How Christianity Shaped North Korea’s Personality Cult

Before Pyongyang became the capital of the Kim dynasty, it was known as the "Jerusalem of the East," a city so devoutly Christian that one American missionary in 1925 declared it "the most Protestant city" they had ever seen. Its most consequential resident was a Sunday school teacher named Kim Il Sung. 

Ian and Chang are joined by Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal's China bureau chief, to break down how a child of the church turned a nation into a nuclear-armed religious society. He is the author of Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult (Knopf, April 2026)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, and welcome to Into Asia. I'm your co-host, Chang Che. And I'm Ian Baruba. Today we are here with the Beijing bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Chang, but we're moving a bit east of China to talk about Jonathan's recent book, Korean Messiah, a biography of Kimmyo-sun and the Christian roots of his personality cult. Jonathan, welcome to Into Asia. Hey, it's a real pleasure to be here. So, John, you were previously the Korea bureau chief for the journal. You had visited North Korea while you were bureau chief. I'm wondering whether you could just talk a little bit about the inception of the book. Was it partly driven by your fascination with North Korea as you visited, or did you already have an interest in North Korea before you were the bureau chief?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Well, I'd been learning Korean for a few years before being sent to Seoul. My family is not Korean. My parents are from Hong Kong, so I'm Southern Chinese, but born in Canada. So I did already have a little bit of an interest in North Korea, but I can't say I had much more knowledge of the country than the average uh avid newsreader, of which I would count myself as one. When I was sent to South Korea in 2013, uh, one of the first things I did do was to go to North Korea. I spent about 10 days there as a tourist. Um, back then it was a bit more of a normal thing that people could go to North Korea. Uh these days, of course, it's it's near impossible, certainly if you're an American citizen. That is really where I think that fascination really kicked into overdrive. Um, I was able to make another trip in 2017 when they invited the Wall Street Journal to visit. But really, it was 2013 that this book really began to take shape in my mind. It didn't actually start as a book at all. It was something that I was thinking I might want to write as a long, perhaps essay-ish, essayistic kind of a weekend piece for the Wall Street Journal because I studied history in school. I'm a big history buff, and one of the first things I did when I knew I was being sent to Korea was to read what I could about North Korea. And so you find that when you pick up any book about North Korea, you'll learn the basics of Kim Il-sung's life because he was the founder of the state. You'll learn that he was born on the outskirts of Pyongyang in 1912, uh, born, in fact, on the same day that the Titanic sank. Um, you'll learn that he um was raised in a devout Christian family. Perhaps you'll learn that Pyongyang was a center of Christendom at the time. All these things were quite fascinating to me, but they're all mentioned for about a sentence or two, or at most a paragraph in any of these books that you'll read before that then moves on and talks about Kimil Sung's uh guerrilla fighter career and then how he ends up in Pyongyang in 1945, and then it just keeps barreling on in that way, and then you get to sort of the North Korea that we know today. And yet for me, I think the really big question was hold on, what is this bit here about his upbringing in the Christian church, about his family being um quite a devout family, about Pyongyang being the city that was so Christianized it was called the Jerusalem of the East. I wanted to resolve this mystery of here I am in Pyongyang, 2013. I'm a tourist, I'm looking around at everything I see in Pyongyang around me, and the statues of Kim Il sung everywhere, his portrait on the walls of every room you walk into, his portrait pinned over everyone's heart, um, the praise songs that have been written for him, um, the quotations that everyone has to memorize of him. Um, it just felt to me like there must have been some sort of a connection here. It couldn't have been coincidence that the man who created the world's greatest and most over-the-top personality cult, the fact that he was raised in a Christian home in a very devoutly Christian city, could there possibly have been any connection? And so that was where it all started. And I wanted to do a little bit of research and perhaps, like I said, put together a piece of maybe, I don't know, call it 1,500 words, 2,000 words, and maybe I could introduce to the average newsreader, hey, did you know that Pyongyang before it became known as the capital of the Kim dynasty was known as this Christian city? Um, so that that's how it began.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

I think the thesis is fascinating, but while you were talking, I kept thinking, but a lot of what you're saying about uh the sort of religious fervor um behind uh the Kim dynasty was true of um Mao Zedong during the Maoist years in in China. Uh, and I don't think there was a Christian background there. How would you compare the Chinese case to the Korean case in this respect?

