한국 보수 개신교의 이슬람 혐오와 배제 정치

초록

This study analyzes Islamophobic discourse in Korean conservative Protestantism, which emerged around 2008 through the rhetoric of an “Islamic tsunami” and has persisted for nearly two decades. Islamophobia has functioned as a symbolic practice that organizes internal collective cohesion by representing Islam as a “polluting other” that threatens the sacred moral boundaries of the community. Drawing on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of cultural performance, Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economy, and Étienne Balibar’s discussion of bordering practices, this study examines how Islamophobia is signified through particular cultural codes and narratives, how these meanings become affectively charged and circulated, and how they ultimately reconfigure the boundaries of citizenship and community. Unlike previous studies that have focused on individual incidents or specific conjunctures, this study compares three cases within a long-term trajectory: opposition to the Halal Food Complex project in Iksan (20152016), opposition to Yemeni refugees in Jeju (2018), and opposition to the construction of a mosque in Daegu (2021 onward). The findings show that conservative Protestant discourse repeatedly represented Islam as a threatening other to national security, public safety, and cultural identity, while building an affective infrastructure through which fear, anxiety, and anger were stored, reactivated, and mobilized. Across the three cases, this affective infrastructure functioned as a persistent force that sustained threat narratives and intensified bordering practices. The logic of exclusion also expanded beyond defense against an external threat to the selective reconfiguration of citizenship within the community itself. In this process, the boundary between “protected citizens” and “excluded others” was increasingly drawn through affective identification with fear, hostility, and moral sameness. The analysis further shows that the power configuration of Korean conservative Protestantism has been differentiated into institutional umbrella organizations and more agile fieldlevel networks, which operate through both tension and tacit cooperation. This study therefore demonstrates that Islamophobic discourse in Korean conservative Protestantism has functioned as an exclusionary mode of governance that reconstructs the community’s moral hierarchy and selectively redraws the boundaries of citizenship.

키워드