Ju Il-lyong first heard the Christian message over a small black radio. It was the early 2000s, and Ju and his family were suffering through the depths of a devastating famine that began ravaging North Korea around the time of state founder Kim Il Sung’s death in 1994, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.
The broadcast that the Ju family heard had come over the airwaves from a Christian radio station in Seoul. It was an unfamiliar message, one that had been effectively forbidden north of the thirty-eighth parallel since the 1940s, when Kim Il Sung—the son and grandson of Korea’s earliest converts to Christianity—established the North Korean state. Like Kim Il Sung’s parents and grandparents, Ju’s family was captivated by the message of redemption that they heard.
In 2008, Ju and his mother and sisters fled their home in northeastern Korea and made the perilous trek through China and, eventually, to South Korea.
Like Ju, many North Koreans who first encounter Christianity—often while traveling along an “underground railroad” run by South Korean missionaries—are struck by the similarities with the ideology that they were raised with, known today as “Kimilsungism.”
When she read the Bible for the first time, Kim Hyŏn-hŭi, a North Korean special agent arrested in 1987 for blowing up a South Korean jetliner, was astonished at the parallels: “So similar…,” she muttered.
Another North Korean, reading the Bible in a missionary-run safe house in China, remarked: “It was as if I was reading our North Korean textbook…‘Wow, it’s just what I have learned and practiced my entire life.’”
A third, puzzled by Christianity while sheltering with missionaries in China, was offered some advice from a fellow escapee: “Just think of God as Kim Il Sung and Jesus as Kim Jong Il. Then it makes more sense.”
None of this was a coincidence. Kim Il Sung had grown up steeped in the very same teachings decades earlier, under American missionaries who helped turn Pyongyang—Kim’s hometown—into the “Jerusalem of the East.”
The future North Korean leader followed his parents to church each week and went on to play the church organ, teach Sunday school, and perform in church plays. When he became leader of North Korea after World War II, Kim cited Christian scriptures to undermine his political opponents and elevated a distant uncle—a former revivalist preacher—to one of the seniormost positions in Pyongyang.
Kim Il Sung understood the power of the faith, and, sensing the threat that Christianity posed, persecuted it for decades—though, as even Kim must have known, he couldn’t suppress it entirely. Eventually, it would make its way to families like that of Ju Il-lyong, whose story I first heard this week in a talk he gave to Liberty in North Korea.
“In North Korea, having faith means death,” Ju said. “Yet, many people still want to believe because faith is not just a comfort, it is the reason they keep living.” That’s a truth Kim Il Sung understood.
Also posted on LinkedIn.