Angry Planet - Christianity Shaped North Korea’s Cult of Personality

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

Kim Song Ju, the man who would become Kim Il Sung, was born to devout Presbyterian parents. Billy Graham’s wife was born to christian missionaries in China and went to high school in Pyongyang. American protestants once spread the gospel in northwest Korea and found fertile ground for their gospel message. Kim listened, learned, and used those teachings to shape a cult of personality that rules North Korea to this day.On this episode of Angry Planet I’m joined by Wall Street Journal China bureau chief Jonathan Cheng to talk about his new book Korean Messiah. Cheng’s work is an exploration of the origins of North Korea and Kim’s deep ties to American Christianity.ShareAngry Planet as dress rehearsalBilly Graham in the Hermit Kingdom19th century Protestant missionaries in KoreaPresbyterians in the untamed northwestUntangling the history of a self-made godkingThe Kim Song Ju nativityWomen without namesAttending church during the Fire and Fury periodThe Soviet eraLeading from beyond the graveKim bombs his first public appearanceBuy Korean MessiahSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. I am Matthew Galt. It is Easter Monday morning, which I did not realize this episode was going to be recorded on Easter Monday morning when we scheduled it like a month, two months ago, something like that. something like that. Jonathan, will you introduce yourself to the audience? Sure. My name is Jonathan

Cheng. I'm the Wall Street Journal's China Bureau Chief. I'm typically based in Beijing, but I am here on the East Coast because I've written a new book on North Korea. It dates from my time when I was the Korea Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, based in South Korea in Seoul. But it took me a long time to write the book. And so I've now been in China for seven years, but here I am on the East Coast about to launch this book, and I'll be traveling down the East Coast from Boston to Washington, talking about it, starting here in Boston on Easter Monday. This isn't your first stop. Is it, am I the dress rehearsal for all the other, like, conversations, interviews?

You are, I think, yes, I think we can say that, actually. I certainly have done a couple other podcasts so far, even before I took off across the Pacific. but this is the first I'm doing here in the United States of America. That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. The book is Korean Messiah, Kim Il-sung in the Christian roots of North Korea's personality cult. And there are a few books that come across the show that, like, I, a producer, Kevin Nodell sent it forwarded to me when, like, the announcement came out. And, like, my whole brain lit up.

because it's just, and it's fascinating. This fascinating intersection of Christian culture and I was not expecting like American evangelicalism to come up. But it does like almost immediately. And the last Stalinist dictatorship in the world and how one shaped the other. And it's just, it's a fascinating. book and thank you for writing it. And I got to start where you start on this Easter Monday and ask, why was the Reverend Billy Graham in North Korea in the 90s? Sure, it's a great question. Billy Graham, of course, if you're perhaps if you're under 30 years old, you may not know

who Billy Graham was. But for anyone who was paying attention to the news or or was anywhere in the vicinity of a church for most of the back half of the 20th century, of course he would be a very familiar name. He was a preacher from North Carolina and was famous for his crusades that he did across America, but also around the world. He filled football stadiums. He filled arenas. And he just, it was a pretty simple message that he preached, John 316, for God so

loved the world that he gave his one and only son and so on. It's the one verse you'll see people hold up on signs at football games. It was a pretty simple message, but he was very consistent on it throughout his whole half century of ministry. He was also famously very close with many U.S. presidents from Harry Truman all the way through to actually Donald Trump, although he would have encountered Donald Trump before Trump was president, of course. So here you have a pretty public figure, perhaps the most public Christian figure, but he also made. made it a real point to go beyond the iron curtain. Obviously, for a lot of the back half of the 20th century, this divide between the communist world and the Western world was a pretty important one.

