조선 메시아

Ed Pulford: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books Network. I’m Ed Pulford, one of the hosts of the channel. On the podcast today, we have Jonathan Cheng, who is China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal and, for the purposes of this conversation, the author of Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, which came out this year, 2026, with Alfred A. Knopf.

Stand on any of Seoul’s many hills looking over the city at night, and the neon red glow of church crosses is unavoidable. Christianity is the largest organized religion in South Korea, and the capital’s spires and megachurches might thus be read as signs of freedom and faith, presumably unavailable in the historically socialist, atheist North. But Christianity arrived in Korea decades before the country was divided into two, and early in the last century, it was, in fact, the peninsula’s northern half that had many more followers of Christ’s teachings. As Jonathan Cheng shows us in Korean Messiah, among these were the parents of the man who, with substantial Soviet help, would later come to lead the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea from the middle of the 20th century. Kim Il Sung’s parental associations with Christian faith, Cheng shows us in this fluidly written and richly researched book, went well beyond the occasional church visit or whispered prayer. The young Kim grew up in an environment surrounded by Christian mentors and suffused in their teachings and patterns of ritual life, all of which cast his later career as a guerrilla fighter and national leader in a new light. Perhaps a man who, having repressed all other rival power centers, including religions, forged a personality cult which portrayed him as a Moses-like savior of his people, bathed him in halo light, and then transferred onto a son and heir as he ascended to an eternal presidency, makes religious comparisons unavoidable. But this impressive tome reveals a wider range of deep Christian resonances running throughout Kim’s life, which extend well beyond these surface-level resemblances.

So, to get into some of these, I’m therefore very pleased to be able to say: Jonathan Cheng, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathan Cheng: Ed, it’s a real pleasure to be here.

Ed Pulford: Well, great to have a chance to chat to you about this book, which, full disclosure-wise, I should acknowledge that I’ve heard you talk about for a number of years. So great to see it out. But perhaps we can start off by familiarizing the listener with where the book came from, how your interest in the topic got going, and that kind of background.

Jonathan Cheng: Sure, full disclosure: we have known each other for a few years, and I am in Beijing right now as I record this. I am the China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, but perhaps more pertinent here is that I was the Korea Bureau Chief before I was here in Beijing. When I got to Korea, it was 2013. At that time, Kim Jong Un had just ascended, just becoming the third-generation leader of North Korea. Of course, that’s the post he holds today. He was, at the time, perhaps seen as a potential reformer. He studied in Switzerland. People thought maybe he would be a different type of leader altogether. He didn’t come of age during the creation of the North Korean state. He’s a millennial. He was taking power in his 20s. It was a very different sort of transition than what we saw from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il.

So I think that’s sort of the backdrop. I should make clear that I am not of Korean descent, my family is of Southern Chinese descent. But when I was sent to South Korea to report on North Korea, I did everything I could to read about North Korea, to learn what I could about this country. And, of course, the personality cult was no surprise to me. I think anyone who casually follows the news is aware of North Korea’s cult of personality, and it’s quite unlike any other personality cult out there. There are certainly many parallels, but in terms of the intensity of it, and certainly the longevity of it, I think it really stands apart. And so I wanted to understand this a little bit more.

So I just picked up any book that anyone can read on North Korea. The sort of standard texts include Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, or you read The Two Koreas by Don Oberdorfer, or you read works by Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, who’s written a lot. Brian Myers, lots of scholars, Victor Cha, that have done a lot of writing on this topic. Andrei Lankov, we can’t leave him out. And so I read all these sorts of books. You can walk into your standard bookstore. I suppose if we’re in the U.S. context, you say Barnes & Noble; if you’re in Korea, you might say Kyobo Books, and get these books anywhere. What I found most interesting was simply to learn, and this was no secret, but of course this is the backbone of my project here, that Kim Il Sung was raised as a devout Presbyterian Christian. Presbyterianism, being a subset of Protestantism, which is the dominant form of Christianity in South Korea today and on the Korean Peninsula historically. And as you already mentioned in that very nice opening, it was the northern half of the peninsula where Christianity really took root, and specifically it was in and around the city of Pyongyang, which today is the capital of North Korea, the capital of the Kim dynasty.

And so when you see Pyongyang on the news today, it will probably be because one of the Kims, now Kim Jong Un is standing on the rostrum overlooking Kim Il Sung Square. There will probably be goose-stepping soldiers, there may be intercontinental ballistic missiles, there may be all sorts of these things being paraded through central Pyongyang. But if you go back about 100 years ago, Pyongyang had an entirely different reputation. It had a reputation as being the “Jerusalem of the East.” It was given this nickname because it was the most heavily Christianized city in all of Asia. I should quickly caveat that by saying I’ve already alluded to the fact that I’m talking about Protestantism here. Catholicism has a very deep and rich history in Korea, but that’s not really the subject of my book. So when I say Christian, I primarily mean Protestantism, and more particularly Presbyterianism, because that is the particular flavor of Christianity that really took root in Korea, that was brought over by American missionaries after the Civil War in the U.S., and that the Kim family itself subscribed to and was quite fervent about.

