The first way to explain this unlikely fusion of merciful religion and a quite merciless modern creed is to remember to what degree the impact of Social Darwinism on early modern Korean intelligentsia was strong and lasting.

For many young intellectuals aspiring to understand the basic principles of the new, “enlightened and modern” world, Social Darwinism was to very high degree synonymous with “foreign thought” and “modernity” as such – the more so, as this creed was on the one hand totally unconnected to the ideologies of traditional time, having no analogues, not even very crude ones, among them, and on the other hand structurally close to orthodox Neo-Confucianism as a philosophy explaining both natural and social phenomena.