K-Pop Demon Hunters film challenges theologies of self-hatred with encouragement to shine

Turn your eyes upon Jesus
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

The K-Pop Demon Hunters (KPDH) craze has completely taken over my life! (For real, without exaggeration!) Every time I open social media or catch up with a friend, comments about the movie or its music somehow make their way into my every interaction.

I watched the movie at home with my roommate on a bad day for both of us, and as someone with a deep love for subtle and complex storytelling, KPDH kind of missed the mark for me. It has been incredibly difficult to break that news to people every other day while they rave about its excellence.

But even as a certified hater (my friends’ words, not mine), there are two KPDH songs that routinely play in my car now. The first is “How It’s Done”—delivery of the line "fit check for my napalm era" does unfortunately get me every single time. The second song on regular rotation is “Golden.”

The other day I was driving home from the supermarket with a friend from out of town and she queued up Golden. As we were speeding down the forested streets of Atlanta, windows down, humid wind pressing into our skin, we screamed the words of the song at the top of our lungs, and I felt myself begin to cry.

I grew up with a theology that heavily emphasized emotional self-flagellation.

I grew up with a theology that heavily emphasized emotional self-flagellation. I can recall scores of sermons whose underlying message was that I should never trust myself—my flesh—because my fundamental being was rotten to the core. The work of a Christian in this framework is to expend every ounce of effort into crawling away from the pits of Hell whose supernaturally powerful draw never ceases to try to entrap you forever.

Only the Bible (as "the Word of God") was to be trusted, but, of course, I was a child, and I could not be trusted to read it on my own or hear from God myself. So, what mattered most was what the church told me. And the church told me that I was undeserving of love, untrustworthy, and constantly betraying the only being in this world capable of redeeming me. My take away from this was that it was therefore my life’s task to hate myself, to name my endless shortcomings, and to feel the constant weight of my inherent evil.

This is what it is to love and be loved... right? A perfect love—one full of fear.

The invitation of this Christianity is to worship your abuser.

It is becoming more widely accepted that this is a damaging orientation towards God. The God of this theology is one who tells you with his mouth that you are loved unconditionally while holding a branding iron to your back. The invitation of this Christianity is to worship your abuser.

I have, in the last handful of years, been privy to the testimonies of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who have been formally diagnosed with some form of mental illness related to the religious trauma they experienced while being inundated with such messaging in the churches of their childhood.

The crux of this damage is found in the relationship between low self-esteem and low mental health. I find that the assault on one’s self-esteem practiced in Asian American churches is compounded by cultural values around saving face, respectability, and honor, and shame.

Enter Rumi, the central character of KPDH, and the opening lines to Golden:

I was a ghost
I was alone 
어두워진 앞길속에 (Hah)

We find reason to keep ourselves secret. In our secrecy, we feel unbearably alone.

It breaks my heart how much we can talk about, sing about, and pray about unconditional love, while still moving through life covered in the evidence of our disbelief. It is we who create caveats and conditions. In the dissonance between the message of grace and whispers of condemnation (heard through pews and on social media and in backroom conversations and from pulpits), we find reason to keep ourselves secret.

In our secrecy, we feel unbearably alone. Desperation pushes many of us to leave our churches, only to find that there are places outside their walls where we are indeed already loved, already justified, already chosen. To taste grace for the first time from the very places you were taught would kill you is freeing and excruciating and sad.

Given the throne
I didn’t know how to believe (Hah)
I was the queen that I’m meant to be (Ah)

I was taught to balk at anything that taught me to like myself too much. Confidence itself was not a sin, but it surely was seen as a dangerously slippery slope to unfettered pride. What our churches need is a more nuanced understanding of the difference between these. I do not believe them to exist on the same line at all.

I have written about this briefly on my own Substack. I will share an excerpt here:

In an attempt to destroy the altar of pride, our theology has created a people embroiled in self-loathing and insecurity. The same idol by a different name.

Humility by definition is a modest or low view of one’s importance—a lack of focus on the self, but not a devaluation. To be so preoccupied with one’s shortcomings, perceived or real, necessarily elevates the self to be of both central importance and of shockingly low value. We become ruled by our inability, our lack, our insufficiency. It becomes the only thing we see.

But I’m not convinced that I have to make myself smaller for God. If I did, what would that say about God? Would I care to worship someone who is only great when I am not? Or, in other words, do we believe God to only have relative greatness, and not a grandness that is absolute?

Pride and insecurity are fruit of the same tree. In the same way, I find confidence and humility to be deeply related as well. It is true what they say about quiet confidence. The most truly confident people I know are those whose self-worth is intrinsic. These are people who know what they are working with but have nothing to prove. Although I must admit, I am never opposed to a little bit of showing off and self-celebration.

How do we move forward when we are filled with shame?

But this essay is not about confidence. My question is this: how do we move forward when we are filled with shame? There is a register of shame that is so normalized that it almost feels impossible to name it as such. Of course we should hate ourselves. God has ordained it...

But he hasn’t. I refuse to believe it. Not when creation was called good before it was called anything else; not when we bear the image of God; not when Jesus wrapped himself in humanity just to be closer to us.

Oh, I’m done hidin’
Now I’m shinin’
Like I’m born to be
Oh, our time
No fears, no lies
That’s who we’re born to be.

We cannot face what we will not name. When I restarted therapy during a depressive episode in the American spring of 2024, the most helpful practice my therapist gave me was one of radical neutrality. I was sitting on one corner of my bed on my laptop trying to tell her how my day was and all I could see was the growing mess in my room—a sure fire sign that I was about to slip back down a hole I felt I had just crawled out of. I hated myself for being back there and I hated myself for hating myself for something I knew was not my fault.

My therapist asked me to imagine a river. I wanted to roll my eyes, but I closed them instead. She told me to imagine leaves floating down the river at a gentle pace. She then told me to take each of my thoughts, put them on a leaf one by one, and simply watch them float on by.

She asked me to try and just see them, really see them, and then to allow them to pass. This is where you are, she said. This is what you’re thinking. This is how you feel. I know you want to move forward, but how can you do that if you won’t admit where you’re starting from?

It is terrifying to walk through life with the stripes of your brokenness bare on your skin. This fear is even worse when you have bought into the lie that you deserve nothing—that you are irredeemably... demonic*.

The point is Christ.

But I don’t think my stripes* are the point. I think the point is Christ.

It is through Christ who strengthens me that I bear my stripes proudly wherever I go, but especially in church. Some may think I deserve death, but Christ gave me life. They may call me an unbeliever, but I do believe. I’m here, too, singing praise with you all. I’m done hiding. Do you see me shine?

*For those unfamiliar with the KPDH narrative, stripes on a person's body identified them as demonic.

Originally published by the Center for Asian American Christianity's Imagine Otherwise Substack. Republished with permission.

Mina Song Lee is currently pursuing a Master of Theological Studies at Candler School of Theology. Her interests include Christian Nationalism, globalization, gender, and practices of diaspora. She is also a fellow at the Candler Foundry and has a deep love for public scholarship. She earned her B.A. in History at Princeton University.