We broke into a million pieces, and we 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
—“This Is What It Sounds Like,” KPop Demon Hunters, written by Jenna Andrews, Stephen Eric Kirk, and Mark Sonnenblick
Raising children is never easy, but with two preteens and a toddler in the home, the challenges this summer felt particularly acute. Every day my wife and I seemed to be strategizing about managing attitudes, resolving conflicts, and finding ways to connect. Around mid-summer, we found help in an unexpected place. After driving past a sign we’d seen hundreds of times advertising children’s martial arts, I asked my kids if they were interested. As a kid I had gotten a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, but this summer, I started all over at white belt, now with my two older daughters joining me. It sparked a fascination with all things Korean in them that reached its apotheosis with our first viewing of KPop Demon Hunters.
The animated film, released this summer, has become the platform’s most watched show of all time. It combines elements of modern Korean popular music culture (K-Pop) with echoes of Korean popular mythology to create a fun, at times dark, but unbelievably catchy and heartwarming story of the triumph of good over evil. The story centers on HUNTR/X, a pop group of three young women who stand in a long line of singers, similar to Korean female shamans (mudang) of old, whose songs beat back the forces of demons (modeled on the mythological, grim-reaper like jeoseung saja) at work in the world, cleverly disguised as a KPop boy band.[1] Ask any girls you know between 8 and 18 about it, and you may be surprised how readily they might join forces to sing a few lines to scare away the darkness of your day. I was surprised at how much the film resonated with me and ideas I had been reflecting on from my other summer indulgence, that is, reading Augustine’s Confessions again.
Aside from its triumphant anthems, the film’s strength shows in the characters and the depiction of their deep humanity that pervades the story (mild spoilers follow). Rumi, one of the members of HUNTR/X, has a shameful secret that she seeks to hide from her bandmates, and it is this shame and the way she addresses it that forms the strongest character arc of the narrative. This depth, I suggest, comes not only from echoes of ancient Korean mythological themes but also what I see as a Christian current tinged with a profound Augustinian anthropology. I will highlight some of these Augustinian themes in KPop Demon Hunters as a way of providing a Christian reading of the film and to reflect on the challenge of serving God in family life as people both fallen and redeemed.
Like an increasing number of modern secular states, South Korea has more religiously unaffiliated people (51%) than religious. However, Christians comprise the largest religious group in the country (31%), with Buddhists being roughly half as prevalent (14%). On the other hand, Korean Americans are majority Christian (59%), and 58 percent of these Christians consider their faith “very important” in their lives.[2] Christian anthropology weaves through the cultural fabric of many Korean-Americans’ lives, even if they don’t profess Christianity, a point driven home for me in a scene from another Netflix series, Beef, when actor Steven Yeun’s main character has a profound moment of self-realization in a Los Angeles Korean-American church service.
It should be said that KPop Demon Hunters is not overtly Christian. The world of KPop Demon Hunters is filled with humans above and demons below, led by the leader of the demonic underworld Gwi-Ma, but there is no divine creator or any upper register to the universe in its cosmology. The action takes place between these two worlds, with only ancestors serving in any role as divine guides for the protagonists. Yet the story’s main themes of shame, confession, and the mixed nature of the human resonate with a Christian, Augustinian anthropology.
The film presents the main character, Rumi, wrestling with evil forces without and within. Rumi and her antagonistic counterpart Jinu, lead singer for the demonic boy band the Saja Boys, both have dark secrets they want to erase. In scenes of dialogue between these two characters, the audience learns that Gwi-Ma controls the demons by reminding them of their shameful pasts. The similarities between Rumi and Jinu poses the question of whether someone tainted by darkness within can fight evil out in the world. Both characters wonder if some people are beyond the reach of redemption. “How am I supposed to fix the world … fix [myself], if I don’t have my voice?” Rumi asks herself in a quiet moment. Before she can overcome the demons in the world, Rumi must confront the demons of her past and the evil “that clings so closely” within (Heb 12:1).