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Sure, it's something I think about a lot, obviously, because the last seven years of my life have been in China. And I think the first point that I would make is that one needn't have a Christian upbringing to build a cult of personality. Certainly there have been many cults of personality that have been built outside of the Christian context. Um that said, missionaries were very active in China. We um all recall the example, of course, of uh Hong Xiochen, the uh the the the leader of perhaps the greatest religious movement, if you want to call it that, in um in Chinese history, the Taiping Rebellion. Um he was inspired by Christian tracts that missionaries had brought to China. So you do have some of that. He was he he claimed to be the brother of Christ. Precisely. Yes. Now, obviously, that's not the same as Mao Zedong and the cult around Mao, but I'm saying there are antecedents in Chinese history for a quasi-Christian um following to actually gather quite a bit of steam. So I think what you have in Mao is you have a cult of personality that certainly burned very bright for a relatively brief amount of time. Um, but you didn't have the same systematic approach that you saw with Kim Il-sung. For those who do read my book, you'll find that there are many socialist allied countries whose diplomats in Pyongyang are very early on writing these diplomatic cables back to their respective capitals and remarking on just how advanced and how far removed from Orthodox Marxism-Leninism this cult of personality is around Kimil Sung. So very quickly, it it it be it adopts these very religious overtones very early on, and it was very striking to these Eastern European diplomats who, of course, would have been familiar with the traditional tropes and imagery and iconography of Christianity. And so I would say that Kimil sung begins almost right away in his 30s. He's only 33 years old when he takes power. And I think the real difference is that the runway that Kim Il-sung had was so much longer because he had from 1945, when he arrived back in Pyongyang, until his death in 1994. That's that's 49 years, that's half a century. And it's a smaller population than China, certainly, but um it burned bright and it stayed bright for decades and decades and decades. And of course, unlike Mao, um, his cult was not repudiated after his death. While it isn't a prerequisite to have a Christian upbringing, um, to have a cult of personality, I think Kimil-sung is unique in that he really understood quite well how religion works, how faith works, how belief works, and how it can be harnessed, and how it can be instrumentalized, how it can be weaponized if you want to use that word. You see, and I quote in here a speech that Kimila-sung gives quite early on. I mean, we know about the speech because the North Koreans have published the speech, um, where he tells his cadres um to take cues from evangelical Christian pastors who have done a very good job of bringing uh young Koreans into the church. We should we should emulate them, we should learn from them. Um so you get these glimpses where it becomes very clear that he did model it on Christianity in some way.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

I think one main difference with China, uh, which is that Kim Il-sung has been followed by his son, and his son was followed by his son, and might be followed by his daughter, which is so it's a dynastic succession. Now, that seems to me to point to something that is not so much Christian as possibly Confucian and and modeled after sort of the old Chinese imperial system, or indeed Japanese.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

Yes, you can certainly point to Confucianism, but you could also turn to medieval Europe, or you could turn to any sort of feudal system where hereditary uh rule was the default, was the expected norm.

SPEAKER_00 8:36

China has that as well. I mean, we have princelings, like revolutionary princelings, right? I mean, there's there's definitely hereditary stuff in there as well.

SPEAKER_01 8:43

Right. And this really points to one trap that I was trying to avoid while I was trying to conceive and write and research this book, is that something like bowing before a statue of Kimil sung, which everyone's expected to do when they arrive in Pyongyang, things like handing off power to your son, I don't want to say that it's exclusively from one tradition or another. I mean, who can say? Even if you had Kim Il-sung in front of you and you asked him, he may not be able to give you an honest answer because he may not be able to articulate it himself. And so, you know, I don't want to say that what we see in North Korea today is 28% Confucian, um, 14.5% Christian, or so on and so forth. There would be a fool's errand. I mean, of course, I throw out these numbers to show how absurd such an idea would be. But I think what we can certainly say here is that Kimil-sung was, like everyone, a product of all of the various influences in his life. And I think the one unmistakable influence in his life and in his family's life that I don't think anyone had seriously looked at, and this is really why I wrote this book. But the reason the book is so long is because I was just astounded by how much I was able to find and how explicit Kimil-sung's debt to Christianity was in terms of his upbringing and how he became the man that he did.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

John, do you think that Kimil-sung was Christian at some point? And or was he just nationalist and conveniently used Christianity for his nationalism?

SPEAKER_01 10:10

I don't know whether he was Christian or not, and it depends on how you define a Christian. Uh, some people would say, well, he was born and raised in a Christian family, therefore he's Christian. I wouldn't agree with that statement myself. I think that whether or not he's a Christian or anyone is a Christian, if you want to talk about Donald Trump, is Donald Trump a Christian? Is is George W. Bush a Christian? Is whoever a Christian, I would say that the answer is really whether or not that person has made a decision that they want to identify that way and that they really believe the doctrine to some degree. It's hard to quantify. But in the case of Kim Il-sung, I mean, who am I to say? I think is is really the question, is really the answer, because I don't know. Um, he may have certainly he never self-identified as a Christian. He self-identified as somebody who grew up going to church and who was very familiar with the church and very familiar with the Bible. And to some people, that would mean that he was a Christian. Uh open and shut case.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

But that wasn't the case at some point in his life, right? That he later in his life, about when he was about to die, he starts to re-embrace his Christianity. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 11:18

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I re-embrace is an interesting word. I mean, I don't know that he re-embraces it per se. I think the word that I might choose instead is that he re-engages with his faith again, that's for sure. Um, whether or not he and and the use of the word or or the prefix re suggests that he had uh embraced the faith earlier. And that I'm not entirely certain about either. But I think that he was a product of a church upbringing. He definitely understood how Christianity works at a sociological level. I think he understood how it worked at a theological level as well. That's not the same as saying that he necessarily embraced it or believed it, um, which in my books would make him a Christian.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Can you become perhaps uh become a bit more specific on that point and tell us what uh what the Christian influence really consisted of? I mean, we know he grew up uh as a Christian, we're surrounded by Christians. We know that there were there were a lot of missionaries in in Pyongyang. What uh is what would you identify as a Christian in in his cult?