And he really wanted to make sure he got to the other side. So he did speak in Moscow. He did speak in Poland and in many of the countries that we now think of as a Soviet bloc. But really, North Korea was sort of at the top of his list in many ways. And that's a little bit curious, but he himself had a lot of connections to Korea. his wife went to high school in Pyongyang, which is, of course, now the capital of North Korea. And the reason for that was that she was the daughter of missionaries to China. And Pyongyang, what we now think of again as sort of the capital of the Kim dynasty,

it's where you see the Kim's standing sort of on the podium with these tanks and these inter-bolicitantinental ballistic missiles and all these goose stepping soldiers going by. That's Pyongyang today. and that's very real. But back then, in the 1930s, it was also the center of the biggest sort of Christian explosion in all of Asian history. Jerusalem of the East.

The Jerusalem of the East, exactly. That was the nickname that it was known by. And so Billy Graham's wife went to high school there. And also Billy Graham at the beginning of his ministry in the 1950s, one of his first international stops was in Korea during the Korean War. And so he went back time and again. again and really made it part of his sort of global footprint. And so he always wanted to go to North Korea, but he didn't get an invitation until 1992.

And he went there once, he went back again in 1994. And in both cases, he was hanging out and meeting, shaking hands, praying with Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean state, and the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, who, of course, is the leader now, the third generation leader now of North Korea. So that's where the book begins. And I hope it's an intriguing, perplexing sort of an intro because that was sort of what grabbed me at first when I first stumbled upon this topic. And you come back, I would call it the framing device of the book, too, because you close the circle quite neatly at the end. But I won't spoil that for people.

but I kind of want to get into the meat here at the top of the book because you spend like the first 200-ish 150 pages walking us through the context of like how Pyongyang becomes the Jerusalem of the East and Korea's place in the world in the late 1800s, early 1900s. So how does it how does Korea become this place where, there is a huge explosion of Christian teaching. Well, missionaries were obviously very active through a lot of the last few centuries. They are, I think, nowadays, mostly seen as a bit of anachronism. That's obviously not entirely true.

There's still thousands, thousands upon thousands of Christian missionaries still active around the world today. But certainly I think we can all kind of agree that the golden age of missionary work, what a lot of Christian leaders themselves regard is the golden age of missionary work, sort of came about in the 1800s. And so you really had, in America, after the Civil War in particular, a lot of young, idealistic, young students, basically whose greatest mission in life was to want to go to the farthest ends of the earth and to spread the Christian gospel. So you had magazines and you had a lot of literature about this illustrated magazines with pictures of missionaries going off into the Polynesian islands or into the depths of Africa and so on, this sort of swashbuckling image of these people going to the ends of the earth. And Korea was then perhaps one of the more isolated countries. It remains so today there's this moniker that you sometimes hear, the Hermit Kingdom, applied. to North Korea today, but also just to all of Korea for much of the 1800s and the 1900s. And it's a little bit overstated, but at heart, it's not that far off. The country was quite isolated,

including from its two neighbors, China and Japan. And so by the time you have the first missionaries get to Korea in the 1880s, you had Christian missionaries. And sorry, when I say Christian, I should make clear, I mean Protestant missionaries. I mean Catholics are related, but but not largely what I'm dealing with here. But you had Protestant missionaries that were already quite active in China, in India, in Japan, in some cases for hundreds of years. But they never really had the first crack at Korea until the 1880s. And that's pretty late in sort of missionary terms here.

But when they first got to the Hermit Kingdom, they were all very excited about the prospect of opening up this country. But you had the first missionaries, and they were all Americans generally. They're typically Presbyterians and Methodians. but they arrived in Seoul, which then and now is the capital, capital today of South Korea, but the capital of Korea at the time and had been for centuries. They set up there, and the Koreans were pretty interested in these white men and women. They were interested in their costume, in their dress, in their manner,

but they weren't all then interested in this preaching that they had about this man who had been crucified, you know, thousands of years ago and all the rest of it. He died for your sins and all that. They didn't really take to that message, but they were interested in the people. So the missionaries then sent some of their colleagues down to Busan in the deep south, and there it was even a bigger swing and a miss. They went there and they tried to spread the gospel, and it just wasn't much interest from the Koreans. Then they sent this one guy, and this guy sort of becomes the center of the first chunk of my book,

