On Oct. 14, 1945, the Soviet Union organized a grand ceremony in the Pyongyang Sport Ground, on the territory which had until very recently been the industrial heartland of the Japanese Empire. Korea was left intact by World War II, whose terrible battles and bombing raids had ignored it entirely. With the Allies victorious, the Shinto shrines that the Japanese occupiers had erected in their bouts of imperial fervor were now being burnt to ash, and from Pusan in the south to the Yalu River border with China, there was a sense of nervous anticipation across the peninsula.
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The 14th was a Sunday, the Sabbath, and many among the tens of thousands in the crowd had gathered to hear the words of a popular independence leader: Cho Man-sik, a 62-year-old Presbyterian elder known to some as “the Gandhi of Korea.” Days earlier, the Soviets had made Cho the de facto leader of their peninsular occupation zone above the 38th parallel. After Cho’s speech, the Soviets rolled out another man, a 33-year-old captain of the Red Army. Dressed in a borrowed suit affixed with a Russian military medal, Kim Il Sung had achieved mythical fame as an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter and was said to possess supernatural powers. On this day, however, man failed to live up to myth. His servile, monotonous speech praising Joseph Stalin was met with disappointment.
In his vivid and refreshingly original new book, Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief Jonathan Cheng reveals how this ambitious young man would ultimately triumph over his rivals to construct the most potent and enduring personality cult in human history. Though Kim died in 1994, his legacy remains firm: a Stalinist fortress state, ruled by his male descendants, which consistently defies and preoccupies the world’s great powers and, with a growing, indigenously sourced arsenal of nuclear weapons and missiles, may continue to do so for many generations to come.
In 1995, shortly after Kim’s death, CIA Director John M. Deutch testified before Congress that “it is no longer a question of whether North Korea would collapse, but when.” Korean Messiah explains why this did not happen, precisely due to the power of the Kim personality cult, a manifestation of North Korea’s fervent, seemingly innate religious belief which continues to outlive its long-deceased lord and savior through the Juche ideology. To explain this unique regional phenomenon, Cheng illuminates the obscure history of the Protestant missionaries who first came to save souls in the remote, Confucian “hermit kingdom” of the late 19th century. As these pages reveal, the religious fanaticism which undergirds the modern Kim personality cult owes much of its endurance and potency to a resolute band of Presbyterians from the American Midwest.
The first Western missionary to reach Pyongyang was the ill-fated Welshman Robert Thomas, who arrived aboard the General Sherman in 1866 to distribute Bibles among the Korean people. After navigating the Taedong River inland, the ship ran aground, before being burned by the natives and the crew massacred. Among the first to resume Thomas’s effort was Samuel Moffett, who arrived in Korea in 1890 from Indiana. In Pyongyang, Moffett found “a city with a reputation for wickedness that spanned antiquity and modernity.” General Sherman’s anchor chains were still draped along the city gates as a trophy, and the locals threw stones at him. But thanks to his considerable efforts, Pyongyang would become so evangelized by the early 20th century that it would come to be known as “the Jerusalem of the East,” even as the south proved resistant to similar missionary efforts. While in 1895, there were 528 baptized converts, a decade later, there were 12,500. From Pyongyang’s hills, Moffett presided over “the largest Presbyterian mission compound the world would ever see.” The compound, with its schools, hospital, and residences, “was effectively a 120-acre swath of Christian America transplanted to northwestern Korea.”
Moffett’s missionary efforts forged a nascent class of educated, literate, and nationalist Korean elites at a time when geopolitical forces were working against them. After the modernized forces of Meiji Japan routed the Qing army at Pyongyang in 1896, China receded as East Asia’s regional hegemon, giving way to Japan and Russia. And after Russia was, in turn, defeated by Japan a decade later, there was no longer any question of regional hegemony. In Christianity, droves of Koreans found not only a spiritual refuge but “a bulwark against Japan’s imperial ambitions.” That bulwark did not hold. Japan established a protectorate in Korea in 1905, with the blessing of President Theodore Roosevelt, and later annexed it outright in 1910.
Kim Il Sung was born just before World War I on the outskirts of Pyongyang to two devout Presbyterians. His father, educated at the Sungsil Academy run by the missionary William Baird, was an independence activist who would be jailed by the Japanese and, like many of his countrymen, endure an exodus of his own in the wildlands of Manchuria. Kim’s mother was so devoted that she would “literally sleep on her Bible.” The Kim family was among the educated Christians who formed the vanguard of the independence movement. After Korean pleas for self-determination were ignored by President Woodrow Wilson (who’d mentored Syngman Rhee at Princeton University) at Versailles, the ideal of America began to fade in the Korean imagination, replaced by the revolutionary fervor of Lenin. “For Korean Christian nationalists, Bolshevism fulfilled many of the messianic promises embedded in Wilson’s vision,” Cheng writes.
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Exiled in Manchuria during the 1920s and ’30s and mentored by the Chinese Communist Party, Kim Il Sung built his worldview on the power of mythologizing one’s own achievements and the seriousness of religious devotion. When the Japanese Empire collapsed in 1945, he managed to play the Soviets against his political rivals and quickly earned the favor of Stalin. Even as he built a gradually intensifying personality cult around himself, however, he privately clung to his Christian upbringing. After the devastation of the Korean War, Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, and internal coup attempts in 1956 and 1967, “Kimilsungism” rose to dazzling heights as a stand-in for Christianity, complete with a virginal mother, confessions, and accompanying rituals. As he neared the end of his life, however, Kim sought to reconcile with the faith he’d so actively displaced by building churches and extending invitations to men such as Billy Graham (whose wife was born to Pyongyang missionaries) and dozens of Korean pastors. Graham would later explain this in simple terms: “He wanted peace with his adversaries before he died.”
Korean Messiah examines the under-explored, intimate relationship between Protestant missionaries and East Asian communism. In so doing, it reveals how the most powerful ideas that animated these movements did not simply arrive from Moscow, but often came from the opposite shore of the Pacific. Cheng has produced a book of significant value that offers vital and original analyses of both North Korea and the United States’s relationship with the world throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.
Carson Becker is an American writer.