And to read these books and to have this be noted, almost in passing that Kim Il Sung was born and raised in a heavily Christian family, and a heavily Christianized city, and a country that I knew, on a peninsula that I knew, down to the present day, again as you’ve alluded to, is very Christian, it kind of made my head spin a little bit, and it made me want to learn more. Part of being a journalist, and I studied history when I was in university, it raises these questions. I wanted to learn more, I wanted to read more. And so that’s really where the quest began. It began simply about wanting to read a book that would say, “Well, surely the fact that Kim Il Sung was raised in this sort of milieu, and the fact that he then went on to preside over this incredibly ornate, elaborate, over-the-top personality cult, and then handed it off to his son, and then to his grandson, there must be some connection here.”

And so that’s really what launched me on this path. My plan at first was not to write a book. My plan was to perhaps write an article, maybe for 월스트리트저널 (WSJ), probably for 월스트리트저널 (WSJ), perhaps a weekend article, that sort that would not be “Here’s a breaking news headline” but “Here’s a little bit of the story behind the news story that you’re reading about, with Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, and missiles and threats, and all the rest of it.” And yet, the more I found, the more I was convinced I can’t do this in an article. I couldn’t believe what I found, and that’s really how you get a book of the length that I did end up producing. This book took me 12 years to research and to write. It is quite a tome. I hope it doesn’t read heavily. As a journalist, the goal is always to keep things moving and to keep things exciting and interesting, and I hope I’ve done that. But it is a long book.

Ed Pulford: No, I would say it doesn’t feel nearly as long as it is, from what I gather both from our conversations and the epilogue you have. It’s a book that was even much longer in its earlier phases, before the finishing straight. But in any case, that’s great to hear that kind of background, and it’s a very relatable feeling, I think. Anyone looking at the aesthetics, the self-presentation, and some of the inescapable parallels and practices of this personality cult, it does feel, beyond just quasi-religious, like something with obvious connections to things that anyone with a secularized, culturally Christian upbringing would have come across.

So we’ll get a bit more into how all this started. You begin the book with a really tantalizing, and I think to anyone uninitiated in this stuff, pretty astonishing 1992 account of a visit by the U.S. evangelical pastor Billy Graham. But perhaps we’ll leave readers to begin the book that way themselves. You then move on to giving us some sense of how it was that, against a background of longer-standing Catholic missionary work, the Ming or Qing courts in China, or some efforts to expand to Japan and Korea too, it was Presbyterianism in particular that became very established. So could you give us more of a sense of why that was, why it was that Pyongyang became the center for this, and what form the spread of the religion there took?

Jonathan Cheng: Yeah, I think part of the context here is that the first Protestant missionaries don’t actually set up shop in Korea until the 1880s. That’s very late by the standards of the large East Asian countries. By that point, you do have missionaries in China, in India, in Japan for centuries in some cases. And so there was a lot of learning that the first missionaries to Korea could draw upon. Korea, of course, has its moniker of the Hermit Kingdom, now applied to North Korea, but it was actually first applied to the entire peninsula of Korea, because it was a very isolated country. Among missionaries who were very idealistic and wanted to go to the ends of the earth, it was perhaps the most tantalizingly exotic place to go. It was like Tahiti or Inner Africa, or Greenland or something like that. We don’t think of it that way today because Korea is very deeply integrated into the world. South Korea, of course, we think about K-pop, you think about the movies, you think about the companies that make cars and phones, and all the rest of it. And yet, if you go back to the late 19th century, it was one of the most forbidding and most unknown places.

And so by the time they first get there, they’re really adopting and applying a lot of the things that they’ve learned from other places. And yet, when they get to Seoul, which today is the capital of South Korea and was the capital of Joseon Dynasty Korea, the last feudal kingdom of Korea, they actually don’t find a whole lot of success, despite having learned from all previous experiences. They have some people who are interested in what they want to preach, but mostly the curiosity comes down to the fact that they look very different from the Korean people. And actually, it was a mutual sort of astonishment, because the Koreans were so different also. And so you have that sort of dynamic happening. You have some missionaries that get sent down to Busan, which is the very southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. They have even less success there.

And so it is that the first main character in my book here is not Kim Il Sung, but this young man named Samuel Moffett. He is an American missionary. He’s from Indiana. He’s only 26 years old on the day that he arrives at Incheon, which is now the home of the main international airport of South Korea. And he arrives on his 26th birthday. Within a few weeks, they’ve decided to send him north to Pyongyang because they’re not having a ton of success in Seoul or in Busan. Pyongyang at the time was, I guess you could call it, the second city of Korea, maybe Busan might have a claim on that as well. Seoul was for almost a millennium the capital of Korea, and Pyongyang was a historic sort of second capital, but it really had a reputation at that time as being, in an American context, a Las Vegas sort of city. If you want to take a biblical example, you might call it Sodom and Gomorrah, and indeed the missionaries did see it that way. It was a den of sin. They saw it as the least promising place in Korea for this Christian gospel to take root. And so they send this 26-year-old, wide-eyed, idealistic, newly ordained missionary from Indiana up to Pyongyang.