SPEAKER_01 12:30

Sure. Um I'll start by picking up a little bit on what you've just laid up there, Ian. I mean, it is true that he was born and raised in this city, that by the time he was born in 1912, it was already known as the Jerusalem of the East. His grandparents were converts to Christianity and quite devout. His parents were effectively raised in the church. Certainly his mother was raised in the church. And so, um, you know, and this is a religion that had just arrived. And by this religion, I refer specifically to Protestant Christianity and more specifically to Presbyterianism. Um, Catholicism is a separate thread and it um actually enters Korea a little bit earlier, but but we'll set that aside. Um, this was a faith that was very vibrant because it was the fervor of the newly converted, really. I mean, the whole country, um, those who had converted to Christianity. This was not something that they went through the motions necessarily on. Um, if you go to a church in the West now, you may have families that have been Christian for many generations, but then uh they may not take it very seriously. But that was not the case here in Pyongyang. And when Kim Il-sheng was growing up, he was not just somebody who showed up for church on Sundays because his parents dragged him out to church. He was intimately um familiar with the church and he was very active as well. He was teaching Sunday school, he was learning to play the organ in church, he was um performing in church plays, he was doing all sorts of things in the church, and he was very familiar with the Bible. Um, we know this because even towards the end of his life, and even in his 30s and all throughout his life, you see him quoting from the Bible in North Korean sources. North Korean sources will show us um Kimil sung um displaying his knowledge of the Bible. How does that translate into the cult of personality that he built? This is where, again, it gets a little bit tricky. I want to take a little bit of um a page from what I just said earlier in response to the previous question. I don't want to say um you point to this thing uh in Christianity and it tracks neatly onto Kimil-sungism, onto his cult of personality. I don't want to say that, I mean, you'll see some people who will say uh Christianity has the holy trinity, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And then you'll say, you'll see some people say, well, North Korea also has its holy trinity, and its holy trinity would be Kimil-sung, Kim Jong-il. And actually, this is where it breaks down a little bit. People will disagree on what the third person of the Trinity in North Korea is supposed to be. Some people will say, oh, it's uh Kimil-sung's wife, the mother of Kim Jong-il. Some will say, no, it's the Juce ideology of North Korea. Some will say, no, it's the masses, the people, or some will say, no, it's the party, it's the workers' party of Korea. And so I don't know that I would transplant and say that Kimil-sung did some sort of a copy and paste job, right? Um, the idea that one would bow before the statue of Kimil-sung when you arrive in Pyongyang is not something that is done in a Presbyterian church. So that practice, while I think very evidently religious to us, the idea of bowing before a bronze statue of another person is a religious act, right? Um, and yet I don't know that I would call it a Christian act per se. Um, what I can say is that when you talk to North Korean defectors, when you talk to the 30,000 or so North Koreans who have fled the country and resettled in South Korea, many of them will tell you that when they first encounter Christianity, because of course they're they're they're not allowed to really engage with Christianity when they're in North Korea, when they come out, they're often introduced to Christianity through the South Korean missionaries that are helping them get to South Korea. Many of them will just be bowled over. They will remark on how similar it is, this Christian faith that they're being introduced to versus the Kimil Sungism that they were raised in. And again, some of them will point to specific things like the Ten Principles in North Korea, the highest sort of um set of principles and doctrines in the land. Um, many of them will say it's it's it's so clearly inspired by the Ten Commandments. And yet it's not like the Ten Commandments, it's not like you could track the first commandment over to the first principle and the second commandment to the second principle. It doesn't work that way. So I just want to resist a little bit this notion that it was a copy and paste job because I simply don't think that that's what happened here.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

It sounds to me that he transplanted his understanding or transposed his learnings of Christianity from his upbringing to his own personality cult. But one possible interpretation is that he understands his audience. I wonder whether uh this interpretation is valid, that he may have not been a Christian, but he was so aware of the Christian faith among the people of North Korea that he just knew how to just replace himself in into the Christian-shaped hole in people's brains. I mean, is that a fair assessment?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

