Written by Yoon Young-Kwan
The author is a former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of South Korea and is the president of the Asan Institute for Political Studies.
The latest attempt by U.S. President Donald Trump to reinitiate dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has strained relations with South Korea and reinforced the growing belief in Asia that the United States is an unpredictable ally. By reducing joint military exercises with South Korea, Trump risks generating greater instability in a volatile region. Even Chinese President Xi Jinping is unlikely to be satisfied, as Kim is almost certain to interpret Trump’s move as support for his efforts to gain greater independence from China.
Similar to the current conflict with Iran, the Trump administration appears to have acted without fully considering the potential consequences of its actions. More than the Soviet Union, North Korea embodies Winston Churchill’s riddle, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” This means that addressing its situation rarely, if ever, succeeds with a policy based on subjective judgments.
Instead, the Trump administration should leverage efforts to shed new light on what is considered the world’s most secretive society. By analyzing how a twisted interpretation of Christianity helped shape the communist dynasty in North Korea, the recent book by Jonathan Cheng, *The Korean Messiah: Kim Il-sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult*, constitutes a valuable contribution to the existing literature.
At the heart of Cheng’s narrative is the extraordinary story of how North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, used his Christian education to develop and consolidate a personality cult that has endured for eight decades. By appropriating religious structures, doctrines, and imagery, he laid the groundwork for the hereditary communist regime now ruled by his grandson, Kim Jong-un.
Scholars have long noted that North Korea’s official ideology, Kimilsungism and Juche (self-reliance), operates in some ways like a faith. Cheng’s contribution lies in placing the regime’s religious dimension within a much broader historical and geopolitical context, tracing the forces that have shaped the Korean peninsula over the centuries, from the imperial rivalries of the late 19th century and Japanese colonial rule to the liberation in 1945, the division between North and South, the Cold War, and the famine of the 1990s. Throughout this broader history lies the book’s central theme: the complex interplay between political power and Christianity that gave rise to Kim Il-sung’s personality cult.
Cheng’s reliance on archival documents, letters, photographs, diaries, and biographies—many of which were previously unknown or inaccessible—allows him to reconstruct the roles of the many figures who shaped Korea’s turbulent modern history. By comparing official accounts with a wide range of independent sources, he creates a rigorous and vivid historical narrative.
His striking account of the transformation of Pyongyang particularly captures the paradox of a regime that brutally repressed organized religion while demanding almost religious devotion to its ruling family. Once dubbed the “Jerusalem of the East,” the North Korean capital became the epicenter of the deification of the Kims, precisely the type of idolatry that Christianity expressly forbids.
The Christian Roots of the Kim Dynasty
Cheng traces the origins of the Christian resurgence in Korea to Samuel Moffett, an American missionary from Madison, Indiana, who arrived in Pyongyang in 1893 and helped spread the faith throughout the peninsula despite numerous obstacles.
Christianity gained followers after Korea became embroiled in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars and, in 1905, lost control of its foreign affairs to Japan. Amid the devastating reality of a country in ruins, many Koreans placed their hopes in what to them was an unfamiliar Western religion. In January 1907, Pyongyang became the center of an extraordinary Christian revival, one of the largest in Asia’s history. The movement soon spread across the peninsula and beyond, reaching expatriate communities in Manchuria.
The Korean Messiah then focuses on Kim Il-sung himself. His father, Kim Hy?ng-jik, attended a missionary school and was deeply religious. Influenced by missionaries such as Moffett and William Baird, he initially aspired to be a pastor. Kim’s mother, Kang Pan-s?k, was even more devout, while his father, Kang Ton-uk, was a religious leader who had founded a missionary school.
However, under Japanese rule, Christian missionaries generally adhered to the Japanese Government-General’s policy of keeping churches out of politics and restricting them to religious affairs. This increasingly alienated Korean nationalists who yearned for independence.
The cause of Korean self-determination seemed to gain significant momentum on January 8, 1918, when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points to Congress to end World War I. His fifth point declared that, in resolving colonial disputes, “the interests of the affected populations must be given equal weight” with those of imperial powers.
However, the hopes of nationalists were ultimately frustrated, leading some to lean toward socialism, just as radicals did in China and Vietnam. The brutal repression of the nonviolent March First Movement in 1919 further weakened the appeal of the moderate Christian strand of Korean nationalism.
Kim Il-sung came of age amid this radical fervor. According to his memoirs, he founded the Down with Imperialism Union at the age of 14 while attending Huacheng Academy. North Korean historiography would later present it as a precursor to the Workers’ Party of Korea.
A significant turning point occurred with the death of Reverend Son Ch?ng-do, a gradualist Christian and friend of Kim’s father, who had greatly influenced young Kim, in February 1931. Shortly thereafter, Kim began to lean towards socialism, with its emphasis on mass power, rather than the gradualist Enlightenment movement associated with activist An Chang-ho and the dependency on U.S. support advocated by future South Korean President Rhee Syngman.