And for reasons that even he can’t quite explain, and that nobody has really been able to explain, although we can get into it, if you’re interested, it was a completely different scene. Samuel Moffett gets there, and he’ll be the first to say it wasn’t anything that I did. It wasn’t because I was particularly clever about it, although I think he is being a little bit too humble by half, because he was a very skilled emissary of the Christian message, if you want to put it that way. But I think ultimately what it was, the results and the response were so strikingly different from Seoul, from Busan, that even if you had said he was a skilled orator, he was a very good messenger, there was still something happening in Pyongyang that was very different. And whatever it may be, the upshot of it is that Pyongyang very quickly, within just a decade or maybe a decade and a half of his arrival, is turning heads in the Christian world all over the world, in London, in New York, in Canada, in Australia, everywhere that something is happening in Korea, and something is happening specifically in Pyongyang that is unlike anything else, with the number of people that are embracing this new faith. And among those very first converts was the family of Kim Il Sung. And the family of Kim Jong Un. And to me, that is just a remarkable fact that I couldn’t quite believe, up until the year 2026, was never really fully explored by anyone else. I almost feel like, with dumb luck, I was able to stumble upon this, but I simply don’t know why it hadn’t been explored to this degree. But anyways, that’s how the Christian message got to North Korea.

Ed Pulford: Great. Yes, well, you trace those networks and some of that trajectory in a very vivid way, I think. You evoke the kind of activities of a mid-20s missionary doing what he’s doing very effectively. But yes, you’ve already alluded here to the protagonists, and the cluster of protagonists really, who lie at the genesis of this story, namely the family of Kim Il Sung. His parents each come from different neighboring villages, their clans, right in Mangyongdae and then nearby Chilgol, these two places where they end up raising their son. How did their involvement in Christianity look? What were they up to? And perhaps you can extend that to the young life of Kim Il Sung, because, as we’re familiar, I think, a more well-known story about the surprising history of the Korean Revolution is that a lot of it took place in Manchuria, in Northeast China, where the family moved when Kim Il Sung was still pretty young. So could you tell us something about Christian life both in Pyongyang, or the outskirts where they were initially living, and then subsequently once they moved up north of the border?

Jonathan Cheng: Yeah, the one thing that we haven’t mentioned somehow is, of course, that Korea was colonized by the Japanese, and this was a very, very scarring experience. It continues to shape politics in Northeast Asia today. And by all measures, it was a very cruel colonization. And so that is a big part of the reason why Christianity becomes associated with Korean nationalism to the degree that it does in the first half of the 20th century. That’s because, unlike Christianity’s entry into almost any country around the world, it was not the hegemonic imperialist forces that were bringing Christianity in. Because the imperialist forces, in this case, were Japan, with its own religion, Shinto. And so Christianity actually ends up being the underdog religion of sorts. It’s a Western religion, or certainly that’s how it’s seen. It’s seen as an American religion when it first comes to Korea, because many of the missionaries are American, although not exclusively, but certainly predominantly from the Anglophone world.

And so the parents of Kim Il Sung are very much in this vein. They are definitely believers in Christianity: the doctrine, the 66 books of the Bible, all the rest of it. And yet you can’t really divorce that from what it represented to Korean nationals at the time, because they saw America as a Christian nation. You could say that that was not a correct perception, but you can see how they came to that conclusion. And so by embracing the Christian faith, and I think in many cases it was genuine. I can’t say in all cases, and the missionaries were very vigilant about this, they were very concerned that many Koreans were embracing Christianity basically because they saw it as a vehicle for getting rid of the Japanese, but indeed, it was so closely intertwined that I think for someone like Kim Il Sung’s father, they were one and the same. And for many of the Korean nationalists during this time, their belief was that Korea must be free of the Japanese, and it’s going to happen under the banner of Jesus Christ. That’s kind of how they believed it would happen.

So at the beginning of the second act of this three-act book, I start with this anecdote with Kim Il Sung’s father in a park, at the tomb of one of the progenitors of the Korean people, semi-legendary, but symbolic, of course, to meet there. And you have him and some of his compatriots. They’re all young teenagers here, piercing their fingers and writing in blood, avowing to do everything they can to get rid of the Japanese imperialists. But what’s notable is that they’re doing this in the context of the Christian ritual. They are praying to God. They’re doing this in the name of Jesus Christ, and it’s inseparable for them to see the Korean nationalist cause and their Christian faith as being one and the same.

And when Japanese rule becomes oppressive enough, it’s the Kim family that joins so many others in going up to Manchuria, as you point out. I know that you’ve spent a lot of time in Manchuria. I think if you haven’t spent a lot of time in Manchuria, or if you’ve not spent a lot of time in 1920s Manchuria, I don’t think either of us has spent too much time in 1920s Manchuria. But perhaps the best way to describe it is, again in American terms, a bit of a Wild West. It was a frontier zone where it was a little bit up for grabs. The Chinese state was not in a position to really assert control over it. The Japanese were spreading their tentacles all across Manchuria, as was Russia from the north. And so you have this contested battleground where all the great powers were fighting for this, and yet nobody had total control. And so it actually turned out to be an ideal place for any Korean nationalist, whether socialist or Christian or otherwise, to try and fight against the Japanese. The Japanese didn’t have full control there.

And so Kim Il Sung’s family is among them. And Kim Il Sung, of course, himself comes of age there. He ends up learning Chinese quite well. Some accounts suggest that his Chinese was even better than his Korean. And what I think is really interesting, too, is that the Christian networks also migrated up into Manchuria. And so throughout Kim Il Sung’s life, his early life, and we know so much of this because he writes about it in his eight-volume memoir, which in many respects is mostly a work of fiction, especially when he tells about all the purported exploits that he did over the Japanese, of which there’s no corroborating independent evidence to be found almost anywhere outside North Korea. But when he writes about his Christianity and his upbringing in the church, it has a very different ring to it. And certainly I would argue that there was very little propagandistic value in him talking so openly about his Christian upbringing.

