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This study examines how South Korea’s 1970s Protestant democratization movement embodied Hans Joas’s concept of the “sacralization of the person” during the authoritarian Yushin regime. Challenging binary narratives of human rights origins as exclusively secular or religious, the research analyzes how Korean Protestant activists created institutions, rituals, and theological frameworks that infused human dignity with sacred character. The study demonstrates how religious actors effectively bridged religious and secular boundaries in human rights advocacy through historical analysis of the National Council of Churches in Korea’s Human Rights Committee, Thursday Prayer Meetings, and the development of Minjung theology. The findings reveal a distinctive process of sacralization that evolved from individual to collective understandings of human dignity, culminating in the radical Minjung Messiah theory. This case study illustrates how Joas’s affirmative genealogy operates in non-Western contexts, showing that sacralization emerges through dynamic interactions between religious conviction, historical events, and cultural transformation rather than through abstract reasoning alone. The Korean experience demonstrates that universal human rights gain moral force when diverse traditions collaborate to uphold human dignity across ideological divides. Full article

The relationship between minjung theology and the process of social change called secularization or theoretical and practical projects based on such processes of social change is complex. It requires more detailed discussions. Therefore, this paper seeks to reinterpret minjung theology as a theological minjung project using the methodology of new-style phenomenology of religion with a theoretical basis on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s conceptions of secularization and profanation as projects with religious intentions and orientations. Through this reinterpretation, the paper demonstrates that minjung theology in relation to secularization is a unique theological project with very different goals from those of Latin American liberation theology as well as other political and situation theologies. In order to accomplish this purpose, the paper first introduces French sociologist Émile Durkheim who has explained secularization differently from German sociologist Max Weber. It then shows that secularization is not the only way in which the sacred is reappropriated through Agamben’s discussions of secularization and profanation. To identify the passage from secularization to profanation of the concept of minjung, this paper analyzes the minjung-event theory of Byung-Mu Ahn, a representative first-generation minjung theologian. This theory emphasizes the importance of “event” as a way of understanding minjung instead of defining it conceptually. Insofar as it presents the minjung as an intrinsically unnamable, invisible, and unpredictable event, a form of religious phenomenon called “the sacred”, minjung-event theory involves an attempt to secularize Jesus-Messiah as the Minjung-Messiah. In conclusion, this paper argues that beyond the secularization of the Messiah into the Minjung, minjung-event theory moves toward a dialectical project of desacralization and re-sacralization, in which the minjung itself is profaned into an event. Full article