and his name is Samuel Moffitt. He comes from southern Indiana, town called Madison. It's right on the Ohio River. It's between Cincinnati and Louisville. And he graduates from college, and he gets on a ship, and he crosses the Pacific. He lands in Seoul on his 26th birthday in January 1890. So he's a 26-year-old guy, fresh-faced, young, idealistic, Indiana, Hoosier, college graduate. They sent him up to Pyongyang,

which of course is in the north of Korea. Now it's capital of North Korea. And there he just kind of finds this hunger for the message that he's preaching. And even he can't really explain it. He is almost like there must be something in the water here because you get up here and nobody else is really interested. But in Pyongyang, he just had a cue out his front door of people who just wanted to hear day in and day out. What are you preaching?

What is this crucified man that you're talking about? where can I learn more? And so he writes in this one letter that is preserved at the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, which I read and that anyone can go and get their hands on. He just sort of writes, he's like, I have so many people coming here. I almost don't have time to eat or to sleep because it's just, they're just beating down my door, trying to learn more about this. And so to sort of condense it a little bit, what you get is you get him building up this

mission station in Pyongyang that sort of becomes the crown jewel of all missionary work in Asia. It's got churches galore and the churches are all so packed that they have to keep building more churches and even those churches get packed and they've got to keep building more. They set up hospitals, they set up middle schools and high schools and universities and seminaries and schools for the blind and the deaf and orphanages and for the lepers and all the rest of it. And it just becomes this massive thing in Pyongyang. And to really put a fine point on it, what I found so interesting about this all is that among the very first Korean converts to Christianity were the grandparents and the parents of Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean state, such that when Kim Il-sung is born in 1912 in Pyongyang, or on the outskirts of Pyongyang, he is effectively a third-generation Christian at this point and part of quite a fervent and devout family. And so to me, this was a central riddle that really pulled me in.

Like, what is going on here? Is there some connection between the Jerusalem of the East, the fact that the North Korean state founder was born in this sort of environment? And the fact that you go to North Korea today. And I went in 2013. I went again in 2017. And even if you don't get the chance to go to North Korea, you go on YouTube and you watch some of the videos of what North Korea is like.

And I'm sure many of your listeners will have seen the footage on CNN or on Fox. or wherever. And that's a very real place. And there's a lot of what I would describe as religiosity in that society. And I had to ask the question, is there some connection between the old Jerusalem of the East and what we now see as the seat of the Kim dynasty? So you've got a chapter called the Untamed Northwest, which is kind of about this. and I kind of want to dig into why you think that area of Korea was such fertile ground for these ideas. Is it kind of the, it's far enough away from the capital, mixed with like a yearning for kind of like a Korean national identity, mixed with like being close to China and like kind of being at the,

the crossroads between like all of these powers, expansionist powers that are around it. Like what's, why do you think it took off there? Yeah, I think you nailed it right there. I think the northwestern Korea was a special place. It was closer to China and therefore it was closer to new ideas. You had many more ideas coming over the border. And even though Korea was a hermit kingdom and that border was quite sealed, there was a lot of smuggling that happened across the border.

the Northwest was also pretty heavily discriminated against by the capital in Seoul. And so you had many quite accomplished, smart, wily, to use that word in a non-perjorative way, sort of Northwesterners who were capitalistic, they were inquisitive, they were open to new ideas, and they were shut out of power. And so when you have Christianity come along and this message that Samuel Moffat is preaching, I think what they hear in it is they hear sort of what we might describe in an American context that's sort of an up-by-the-boots-strap's sort of ethos, a kind of equality before God that if you work hard and you pray to God and all the rest of it, you can advance.

So I think that's definitely part of it. Obviously, if you read the missionary literature, they all try to wrestle with the same question as well. And of course, in many cases, they come to the conclusion that the Holy Spirit wanted it to happen in northwestern Korea. But I understand that that explanation is not going to fly for everyone listening to this today. But certainly there was no debate that there was something very, very special going on in northwestern Korea and specifically around Pyongyang.