But whether it was back in the Pyongyang area or whether it was up in Manchuria, it was very clear that Kim Il Sung was raised thoroughly steeped in Christianity. It wasn’t merely, as you said in the opening, going to church on Easter or on Christmas and muttering a few prayers. He was in the deep end of the church. He was learning to play the organ. He was teaching Sunday school. He was performing in church plays. He was living in the home of a pastor for two years in Manchuria. He was doing all these sorts of things. He knew his Bible very well, and he wasn’t afraid to show off how much he knew about the Bible. He had really internalized it to a degree. And a lot of the research I did in this book was very simple: it was simply to take his memoirs, and so many of the people he names—friends that he had, or his father’s friends, or his mother’s relatives, or this and that—sometimes he’ll identify them as being a church elder, or a pastor, or this or that. But many times he’ll just mention them by name, and that’s it, and just not say anything more about them. But you look up a lot of these people, not all of them are famous, but those that you can track down records of, almost all are Christian. For the first 20 years of Kim Il Sung’s life, he lived in what I would call a Christian bubble, whether it was the Pyongyang area or up into Manchuria. He was so surrounded by Christians. He was steeped in this worldview, and this community, and these networks. And so when his father dies, his mother dies, he stays in this network, and it’s all of his father’s Christian friends, and all of his mother’s Christian relatives, helping him out. And as I mentioned, he lives in the home of a pastor for two years, and the home of the pastor is the annex of the church. So one could say that he lived in a church for two years, a Methodist church, as it turns out, a Korean Methodist church in northeastern China, in Manchuria.

Ed Pulford: So good. A lot of those people that you trace from With the Century, right, his sort of autobiography or hagiography, however we might define that book of many volumes, a lot of those appear in your dramatis personae at the end of your book, and quite wryly, I enjoy, at least in the copy I received, that Kim Il Sung, as the first person in that list, is defined first as a church youth group leader, or a Sunday school volunteer, or something, before president of the DPRK. So I do quite enjoy that wry observation, which I think draws directly from your well-argued points about his very active role in a lot of this activity, both as a very young person in Korea itself, up in Manchuria, Northeast China, and then you also discuss his brief return journey as a young person, as a teenager, to Korea, and then subsequent return again to Manchuria, these journeys that are now made legendary or origin-myth-type material in North Korean history, as it’s taught to citizens there.

But perhaps we’ll move on to his subsequent career in the northeast of China, and actually further afield in Northeast Asia, on the background of the Japanese colonial occupation, as you say, which didn’t perhaps completely suppress or wipe out Christianity, but certainly looked askance at it. How did Christianity figure in his life, if at all, once Kim Il Sung took up a more anti-Japanese activist guerrilla-type role? And then subsequently in his rise to political prominence?

Jonathan Cheng: That’s a great question. And I wouldn’t try to assert that Kim Il Sung remained a Christian, if indeed he ever was one. I think that question is one that has vexed me a little bit: the question was, was Kim Il Sung a Christian at any point? And that’s a very difficult question. I suppose it’s how you define that word. How would you define someone being a Christian? We can set that aside. I think what’s very clear is that up until he turns about 20 years old, he’s very much a cultural Christian. He is very much in the church. He understands the church. He understands the ritual and doctrine of the church. He’s internalized it. That’s not the same as saying he was a Christian, per se, but it is true that after the age of 20, he’s now an orphan, and you see him adrift in Manchuria, and eventually he goes over the border into the Russian Far East. And we actually have very little documentation about his life at this point, other than what we have through official North Korean sources, which I think most scholars outside of North Korea would agree are mostly fictionalized, although there is, as with so many things in North Korea, a kernel of truth to a lot of it.

He was somebody who did contribute. He was a guerrilla fighter against the Japanese. This idea now that’s taught in North Korea that he single-handedly vanquished the Japanese is, of course, fiction. And yet, there is a kernel of truth there. We don’t know about his drifting away from the church in too much detail, but I am able to track it through different proxies, because he’s not the only one who starts as a Korean Christian nationalist and then ends up embracing socialism and shedding Christianity. There were many who followed this trajectory, and a lot of it you can actually trace back to Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States at the end of World War I, which is a pivotal moment in my book and in this narrative.

Woodrow Wilson, I won’t dwell on it too long, but of course he was, as president, a very important figure in determining the post-First World War global order. He was the son, grandson, and nephew of Presbyterian ministers, and he had a personal connection to Syngman Rhee, who ended up becoming the first president of South Korea, one of Kim Il Sung’s great bitter political rivals. And so many of the Korean Christians were looking to Woodrow Wilson and his lofty talk of self-determination, the Fourteen Points, all these high ideals. And when they saw that none of it came to pass, that Korea, despite clearly being a distinct people with its own language, and history, and culture, and clothing, and food, and all the rest of it, was not given any sort of recognition. That’s when the appeal of Vladimir Lenin, who also, by the way, talked a lot about self-determination as well. In fact, it was Lenin who spoke of it before Wilson did. And the difference is that in 1919, Wilson did not succeed in implementing so many of his high ideals, whereas two years earlier, in 1917, they did see Lenin come to power in Moscow. So many of the Korean nationalists, many of them Christian, who drift up into Manchuria and, as I mentioned, over the border into the Russian Far East, can see with their own eyes that the promise of Wilsonian democracy and independence and freedom was all talk, whereas you had a revolutionary spirit that had taken hold, and there was a lot of idealism in the early days of the USSR.

