The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Jonathan Cheng – China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal and author of “Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult” (Knopf 2026) – is the 504th in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Explain the impact of Protestant Christianity and American evangelist Billy Graham on Kim Il Sung.
North Korea’s founder Kim Il Sung was raised in a devout Presbyterian household on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Many of the first Protestant Christian missionaries to take up residence in Korea were American Presbyterians who arrived in Seoul beginning in 1884. While Christian missionaries had found only mixed success in China, India, and Japan, they were extraordinarily successful in Korea – nowhere more so than in Pyongyang. Kim Il Sung’s grandparents were among Korea’s first converts, and Kim was steeped in Christian teachings not all that different from what Billy Graham heard growing up in North Carolina.
The impact of American missionaries in Pyongyang was so pronounced that the city became known as the “Jerusalem of the East.” It was home to Billy Graham’s wife Ruth Bell, a missionary’s daughter who attended a Presbyterian-run high school there. I don’t purport to know whether Kim Il Sung ever considered himself a Christian, but he was certainly comfortable in the church – teaching Sunday school and playing hymns on the organ.
As Billy Graham brought his evangelistic “crusades” to the Soviet Union, Poland, and the socialist bloc in the 1980s, he reached out to North Korea – which had built a pair of Protestant churches in Pyongyang by then, including one on the birthplace of Kim’s mother.
Billy Graham first traveled to Pyongyang in 1992, preaching from John 3:16 and getting plenty of time with Kim Il Sung. Graham reminded Kim of the faith of his youth, while the North Korean leader regaled Graham with memories of his childhood pastor. Graham gave him a Bible and his 1953 book, ”Peace with God.”
What is the origin of the “gospel of Chuch’e (Juche)” and “The Jerusalem of the East?”
Before it became the capital of the Kim dynasty, Pyongyang was known during the first half of the 20th century as the “Jerusalem of the East.” Originally, Pyongyang had a reputation as the Las Vegas of its day, full of drinking, carousing, and prostitution. But after it was destroyed during an 1894 battle between Japan and China, citizens flocked to the Christian faith under the guidance of a 20-something Indiana missionary named Samuel Moffett. For the next half-century, Pyongyang gained its new status as the center of Christendom in Asia – home to the world’s largest Presbyterian missionary compound, its largest seminary, and some of its largest churches. Christian leaders from around the world flocked to Pyongyang to witness the vibrancy of the faith there.
After Kim Il Sung came to power in 1945, he remade the city as the holy capital of what some call “the gospel of Chuch’e” (often spelled Juche), a word frequently translated as “self-reliance,” and which became part of North Korea’s increasingly idiosyncratic ideology, built around worship of the former Sunday school teacher.
Examine the evolution of North Korea’s personality cult from its Christian roots to a national religion and ideology.
Kim Il Sung’s personality cult began in a Stalinesque mold, backed by the Soviet leader himself. But by the late 1940s, deviations became apparent – many informed by Kim’s Christian upbringing. Kim quoted from the Bible and gave his distant uncle, a revivalist Presbyterian minister, one of North Korea’s top posts – one that he would hold for decades.
Many of the rituals of Kimilsungism are certainly redolent of Christian practices, from the singing of hymns to the weekly confessing of sins and the rendering of Kim’s words in red-letter boldface. North Koreans who encounter Christianity after fleeing are uniformly struck by the similarities with Kimilsungism. But some practices are not easily identifiable as “Christian,” such as the bowing before his statue and the ritualistic dusting of his portrait.
Analyze Kim Il Sung’s approach to Korean Christians and American missionaries.
Kim Il Sung’s relationship with South Korean Christians and American missionaries is more nuanced than one might assume given North Korea’s well-documented oppression of Christians. After Kim’s 60th birthday in 1972, he reopened Pyongyang’s old seminary and established a pair of Protestant churches. He invited dozens of pastors from South Korea and the U.S. to Pyongyang, including Billy Graham, and prayed with many of them. In his memoirs – required reading for North Koreans – he wrote so fondly about his Christian upbringing that the country’s dictionaries were rewritten to soften definitions of “church,” “pastor,” and so on.
This is not to say that Kim embraced Christianity. Pyongyang’s two churches are tightly restricted and closely monitored; many visitors dismiss them as Potemkin churches. And Pyongyang continues to harshly persecute Christians. But Kim’s nostalgia toward his Christian upbringing complicates the notion of an inveterate, unwavering hostility to the faith.
Assess how Christianity has and continues to animate relations between Pyongyang and Seoul and its implications for Washington’s approach to Korean peninsula politics.
After Kim’s death in 1994, the church continued to serve as a conduit for engagement between the two Koreas. North Korea’s state-backed Christian federation, led by Kim’s relatives, sent its pastors abroad to highlight the commonalities between Christianity and Kimilsungism, while South Korean Christians built churches at inter-Korean projects north of the thirty-eighth parallel, including at an industrial park, a mountain resort, and an experimental light-water reactor in northeastern Korea. When famine swept North Korea during the 1990s, it was primarily missionaries –South Koreans and Americans – who brought in food, medicine, and aid. Many North Koreans who fled embraced Christianity and smuggled Bibles, tracts, and DVDs back into the country. But those efforts were increasingly stymied as geopolitical tensions rose, ending for good during the Covid pandemic.
Christianity’s influence on North Korea may be blunted, for now, but the Kim personality cult has only grown under Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, and perhaps soon a fourth-generation leader. That brings me to what I believe is the main implication for Washington: The personality cult that has defined North Korea for eight decades is firmly entrenched in the psyches of its 25 million people and isn’t going away. While North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is the primary source of concern in Washington, no less powerful is the ideological hold the Kim dynasty has over its subjects.