So is there anything about it's Protestant and very specifically, Kim's family is Presbyterian? What does that denomination matter to this? story. Is there anything special about Presbyterianism? Like, is there anything? Do you think Episcopalians could have taken off here? You know, what's, is it just kind of a trick of fate? Or was there something about that denomination that made it work better? I think there is an element of a trick of fate. I do think that any number of denominations may well have succeeded. The Methodists were right there, along with the Presbyterians, for example. And then you had other

denominations that also did quite well there as well. You did have Baptists and you did have, I mean, you had Seventh-day Adventists as well, up there as well, and you had other denominations that all did quite well. The Northwest was also the place where you saw the Reverend Moon of the Unification Church also emerged from. So you really had like this real cauldron of sort of spiritual influences and spiritual hunger, I guess you could say, that emerged from in the Northwest. So in some ways, you could say that Samuel Moffitt was kind of in the right place at the right time. But I also think that Presbyterianism, there was something about the way it's organized. It's very well organized. It's very, what we might think of as democratic and there are a lot

of procedures and everything else. And I think that that really played well in a pretty stratified society at that time in the late 1800s in Korea. And for me, as a researcher of this period, the Presbyterians were wonderful. They kept records like nobody else. They kept minutes of meetings. All their letters are preserved, diary entries. And so you can really recount and retrace and recreate the Jerusalem of the East, this sort of environment where the faith first took hold in Korea.

And so, yes, I think that's what's special about the Presbyterian aspect of this. You've given me a great segue to a question I was going to save till the end, but I want to ask it now. As we're about to launch into more of a conversation about Kim and his life, but this is a man who shaped his own myth and shaped his telling of the history of the country. And you write about that. You write about the process by which he retells the story of the country. reshapes things in kind of his own image. How do you write a book of history about this person and about that time period and suss out like what actually happened versus what we know about what happened? It's a great question. And a lot of people I've spoken to over the years as I've

worked on this project. And by the way, this took me 12 years to do. I do have a busy day job. But but it was also just a big long project and a real labor of love. But very early on, I had people including scholars of Kim Il-sung, people who had devoted the whole lives to studying this man, who sort of tried to warn me off the project. They sort of said there just isn't enough material out there about Kim Il-sung and Christianity to merit much more than a magazine article. That was one thing I heard.

And by that point, I had already found a whole lot more than I could fit into a magazine article. Otherwise, I probably would have just done it as sort of a, big Wall Street Journal kind of a weekend piece. But to answer the question, what I think people miss is that you have to take the North Korean sources themselves seriously, in a certain sense. I don't mean take it literally. I suppose there's this whole debate about taking things literally or seriously, but I think you have to take it not necessarily literally, but you do have to take it seriously because

they do pump out voluminous, voluminous accounts of Kim Il-sung's life. life. Most of it is myth, but you need to understand what may not be myth. And so when you look at his eight-volume memoir, two of the last volumes, the two last volumes were published posthumously, but six volumes were published during his lifetime in his own name. Very few serious scholars, and I would include myself in this category, would actually consider Kim Il-sung the real author of that memoir. But that first volume of his memoir, chronologically covers the first 20 years of his life. And so obviously there's not very much about years one, two, and three.

I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's in the church. and he goes into quite a bit of detail about it. And for all of the myth making around him, um, this always stood out to me. I don't know that myth makers around Kim Il-sung would have wanted to highlight this, Christian past that he had, it wasn't really advantageous in too many ways. Some people might say, well, it sort of helped him soften him up at the end of his life and make his outreach to South Korea a little bit more human because South Korea by the 1990s is one of the great centers of

modern Christendom. It has some of the biggest megachurches in the world, including up to today. And it's the largest center of foreign missionaries today, other than the U.S., which has a population seven times the size of South Korea. So you could say that perhaps he invented this or exaggerated his Christian influences, but I just, frankly, I don't buy that. I think he's telling us about his Christian upbringing because it was real, because there was no way for him to get around it, but also at the end of his life, he was very nostalgic, and there's so many signs of this.