And so many, and I think Kim Il Sung would be part of this, although he overplays, I think, his familiarity and his understanding of Marxism-Leninism. He didn’t finish high school, and I don’t want to say that means he was incapable of understanding these sorts of things, but he wasn’t a particularly well-read person. I think even he himself would probably acknowledge that to some degree, although North Korea does, of course, say that he knew all these texts inside out. But we know that for many people who went to go meet him, as the Great Leader of North Korea, came away quite disappointed with his understanding of even his own ideology, the one that was created in his name, the one that is typically called Juche, self-reliance, is usually how it’s translated. Or I would consider that a subset of the real ideology of North Korea, which I would call Kim Il Sungism, which is self-explanatory. And of course, many North Korean texts make it clear that this Juche is but a subset of this larger Kim Il Sungism. But he wasn’t a particularly learned revolutionary in that regard. And I think you could say that many Asian communist leaders, certainly Ho Chi Minh, I think many would put him in that category, were actually relatively well-read. But nonetheless, I think that Kim Il Sung, like so many others, embraced socialism and drifted away from Christianity simply for practical reasons. One worked, the other didn’t. And for him, he always made it very clear that the most important thing to him was nationalism, like being Korean. That was the most important thing to him. And if Christianity would have aided in that, perhaps North Korea would have been more explicitly Christian. I don’t know that that would be the case, but it’s something that is certainly quite interesting to surmise and turn over in our heads.

But be that as it may, the way he does end up setting up his state, he does actually try to keep the vestiges of Christianity all the way up to the present day. You mentioned Billy Graham coming and visiting, and of course that happens under the auspices of this state church that he allows to continue, but we can get into that later, if you’re interested.

Ed Pulford: Yes, I think perhaps we will. There’s a lot that you’ve identified there which gives some of the big world-changing 20th-century ideologies, if we call them that, or ways of thinking, ways of organizing the world, a certain kind of connection to Christianity and to the kinds of culturalized, or sort of inextricably embedded, presence of Christianity in some of the contexts from which nationalism, or indeed Marxism-Leninism, or many other things, emerged. I think some would point to the very teleological, almost Edenic, heavenly trajectory of Marxism, as a process of linear movement towards communism, as having a certain formal connection. And I think a lot of research in terms of who the 19th-century interlocutors and discussion groups were, that were the seedbed of a lot of that thinking, shows that it doesn’t make those things Christian, but Christian people, or culturally Christian people, were involved in a great deal of that stuff in Europe. And as you say, so too whether the national form in general, or the Wilsonian moment in particular, in the earlier part of the 20th century, also emerged from this kind of increasingly hegemonic Euro-American axis and way of thinking. But to see the way it bedded down in this quite specific context, and of course the way it’s subsequently developed, is what’s so intriguing, or one very intriguing aspect of your book.

So, as you’ve already mentioned, Kim ends up in the Russian Far East, in this camp. The end of the Japanese occupation of Korea came with the defeat of Japan in 1945. And although Kim doesn’t actually participate in the liberation per se, he ends up back in Korea in the mid-1940s, and is sort of shunted into place, if that’s not too crude a representation of what happens, by Soviet sponsors who occupy the northern half of the peninsula at this point. Once he’s sort of established in power and getting momentum there as the leader of this new state in the North, what sort of attitude towards Christianity does he display? What’s left of that flourishing community from the earlier parts of the 20th century by this mid-stage in the 20th century? And how does it get treated politically?

Jonathan Cheng: Yeah, great question. You know, I think we alluded to it earlier, but the Japanese did not shut down the church on the Korean Peninsula, in part because a large motivation that they had was to show the Western world that the Japanese, too, could be a civilized colonizing power. And in order to show that they belonged at the table with all the other great empires, they did not want to attack the one institution that would have been most dear to many of the Western leaders, which would have been the church. And so that’s part of the reason why the church remained as this network of resistance against the Japanese, because it was the only place on the Korean Peninsula where one could express one’s pride in being Korean, and one could organize and meet and do all these sorts of things.

And so by 1945, the church was still intact in Pyongyang, in Seoul. In fact, it’s spread all over the peninsula, although the heartland of the faith remains the northwest where Pyongyang is today. And so Kim Il Sung is interesting in that when he comes to power, I think we need to make clear, he’s 33 years old. He did not finish high school. He was somebody who was shunted into place, as you said, I think that is true to a degree, although that might undersell a little bit how just incredibly smart and wily he was, because it did require quite sharp elbows in order to be the one Stalin and the Soviets backed. And I think what’s interesting is, for Kim Il Sung, for him to become leader, the most important thing was, yes, the sponsorship of the Soviets. There’s no question about that. But I think what he understood, growing up in the Jerusalem of the East to a deeply Christian family, is that if Pyongyang was going to be the capital of the Soviet-backed North, which it effectively was—it wasn’t actually made official until 1972, but it was the de facto capital of what we would now call North Korea from the beginning—he knew that this was a conservative stronghold, a conservative Christian stronghold, and he knew that other than securing Stalin’s support, this was the next most important thing he needed to do.