In this way, Rumi is not unlike St. Augustine, who writes his Confessions less as a narration of his conversion than as a form of meditation on the state of his inner life, addressed toward God as prayer. In the Confessions, Augustine, following St. Paul in Romans 7, speaks of the condition of humanity as “justly handed over to the ancient sinner, the president of death, who has persuaded us to conform our will to his will” (Confessions, 7.21.27, tr. Chadwick). Jinu, confined to the demon world for his sins, and Rumi, seeking to eliminate the darkness, both struggle with their wills in overcoming this demonic power in true Augustinian fashion.
Augustine, like Paul before him, acknowledges that even if we endeavor to follow God, our wills are tainted by indwelling sin: “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Rom. 7:15, 19). Augustine’s conversion, described in Book 8 of his Confessions, is ultimately one of his own “monstrous” will (8.9.21) to conform to God’s will. This conversion takes place in fits and starts, begun by a half-hearted prayer—“Give me chastity, but not yet!” (8.7.17)—that results in how “emotions of humiliation, desperation, and shame are combined with hope” in Augustine’s inner dialogue, prompting him to surrender to God’s will.[3]
Rumi expresses a similar sense of surrender and hope in the song Golden that she sings when the audience first learns of her secret: “No more hiding, I’ll be shining like I’m born to be.” This theme, voiced as aspiration at first, becomes a confession that leads to faithful action: “We are hunters, voices strong, and I know I believe.” This belief is in more than her own strength; Rumi holds out hope that defeating the demons will help her escape her dark secret and free those whose souls are trapped in the lies of the demons’ despot.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus’ arrival at the banks of the Jordan to be baptized by John inaugurates his ministry with the descent of the Holy Spirit and the voice of the Father (Mark 1:8–11). The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness to contend with Satan and the demonic wild beasts (1:12–13), and Jesus emerges from this trial with his own voice proclaiming the dawning of a new era: “Repent and believe in the gospel!” (1:15). This voice is more than just a message demanding a response; Jesus speaks with authority as the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit (1:8) and drives out the spiritual forces of darkness: “A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him” (1:27). Jesus shares this voice with his disciples—“He gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (6:7)—and it works: “They cast out many demons and anointed many with oil who were sick and healed them” (6:13).
As a priest, a seminary professor, and a parent struggling like everyone else with the world, the flesh, and the devil as I seek to understand and live out God’s will in my life, I take encouragement from Augustine and Rumi alike. We are all, like Augustine, called to confession, to meditation on the broken foundations of our lives, and we are called to repentance and conversion, to offer that brokenness in honest, unflinching prayer to be transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit for God’s purposes. We don’t have to be perfect to seek to do God’s will. Like Rumi, we can acknowledge the darkness within and “let the jagged edges meet the light instead,” as the song at the film’s climax puts it.
With my family this has involved honest conversations, occasioned by the film and our various struggles, discussing shame, what it means to accept ourselves in the light of Christ’s redeeming love, and offering Christ’s forgiveness and acceptance to each other as we face our different challenges. In my ministry, Augustine reminds me what joy and peace await when I offer myself to God, “to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden.” There I can find peace, and above all, even as I juggle a busy back-to-school ministry and teaching schedule with the strains of family life, I can remember that “our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions 1.1.1). I can orient my will toward God’s, and offer my service, confessions, and my voice to God. As the climactic anthem says at the movie’s close, this transformation helps us find our voice of confession to God: “When darkness meets the light, this is what it sounds like.”
[1] On the Korean mythology behind the film, see https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/movies/kpop-demon-hunters-directors.html, accessed September 3, 2025, 3:52 p.m. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_shamanism, accessed September 3, 2025, 3:53 p.m.
[2] Data taken from https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/08/30/korean-americans-are-much-more-likely-than-people-in-south-korea-to-be-christian/, accessed September 3, 2025, 3:11 p.m.
[3] Volker Henning Drecoll, “Grace” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine’s ‘Confessions’ (Cambridge University Press, 2020) 117.
The Rev. Dr. Paul D. Wheatley is assistant professor of New Testament at Nashotah House Theological Seminary.