By late 1940, Kim crossed the Amur River into the Soviet Union, where he later became a captain in the Soviet Army’s 88th Brigade, placing him firmly in the Soviet political and military orbit. These were desperate years for Korea. The Japanese invasion of China had turned the peninsula into a military supply base, while colonial authorities attempted to suppress Christianity by forcing Koreans to attend ceremonies at Shinto shrines.
The Birth of the Cult of Kim
Much of the second half of The Korean Messiah focuses on the Soviet occupation of North Korea, when the seeds of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult were sown. The historical irony is that Kim and his followers systematically persecuted Christianity, only to fill the spiritual void by repurposing Christian language and symbolism, creating a political religion centered around Kim himself.
Cheng contrasts the rapid and shrewd maneuvers of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during the final stages of World War II with the relative indifference of the United States to Korea’s fate in the postwar period. On August 8, 1945, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and quickly sent troops to the Korean peninsula. Alarmed by the speed of the Soviet advance, the Truman administration hastily proposed the 38th parallel as a temporary dividing line, a suggestion that Stalin accepted.
The Allied powers soon went further, agreeing to subject the country to an international trusteeship for a maximum of five years instead of granting it immediate independence. The idea itself was not new. At the Tehran Conference in 1943, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed to Stalin that Korea be placed under trusteeship for 40 years, arguing that Koreans were still incapable of self-governance. Subsequently, that period was shortened at the Moscow Foreign Ministers’ Conference, where the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom announced the agreement on December 27, 1945.
Koreans viewed the agreement as a profound betrayal. Following the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905 and Wilson’s failure to fulfill his promise of national self-determination in 1919, the trusteeship regime reinforced the sense that Korea’s fate was still at the mercy of foreign powers. The Korean War would ultimately confirm those fears, as the 1953 armistice replaced the 38th parallel with the Military Demarcation Line that separates North and South Korea to this day.
In Korea, the news of the agreement unleashed a fierce struggle between supporters and opponents of the trusteeship regime. The vast majority of Korean political factions initially opposed the plan, but after Stalin ordered Northern communists to support it, Kim Il-sung and his allies quickly fell in line.
Notably, the Soviet authorities occupying North Korea had not initially planned to appoint Kim as their leader. Their first choice was Cho Mansik, a Christian nationalist and gradualist who enjoyed overwhelming popular support. But when Cho firmly resisted pressure from both the Soviets and Kim’s supporters to endorse the trusteeship plan, the Soviets abandoned him and threw their support behind Kim.
To consolidate the communist regime, Kim and his Soviet allies needed to win over the influential Christian population of the North. A crucial ally in this effort was Kang Yang-uk, a distant maternal relative of Kim who had also been his catechism teacher.
Kang created the Christian Federation of Chos?n to bring pro-Kim Christian leaders under the regime’s control, punishing those who refused to join. The 1946 agrarian reform dealt another severe blow to the church and other centers of opposition by undermining their economic bases. Meanwhile, missionaries were increasingly denounced as agents or spies of U.S. imperialism. As persecution intensified, over a million Christians fled south between 1945 and 1950, contributing to the emergence of Christianity as a powerful force in the South.
Because Kim lacked a solid political base, Soviet authorities embellished his military record. His idolization took on a life of its own in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s personality cult and initiated the process of de-Stalinization, which deeply unsettled Kim. In August of that year, Kim’s internal rivals attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow him. North Korea responded by further distancing itself from the Soviet Union and China, while doubling down on its efforts to deify Kim. According to Cheng, by the early 1960s, his personality cult surpassed even that of Stalin.
From Cult to Dynasty
Faith in Kim, the Great Leader, soon came to dominate daily life in North Korea. Citizens received between three and four hours of ideological education daily, in addition to regular sessions of “self-criticism.” Just as Catholics confess their sins to God, North Koreans were required to acknowledge their failures to live according to Kim’s teachings before their peers on a weekly basis. Art and literature were similarly transformed to place Kim at the center of the hopes, dreams, and imagination of the people, systematically integrating his cult into the country’s cultural fabric.
At the same time, the regime sought to isolate the country from ideas, ideologies, and cultural influences that challenged Kim’s supremacy. Under Kang’s leadership, Christianity—considered an ideological rival to Kim’s personality cult—was eradicated, and external influences were increasingly excluded. After visiting Pyongyang in October 1964, British economist Joan Robinson noted that Kim did not seem “a dictator, but a savior messiah.”
After thwarting another coup plot in 1967, Kim further expanded his personality cult by consecrating his absolute authority. The regime subsequently codified its demand for total loyalty in the “Ten Principles for Establishing a Monolithic Ideological System,” which prevailed over the constitution and ordinary law, and which Cheng compares to the biblical Ten Commandments. As Kang Myung-do, a defector and great-nephew of Kang Yang-uk, wrote in his 2017 book, *Now I Can Speak!*, Kim Il-sung “used his family’s deep Christian tradition to idolize himself.”
Deification soon extended beyond Kim to his family, laying the ideological foundations for hereditary succession. Kim’s parents became “saints of the revolution,” while his mother was elevated to the status of “Mother of Korea,” akin to that of the Virgin Mary. In this process, North Korea rejected the prevailing view within the socialist bloc—shared by Stalin and Mao Zedong—that leadership should not be transmitted by lineage.