And so he did not actually first go and try and take down the Christians in any way. He tried to co-opt them. He tried to work with them. He tried to cajole them, and he did that by leaning on his Christian upbringing. He has a distant uncle of his who was his teacher when he was studying for two years as a young boy in a church school that his grandfather helped establish. And by this point, he’s a revivalist pastor, and he gets this former teacher, distant uncle, revivalist pastor of his, to go and try and build bridges with the Christian leaders in Pyongyang, and he’s presented, again as you said at the beginning of this episode, as a Moses-like figure who could lead the Korean people, like Moses did in the Old Testament, out of the clutches of the Egyptians—in this case, out of the clutches of the Japanese—and into the promised land, as it were, in this case, a socialist promised land. And so that was really the pitch. And it wasn’t until the following year, 1946, that you start to see the tone shift a little bit, and that’s partly because he faces a lot of resistance from the Christian community in Pyongyang. Many of them are quite conservative, and at this time this is a period of assassinations, a lot of intrigue, a lot of this sort of thing. And the Christians were not immune to this at all. Christian doctrine may teach a lot about love and mercy and all the rest of it, but many of them were trying to kill Kim Il Sung because they regarded him as a representative of an atheistic, socialistic, godless regime, and so they tried to take him out. And when that happens, I think you start to see the turn come quite dramatically.

And so the notion that most people would have in their heads about North Korea being quite harsh towards Christianity is certainly true. I would say that that is the main feature of North Korea and its relationship with Christianity. What I’ve tried to bring in with this book, of course, is to show that it’s far more complex than that, it’s far more unexpected than that. And yet, it is true that in the main, Kim Il Sung and the North Korean regime that he set up was incredibly hostile to Christianity, although it wasn’t at first. Very soon, though, it did take on the forms that any layman, myself before I started writing this book, would have thought, that indeed the goal was to suppress Christianity, because they saw it as a rival ideology, a rival faith, as it were, to Kim Il Sungism. And so that persists for most of the first two or three decades of North Korean rule.

Ed Pulford: Yes, it’s certainly the case, as you say, that there’s a lot more nuance there, as you argue, between the point at which Pyongyang remains a focal point for Christian activity, and then a more archetypal state-socialist approach to not only theism as a social force, but anything that is a rival power center or an alternative source of loyalty. You’ve already alluded a bit to the intersections between Christianity and nationalism in a broader Korean context here, given the simultaneity, if nothing else, of the uptick in Christian belief with the experience of Japanese colonization. And it’s also the case that in the ’40s and ’50s, either side of the horrible Korean War, which Kim Il Sung basically stands at the heart of as the prime actor behind the whole thing, Christianity in South Korea is also taking off a lot, the kind of nationalist energy behind it. You’ve mentioned Syngman Rhee already as someone involved in this world. So it occurs to me now whether there is any comparative attention that Kim Il Sung and the North Korean government are paying to the South Korean situation and the presence of Christianity there. That continues, obviously, to develop into the ’60s and ’70s, and under Park Chung-hee on either side. Christianity contains a new kind of prominence. Is Pyongyang looking at South Korea as this completely rigidly divided Cold War situation develops in Korea, as a place where Christianity is actually quite vocally discussed, and then somewhat on the way to becoming what we see now, and making an effort to differentiate oneself from that? Is that something you see in the political project?

Jonathan Cheng: I think it creates a problem for Kim Il Sung. First of all, many of the great megachurches that were founded in Seoul after the Korean War, or during the Korean War, or shortly before the Korean War—certainly after the division of the peninsula—were founded by Christian refugees from the North. So many of the great megachurches were founded by pastors who fled from the north and wrapped themselves in the flag, as it were, of South Korea. And so you have this really close association between anti-communism and Christianity. And I think, by the way, that helps to explain a little bit of why no serious scholarship has been done on this topic. I think for many years, certainly under Park Chung-hee, as you say, when South Korea was under strongman leadership, you couldn’t freely study. And the close association—and partially he was himself not a Christian, he was a Buddhist, but he allied himself very closely with the Christian Church—I think it was very difficult for any scholar at that point to have really deeply investigated Kim Il Sung’s Christian upbringing, because Kim Il Sung was the Antichrist, really. That was kind of how he was portrayed in the South. He was this demonic force that had crushed Christianity in its heartland. And the notion that he himself might have been a product of the church was just too much to handle in many ways. And of course, I then go back and think a little bit about the story of Lucifer in the Bible, and you get reminded that Lucifer was not always an adversary. He was a fallen angel. And so I see a parallel there too, because the greatest enemy of the church in North Korea was not somebody who just had it out for the church from day one. It was a product of the church.

