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<\/p>\nA new book on North Korea traces the Christian roots of an atheist state that demands near-religious devotion to its ruling family<\/p>\n
US President Donald Trump\u2019s latest effort to re-engage with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has strained relations with South Korea and deepened the growing conviction in Asia that Washington is an unpredictable ally. By curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, Trump has risked creating greater instability in a volatile region. Not even Chinese President Xi Jinping (\u7fd2\u8fd1\u5e73) will be pleased, because Kim seems almost certain to interpret Trump\u2019s move as empowering his efforts to secure greater independence from China.<\/p>\n
As with the current war with Iran, the Trump administration appears to have acted without fully considering the potential consequences of its actions. Even more than the Soviet Union, North Korea embodies Winston Churchill\u2019s \u201criddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.\u201d This means that dealing with it can rarely, if ever, succeed with a policy based on impressionistic judgement.<\/p>\n
Instead, the Trump administration should avail itself of efforts to shed new light on what is widely considered the world\u2019s most closed society. By tracing how a perverse interpretation of Christianity helped shape North Korea\u2019s communist dynasty, Jonathan Cheng\u2019s recent book, Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea\u2019s Personality Cult, is an invaluable addition to the canon.<\/p>\n
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Illustration: Louise Ting<\/p>\n
At the heart of Cheng\u2019s narrative is the remarkable story of how North Korea\u2019s founder, Kim Il-sung, drew on his Christian upbringing to develop and consolidate a personality cult that has endured for eight decades. By appropriating religious structures, doctrines and imagery, he also laid the foundation for the hereditary communist regime now ruled by his grandson, Kim Jong-un.<\/p>\n
Academics have long observed that North Korea\u2019s official ideology, Kimilsungism and Juche (self-reliance), functions, in some respects, like a faith. Cheng\u2019s contribution is to place the regime\u2019s religious dimension within a much broader historical and geopolitical context, tracing the forces that have shaped the Korean Peninsula through the centuries, from the imperial rivalries of the late 19th century and Japanese colonial rule to liberation in 1945, the division between North and South, the Cold War and the famine of the 1990s. Running through this larger story is the book\u2019s central theme: the complex interplay between political power and Christianity that gave rise to Kim Il-sung\u2019s personality cult.<\/p>\n
Cheng\u2019s reliance on archival documents, letters, photographs, diaries and biographies \u2014 many of them previously unknown or unavailable \u2014 allows him to reconstruct the roles of the many figures who shaped Korea\u2019s turbulent modern history. By comparing official accounts with a wide range of independent sources, he manages to produce a historical narrative that is both rigorous and vividly drawn.<\/p>\n
His striking account of Pyongyang\u2019s transformation, in particular, captures the paradox of a regime that brutally suppressed organized religion while demanding near-religious devotion to its ruling family. Once dubbed the \u201cJerusalem of the East,\u201d the North Korean capital became the epicenter of the Kims\u2019 deification \u2014 the very kind of idolatry Christianity expressly forbids.<\/p>\n
CHRISTIAN ROOTS<\/p>\n
Cheng traces the roots of Christianity\u2019s revival in Korea to Samuel Moffett, a US missionary from Madison, Indiana, who arrived in Pyongyang in 1893 and helped spread the faith throughout the peninsula despite numerous obstacles.<\/p>\n
Christianity gained converts after Korea was caught up in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars and, in 1905, lost control of its foreign affairs to Japan. Amid the devastating reality of a crumbling country, many Koreans placed their hopes in what was, to them, an unfamiliar Western religion. In January 1907, Pyongyang became the center of an extraordinary Christian revival, one of Asia\u2019s largest ever. The movement soon spread throughout the peninsula and beyond, reaching expatriate communities in Manchuria.<\/p>\n
Korean Messiah then turns to Kim Il-sung himself. His father, Kim Hyong-jik, attended a missionary school and was deeply religious. Influenced by missionaries like Moffett and William Baird, he initially hoped to become a pastor. Kim\u2019s mother, Kang Pan-sok, was even more devout, while her father, Kang Ton-uk, was a church leader who had founded a missionary school.<\/p>\n
However, under Japanese rule, Christian missionaries generally adhered to the Japanese Government-General\u2019s policy that churches stay out of politics and confine themselves to religious affairs. This increasingly alienated Korean nationalists who yearned for independence.<\/p>\n
