This dissertation explores the early Cold War conditions that privileged Christian ideas, sensibilities, and visions on the terrain of anticommunist political identity in South Korea. During the Korean War (1950–53), Christian politics of rescue and conversion scripted a pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers who traversed the zone between “Red” and “citizen,” “potential enemy” and “friend” to gain admission into wartime South Korea. Profession of Christianity through corridors of US military rescue and conversion to Christianity behind the barbed wire of prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, I argue, moralized the incorporation of certain North Koreans as good, Christian citizens into the Cold War body politic of South Korea while also recasting US-Korean relations through a transpacific imagination of the body of Christ. By examining the techniques of narrativization and performance in the political naturalization of North Korean refugees and POWs who reached for South Korean citizenship, this dissertation locates the ascendancy of Christianity in postwar South Korea in the wartime moments of crisis and deliverance that placed Christian politics at the center of the nation- and empire-building projects for the making of “Free” South Korea. Building on but departing from previous scholarship that has looked to either the politics of missionary projects and social transformations in the early twentieth century or the contemporary evangelical “boom” as ethnographic and sociological field sites, this dissertation intervenes in the historiography and the broader scholarly literature to excavate why and how the Korean War, a war that violently defined the political identities of both Koreas, has served as the raison d’être for Christianity’s enduring claims on political belonging in South Korea. This project also sits more broadly at the intersection of the history of US empire and the history of religion and the Cold War. By carefully attending to the Cold War architecture of wartime sovereign power in/over the South Korean nation-state, I reconstruct transpacific networks of actors from often crisscrossing domains of religious, state, and military authority who saw in the Korean War an advent for new arrangements of religion and politics under state and imperial power. As the opening “hot” theater of the global Cold War, the conflict in Korea concretized the American imagination of the Christian gospel’s war against communism and engendered new modes for evangelistic missions that laid down the spiritual and moral springs of the US military empire. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods of microhistory, empire studies, and religious studies to critically read and reinterpret underexamined archival records, including textual/visual documents and material objects, this dissertation traces new forms of making and performing the political self as a Christian self in response to the salvific and moral promises of Christianity in moments of crises, rescue, and witness during the Korean War. Across five chapters organized into three parts, this dissertation retells both familiar and unfamiliar stories of Christian border crossers from North to South and the conditions and terms of their political subjectivity in “Free” South Korea.