My dissertation is a critique of the conventional Christian virtue discourse that focuses on imitating the self-sacrifice of Jesus for its harmfulness to the oppressed. It aims to construct an alternative virtue discourse of a Christian community that has been structurally coerced into sacrificing themselves excessively.

To adequately register the lived experience of the oppressed, this project employs a specific case study—South Korean Christian women’s social movements for democratization against the totalitarian regimes of Park Chung-Hee and Chun Doo-Hwan in the 1970-80s—based on fieldwork in South Korea for the archival and qualitative data collection.

Using the collected data, in the first part, this project debunks various forms of structural and cultural violence perpetrated by the totalitarian regimes and suggests how these forms of violence influenced the women’s lives as mothers and/or wives of political victims. Then, this project presents a thick description of moral life of the women tracing the historical development of their social movements called Kajok Woondong, translated as family movement, which is based on their radical re-appropriation of the traditional concepts of motherhood and wifehood in Korean culture.

In the second part, this project offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the transformative process of cultivating the women’s moral agency, highlighting the dynamic relation of practices, emotions, and virtues. By exploring their non-violent and life-affirming/flourishing protest, this project argues that the women’s protest embodies alternative moral virtues to the propagandized virtue of the total sacrifice for the totalitarian state. Finally, given their creative use of religious symbols related to the resurrection of Christ in their public protest, my project presents a theo-ethical reflection on the women’s theological virtues as faithful witness to Jesus’ resurrection instead of the imitation of his sacrifice unto death.