And I don't think it's particularly surprising that somebody entering their 80s would get nostalgic about their childhood. I think that's pretty common. But he goes back and he's just such reminiscing about growing up in church. And at some level, what I've done in my book is I've sort of done an alternate reading of his memoir. I guess that's one way to put it. I sort of retell it.

But what's interesting is if you read his memoir, many of the characters that appear in his first volume there, he'll describe as, oh, so and so is a pastor or an elder. or a deacon or a whatever position in the church. But many of the other people, he won't explicitly say they were Christian. He'll just sort of mention so-and-so, my friend, or my dad's friend, or this or that. But you look up all these people, and that's part of what I did over the last 12 years. You look up a lot of these people, and you find they're all Christian. They're basically all Christian.

He basically grew up in this bubble that was centered around the church. His whole life was built around the church. And so, of course, he followed his mom and his dad to church on Sunday mornings. That's kind of a given. And he's very open about that. Although he does say, this is, in my opinion, pretty disingenuous. He says, well, my parents went to church, but they weren't really Christian. My dad was an atheist.

My mom was just really tired on Sunday mornings. So it was just a good place to sit in the pews and fall asleep and take a nap. And that, I think, he protests a little too much there. But he talks a lot about learning the organ at church. He writes about teaching. Sunday school. He writes about performing in Nativity plays. Actually, he says church plays. I sort of imagine a nativity play when I think about this, but he doesn't get quite that specific. But maybe he's one of the wise men, or maybe he's like Joseph and whatever. Who knows what he might have played? But he was

very involved in the church, and he's quite upfront about it. And so part of it was just the puncture the myth-making was to sort of take him at face value on some things, fact-check everything. And just check out all the other people he talks about, that he doesn't necessarily describe as being Christian. And again, you find that they're all Christian, basically. I like that you said that you take their accounting of events seriously, if not literally. One of the fascinating things about the book, just like as a book, first of all, thank you for including pictures of everyone in the index. I don't think I've ever seen that before. It was extremely helpful to have, like, a visual.

for all of these characters. And then as you're kind of recounting his life, you're quoting letters and like quoting from the memoir. And then you'll have like a here's a oil painting. Like here's the moment depicted in North Korea. This is how they think of it. And like kind of having those beats, like seeing the like the official state propaganda, non-prejorative, like for those events as you're reading through it,

you're kind of reading this history of it is also helpful and very fascinating. And just in general, the book has a lot of, like, that kind of documentation in it. And it's not, it's not, I mean, maybe the galley is different from what the Puffinish Pub book will be, but, like, it's not kind of segmented in the middle where, like, I'm having to go to the big thing in the middle of, like, looking all the pictures. I liked having it kind of inset into the book itself. So shout out to whoever laid this thing out. Yeah, and that is indeed the final. version. We did discuss having those sort of glossy pages all clumped together in the middle, and we said, no, let's not do that. Let's sprinkle it throughout because you're right.

There are a lot of names. I tried to reduce the number of names, and Korean names can be tricky. Not a lot of syllables, but many kims, and you need to sort them all out. And so I think I just needed to help the reader along by just trying to be as friendly as I could be. Keep the number of names down and keep them to the essentials and make sure that you have a picture of them. at the back so you can kind of visualize them. All right. Tell me about his mother, because she's the

devout one, right? Well, actually, I mean, both her mother and father were both quite devout. But the mother obviously, I think, really, really left a deep impression on her son. This is, of course,

now you could say the great grandmother of Kim Jong-un, and her name was Kang Banzok. She herself was the daughter of quite a prominent Korean Christian, one of the very first converts. And so she was what you call a Bible woman. That's the term that they used. The Presbyterians were relatively progressive in the context of Korea, but they were also quite conservative. And so women were not given any leadership roles in the church, but they created this sort of unofficial position called a Bible woman. That's the term that they used. And so a Bible woman,