The interaction between Christianity and the Kim cult continued to shape North Korea’s history in the ensuing decades. Following Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 and the subsequent joint communiqué of July 4 between North and South, Kim Il-sung began to openly acknowledge the Christian influence in his youth. In the 1980s, the regime softened its hostility toward Christianity and allowed exchanges with international Christian organizations. The publication of Kim’s memoirs in 1992 marked another turning point, followed by visits from prominent Christian figures, such as American evangelist Billy Graham.
Kim Jong-il, who assumed leadership after his father’s death in 1994, further developed the religious dimensions of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult. In the face of the Great Famine and the Arduous March, he transformed Kimilsungism and Juche into a faith system designed to endure across generations, preserving Kim Il-sung as an immortal presence at the heart of North Korean life.
Cheng attributes the regime’s survival under Kim Jong-il to a powerful combination of tactical cunning and the continued deification of his father. The current ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, receives relatively little attention, with only eight of the book’s 768 pages dedicated to his rule. However, Cheng underscores the continuity of the personality cult across generations. Like his father and grandfather, the regime’s propaganda presents Kim as a genius, a descendant of the sacred lineage of Mount Paektu, who excels in virtually all fields. He is described as “identical to President Kim Il-sung in every respect,” linking the grandson to the dynasty’s founder by ties of blood and character.
Can the Sect Survive?
The Korean Messiah on the origins and extraordinary reach of Kim Il-sung’s personality cult may lead readers to believe that his influence in North Korea is permanent. However, the forces that sustain authoritarian regimes are never static. Geopolitical conditions change, economies and societies evolve, and public attitudes transform accordingly.
In this regard, the book pays little attention to deeper structural forces that may be eroding the foundations of the Kim dynasty. Readers interested in the future of North Korea will wonder whether a system built around the deification of Kim Il-sung can remain relevant under Kim Jong-un’s rule and that of whoever succeeds him.
Kim Jong-un’s governing style offers few reasons to believe this is possible. Since 2023, he has abandoned the goal of national unification, a cornerstone of Kim Il-sung’s vision and the ultimate aim of Juche, treating North and South Korea as two hostile states. In doing so, he has undermined a fundamental pillar of the ideological heritage that supports the Kim regime.
Moreover, the exclusion of contrary ideas and external influences has become increasingly difficult. Following the Great Famine and the Arduous March of the 1990s, the partial introduction of market mechanisms revitalized trade and contact with the outside world, creating new channels for foreign information to enter. The spread of South Korean pop culture among the market generation has been particularly significant. As a defector recently told me, almost all North Korean citizens are likely to have heard South Korean dramas or music at least once, exposing them to a reality that starkly contrasts with what the regime presents.
The implications can be profound: losing the monopoly on information makes it exceedingly challenging to hide North Korea’s poverty or maintain the carefully constructed image it projects to the outside world. Kim Jong-un’s own rhetoric suggests he is fully aware of these risks. At a military parade commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea in October 2020, he shed tears and apologized for not always living up to the immense trust the North Korean people had placed in him. A year later, while praising the revolutionary achievements of the Party, he acknowledged that significant changes were occurring in popular consciousness and the social environment.
In this context, Kim’s abandonment of unification and adherence to the doctrine of “two hostile states” can be interpreted as an attempt to contain the growing appeal of the South. As access to outside information reveals the deep gap between the two countries, the prospect of unification carries the dangerous implication that North Koreans might begin to envision a better life as part of a unified and democratic Korea.
All of this suggests that the Kim family’s personality cult may no longer be sufficient to withstand the pressures generated by economic hardships, changing public opinion, and the rising influence of South Korean culture. While the regime’s political ideology proved enormously effective in consolidating Kim Il-sung’s power and legitimizing hereditary succession, its influence seems to have weakened. Kim Jong-un has responded by tightening control over information and reinforcing barriers between North Koreans and the outside world, resorting to a politics of fear to keep the population in check.
Meanwhile, Kim has begun to appear in public with his daughter Kim Ju-ae, believed to be around 13 years old, sparking speculation about whether he is preparing her to be his successor. But even if she comes to power, it remains to be seen whether the personality cult constructed by her great-grandfather can keep the Kim dynasty alive into a fourth generation.
The final irony lies in the fact that, as effectively as North Korean rulers have appropriated Christian doctrines and rhetoric to elevate Kim Il-sung to a nearly divine status, the entire system is based on the deification of a mortal man. Despite their efforts to transform the Kim dynasty into an eternal kingdom, the most appropriate biblical parallel may be the Tower of Babel.
Cheng’s nuanced and compassionate account of North Korean Christianity also resonates with me personally. I converted to Christianity thanks to my wife and her mother, a Christian who fled Pyongyang during the Korean War. As a believer and political scientist, I hold out hope that North Koreans will one day find relief from their suffering and freedom from the regime that has perpetuated it.