And so I think a lot of that also led to a lot of skepticism when Kim Il Sung, later in life does start to re-engage with the faith of his youth towards the end of his life. But yes, certainly Christianity becomes this kind of battleground. It also makes it more difficult for Kim Il Sung because he’s portrayed in this way, and he is crushing the church, and there are no churches openly practicing Christianity for decades after Kim Il Sung came to power. And so he does a little bit of this two-step where he says, “Look, I’m not against Christianity itself. I’m against people who have equated Christianity with America. They’re worshiping America. They’re not worshiping God.” And actually, that’s the other interesting thing: Kim Il Sung is very rarely quoted saying anything mean or not nice about Christianity as a faith. Partly because I think he understood his own personal debt to Christianity, he never goes and attacks Christianity. He always says you can be a Christian patriot. And indeed, that pastor uncle of his that I mentioned is elevated to the vice presidency of the DPRK, where he remained for decades until his death in the early ’80s. And so that’s something that is not a secret: that Kim Il Sung had populated the upper echelons of his government with many of his family members, and many of them were Christian. And of course, they owed their fealty to him first and foremost, and found some way in their minds to square the fact that they were self-identified as Christians but also okay with this personality cult that had grown to monstrous levels and that was effectively making Kim Il Sung himself a deity. So there’s a lot to unpack there.

Ed Pulford: Yes, indeed. And you trace the history you’ve briefly condensed there in great richness and depth, including documenting some of the cultural representations of missionaries that appear in the decades after the Korean War, as these sort of monstrous, exploitative figures in league with the American imperialists and so on. And so it’s pretty clear that an absolute denunciation and rejection of that as a nationalistically poisoned faith is the picture that largely emerges of Christianity in official North Korean state narratives, and the history of that faith community in Pyongyang and so on is minimized to a great extent. But exactly as you’ve just finished your answer to me there, and as we near the end of our conversation, it is the case that as time goes on Kim Il Sung attains this deified status, if by nothing else than, of course, his own or large part because of his own designs. And there are, again, beyond the Moses analogy earlier on, all of these other very appealing comparisons and resemblances: this sort of Trinitarian quality to once Kim Jong Il comes on the scene as the son and successor, and of course Kim Jong Il’s mother as a third figure in that pattern; the imagery and iconography, these halo-like glows that you get on portraits of the leaders and so on that I mentioned briefly in my intro. And indeed, you get something which in a vernacular, everyday way starts to look a lot like a faith, or certainly an intense form of dedication and self-subjugation to an ideology, which might in some people’s eyes be tantamount to a religion. If someone asks you, “Is Kim Il Sungism a religion?” What’s your answer to that question?

Jonathan Cheng: I would say it is a religion. Obviously, defining a religion can get squishy, defining a cult is even more perilous, I think we all have to be very careful about that. But I would definitely describe it that way, because whether you’re talking about ritual or doctrine, we’ve had people going back several centuries trying to pin down what is a religion. And certainly in the context of East Asia, we know that things like Confucianism or Taoism don’t fit the Western classical definitions of religion so much. And yet, what you find with Kim Il Sungism is so much that does actually fit standard Émile Durkheimian sort of definitions of what a religion would be. I’m not going to get into all of it here, but suffice it to say that I do spend quite a bit of time going into all of that. And it doesn’t happen all at once. It happens over the course of decades, where you start to see new teachings emerge, rituals emerge, that give it more and more the feeling and the trappings of a religion.

And so much of what I’m trying to do here is to try and convince and show that North Korea in many ways is a religious society. It’s a religious society that is organized around the veneration and the worship of Kim Il Sung, and of course now Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, and the Kim family. That’s what it is. I mean, when you get to the core of what Kim Il Sungism is, you had many people, many quite earnest, bushy-tailed students of Juche ideology that would come to North Korea and realize there wasn’t anything there. It was a religion. It was ultimately about whether or not you were going to owe your allegiance, owe your loyalty, owe your veneration, your faith, your worship, to this family, or were you not? And so you see it even today with North Koreans sent to the warfront in Ukraine, and you see the letters that they send home and the kind of devotion that they have. It transcends mere political loyalty. It is closer to religious fervor.

Ed Pulford: But religions do have teachings. They have widely adhered-to moral codes and these kinds of other things beyond the faith, as an expression in some ways of an adherence to a wider position in the world and broader forms of comportment towards others and so on. What’s your sense of what that does to our understanding of religion, whether Kim Il Sungism is one?

Jonathan Cheng: Yeah, I don’t want to say there’s nothing there, but certainly if you try to understand it through the lens of Marxism-Leninism, which is how the North Koreans portray it, they see Kim Il Sungism as an improvement on, and then eventually a transcending ideology that took them beyond anything that Marx or Lenin could possibly have imagined themselves, and therefore deserving of this title, like Maoism, like Stalinism, like Kim Il Sungism. And yet so much of it was so strikingly religious. And again, I do get into it in the book, but you have a doctrine that begins to emerge in the ’80s. It does talk about this sociopolitical life that we all have supposedly. It’s not just our physical, biological lives, but if you lay your life down for the cause of the leader, you attain a transcendence. You attain immortality of sorts through this act that you’ve done. And I don’t want to say that that is exclusive to Christianity. I think there are many faith traditions that have this element of giving one’s life and finding some sort of eternal meaning and significance in having done that. And yet, of course, we know that what Kim Il Sung himself was most familiar with, was most deeply steeped in—and by the way, that’s the guy who not only founded North Korea but ran it for 49 years and then handed it off to his son and his grandson—we know it wasn’t an accident. You may say, “Oh, they have this tradition in ancient South America or something like that,” but that’s not where Kim Il Sung would have been drawing from. He would have been drawing from his own experiences.