as the missionaries wrote, would sort of travel from village to village. They would meet with women in those villages, and they would sit down and they would talk to them about the outside world. They would sell them books, not, I don't think all Christian books necessarily, but just literature about the world. And they would teach them to read and write. And they would, of course, share the Bible and they would sort of do these itinerating circuits. They would sort of go around from village to village and they'd come back to these villages and build up these these ties with the woman there. And a woman embraced Christianity, especially in the Northwest, with real gusto, because I don't know that the 19th century was great for women in many parts of the world,

but I think they were especially bad for women. I think one of the first things that the missionaries were most appalled by in Korea was that Korean woman by and large did not have names. If you had a son, you would give the son a name. If you had a daughter, you actually wouldn't give them a name, at least in the context of Korea at the time. They would call their daughter number two or number three or the one who was born in the stable or the one with a birthmark on her chin or something like that. Like that's what they would call them. And so never mind, education, that was just out of the question for them. They were sequestered in the back of the house, the filthier part of the house, and they were expected to do the cleaning and to do the

cooking and all of that. And so, Kangban sock, Kim Il-sung's mother was one of the first, I guess you could call it liberated women in Korea in that she was given a name and she was educated and could read and was sent around by the Presbyterian Church as this Bible woman. And what's really interesting is just that they then, he then built up a cult of personality around his mother when he came to power and made her what the Koreans, what the North Koreans called the mother of Korea. She sort of became a mother figure for all Koreans. That was the, that was the way that they sort of framed it in the 1960s and 1970s in Korea. And of course, by then, she's, she's long gone. She died in the 30s and never got to see her son become the leader of,

of North Korea. But she is this quite pious, quite devoted, devout, presbyterian Bible woman. And yet she then sort of becomes this cult figure in North Korea. They compose songs about her that women sing in North Korea to her, sort of like Mary, like Virgin Mary, because she was the mother of this divine figure. She almost takes on some of the reflected glow of the Messiah. And at the end of his life, sorry, at the end of his life, Kim Il-sung in 1992, builds a church on his mother's birthplace. And he does it because he has a dream where his mother appears to him.

And Kim Il-sung late in life here is trying to figure out what's going on here. By this point, he is the supreme leader of North Korea. He has thousands and thousands of statues built to him around the country. he's got every superlative heaped upon him. He is at this point already a greater God than Stalin or Mao or any other leader in history has ever been sort of extolled to that level. And yet his mother appears to him and he's troubled by it and asks people around him, like, what does this mean? What do I need to do? And so the answer comes from one of his interlocutors that you need to, you should, you should do something.

And so he ends up building this church on his mother's birthplace. And it's the church that he followed his mother to when he was a boy. And that's, there's a lot to unpack there. And obviously, I don't have access to his, you know, thinking. But I think if you're listening to this, I think you can kind of connect the dots here, that there was some sense of peace that he was looking for. And I think he was troubled by, I think, what he did do to the church. because I don't want to overstate how Christian Kim Il-sung might have been,

especially towards the end of his life. There's no question that he was perhaps one of the greatest persecutors of the Christian church in modern history. And yet he himself is a product of this church. And at the end of his life, he has this really sort of complex relationship with the faith. And so he does these things. And I almost read it as an act of penance. But I can't prove that. But that's sort of how I read it when I look at what he did towards the end of his life.

Okay. He builds this church. When you say, you call it a church, like, is it a museum piece? Like, do people actually go there to worship? Like, what's the deal inside that building? Yeah, it's a great question. So I mentioned I went to North Korea twice. I went to 2013, and I went as a tourist in that case.

But when I went back in 2017, I was invited explicitly. as the Korea Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. At this point, 2017, just to resituate our listeners here, Donald Trump's come to office for the first time. He is threatening fire and fury against North Korea. He is pursuing a policy of maximum pressure and talks about the big button he has on his desk that he could sort of nuke North Korea with.