No, I think I think you've hit the nail on the head. He tells us that people need something to believe in. And I'm gonna be that person that they're going to believe in. I'm gonna be that messiah. I'm going to be that messianic figure because everyone needs that. The Korean people need that. And so he is explicit about that. He's explicit about that in his own memoir because we have a couple of these incidents where in his eight-volume memoir, which which very few North Korea scholars, I think, have have read, actually. I don't I don't want to make a blanket statement here, but I've raised it in a lot of conversations, and I don't believe there have been too many North Korea scholars who have read all eight volumes of his memoir. Um, and that's mostly because um it is filled with a lot of fiction, and yet um you have these anecdotes, you have these moments in his adolescence where he very self-consciously breaks the fourth wall and helps explain why it is that he adopts this persona of Kim Il-sung. That's not his birth name. That's why he takes on this almost Superman type of a of a of a figure where he's able to teleport, where he's able to um turn bullets into pine cones, where he's able effectively almost to walk on water. Um, he knows he can't do this and he makes that very clear. And yet he knows that the Korean people who have been colonized by Japan, their hated neighbors for 40 years, if you include the five years of the protectorate, um, they want someone to believe in. They want a Korean messiah, they want somebody who is going to vanquish the Japanese. And even though we know that it wasn't because of Kim Il-sung that the Japanese surrendered, um, it was so it it was such a craving in the nationalist spirit that I think at some level they were willing to suspend disbelief um and attribute the defeat of the Japanese not to Hiroshima Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but rather to um this guerrilla fighter um born to Christian parents who called himself Kimel Zung and and claimed to have vanquished the Japanese. Uh and so I think that's uh really what he uh I think that's really what he he took away from from Christianity.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

So John, uh what you just said makes a lot of sense. You obviously you can't put percentages on influences, and there are many uh in all countries. What I find extraordinary in uh the history of China and uh Korea and Japan is that you so often find this h- these hybrids between Western and in this case Christian influences and much older local uh uh cultures. And in the cult of Kimil Sung, there is also they also make a lot of the mount the sacred mountain pekdu, which is where he was supposedly a guerrilla fighter, with Dangoon, the founder of the of the Korean state and all that. And so it's these hybrids that that are interesting, and and they they have one thing in common. And this is where I I'd like you to elaborate a little bit more on the Taiping, which is why this phenomenon, it seems which is of course something you'll find in many different countries, not just in Asia, but uh it seems to be particularly strong in Korea and other parts of East Asia, this phenomenon of messianic figures who use Christianity as well as local uh shamanistic and other religions to position themselves as holy figures. This is not something you find so often in France or even in Spain or Turkey. It's it there is something East Asian about this, and what what could it be?

SPEAKER_01 21:20

It's a great question. Um generally, it is true, of course, that syncretism, this idea that religions mix and blend and indigenize, I think is is is natural. That's part of the reason that a foreign religion can become um a domestic religion, can take root in a place, is because it has to almost meld with the local culture in order to succeed in any way. But certainly, this book I spent a lot of time thinking about Korea in particular. And I got this question a lot, including from Koreans, which is is there something special about the Korean case? A lot of people will point to this notion. That there seem to be more cults, for one of a for want of a better word, in Korea than in many other countries. The only point I'll I'll make here is that some people have theorized, Koreans have theorized, Korea has thrived, in a sense, by going to extremes, by internalizing foreign ideologies and taking them to their logical endpoint. You could point to Confucianism, because almost any scholar of Confucius would tell you that the most Confucian country in the world is probably Korea. It's probably not the Chinese. If you want to take a foreign ideology such as socialism or Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism, if you want to call it that, you can look at what the North Koreans did, and they took it to a degree that that surprised even its socialist bloc allies. Christianity, certainly, as I describe in the book, when it first enters Korea, they take it to a degree, the converts take it to a degree that you didn't see in Japan or in India or in China. And indeed, even the Western missionaries that brought Christianity to Korea were stunned at how quickly and how fervently the Koreans adopted it. You could say the same of capitalism in South Korea because it's become this hyper-capitalistic society. You could even turn to K-pop music and say that what the Koreans did with Western pop music was to take it, internalize it, and take it to its logical extreme, which is how it's managed to stand out even in that realm as well. And so I don't know if I've directly answered your question, Ian, but I but I feel like that's part of explaining how does this Christianity, how does this cult of personality sort of take root in Korea and become something that is so much um more than what you see in Stalin's uh USSR or in Mao's China.

SPEAKER_02 23:52

Yeah, I agree with you that it's it's a mugs game to do what what many Koreans and indeed Japanese are prone to do, or Chinese, is to see themselves as more unique than they really are. And um uh I I don't think it's uniquely uh Korean, but uh this is a speculation, I'm just putting it to you. It could be that in all three countries they have a long history of um imperial rule, where the emperor was also a sacred figure. And what happens when a sacred institution collapses is that uh you get a lot of mini-emperors. This was often said in in Japan just after the war, when the imperial system collapsed, when the emperor had to say he was not not divine, you got a lot of mini-emperors who had their own little cults. And maybe in China and Korea and Japan, the collapse of sacred imperial rule um paved the way for figures like Mao, uh, for and and for for the Kim dynasty that sort of in a in a grotesque way uh took the place of something that was very culturally established.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

