Hello from Boston, where I’m set to embark Tuesday on my book tour down the East Coast of the U.S. (plus a week in Canada). If you’re in Boston, New Haven, New York, Princeton, Philadelphia, Washington, or Toronto over the coming month, please check out my book website for the tour dates. I’d love to see you.
While I didn’t write KOREAN MESSIAH with an exclusively American audience in mind, the book carries a special resonance for those in the U.S. To many Americans, there are few places stranger and more “other” than North Korea: The sight of Kim Jong Un gazing out from the rostrum as long-range missiles and goose-stepping soldiers are paraded in the vast square below, for instance, or their state media outlets denouncing the U.S. military and American missionaries as predatory imperialists. Nearly all the Americans detained in North Korea over the previous decade have been Christians—or tarred as working for the church.
And while the Trump administration’s attention has been fixed on other adversaries—Venezuela, Iran, Cuba—no country has been more successful in defying America over the past decade than North Korea. Unlike its Soviet bloc peers, Pyongyang has not only resisted the economic changes that have swept the world since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it has also survived—and, under Kim Jong Un, even thrived, in its own way and on its own terms.
Yet one of the things that drew me to this topic was the realization that, as foreign and “other” as it may appear from afar, North Korea, far from being the antithesis of all that America stands for, has its roots deeply planted in America.
As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, and as KOREAN MESSIAH lays out, the missionaries that first introduced Protestant teachings to northwestern Korea in the 1890s were, for the most part, Americans. Samuel A. Moffett, who brought the Christian message to Pyongyang and who toiled alongside Kim Jong Un’s own family to spread the gospel there, was the product of the same small Indiana college that later produced Mike Pence (indeed, they led the very same fraternity, ninety-seven years apart).
Moffett emerged from a particularly heady moment in American history: with the nation reunited after the Civil War, a generation of idealistic young Christians, awakened by the possibilities created by electricity, steam, the railroad, and the telegraph, set their sights on distant shores, carrying with them a belief that God had ordained America to spread faith and progress to the world.
It was these postbellum Presbyterians from the American heartland, and their breed of industrious, individualistic, moralistic fundamentalism, that flourished in Pyongyang during the first half of the twentieth century—perhaps most consequentially in the family of Kim Il Sung.
North Korea, with its goose-stepping soldiers marching across Kim Il Sung Square, may look foreign, but at heart, its ideological underpinnings should be very familiar to many an American reader.