Confession, Evil, and Being
First, let’s get on the same page: what is a confession? And what qualifies something as a Christian confession? For many Americans, the word “confession” primarily evokes an admission of guilt of a crime, regardless of the feelings involved. But another common association with confession is a confession of feelings. The outcome of the first is justice; the outcome of the second is (hopefully) improved relationship. For many Christians, “confession” is more nuanced: although any admission of guilt to God is indeed a confession, the central aspect of this type of confession is a reorientation of your whole self back towards God.
While many people treat evil as a “thing”—something that can be revealed, isolated, rejected, conquered, or quit—early Christian fathers, like Augustine, disagree.1 These theologians argue that evil is the absence of good, just as darkness is the absence of light. It may seem that darkness has substance because it is so apparent to us; however, it is really the absence of photons hitting our retinas. God is the source of all goodness, and anything rooted in God is good. Therefore, anything not rooted in God—anything deviating from God’s rule or even in open rebellion against God—simply “is” evil. The closer something is to God, the better it is; the further away it is from God, the less good it is.
Confession, then, becomes not a fight against evil for its own sake (who can fight what is essentially nothing?), but an act of turning from not-God towards God. We must first realize that something which we have done or some aspect of our life is not rooted in God but in something creaturely which has usurped God’s place. Only when sin is exposed can repair begin, so that we can return to God to worship him. We confess not for our own sake—for that “something creaturely” may very well be ourselves—but out of our love for God and for the sake of his glory. This is why confession is sometimes called ‘the rite of reconciliation,’ so that it is centered on the object of our love (God) and powered by our Partner who shows us mercy.
Shame is a legitimate part of confession; it is a “check engine light” that gets our attention so that we can examine and amend our life. This can be a hard struggle; if you live long enough, you will be ashamed of something, and the deepest shame of all is tied to identity. When you believe that your very existence is wrong, it feels impossible to face yourself, much less to talk about it with another person (or God). A common response to feelings of shame surrounding identity is to simply avoid it—avoid the situations that spark strange feelings; don’t talk about them; don’t acknowledge them—don’t ask, don’t tell. Don’t confront the truth.
KPDH gets this struggle absolutely right: “We can’t fix it if we never face it/ What if we find a way to escape it?/ We could be free.” But the film is wrong to make shame itself into the main antagonist—shame becomes the problem that ruins Rumi’s mission and relationships, the chief “evil” to be overcome, the “demonic side.” And how does Rumi overcome her shame? She makes not a confession but a psychological adjustment that dismisses shame so that she can continue her life in peace.
Shame or Stigma?
The conflict in KPDH begins when Rumi, the main character, loses her voice. As a world-famous K-pop idol, this is a big deal, and she and her bandmates, Zoey and Mira, do their best to heal Rumi’s voice—to no avail. Rumi’s voice only begins to heal when her biggest secret—that she is a half-demon, complete with the patterns on her skin that mark her as such—is revealed to Jinu, a demon disguised as another K-pop idol. Once her patterns are revealed to her rival Jinu, Rumi can talk with him about not only her parentage, but also her sense of self, her fears, and her hopes for the future. It becomes clear that the secrecy in Rumi’s life is highly destructive. She is deeply ashamed of her parentage and her patterns, seeing them as evidence that she is inherently evil—and the more she hides them, the more her shame grows. This was ultimately what took her voice away, threatening not only her career but her identity. Rumi almost trusts her friends with her most vulnerable secret, but Gwi-Ma, the king of demons, unilaterally makes this choice for her at the crisis of the film.
Throughout KPDH, there is a strong association between Rumi’s demonic patterns and shame: her patterns are something she regards as an evil which must be eradicated, and Jinu characterizes all demonic patterns as “a reminder of [someone’s] shame.” Elsewhere we have pointed out, “the categories of the demonic and those held captive by sin have been confusingly blended together.” This is especially true when it comes to the demonic patterns, which do not cleanly map onto sin as an individual’s sinful actions. Instead, the patterns stand for some aspect of one’s life for which one is not to blame, but for which one still bears the shame. In the film, it is Rumi’s parentage, something we see mirrored in various ways in real life.
For example, it is often considered shameful to have a parent in jail. A parent’s actions are never the fault of the child; yet when the child goes to school, she may still be made fun of—though she is not responsible, she bears the shame. People go to jail for many reasons, some more shameful than others. One may have committed an unprovoked, violent crime or spoken some truth unpalatable to the authorities. If we leave our lives unexamined, we run the very real risk of being ashamed of that which not only is not our fault, but is in fact not shameful in the first place. This is the question around which KPDH revolves: are Rumi’s patterns truly shameful? Or is she the victim of stigma and a cultural taboo?
The situation is as if someone’s parent is in jail because of violent crimes, but the child grows up and becomes the head of police. At some point, the child must realize that although the parent’s actions will always be a part of her story, she is ultimately her own person, to be judged by her own actions and not by the actions of others. This is essentially what the film shows Rumi realizing, at which point, she and her friends can sing:
I broke into a million pieces and I can’t go back
But now I’m seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me
Darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies,
this is what it sounds like
Conclusions
Although this resolution may at first seem like a demonstration of the healing power of confession—Rumi faces her patterns, reveals them to her friends, and has her weaknesses transformed into sources of strength—this is not confession. Rumi is now willing to bare her arms to her friends (and the world) not because she trusts them with the evil inside her, but because she has realized that these patterns are not themselves evil.
While KPDH does not minimize the evil actions of Jinu and the other demons, the message of this film is ultimately about breaking free of unnecessary (and often oppressive) cultural stereotypes and recognizing that you—as a whole—are a beautiful creation, deserving love. Jinu’s “redemption” only reinforces this message: the idea that he can overcome Gwi-Ma’s influence and switch sides simply by changing his mindset. This is another way the film demonstrates that the patterns ultimately mean little, and those who have them do not need to be ashamed of them: their actions define who they are, good or bad. This is a beautiful story of self-acceptance; it is not, however, confession—after all, under this framework, Rumi has no real sin or evil to confess.
Confession requires that, first of all, we recognize it when we are turning away from goodness and need to be reoriented. If you want to go north, you must follow a compass, you can’t simply walk in whichever direction you’re facing. Rumi accepts her patterns because she has come to define herself as good and then to treat her patterns as rooted in herself; in so doing she removes their moral significance altogether. Regardless of whether Rumi’s assessment of her patterns is correct or not, this is not a story about confession, but radical self-acceptance—it is defining oneself as the starting point of good and evil. Even if KPDH is a channel for opening discussions about these things, especially with younger audiences, Christians should refrain from the temptation of treating the film as if it depicts the healing power of confession.
By Elizabeth Ji