I think that's a fascinating theory. You know, what I tried to do in my research was less to try and give a grand theory, the best thing that I could do was simply to present the facts as best as I could find them and to unearth as much as I could about Kim Yo-sung's own Christian upbringing, but also um about how he ended up constructing this person's cult of personality that um was so striking to um people who grew up in the system, as well as to the Christian leaders that Kim Il-sung towards the end of his life invites to come visit him in Pyongyang and who engage with his cult of personality and find it just striking in its parallels. And of course, um Kimul-sung himself wrestles with Christianity again in the last decade or two of his life. He's very explicit in grappling with his upbringing and in trying to make sense of it himself, because he too was mortal and he too um was, I presume, grappling with his own mortality, um, but also the immortality that he had created around himself, because today here we are in 2026, more than uh three decades after his death, and he is still the eternal president of North Korea. And so um there's a lot here that I think was deeply embedded in his own psyche. And I think so much of what the North Korean experience is, is sort of an outward manifestation of the internal grappling that he had with his own upbringing in this Western faith. And part of my purpose, if there was a purpose in writing this, um, other than to satiate my own curiosity, was to uh posit that North Korea is misunderstood when we look at it primarily as a political nation-state. Um, it absolutely is a nation-state, but I think that that uh fundamentally uh overlooks so much of what it is that makes North Korea what it is. And my own theory about what it is is that it's a religious society, it's a nuclear-armed religious society, but at core, I believe it's a religious society that is built around the veneration um of the Kim family.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

No, that is clearly the case. Joe, if one looks at Christian influence in in East Asian countries, it's so interesting because it has so many different facets. Um, on the one hand, there is what you point out, the the Presbyterian uh influences that may have gone into the cult of Kim Il-sum. Um Li Kwan Yu, the strongman of Singapore, um, liked to say he admired the Leninist organization of the Catholic Church and uh and took a lot of his own sort of autocratic notions from that. But then there is the other side of Christianity um which fires up a lot of dissidents and a lot of Chinese dissidents against the Communist Party, uh including uh very much including Jimmy Lai, the newspaper uh owner who's now in prison in Hong Kong, uh, think that Christianity is the only way to fight against uh Chinese authoritarianism because uh it's an alternative dogma and so on. Maybe that is and this is something you've already hinted at in an earlier answer. There is something to be uh uh looked at here, which is that uh one reason why East Asians take to these hybrids is indeed the history the tradition of syncratic uh religions, that there is no one dogma, there isn't uh a Buddhist dogma or a Shintoist dogma or anything like that. Uh what the dictatorships have often done is to create a new uh create a dogma, uh Mao's little red book, uh Kimil Sung's Ten Principles and so on. And uh that may be uh the biggest influence of a monotheistic religion, in this case Christianity, which luckily uh these countries have not really had before, and it may be uh an import from the West that has had very unfortunate consequences.

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Yeah, and you know, I think uh one point that I like to pull out from what you just said there is that uh perhaps in America, this notion of separation of church and state, this ideal, anyways, um, it's more the exception than the rule. I think that in many places religion and politics perhaps should be seen as as being a continuum, as it were. Certainly the Vatican would be a wonderful illustration of how politics and religion dovetail almost entirely in a state such as the Vatican. Um, and I would put North Korea right up there. Um there is a state religion, and that state religion is Kimil Sungism, and um he's literally written into the constitution of the country, and yet what it represents is something that's true in every uh polity, which is that there is always an element of loyalty that's demanded by the state, but loyalty can bleed into something larger than loyalty, meaning devotion, into uh almost a veneration and worship, right? It's it's a continuum in a certain way. And um and Kimille-sung was really good at it, uh, so good at it that when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, when the USSR and the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1991, um nobody thought that the North Koreans would be able to keep it going. And yet here we are, two more generations later. It's now 2026, and in some ways the North Korean state is looking more impregnable than it's ever looked ever. It has nuclear weapons, it is not in danger, I don't think, of going the way of um a Venezuela or an Iran, as we've seen this year, because of its possession of a nuclear deterrent. Um, it has uh a cult of personality that is um, and this is another contrast with Mao. There was never any liberalization, there was never any reform and opening in North Korea, there was never any glass nostra perestroika in North Korea. North Korea has only adhered to a very extreme and highly dogmatic cult of personality since 1945 with almost no breathing room. It has it has sustained itself at a very, very, very high level now for more than eight decades.

SPEAKER_02 31:42

I think one great merit of your book is that it makes mince meat of the cliche that you often hear in East Asia that we are not a religious people. We don't have religion here. We are a religious, and you people in China say it, people in Japan say it, and people in North Korea. This is uh clearly bullshit. They're as religious and as prone to uh worship and submission and so on as any other people. And what is interesting is the form that it takes. In North Korea, and certainly in Mao's China, they had to actually be believe dogmatically in everything that the great leader said or wrote. Hence the fact that in in photographs of Kim or Kim's, you see all these dignitaries behind them sort of scribbling notes. Every word is sort of something that you know is is a lesson to be taught. And this idea that you have to believe dogmatically, I think that's the main uh legacy of of of Christianity, of a monotheistic religion, which didn't exist before.

