Today, Pyongyang is best known as the sacred capital of North Korea’s Kim dynasty. But in the first half of the twentieth century, it had a different reputation altogether: as the “Jerusalem of the East,” the center of Christendom in East Asia and home to some of the world’s biggest Presbyterian missionary institutions.
At its heart was one man who became synonymous with the “Jerusalem of the East.” Samuel A. Moffett, a native of Madison, Indiana, was born during the Civil War and graduated from nearby Hanover College in 1884, where he became a member of Phi Gamma Delta—ninety-seven years before Mike Pence, Hanover class of 1981, would become president of the very same fraternity chapter.
Like other young idealistic Christians in the late nineteenth century, Moffett longed to become a foreign missionary, and on his twenty-sixth birthday in January 1890, he arrived in Seoul by steamship, making him one of the first Protestant missionaries in the newly opened kingdom of Korea.
By then, Protestant missionaries had been spreading the Christian gospel for decades in India, China, and Japan—with only limited success. In Seoul and the southeastern Korean city of Pusan, that pattern largely continued, with Moffett’s colleagues struggling to win converts.
But it was a different story entirely in Pyongyang, a city that had developed a stature over the centuries as a kind of Las Vegas—home to Korea’s most notorious saloons and dancing girls. It also boasted a reputation for scrappiness, business acumen, and openness to new ideas. As Moffett preached the Christian message in the city, he found a receptivity that astonished him. Before long, he described being so inundated with inquirers that he hardly had time to eat or to sleep, so curious were the people of Pyongyang for the gospel he was preaching.
Within a few years, Moffett opened one church after another, only to have each new building bursting at the seams with new converts and congregants—so packed that, as one missionary wrote, “we are almost afraid that the walls will begin to bulge out.” Primary schools, high schools, a college, a seminary, hospitals, schools for the blind and the deaf, and orphanages soon followed, until Pyongyang had won a reputation across the Christian world for its fervency in the faith—most notably in a mass revival that swept the city in 1907, just five years before Kim Il Sung’s birth.
In Pyongyang, one missionary wrote, “everywhere praying was heard, weeping, singing. The world had gone mad over a religion that the fathers had never heard of.” Among the city’s very first converts was Kang Ton-uk, who became a church elder and worked with Moffett to found a Christian school in the outskirts of Pyongyang. Kang raised a daughter who would later serve as a “Bible-woman,” and delighted in a grandson who, in time, would become known as Kim Il Sung—a boy who, raised on Bible stories and Sunday school in the “Jerusalem of the East,” would reshape the city in his own image.