And so you have this back and forth with Kim Jong-Jun, and Kim Jong-un is firing back threats in the other direction. And so this was a pretty scary time. I don't know that people appreciate, I think, just how close we really were to something happening. Because I think across the poker table here between Trump and Kim, I don't know that either side really knew the other side was not going to actually follow through on their threats. I really think that that was a genuine risk. And with game theory and everything else, I think you sort of have to throw some of that out

because with Trump and Kim, I don't think either side really knew what the other guy had in his hand and just how much of a madman the other guy was. But it was in that context that North Korea invited us at the Wall Street Journal. But they also had a separate invitation to the New York Times and a third one to the New Yorker. So all of us came in on three separate trips, all spaced about a week apart. And we had about a week for us at the Wall Street Journal to come in. So I went in with three colleagues of mine. and they asked us when we got there, what would you like to see? And so obviously we asked for an interview with Kim Jong-in, which did not materialize. We asked for a visit to the nuclear site, which did not materialize.

They wanted to show us Pyongyang and show off their crown jewel of their country and show us that all of these economic sanctions and all this pressure that Trump is trying to put on us doesn't work. Look at our city. It's glittering. It works. It's wonderful. but I slipped in a little request there and I said, can you, can you let us go to church? It just happened that our trip there spanned a weekend. I think we, I'm not making this up. We came in on a Thursday and left on a Tuesday or something like that.

So I said, Sunday morning, what do you think? Can we go to your churches? And they actually said, yes. And so they let us go to two other churches. They only have two Protestant churches that they built in Pyongyang, and this was built by Kim Il-sung, one in 1988, one in 1992. two. And so we went to church on Sunday. Now, I didn't go to the church service at the church where his mother's birthplace was. We did get to go visit that church, but the two services

happened at the same time. So we were able to go to the church service at the one that was built in 1988, but not the one that was built in 1992 to his mother. But I can tell you about that church service, which was pretty fascinating. I mean, I grew up in the church in sort of Presbyterian adjacent sort of a church. So it was very familiar to me. And if you had walked into the church, it genuinely wouldn't have looked that different from a church that you could have walked into in South Korea. There were no portraits of the Kim's on the wall like there are in almost any other public space in all in North Korea.

And if you meet North Koreans, they almost always have a badge pin over their heart with a picture of Kim Il-sung, sometimes also with Kim Jong-il, his son. and maybe soon one day we'll start to see a lot of people with Kim Jong-un pins over their hearts. But none of the congregants or the pastors, I don't want to say none, but most of them were not wearing the pin. And that was pretty striking to me. And if you listen to the sermon, it would have sounded like a sermon you might have heard somewhere else. There was a choir off to the side and they were wearing their robes just like you would expect a choir in a church to look.

they had Bibles and hymnals in the Pughes, and you could flip through that Bible. It had every one of the 66 books of the Bible in there. It would look pretty familiar to anyone. Of course, it was in Korean, but had every book, every verse. It was a complete Bible there. And so it was a bit of a puzzle to me to try and figure this all out, and I do recall talking to the pastor afterwards, and I just sort of asked, you know, what's going on here? No pins, no portraits.

And he just sort of said, I'm paraphrasing. a little bit. And this was now almost a decade ago. But he sort of said, yeah, they understand that we're Christians here. So we don't need to wear the pin. We don't need to have the portraits up on the wall. So Kim Il-sung, I think, perhaps had some sort of a carve-out because I think he understood that what he had replaced Christianity with was effectively a religion of its own. And I think he recognized that the religion of his childhood needed some sort of a special carve-out because there was something different there for him. Now, I should just make very clear here that a lot of people who have visited North Korea, many Christian leaders, including Billy Graham, have been

in those churches. Billy Graham preached at that church when he was there. And I'm not going to say that it's a real church, all right, but it does have real teachings in there, real Christian teachings in there. But it is frequently described as a Potemkin church, or Potemkin churches, these two. And I was allowed to attend one. And it seemed pretty legit. But I wouldn't take that as gospel, as it were, that this is really all that it is. There have been people who have said that they are all actors in there. I don't know that I would go that far. But I think that Kim Il-sung recognized that when the dividing line was drawn in 1945, there were a lot of Christians

in the Pyongyang area. And many of them were loyal to the regime that he set up as opposed to the regime that was set up in the South. And he promised to them that we'll let you preserve your religion and your tiny little... I mean, keep in mind, this is a big country of