SPEAKER_01 32:49

Although I am frequently asked, how much do you think the uh fervor uh that is on display in North Korea when Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un walks into the room and you see everyone um almost in a moment a state of ecstasy. Um, how much is that real? And um I wouldn't, first of all, let's begin with the idea that there is no way to know for sure. Um but I think most people would accept that not all of it is real, some of it is feigned, some of it may be affected, and yet I still think that the vast majority of it is probably real. Again, I can't prove that.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

But um Yes, but if you put a bunch of teenagers with Taylor Swift, they'd react in a very similar way. I mean, I actually saw it because I I was in uh Pyongyang uh a few months after Kim Il-song died. So I was told to go and mingle with a crowd that bowed to the statue and so on, and you had professional mourners in the Korean tradition through loudspeakers who were wailing and crying and so on, and there were a lot of teachers with children. And many of these children probably didn't have very strong feelings about the great leader, but as soon as they saw their teachers cry and they heard it through the loudspeakers, then it's a matter of crowd psychology. There's nothing particularly Korean about it, and then they all went into hysterics.

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yes, that's right. I think in many ways, the fans of a rock star or a pop star or a movie star is akin in many ways to a religious experience in in some ways.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

Yeah, which is why the founding fathers wanted to keep it separate. It almost becomes uh uh one almost begins to think, and I say this as somebody who has no religion whatsoever, that uh organized religion, uh just like rock concerts, is actually a good thing because it allows people to go through all these things without it becoming political.

SPEAKER_00 34:50

John, there's a line in your book that's like, you know, this this guy who grew up Christian is like the greatest persecutor of Chris like Christians. Like, how do you explain that about her?

SPEAKER_01 35:00

I think the answer in my mind is quite straightforward. He harnessed the power of Christianity because he understood it. But part of understanding the power of Christianity is then recognizing it as a potential threat. In other words, I think he recognized Christianity as both a blueprint and as a potential threat to the very um pseudo-Christian sort of uh belief system that he himself was propagating and championing. We've seen how Christianity has transformed our species over the last 2,000 years and how it's affected the sweep of history.

SPEAKER_00 35:38

Do you think that if in an alternative historical timeline Japan was like really nice to the Koreans, Christianity would not have been so uh ubiquitous in North Korea and that it may not have been called the Jerusalem of the East?

SPEAKER_01 35:57

It's a great question because I spend a lot of the book explaining how the flourishing of Christianity in Korea was really hand in hand with the rise of Korean nationalism. I'm very careful about putting the two words Christian and nationalism next to one another because it carries so much baggage in the context of modern-day America, um, for one thing. But certainly that's what you saw happen in Korea at the turn of the century, the dawn of the 20th century, was that you saw the two really flourish as parallel, intertwined ideologies here. Because Christianity did not enter Korea as a classically sort of imperialist endeavor, like the way Christianity entered the Americas. It was sort of um an imperialistic handmaiden to the conquering power. And yet in Korea, what we see is that the conquering power was actually a non-Christian nation, a Shinto nation, and Christianity, rather than be associated with the ruling colonial force, was actually seen as a bulwark against the um, you know, sort of the encroaching imperialist power. And so, yes, I do think that if Japan's colonial rule over Korea was not as cruel and not as iron fisted as it was, it is possible that Christianity would not have flourished to the same degree as it did in Korea. That's a big counterfactual, and I don't know how far we can possibly take that. Um, but it's a fascinating one to consider.

SPEAKER_00 37:40

There's something that like I noticed in your book that made me think this, which had to do with uh something that I'm familiar with, which is the Zainichi Koreans. So what what these are are the Koreans who live in Japan. And you know, during the war efforts uh during World War II, Japan uh forced a lot of Koreans to move to Japan, and a lot of them stayed in Japan. And one thing that uh struck out from your book was that um during the time in which Kimio-son was cultivating his cult of personality, there seemed to be a lot of Zainichi Koreans who were not on the mainland, you know, they were not, in fact, living near Kimmyo-sun, but they somehow fell into the cult of personality of Kimmyo-sun and wondered whether maybe the reason is because they have a common enemy, which is the Japanese. They were extremely discriminated against. I mean, it's famously the Zainichi Koreans are discriminated against in in Japan, and they saw Kimul-sun as the nationalist figure that would liberate them from the Japanese.

