Olive Tree is the most common English name of a Christian new religious movement founded in South Korea by Park Tae Son (Korean: 박태선; Hanja: 朴泰善; MR: Pak T'aesŏn).
[6] According to American anthropologist Felix Moos, Park felt discriminated against in Japan as a Korean, which explains why he maintained a strong anti-Japanese orientation in later life.
[8] The incident converted Park into a nationally well-known preacher, and in April 1955 he formed the Jesus Christ Congregation Revival Association of Korea (한국예수교전도관부흥협회), originally as part of the Presbyterian Church.
He gathered thousands eager to be healed through a ritual he called anch’al (laying on of hands), a sort of strong massage supposed to transmit divine energy from Park to the infirm.
[2] Although the exact number of followers he gathered is a matter of controversy, Park’s became one of the largest new religious movements in Korea, with perhaps two million members in the mid-1960s.
Lee answered that there was indeed in South Korea a problem with cults, but these were the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Unification Movement founded by Sun Myung Moon rather than his own organization.
[9] Park was arrested for fraud four times, although he initially managed to obtain lenient sentences due to his good relations with president Syngman Rhee, to whom the Olive Tree offered the votes of its followers.
[6] With the decline of Rhee’s power and his eventual exile from Korea however, Park spent longer periods in jail, both for deceiving his followers with false healing claims and defrauding them of their money (which was then not declared to the tax office) and for illegal electoral practices supporting pro-Rhee candidates.
[9] Contrary to his expectations, only a limited percentage of his followers were ready to accept what scholar Kim Chang Han called in his dissertation a “radical divorce from Christian beliefs,” and the movement quickly declined.