“From Crime to Covenant: What Korea’s Decriminalization of Adultery Asks of the Church” by Joe Cho

Constitutional Court of South Korea by Wei-Te Wong (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Within five years, three of Asia’s major democracies stopped treating adultery as a crime. South Korea’s Constitutional Court struck it down in February 2015 in 2009 Hun-Ba 17; India followed in 2018, Taiwan in 2020. The pattern is usually filed under a familiar heading—traditional sexual norms yielding to liberal modernity—but that reading skips the harder question the wave actually raises: what happens to a shared moral norm once the state stops enforcing it with the criminal law? Until recently that question had little evidence behind it. A 2025 study in Demographic Research supplies the first empirical look at the Korean case, and its findings should unsettle anyone—religious or not – who assumed the norm would simply hold on its own.

Let’s begin with what the Korean court did and did not do, because the argument turns on it. The Court did not declare adultery harmless, admirable, or morally indifferent. The Court’s reasoning, fairly read, drew the line with unusual precision: even if adultery deserves moral condemnation, the coercive power of the state should not reach into private life on that account. That is a judgment about the limits of the criminal law, not a verdict on the morality of betrayal. What the ruling established was narrower than either celebration or lament suggests – that conduct can be immoral without being a fit subject for criminal punishment. The state withdrew an instrument it had come to judge disproportionate. Whether that withdrawal also hands the underlying responsibility back to the institutions better suited to carry it is a further, normative claim – mine, not the Court’s holding – and the argument for it is what follows.

What the Court decided

The 2015 ruling was the Court’s fifth encounter with the provision. Between 1990 and 2008 it had upheld the ban four times, reasoning on earlier occasions that sexual self-determination could be limited in the name of social order. Article 241 of the Criminal Act was no antique curiosity: it carried up to two years’ imprisonment, and roughly 100,000 people had been punished under it across its life. Yet its practical operation already told a quieter story. Adultery was prosecutable only on the complaint of an aggrieved spouse, and a case dissolved the moment that spouse withdrew the charge – which frequently happened once a divorce settlement had been negotiated. Long before the Court formalized its retreat, the criminal charge had often functioned as a bargaining chip in what were, in substance, civil disputes.

By a 7-2 vote, the majority rested its decision on the right to sexual self-determination and the privacy of personal life, together with a proportionality analysis familiar to constitutional lawyers everywhere: criminal punishment had become an excessive, and increasingly ineffective, means to its end. The two dissenting justices saw it differently, insisting that adultery falls outside the protected sphere of sexual autonomy precisely because it injures the marriage-based order and the families that order sustains. Their worry deserves to be stated at its strongest: a society that ceases to mark a wrong may slowly cease to feel it. But the majority’s structure is the point. It did not reclassify adultery from wrong to permitted; it retired one tool – the penal one – as unsuited to the task. Coverage was immediate and global – from CNN and the Guardian to outlets across Europe and Asia – a measure of how unusual a constitutional withdrawal of penal regulation from intimate life had come to seem.

What did not change

Everything else in the legal architecture remained standing, and this is where the familiar narrative most misleads. It is tempting to say adultery “moved” from the criminal law into family law, but it did not, and the inaccuracy matters. Adultery was a matrimonial wrong before 2015 and remains one today. Infidelity is still a statutory ground for judicial divorce under Article 840 of the Civil Act, and it still supports a claim for consolatory damages—wiaryo—against an unfaithful spouse and, in Korean practice, against the third party as well. Nothing migrated in 2015. What changed is that adultery stopped also being a crime, leaving the civil and moral layers that had been there all along exposed as the primary ones. The penal overlay had concealed how much of the real work was already being done elsewhere.

Return to that study, because its result is the empirical spine of the worry. Using a longitudinal survey of Korean women and the timing of the Court’s decision for causal identification, it found that after decriminalization women became measurably less likely to regard a husband’s infidelity, on its own, as sufficient ground for divorce. It does not show that decriminalization erased moral disapproval of adultery; it shows something narrower but still telling – that the removal of the criminal label tracked a measurable shift in how infidelity is weighed within a marriage. The authors offer a concrete mechanism for the shift: with the criminal charge no longer available to hold over an unfaithful spouse, the wronged party lost the leverage it had supplied in the negotiations over assets and custody that divorce in practice involves. One need not accept every causal inference to draw the modest lesson—that when the state retires a moral category, a society cannot assume its inherited convictions will keep their force unaided. Legal categories teach. That is not an argument for re-criminalization; it is an argument that someone other than the prosecutor now has to do the teaching.

Why that leverage mattered so much is itself a story about women’s economic vulnerability. Until a 1990 reform of the Civil Act, a divorcing spouse in Korea had no right to a share of the marital estate; a homemaker who had built no assets in her own name could leave a marriage with almost nothing. In a fault-based system with little tradition of ongoing spousal maintenance, the threat of an adultery prosecution was, for many wronged wives, less a moral cudgel than a crude instrument of financial survival—a lever to extract a settlement the property law would not supply. This is why Korean women’s organizations defended the criminal statute for decades, treating it as a shield within a patriarchal order rather than a relic to discard. As the civil law matured into that protective role—counting a homemaker’s labor as a contribution to the marital estate – the criminal law’s rationale thinned, which is part of why the Court could finally let it go. The reallocation toward civil law was already underway; the 2015 decision largely ratified it.

