In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal (나는 신이다) is an eight-episode-long Korean documentary series directed by Jo Seong-hyeon. Each episode has a runtime ranging between 39 to 70 minutes, and investigates the cases of four religious cult leaders who push their followers’ trust a bit too far, in turn questioning the people’s blind and unquestioning faith in them and the morally fraught grounds on which they build their supposed religious empires.
The first three episodes of the series are centred around ‘Providence’ or ‘Jesus Morning Star’ or ‘JMS’, founded by Jung Myung-seok, who has been charged with several sexual abuse allegations. The following episode is about the apocalyptic cult ‘Odaeyang’ or ‘Five Oceans’, followed by two episodes about Kim Ki-soon’s ‘Baby Garden’ commune. The last two entries focus on Pastor Lee Jae-rock’s congregation at Manmin Central Church.
-No Spoilers-
In the Name of God: A Holy Betrayal Review
Examining the brutality put into motion by four religious leaders, who established their identities as ‘prophets’, the long (although it’s a mini series, it appears to go on forever due to its tragic and harrowing subject matter) and hefty series opens with the crimes conducted by the founder of the JMS group, Jung Myung-seok. The first three episodes vividly thread out his direct and overtly sexual approach in terms of interpreting the Bible’s reading to his followers. Initially, many people accepted his ways to be progressive, as his ‘religious gatherings’ sought scientific explanations and openly allowed for the youth to partake in pompous cultural activities as opposed to other churches that demanded their followers to enact restraint.
This allowed for many youngsters from various top universities to be fooled and trapped in the propaganda unleashed by the cult’s founder, who was eventually exposed for his sexual misconduct against his female followers. Not only did he mislead them all by brainwashing them, thereby turning the victims into accomplices of his sinful misbehaviours after some time as well, but he also tormented their lives to such an extent that these women stopped being able to distinguish right from wrong.
Each of the episodes of the series probes into how the concept of organised religion can often meander into such pits from where there’s no coming back. The interviews held throughout focus on the horrific accounts detailed by the survivors of abuse, which didn’t spare even minors. This kind of violence has not only resulted in many deaths in the past, but it has also severely hampered the psychological and emotional balance of the survivors.
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While the main objective of the series is to round up the facts surrounding each of these mishaps, it also leaves us pondering over issues like how people continue to indulge in their criminal dispositions under the garb of religion. It traumatically impacts the ones involved, and it’s even scarier to imagine how something can have such a strong hold over people’s sentiments and logic that they get reeled in without giving it a second thought. Moreover, it leaves them behind with nightmares for life, much like the visuals of the documentary will leave its viewers with.
At some point, it will start getting to your head, and it’s okay to stop watching because there are a lot of visual indicators that directly link to the immorality conducted by these supposed leaders who don’t seem to possess a single drop of human blood in them. It’s an eye-opening documentation which specifically picks up the Korean context, but we know very well that such incidents have a more universal calling than we would like to admit.
Watching the series is bound to make you recount similar headlines emanating from your surroundings or national context. Therefore, it’s a waking call, but again, too much graphic evidence tags along to build up the case that it leaves you feeling hollow in the end, questioning the fractured human tendencies fuelled by negatively stimulating images from the series.
Final Thoughts
There may be a lot of true-crime series viewers who can’t help but collect information on real-life crime cases like these, and would love to binge-watch the entire series at a go. However, consuming all eight episodes of the documentary is not something that I would advise anybody else. Each episode is a deep dive into inhuman figures of authority who pushed it too far. The re-enactments of the crimes, more like sins they committed, aren’t the kind of view that leaves you with warm memories.
They’re exceedingly disturbing because that’s the extent of crimes they’ve led their lives with as well. The visuals of these episodes are haunting in the sense that they pierce your conscience and leave you with a lot of triggering images that may make it hard for you to proceed with the latter episodes, especially since you share the knowledge of these events being true to life. The documentary special has been restricted to adult audiences, and rightly so, due to the mentions of suicide, sexual violence, nudity and child abuse. So, it’s definitely not your typical pick to breeze through over the weekend if you’re looking for something light-hearted to unwind to.
In the Name of A Holy Betrayal is now streaming on Netflix.
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