SPEAKER_01 38:38

I I think you're spot on. Um, most of the Zainichi Koreans, as far as I understand it, are actually from what we would now call South Korea, but the southern half of the peninsula, of course, they all were over there before the division of the Korean peninsula at the 30th parallel. Um, and so none of them should have necessarily had a geographic or familial tie or reason to associate with Kim Il-sung. And yet um most of the Koreans were indeed, as you say, the underclass in Osaka, in Tokyo, in these other cities, including, by the way, Kim Jong-un's mother, who um, as Anna Fei Fields wrote in her biography of Kim Jong-un, was um singing in the choir of the Korean church in um in Osaka. And so many of them, you write, do end up identifying with Kim Il-sung. And there's one particular source that I cite, a memoir from uh a North Korean, or rather a Zainichi Korean who ends up in North Korea and later escapes, who talks exactly about this. He said that Kimil-sung was like a Robin Hood Superman sort of uh messianic figure to these Zainichi Koreans, this um superhero who could single-handedly vanquish the Japanese. And even if it was fanciful, bordering on utterly fictional, it was a comic book portrayal of Kimil-sung, and yet it's what they wanted to believe. And because they wanted to believe it, and because Kimil-sung was so willing to play the part, it had a real attraction and had a real magnetism for many of these Zainichi Koreans. And so that's another thing I really hope that I got across in the book, too, is that I think from the outside, it's so easy to mock North Korea, and we know that because so many people in the West, their understanding of North Korea comes from Team America, World Police, that movie in 2003, or from uh the interview, the movie from a few years back that Sony Pictures uh put out to their regret later. Um, you have these, they're so easy to mock in a certain way, the Kim family, because of the way they look, because of how isolated the country is. And yet it's not all what you might call or dismiss as brainwashing. I think there really is a genuine appeal to this plucky country that has been able to stand up to the great imperialist powers of the day. Here it is in 2026, um, with a nuclear deterrent, um, with a fourth generation waiting in the wings. This is this is a success story when you consider what happened to all of North Korea's ideological and socialist peers.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

So I kind of was sympathetic to Kim Il-sun in the first half of the book, okay? Because he just comes across as a guy who, even in the parts where you sort of uh there's a there's an interesting section where you highlight the moment when he kind of explicitly says that he's basically gonna start a personality cult, which is that he's like, oh, you know, people need a hero and I'm gonna be that person. But then in the second half of the book, things take a really, really dark turn. And his personality cult becomes like really deranged, it becomes very aggressive. And I'm wondering whether there was a tipping point or like the fall, like the time when Adam ate the apple that changed, you know, like in your research, did you find anything that explains how it became so dark at the second half of the book?

SPEAKER_01 42:04

Well, I would point to two moments. One is when he first comes to power in 1945, you see him actually not persecuting Christians right away. He is taking power in Pyongyang. He knows this because he's a child of Pyongyang. He knows that this is a conservative Christian stronghold. And so he actually reaches out with an olive branch to the Christian leaders of Pyongyang. He quotes scripture, he shows off his knowledge of the Bible, he talks about his favorite hymn when he was growing up as a child and all the rest of it. But then you have this assassination attempt on him very early on, March the 1st, 1946, um, and on his uncle, his distant uncle, who he makes the vice president of the DPRK later, um, where I think that's one moment where you can sort of see the dark side uh come. Uh, certainly the Christians who were trying to kill him, one might say that they weren't practicing the highest ideals of Christian teachings, and yet one can understand how an assassination attempt or two can change your mind about um working with these Christians. I think that's one moment. And the other comes in 1956 when you have um Khrushchev in Moscow um call for destalinization and the scrapping of the personality cult. So when uh Khrushchev tries to squeeze him, they even do a joint intervention where the USSR and the PRC send two of their top men to Pyongyang to try and get Kim Il-sung in line. And of course, he also has a coup attempt at this point. The only real coup attempt that he faces is also in 1956. I think actually it's pretty simple. In 1946, Christians tried to kill him, and in 1956, his own sort of more orthodox Marxist Leninist colleagues try to depose him. In both cases, he fends off the challenge and he gets more extreme and he doubles down on his culture. Personality. And I think that's I think that's really what happens.

SPEAKER_02 44:02

Yeah, but I'd like to challenge the idea of him as a per as a nice fellow full of Christian virtue, who somehow psychologically something tipped him over into something else in the way that power corrupts and so on. Don't forget, I mean, he was a ruthless operator who would never have been in power had it not been for Stalin's Soviet Union. I mean, he was their puppet. They put him in there. And he knew what they were doing and used them, but they were also using him. So the thing was was pretty dark from the very beginning. And you describe in your book very uh well in great detail how there were far more decent people, many of them Christians, uh, who could have uh um had political power in North Korea and were ruthlessly disposed of. So I don't think it was a case of uh, you know, the the same case has often been made for Ho Chi Minh, I mean that he was rarely a liberal and it was only the Americ only American imperialism that turned him into a despot. And this is nonsense. I mean, the he was never a a Jeffersonian liberal.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