The cause of Korean self-determination appeared to receive a major boost on Jan. 8, 1918, when then-US president Woodrow Wilson presented Congress with his \u201c14 Points\u201d for ending World War I. His fifth point declared that, in resolving colonial disputes, \u201cthe interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight\u201d with those of imperial powers.<\/p>\n
However, nationalists\u2019 hopes were eventually dashed, prompting some to turn to socialism, much as radicals in China and Vietnam had done. The brutal suppression of the non-violent March First Movement in 1919 further weakened the appeal of the moderate Christian strain of Korean nationalism.<\/p>\n
Kim Il-sung came of age amid this radical ferment. According to his memoirs, he formed the Down-with-Imperialism Union at the age of 14 while attending Huacheng Academy. North Korean historiography would later portray the organization as a precursor to the Workers\u2019 Party of Korea.<\/p>\n
A major turning point came with the death of the Reverend Son Chong-do \u2014 a Christian gradualist and a friend of Kim\u2019s father who had been a major influence on the young Kim \u2014 in February 1931. Shortly thereafter, Kim began to gravitate toward socialism, with its emphasis on the power of the masses, rather than the gradualist enlightenment movement associated with activist An Chang-ho \u2014 and the reliance on US support championed by future South Korean President Rhee Syngman.<\/p>\n
By late 1940, Kim had crossed the Amur River into the Soviet Union, where he later became a captain in the Soviet military\u2019s 88th Brigade, placing him firmly within the Soviet political and military orbit. These were desperate years for Korea. Japan\u2019s invasion of China had turned the peninsula into a military supply base, while colonial authorities sought to suppress Christianity by requiring Koreans to attend ceremonies at Shinto shrines.<\/p>\n
BIRTH OF THE KIM CULT<\/p>\n
Much of Korean Messiah\u2019s second half focuses on the Soviet occupation of North Korea, when the seeds of Kim Il-sung\u2019s personality cult were sown. The historical irony is that Kim and his followers systematically persecuted Christianity, only to fill the spiritual vacuum by repurposing Christian language and symbolism to create a political religion centered on Kim himself.<\/p>\n
Cheng contrasts Soviet leader Joseph Stalin\u2019s swift and shrewd maneuvering during the final stages of World War II with the US\u2019 relative indifference to Korea\u2019s postwar fate. On Aug. 8, 1945 \u2014 two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima\u2014the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and quickly sent forces into the Korean Peninsula. Alarmed by the speed of the Soviet advance, the Truman administration hastily proposed the 38th parallel as a temporary dividing line, which Stalin accepted.<\/p>\n
The Allied powers soon went further, agreeing to place the country under an international trusteeship for up to five years rather than grant it immediate independence. The idea itself was not new. At the 1943 Tehran Conference, then-president Franklin Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that Korea be placed under trusteeship for 40 years, arguing that Koreans were not yet capable of self-government. That period was subsequently shortened at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, with the US, the Soviet Union and the UK announcing the agreement on Dec. 27, 1945.<\/p>\n
Koreans saw the agreement as a profound betrayal. Coming after the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement and Wilson\u2019s reneging on his promise of national self-determination in 1919, the trusteeship reinforced the sense that Korea\u2019s fate remained at the mercy of foreign powers. The Korean War would ultimately vindicate those fears, as the 1953 armistice replaced the 38th parallel with the Military Demarcation Line that separates North and South Korea to this day.<\/p>\n
In Korea, news of the agreement triggered a fierce struggle between supporters and opponents of trusteeship. The vast majority of Korea\u2019s political factions initially opposed the plan, but after Stalin directed the communists in the North to support it, Kim Il-sung and his allies quickly fell in line.<\/p>\n
Notably, the Soviet authorities occupying North Korea did not initially intend to install Kim Il-sung as its leader. Their first choice was Cho Man-sik, a Christian nationalist and gradualist who enjoyed overwhelming popular support. But when Cho steadfastly resisted pressure from both the Soviets and Kim Il-sung\u2019s supporters to endorse the trusteeship plan, the Soviets abandoned him and threw their support behind Kim Il-sung.<\/p>\n
To consolidate communist rule, Kim Il-sung and his Soviet patrons needed to win over the North\u2019s highly influential Christian population. A crucial ally in this endeavor was Kang Yang-uk, a distant relative on his mother\u2019s side who had also been his Sunday school teacher.<\/p>\n
Kang established the Choson Christian Federation to bring Christian leaders sympathetic to Kim Il-sung under the regime\u2019s control, penalizing those who refused to join. The 1946 land reform dealt another severe blow to the church and other centers of opposition by undermining their economic foundations. Meanwhile, missionaries increasingly found themselves denounced as agents or spies of US imperialism. As persecution intensified, more than 1 million Christians fled southward between 1945 and 1950, contributing to Christianity\u2019s emergence as a powerful force in the South.<\/p>\n
