By Deben Bachaspatimayum
This is a humble appeal for the early release of Chairman Lee, the founder of Shincheonji Church of Christ who is currently under detention in South Korea.
The news of the detention of Chairman Lee Man-hee of Shincheonji Church, South Korea, came to me as a shock, in my disbelief! I visited South Korea in Nov-Dec 2025 and attended the First March Declaration of Independence Day observation and annual graduation ceremony of 100,000 graduates at the Church from around the world. Being my maiden visit to the country, I explored several peace initiatives of the church, Academia, NGOs and the Government and returned inspired by the history of the nonviolent movement and the rich interfaith culture. I look at South Korea as an emerging resource centre for peace in the Southeast and East Asian region and the world for my lifetime mission for peace in Manipur, a northeastern boundary state in India, through interfaith understanding and relation-building processes.
My first contact with South Korea began with a global outreach program (HWPL) of the Shincheonji Church in 2024 to discover the global peace mission of the Church. I entered the program for an endless journey of learning through the International Religious Peace Academy (IRPA) in the early part of 2024 which further led to an immersion into a Bible Experience Program (BEP) and a short course on the Honorary Interfaith Educators Program that eventually took me to South Korea participating in the International Peace Forum. This was a great learning opportunity to dive into the Bible while being rooted in my own religion. I discovered common threads for weaving world peace in South Korea which resonated well with our own local initiatives of a nascent interfaith forum in my home country, India.
Interfaith Forum Manipur (IFM) – a group of interreligious leaders- is in the process of shaping a common destiny of all religions through interfaith dialogue by discovering core universal values across different religions despite the differences in languages, cultures and places of origin. Subscribed to the principle of equality, the forum believes that each religion is sovereign on its own within its region of origins, but when religions cross their geographical boundaries and meet with other religions, dialogue is the only means of communication to discover core universal values such as compassion, nonviolence, justice, fairness, truth, integrity, peace and harmony. The importance of inter-religious and interfaith initiatives for peace in the 21st century cannot be further emphasized.
Professor Hans Kung, founding president of the foundation of global ethics says, there will be no peace among nations without peace among religions and there will be no peace without dialogue among religions. Religions like rivers are destined to the ocean, rise up in the sky as cloud and showers rain, giving life to all creatures on the earth, the destiny of all religions originating from different geographies is one humanity, one spirituality: The Love in Action of one God, or of the Sun – the source of energy on this Planet.
Ideally, I also believe every religion within its geography of origin is sovereign. And the basic goal of each religion, within its place of origin, is peace and harmony within the community and with the natural environment. Each religion has an inbuilt binary system of good versus evil, moral and ethical principles to mediate the everyday life struggles. The good may be equated with the universal values found in each religion, and evils with the local geo-specific survival values that often essentialize violence within and outside. This binary system helps individuals and groups in discovering a spiritual world or conscious living in peace and harmony within and with the world outside through constant processes of introspection and reflection on the daily life experiences of the mundane world within their own region as long as the sovereignty of the religion or God’s power remains unquestionable.
It is also observed that wherever the sovereignty of religion is challenged or appropriated from within or by others from outside, the evil is exteriorized to the others who may have differences of opinion. The exteriorization of evil from inside can be mutually reciprocal in a conflict situation. Such a situation makes a religion structurally weak and vulnerable due to the malfunctioning of the binary system – separation of the good as one’s own and the bad as the others outside. Weak religion becomes vulnerable to threats and exploitation as it is the most easily accessible resource for manipulation, wars and violence against others. This may be the general character of present politics in the Middle East and South Asian countries, India in particular. It is time to correct the binary system to work for peace and harmony within and across religions. It is possible to relocate and interiorize the exteriorized evils within oneself and the community, even when it amounts to walking an extra mile outside the scriptures. An increasingly interconnected and interdependent world where one’s immediate neighbour may be of a different religion or a non-religious person may require us to live as one single human family.
While I fully respect the sovereignty and judicial propriety of the country, I am hopeful that the Supreme Court of the country will deal with the case of Mr Lee Man-hee – a 95-year-old church leader in all fairness. Chairman Lee, whom I so highly respect as a visionary leader, grew up as a humble farmer in the backyard to become a Korean War veteran, may be trusted for his honesty and integrity towards the nation and humanity. I am sure freeing him from detention without compromising due process of the law will be not only doing justice to an aged senior citizen but also honouring his services to the country. I pray for God’s blessings upon the presiding Judge of the case and Chairman Lee.
Deben Bachaspatimayum, Program Director, Tyagarchana Shanti Mission, Manipur, India & endorsed by Acharyasri Sachidananda Bharathi, Founder of Disciples of Christ for Peace (DCP), Dharma Rajya Vedi (DRV) & Divine Grace Fellowship (DGF), India
