of ontological anxiety is the structuralization of the anti-Protestant habitus in the religious field, as modern self forms a strong in-depth antipathy to Protestantism and these in-depth reactions are reaffirmed through various mediators.
Through this analysis, it will also be possible to infer the fact that the symbolic power and status of Protestants are being reversed in the religious field related to the semantics of life in Korean society. There is a paradox here, which is the fact that Protestantism, which symbolized modernity, causes discord with modernity, and that traditional religions such as Buddhism, which were considered traditional and old, are considered rather harmonious and suitable with modernity.