For those who know North Korea as an atheistic, communist nation generally seen as the world’s most oppressive place to try to be a Christian, a new book on the country’s history offers a surprising revelation.
At the heart of North Korea’s cult personality and the root to the Kim family’s continuing rise to power is evangelical Christianity.
The influence of Christian faith starts with the founding leader of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, born in 1912. At the time the capital city of Pyongyang was the centre of Christian practice in Asia — referred to by missionaries as “the Jerusalem of the East.”
Canadian journalist Jonathan Cheng has spent 15 years piecing together how Christianity played a key role in the family history of North Korea’s Kim dynasty. His book is called Korean Messiah.
Cheng is the China bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal based in Beijing. He was previously the Korea bureau chief, running coverage of the Korean peninsula. Cheng spoke to Nahlah Ayed about his research and visiting North Korea in 2013 and 2017.
Here is an excerpt from their conversation.
When was the last time you were [in Pyongyang]?
I was there again in 2017 and this time it was an invitation from the North Korean government. They had invited us as the Wall Street Journal to come. We went in as a team of four. They put us up at the same guest house where Jimmy Carter stayed when he visited in 1994. And they kind of rolled out the red carpet for us.
This was during Trump’s first term and I think they wanted to send a message to the White House through big American media outlets that they weren’t afraid of Donald Trump.
They weren’t afraid of his military threats. They weren’t afraid of sanctions, his maximum pressure. They wanted to show us that they were doing very well, thank you very much.
How free were you to move around as a journalist?
We weren’t free. I mean, no one is ever really free to move around North Korea. Just doing the research for the book, I find even the Chinese, even the Russians, even their so-called friends are kept on a very short leash. But they did ask us on the first night opening banquet, they said, ‘Well, you’re here for a week. What would you like to see?’ So, like any good journalist, we asked for an interview with Kim Jong-un. We asked for a visit to the nuclear facilities. They were both politely declined.
I did make one request. I had been working on this book for a few years by 2017. And I said to them, ‘I understand you have a few Protestant churches here in Pyongyang. We’d like to see if we could visit them, maybe attend service on Sunday.’ And they looked at each other, they thought about it a little bit and they said, ‘Yeah, I think we can make that happen for you.’ So we saw all the things they wanted us to see… and they did actually let us see some of what we wanted to see including morning church service in North Korea.
That’s extraordinary. What was it like?
It’s surreal, [walking] in you wouldn’t think you were in North Korea. They don’t have portraits of the Kims on the wall. They don’t have the badge pins of the Kims over their hearts. It looks like a church. It has pews, the pulpit and the choir all in their robes, and Bibles donated by South Korean Christians.
There’s been this long running debate about how real these churches are. I don’t want to overstate how real they are because this is North Korea after all and I know that the controls on what people can do and how they can worship are extraordinarily limited. I don’t know that there’s any place on earth where it’s more restrictive, more repressive.
And yet I do think that within the very narrow confines of this little church — and there are two of them… in a country of 25 million people — that there’s some freedom given, again within very narrow parameters. I guess you could say a dog has the freedom to move within their cage. They’re still in the cage but they have the freedom to move in their cage, maybe that’s the analogy there.
When you went [to North Korea in 2013] as a tourist, you listed signs that began to hint to you, very strongly, that there was some correlation to the Christian history of Pyongyang. Was there one thing when it just hit you and you thought, ‘Oh my God, this is actually very familiar’ and it has to do with Christianity?
When we were taken to the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, a sacred site — it’s a pilgrimage site. It’s this humble, thatched hut in these bucolic grounds. They literally have these, I don’t know what they are, like plastic mushrooms on the side, and they pipe very ethereal music. So it feels like you’re in this sacred space.
Billy Graham, the evangelist, was invited to visit North Korea by Kim Il-sung twice in ’92 and ’94. And when Billy Graham first gets there, he says the same thing that I was thinking when I got there. He says, ‘All they’re missing here is the manger and the three wise men.’ Of course, the reference is to the nativity of Christ. How eerily similar it was, how obviously modelled.
The other would be the resting place of Kim Il-sung. That’s another place where people are taken. He’s embalmed in formaldehyde under glass, and you’re expected to go into the Holy of Holies, as it were. They have these dust blowers to blow off any particle of dust.
I’ve also been to semiconductor fabrication facilities. It’s almost similar in that over the top kind of [way], making sure you’re totally pure before you go in, and then you’re expected to bow three times before his body. There was something very religious, very eerie there, that this is nominally an atheistic state and yet you know it’s anything but.
I wonder whether there were any really nuanced signs that you picked up on as well that really hinted at the Christian roots to this cult of personality.
Sure, if you pick up North Korean publications, and I’ve picked up a lot over the years. I packed my suitcase full of basically propaganda. What you’ll note is that in Korean, and I can read Korean, I’m ethnically Chinese, but I’ve been learning Korean now for two decades at this point. When you flip through North Korean text, you’ll find that the words of Kim Il-sung are typically printed larger than the rest of the text, oftentimes in bold, and very occasionally in red letters.
That to me was just incredible. This notion that if you walk into many churches, you pick up a Bible, the words of Christ will be in red. And here you have the words that Kim Il-sung treated like sacred writ, which it is.
I know that you’re a journalist and that you’re there as an observer but what was your reaction to realizing this connection?
I was bowled over because intuitively we all understand that people kind of need something to believe in. In modern society you have movie stars, pop stars, rock stars and so on. If you saw one walking down the street, you’d get excited… You almost put this person up on a pedestal. Even though you know intellectually this person is just like you and me and yet at the same time you can almost get to a point where it’s more than just respect it’s almost… reverence that you have for another person.
Kim Il-sung — the founder of the North Korean state and the grandfather of Kim Jong-un — was able to tap into this and the worshipful tone that people use, even when they just refer to him [or] walk by his image, they treat him like a living deity.
I mean, he’s been dead for more than 30 years and he’s still treated like a live deity. He’s literally written into the Constitution as the ‘Eternal President of North Korea.’
So he’s gone, but he’s not gone at all. He’s everywhere.
*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Tom Howell.