FROM CULT TO DYNASTY<\/p>\n
Because Kim Il-sung lacked a strong political base, the Soviet authorities embellished his wartime record. His idolization took on a life of its own in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin\u2019s own cult of personality and launched the de-Stalinization process, deeply unsettling Kim Il-sung. That August, Kim Il-sung\u2019s domestic rivals tried and failed to remove him from power. North Korea responded by further distancing itself from the Soviet Union and China while doubling down on Kim Il-sung\u2019s deification. By the early 1960s, in Cheng\u2019s account, his personality cult surpassed even Stalin\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Faith in Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, soon came to dominate everyday life in North Korea. Citizens underwent three to four hours of ideological education each day, alongside regular sessions of \u201cself-criticism.\u201d Just as Catholics confess their sins before God, North Koreans were required once a week to acknowledge before their peers their failures to live according to Kim Il-sung\u2019s teachings. Art and literature were similarly remolded to place Kim Il-sung at the center of people\u2019s hopes, dreams and imaginations, systematically weaving his cult into the country\u2019s cultural fabric.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the regime sought to seal off the country from ideas, ideologies and cultural influences that challenged Kim Il-sung\u2019s supremacy. Under Kang\u2019s leadership, Christianity \u2014 regarded as an ideological rival to Kim Il-sung\u2019s personality cult \u2014 was uprooted and outside influences were increasingly shut out. After visiting Pyongyang in October 1964, the British economist Joan Robinson observed that Kim Il-sung appeared \u201cnot as a dictator, but as a savior Messiah.\u201d<\/p>\n
After thwarting another coup plot in 1967, Kim Il-sung further expanded his personality cult by enshrining his absolute authority. The regime subsequently codified its demand for total loyalty in the \u201cTen Principles for the Establishment of a Monolithic Ideological System,\u201d which took precedence over the constitution and ordinary law, and which Cheng compares to the biblical Ten Commandments. As Kang Myung-do, a defector and great-nephew of Kang Yang-uk, wrote in his 2017 book Now I Can Speak!, Kim Il-sung \u201cused the deep-rooted Christian background of his family to idolize himself.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deification soon extended beyond Kim Il-sung to his family, laying the ideological groundwork for hereditary succession. Kim Il-sung\u2019s parents became \u201csaints of the revolution,\u201d while his mother was elevated to \u201cMother of Korea,\u201d a status mirroring that of the Virgin Mary. In the process, North Korea rejected the conventional wisdom within the socialist bloc \u2014 shared by Stalin and Mao Zedong \u2014 that leadership should not be passed down through bloodlines.<\/p>\n
The interplay between Christianity and the Kim cult continued to shape North Korea over the following decades. In the wake of then-US president Richard Nixon\u2019s 1972 visit to China and the subsequent July 4 South-North Joint Communique, Kim Il-sung began openly acknowledging the Christian influences on his early life. In the 1980s, the regime softened its hostility toward Christianity and allowed exchanges with international Christian organizations. The publication of Kim Il-sung\u2019s memoirs in 1992 marked another shift, followed by visits from prominent Christian figures, including the American evangelist Billy Graham.<\/p>\n
Kim Jong-il, who assumed leadership following his father\u2019s death in 1994, further developed the religious dimensions of Kim Il-sung\u2019s personality cult. Faced with the Great Famine and the Arduous March, he transformed Kimilsungism and Juche into a system of faith designed to endure across generations, preserving Kim Il-sung as an immortal presence at the center of North Korean life.<\/p>\n
Cheng credits the regime\u2019s survival under Kim Jong-il to a potent combination of tactical savvy and the continued deification of his father. North Korea\u2019s current ruler, Kim Jong-un, receives comparatively little attention, with only about eight of the book\u2019s 768 pages devoted to his rule. Yet Cheng emphasizes the cult\u2019s continuity across generations. Like his father and grandfather before him, regime propaganda depicts Kim Jong-un as a genius, descended from the sacred Mount Paektu bloodline, who has mastered virtually every field. He is described as being \u201cone and the same with President Kim Il-sung in all aspects,\u201d linking the grandson to the dynasty\u2019s founder through blood and character.<\/p>\n
CAN THE CULT SURVIVE?<\/p>\n
Korean Messiah\u2019s focus on the origins and extraordinary reach of Kim Il-sung\u2019s personality cult can leave readers with the impression that its grip on North Korea is permanent. However, the forces that sustain autocratic regimes are never static. Geopolitical conditions change, economies and societies evolve, and public attitudes shift with them.<\/p>\n