And so much of it is quasi-religious, bordering on religion itself, that yes, I think that is what he built. And I think he understood, growing up in the Jerusalem of the East, how powerful religious faith can be, how core it is to the human condition to need to believe in something bigger, to feel part of something bigger, our community, and to have some sort of answer for what happens after we die. Because science, for all of its incredible advances, has not really been able to definitively answer that question. What happens after you die? Are we just ashes to ashes, dust to dust? And so all the religions, all the great world religions, and even some of the lesser-known ones, even some of the kooky ones, will all at least attempt to address that, because there is no scientific textbook answer that is ultimately satisfying to hundreds of millions and billions of people around the world.

So you do have all of these elements that come in, and I think he recognized partly because he was raised in the Christian church. And it wasn’t a bad religion to be raised in, even if you were only looking to religion as a pure political cudgel with which to exercise authority, because Christianity, as we all know, through the millennia, has proven to be perhaps the most, or certainly one of the most powerful, political ideologies, if you want to consider it that. And so to model it after that requires two things. It requires an understanding of how faith works and being able to substitute yourself for Jesus Christ, or however you want to put it. But it also does require sidelining the real thing, the genuine article, because he was alive and very aware of the power of Christianity, because he himself experienced it and he saw it all around him. And so that is part of the reason why he was cracking down so harshly and so thoroughly against Christianity, even as he was building up Kim Il Sungism in its place.

Ed Pulford: Great. I think one thing that is most compelling about this book as a whole is the person of Kim Il Sung, with which you sort of just concluded there, as a kind of nexus for this tremendous set of forces or influences, and then, as you say, actions building on those influences, as a social being, a political actor, all these different things. And there is something very human, perhaps, in the way that he becomes a bit smushy in his old age and gets a bit nostalgic and a bit misty-eyed about that past. And that’s how we get to the appearance of people like Billy Graham, along with a whole host of other pastors and people with connections to that northern bastion of Christianity in earlier decades, returning to Pyongyang in the latter part of the book. You also trace, in an epilogue, some developments subsequent to that, including the activities of various Christian missionaries or attempted Christian missionaries in North Korea in more recent times, the opening of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), which has a Christian background too. But we’ll leave those things for the readers to explore, because there are so many other things we could have discussed. So I’ll firstly say thank you very much for talking to me today. It’s really been great to discuss this amazing book.

Jonathan Cheng: It’s a lot of fun, and again, you’ve been listening to me talk about this book for a very long time. There were moments where I wondered whether I would ever get it over the finish line, but here we are. It’s out there in the world. And yes, I mean, I could talk for days about this, but fortunately there’s a written version of it that you don’t have to listen to me talk about for days, but it may take you days to read.

Ed Pulford: It will be a pleasure over many days to do so for anyone who does pick it up. This one has been a labor of love for you, as you’ve mentioned. So I guess maybe it’s uncharitable, perhaps, to ask you whether you have any next-book-type projects in the pipeline, things developing from or building on, or completely away from, your journalistic work in China. Anything else that’s kind of now this is finally done, anything else in the pipeline?

Jonathan Cheng: No, honestly, my genuine answer to that question, and you’re not the first to ask, is I really don’t have another one in me, at least not that I can see. Part of why I wrote this book—and we talked at the beginning about how I stumbled upon this and how I came to write this book—is I think I need to have, first of all, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this book. I enjoyed it perhaps too much. But part of the reason I enjoyed it so much is because I really do feel like this was a topic that grabbed me by the lapels and demanded that I write it. And unless I feel that again, I don’t intend to write a book simply because I want to write another book. But this one just tied together so many things that I was always so curious about. And having spent six years in South Korea, having been to North Korea a few times, and having just been so fascinated by North Korea. Anyone who spends a little bit of time getting deep into North Korea, it can stick its hooks in you. There’s nowhere else like it on Earth, really. There’s nowhere else like this society on earth, and it’s intriguing. And here in Beijing, it’s not that far away either. And yet even the Chinese look at North Korea and even they are gawking and baffled as well, because even though they have their own experience during the Cultural Revolution with Maoism reaching these fevered heights, it’s nothing like what we have had in North Korea now for three generations, 81 years and counting. And that now has a nuclear arsenal. This is something that we need to understand and something that we need to take seriously. As much as the Kims have been mocked or made fun of in the Western imagination, it’s a deadly serious thing, of course. And to recognize and understand that its roots come in many ways from the very heart of America, the Western world, Christianity, there’s something there that I just found so powerful and that I just needed to follow all the way to the very end. And so that’s what I’ve done. But I don’t have a second act. But you never know. Another topic may come and grab me by the lapels, but until then, I’m enjoying my life not writing books right now.

Ed Pulford: Great. Well, as you say, it’s something that does need to be understood, and I think you’ve done a great service in helping us towards that understanding. It also shows a degree of humility and realism, which is maybe perhaps not so present in your protagonist in this book, to be realistic about not having something that immediately you need to do to further take over the world. So Jonathan Cheng, once again, thank you very much for speaking to the New Books Network today.

Jonathan Cheng: It was a lot of fun. Thank you.

Ed Pulford: Great. And listeners, thank you very much for listening, as always, and we will be back in your feeds or ears or somewhere next time. Goodbye.

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