No, and and thank you for making that point, Ian. I I think that's exactly right. I think there's been this portrayal of him as as kind of almost bumbling his way to the top. But this was a very high-stakes game. This was this was life or death. Um, the elbows were very sharp, and Kimel-sang was a genuinely charismatic figure. I I I believe that, not having met him, but the photos and everything that's written about him, I think there was a charm to him, but that doesn't change the fact that beneath it there was a real ruthlessness that was necessary in order for him to get to where he got. There's no way he even gets to 1956 as a leader of North Korea. Perhaps there's not even a way he gets to March 1946 when that assassination attempt on him takes place, unless he is very sharp-elbowed indeed. And he was incredible at playing that game, as well as the game of playing off his two patrons, the USSR and the PRC, off one another, as you made that point, Ian. And also at understanding how to instill a deep, deep, deep sense of devotion, loyalty, and worship in his people. He didn't finish high school, he wasn't particularly well read and educated in that regard, and yet he was very skilled in the school of hard knocks, if you want to call it that. He knew how human nature works, and he was incredibly savvy about it.

SPEAKER_00 46:33

Can we talk about uh the other Korean messiah, Sun Young Moon? So he is also a North Korean, and he's potentially in a way more powerful than Kim My-sun, because of just the power that he projects globally uh with the Unification Church and the different branches, and his followers are sometimes called the Moonis. Um, the person who assassinated Abe Xingzo, whose mother was deeply tied to the Unification Church. Um, and so John, I just want to ask you like, how should we think about Sum Young Moon in light of all this research that you've done on Kim Yo-sun? Maybe also talk about their relationship, because that that their relationship is also bizarre. And I I don't quite understand how they embraced at some point to enlighten us about Sum Young Moon, please.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

Sure, yeah. I mean, this is a section of the book where I talk about all three men, not just Kim Yo-sung and um Moon Sun Myung, but also Jim Jones. They understood this human need to have answers, to understand what happens after we die, to to to to find meaning, to find community, um, to have someone to look up to and to follow in a certain sense. And I think all three of them were masters, were genius at turning this mere devotion into something that was larger. And so, yes, the Reverend Moon is this fascinating figure because he's just eight years younger than Kimil-sung, but also born in Northwestern Korea. Um, he too is a messianic figure, a Korean messiah, as it were. He appears in Pyongyang and begins to preach in Pyongyang in 1945, the same time that Kimil-sung is coming to power in that same city. And it's Kimil-sung's state that locks up the Reverend Moon twice. And when Reverend Moon makes it out of North Korea, um, he becomes an anti-communist crusader and a preacher who sort of melds Christianity, his version of Christianity, with um with anti-communism. And so that endears him, of course, to Richard Nixon. Uh, it brings him to the U.S. Um, he presides over his famous mass weddings. Um, he buys up all of these assets, like the Washington Times newspaper, like the New Yorker Hotel, uh, just outside Madison Square Garden. Um, he builds up this sushi empire in the U.S., right? And so what's interesting is that I think for all three of these men, they all controlled different faith communities. Jim Jones was very, very clearly this swath of the jungle in Guyana, where he was the unquestioned deity almost, right? In Reverend Moon, what you have is not a geographically delimited sort of faith community. It's a transnational one. But I think what really makes Kim Il-sung stand out among the three men is that he happened to build his following within the confines of a nation state. And he was able to do that because he was in the right place at the right time, but also because he was very wily and he played his cards right and he managed to maneuver himself into the favor of Stalin and um position himself in Pyongyang. But all three of them, I think, at some level, um, were able to blend belief, faith, political power in a certain sense, um, and really turn themselves into these sorts of messianic figures um with almost total sway over their followers. Um, so I think that by the time the Reverend Moon comes to Pyongyang at the invitation of Kim Il sung, the two of them are both survivors. They've both been doing this now for decades and decades and decades. They both have um total dominion over millions of their followers. And so I think there's a sense of mutual respect there. And so they they embrace in Pyongyang, as you mentioned. I have the photo in my book. Um, the Reverend Moon sets up uh the Potongang Hotel in Pyongyang, which still stands today and still takes guests. Um, you know, they start an automotive joint venture together, Pyonghua Motors. Um, and Kimil Sung permits the Reverend Moon to turn the Reverend Moon's birthplace and northwestern Korea into a pilgrimage site. I think there's something just so I actually, Chang, I sort of have the opposite view of you. I it it's not bizarre in a certain sense. It it makes perfect sense. The two of them understand each other, they're two peas in a pod, one could almost say, in that they they could look each other in the eye, right? And I mean, it's kind of like Trump and Xi. Yeah, they're they're they're so they're so different in so many ways, and they were antagonistic on the surface in so many ways, and yet there was perhaps more that bound them together than there was that actually divided them. And I think that's what you saw at the end of their respective lives.

SPEAKER_00 51:36

Great. Okay, well, with that, thank you so much, Jonathan Chen. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Thank you. It was a real pleasure being here. Um, really, just so much fun talking about this and and putting it in the context.