In this respect, the book pays too little attention to the deeper structural forces that might be eroding the foundations of the Kim dynasty. Readers interested in North Korea\u2019s future will be left wondering whether a system built around the deification of Kim Il-sung can prove as durable under Kim Jong-un and whoever might succeed him.<\/p>\n
Kim Jong-un\u2019s governing style offers little reason to believe that it can. Since 2023, he has abandoned the goal of national unification, a cornerstone of Kim Il-sung\u2019s vision and the ultimate objective of Juche, in favor of treating North and South Korea as two hostile states. In doing so, he has undermined a core pillar of the ideological patrimony that sustains the Kim regime.<\/p>\n
Moreover, exclusion of competing ideas and outside influences has become increasingly difficult. After the Great Famine and the Arduous March of the 1990s, the partial introduction of market mechanisms revitalized trade and contact with the outside world, creating new channels for foreign information to seep through. The spread of South Korean pop culture among the jangmadang (market) generation has been particularly significant. As one defector recently told me, almost every North Korean citizen has likely encountered South Korean dramas or music at least once, exposing them to a reality vastly different from the one portrayed by the regime.<\/p>\n
The consequences are potentially profound: losing its monopoly over information makes it much harder to conceal North Korea\u2019s poverty or maintain its carefully constructed image of the outside world. Kim Jong-un\u2019s own rhetoric suggests that he is keenly aware of these risks. At a military parade marking the 75th anniversary of the Workers\u2019 Party of Korea in October 2020, he shed tears and apologized for having \u201cfailed to always live up\u201d to the enormous trust placed in him by the North Korean people. A year later, while praising the Party\u2019s revolutionary achievements, he acknowledged that \u201cgreat changes are taking place in the state of people\u2019s consciousness and the social environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Against this backdrop, Kim\u2019s abandonment of unification and embrace of the \u201ctwo hostile states\u201d doctrine can be seen as an attempt to contain the South\u2019s growing appeal. As access to outside information exposes the gulf between the two countries, the prospect of unification carries the dangerous implication that North Koreans might begin to imagine a better life as part of a unified, democratic Korea.<\/p>\n
All this suggests that the Kim family\u2019s personality cult might no longer be enough to withstand the pressures created by economic hardship, changing public attitudes and the growing influence of South Korean culture. While the regime\u2019s political religion proved enormously effective in consolidating Kim Il-sung\u2019s power and legitimizing hereditary succession, its hold appears to have weakened. Kim Jong-un has responded by tightening information controls and reinforcing the barriers between North Koreans and the outside world, relying on the politics of fear to keep the population in check.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Kim Jong-un has begun appearing publicly with his daughter Kim Ju-ae \u2014 believed to be 13 years old \u2014 prompting speculation that he is grooming her as his eventual successor. But even if she assumes power, it remains to be seen whether the personality cult built by her great-grandfather can carry the Kim dynasty through a fourth generation.<\/p>\n
The final irony is that however effectively North Korea\u2019s rulers appropriated Christian doctrines and rhetoric to elevate Kim Il-sung to near-divine status, the entire system rests on the deification of a mortal man. For all their efforts to fashion the Kim dynasty into an eternal kingdom, the most fitting biblical parallel may be the Tower of Babel.<\/p>\n
Cheng\u2019s nuanced, compassionate account of North Korean Christianity also resonates with me personally. I became a Christian through my wife and her mother, a Christian who fled Pyongyang during the Korean War. As both a believer and a political scientist, I am therefore left with the hope that North Koreans will one day find relief from their suffering and freedom from the regime that has perpetuated it.<\/p>\n
Yoon Young-kwan, a former South Korean minister of foreign affairs and trade, is chairman of the Asan Institute for Policy Studies.<\/p>\n
Copyright: Project Syndicate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A new book on North Korea traces the Christian roots of an atheist state that demands near-religious devotion…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137450,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[141,31,34,934,933],"class_list":["post-137449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-north-korea","tag-kim-jong-un","tag-korea","tag-north-korea","tag-the-taipei-times","tag-933"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137449\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}