Why this should interest the church

Here the decision should engage Christians, and here the usual scripts fail. The reflexive response is lament – one more instance of secularization hollowing out public life. But that concedes a premise Christians should refuse: that a norm backed by the threat of prison is the only kind that counts. One can hold two things at once —that adultery should not be a crime, and that adultery remains a grave wrong. The Constitutional Court drew its own version of that distinction when it separated the immoral from the criminally punishable. The error is to imagine that, once the line is drawn, the church is left with less to do.

It helps to be clear about the church’s standing to speak at all in an order like Korea’s. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and provides, in Article 20, that no state religion shall be recognized and that religion and state remain separate. That settlement does not silence religious moral judgment; it situates it. The church speaks as one voice among many in a plural society—persuading rather than commanding, and without expecting the criminal code to carry its theology for it. The church was never entitled to borrow the state’s coercive power to enforce fidelity; it had merely grown used to the loan. Decriminalization does not shrink that role so much as return it to its own, unborrowed form.

International human-rights bodies have for years urged states to decriminalize adultery while leaving its civil consequences in divorce, custody, and support intact. That position is not itself a Christian one, but it converges with the Christian argument in a single limited respect: both insist that a wrong can carry real consequences without carrying a prison sentence. The better Christian response to Korea’s decision, then, is not a campaign for recriminalization. It is the harder question of what the church inherits when the state steps back.

The church cannot outsource its formation

Christianity helped shape the legal vocabulary in which adultery was long treated as a public wrong with both ecclesial and civil significance. But modern criminal law neither does nor should mirror the full catalogue of sin, and a church that quietly relies on the state to do its moral work will be disarmed the moment the state declines. The Catechism describes adultery as an injustice – against the marriage bond, against the wronged spouse, and against the children of the union (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2380–2381). Christians well outside that tradition can affirm the core claim: adultery is not merely private sexual conduct but the breaking of a promise and the wounding of a community formed by covenant. When the criminal law withdraws, none of that disappears. It becomes more dependent on whether the church’s own practices – preaching, counsel, discipline, repentance, forgiveness, restoration – actually form people who keep their promises. That is a more exacting standard than prosecution ever was, because it cannot be delegated: a penal statute needs only a complaint and a courtroom, while forming faithful people needs a community whose own life is credible.

The Korean response in 2015 ran along predictable but uneven lines. Protestant umbrella bodies, including the Communion of Churches in Korea, opposed the decision as a collapse of moral order, while Catholic commentary, grounded in marital indissolubility, treated the criminal-law status of adultery as largely incidental to the Church’s own teaching. More striking were voices from inside the Korean church—notably the evangelical-feminist scholar Kang Ho-sook of Chongshin University—who argued that the Church’s first task after decriminalization was to discipline the misconduct within its own ranks rather than to lament the law’s withdrawal.

And here honesty is owed, because the church has often handled adultery badly and at times worse than the courts. It has shamed women while quietly tolerating men, mistaken gossip for discipline and silence for grace, shielded institutions and prominent figures rather than the betrayed, and pressed wounded spouses toward a forgiveness that mostly spared everyone else the trouble of justice. A church with that record cannot claim the field of marital fidelity by default merely because the prosecutor has vacated it. But the failure cuts toward the argument rather than against it. If the law’s withdrawal exposes how thin the church’s formation has actually been, the answer is not to retreat into platitude but to build the competence the criminal law never demanded: wrong named truthfully, discipline applied without favoritism, and care for the betrayed that does not collapse into pressure to reconcile. The responsibility is not one the church is owed. It is one that is now, unmistakably, its own.

None of this is a call to restore a lost golden age, and Korea’s own history forecloses the nostalgic version. The earlier criminal regime punished women’s adultery while exempting men’s, and only the 1953 Criminal Code rendered the offense formally gender-neutral. “Tradition” here is no stable Christian ideal awaiting reinstatement by statute; the penal order now retired was itself shot through with inequity. The church’s task points forward – toward the formation of faithful people – not back toward a coercive regime it should not wish to recover.

A summons, not a defeat

Read this way, the decision is less a loss for the church than a summons. It narrowed the reach of the state and, in the same motion, widened the field of the church’s own responsibility. The state once claimed to guard marriage from the outside, by the threat of prison; the question handed back to the church is whether it can sustain marriage from the inside, by the slower work of formation. That is not the work of a second state, enforcing by other means what the Court declined to enforce. It is the ordinary work of the church – teaching, discipline, forgiveness, repair – now stripped of the borrowed authority that once let it skip the hard parts. And the work is not Korea’s alone: the criminal law has withdrawn in India and Taiwan as well, and Korea is simply the case where the evidence has arrived first. The question that withdrawal poses – what a community of faith owes a norm the state will no longer enforce – now belongs to churches across the region. Korea’s adultery decision did not make that work irrelevant. It made it harder to evade.♦

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone.

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Recommended Citation

Cho, Joe. “From Crime to Covenant: What Korea’s Decriminalization of Adultery Asks of the Church.” Canopy Forum, June 12, 2026. https://canopyforum.org/2026/06/12/from-crime-to-covenant-what-koreas-decriminalization-of-adultery-asks-of-the-church/

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