25 million people. Pyongyang has two churches. We're talking maybe a couple hundred people in a country of 25 million people. I think for them, for those who, for families, have proven their loyalty to his regime. I think he did genuinely permit some sort of a carve-out there in a limited sphere. It is definitely used as a showcase for the Wall Street Journal, but also for Billy Graham and

for any other visiting preacher that comes through. I think there's a little bit of both in there. And so those churches continue today, as far as I know, I haven't been since 2017, but from everything I understand, it is still happening there. it. And it's just kind of a little testament to his own personal relationship with the church that I suppose Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un has continued to respect, even though neither of them had any real direct connection with the church themselves. Got like five different places. I could go from that. But I think I want to, how do you,

how does Kim go from attending Sunday school? life in this devout Presbyterian household to not finishing school and becoming like a military figure. Well, I think one thing to keep in mind here is that the only thing that could rival Christianity in terms of stirring the passions of Koreans in the first half of the 20th century would be nationalism. And that, of course, is not unique to Korea. nationalism was obviously a very big ingredient in World War I. I think you could say World War II as well in a lot of places around the world. But the Koreans, I think, were especially passionate about this, and Kim Il-sung was among them. And I don't know that even the greatest skeptic of Kim Il-sung would doubt his genuine fervor for the cause of Korean nationalism.

Of course, he looked at it through a very particular... lens that would be very different from what you would see in South Korea. But nonetheless, I think he was genuine in that desire. The backdrop, of course, is that Japan was the imperialist sort of power in the region at the time, and they had colonized Korea. Korea, keep in mind, it's a relatively small country, 25 million people, as I mentioned, in the north, but back then, for the entire Korean Peninsula, we're talking maybe about 20 million people total at that time. And it's this appendage on the Asian mainland if you look at a map. And of course, it's on the edge of the Chinese empire

that has sort of grown bigger and smaller over the dynasties. And yet Korea was never absorbed into China fully, despite the fact that if you look at a map and everything else, it kind of should. I guess you could almost say, I mean, it looks like it ought to. And yet it never did. And that's because Korea managed to retain its own unique sense of identity through the centuries.

And it's quite a feat. But you have this unified country with a shared language, a lot of customs, there's some regional variations, of course, but pretty consistent. And so they were pretty galled by the fact that Japan, who they regarded as an upstart power,

should be their colonizer. And that was actually quite unique in imperialist history, as well. I mean, if you look at the colonies that the British, the French, and others set up, they were usually far-flung colonies, but Japan was a direct neighbor of Korea and did share a lot culturally with Korea. And so that really, really stuck in their craw. And so you saw so many different manifestations of Korean nationalism. And I think in some respects, it sort of became a religion of sorts for Kim Il-sung. It certainly replaced Christianity as the

main driving motivator of him into his adolescence and into his manhood. And I think that is effectively what happened. I don't know that I would ever have called Kim Il-sung necessarily a Christian himself, although that's a squishy question. I don't know. That's kind of between him and God, if you want to put it that way. But certainly by the time he's in his 20s, he is no longer an active member of any sort of a church community, although that upbringing lingers with him and it continues to manifest itself throughout the rest of his life. And it should be noted that Japan, I mean, all colonists are brutal, but Japan, like in Korea, it's a pretty brutal and horrifying regime.

That's right. There's a reason nationalism takes root. and Japan is behind a lot of that. Okay, after World War II, Soviets are on the winning side. What is, how do Soviets kind of get a sphere of influence here? And like, what is Kim's relationship to them? And what are the Soviets' relationship to North Korea? And what does Kim take from them?

Great questions. I'll try to tackle it as quickly and succinctly as I can. effectively you have the Soviets, Stalin enters the war against Japan, right around the time that the two atomic bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So his timing is impeccable. The Americans, despite being the ones that dropped the two atomic bombs, were actually surprisingly unprepared to handle a sudden Japanese surrender. And so they didn't have any troops ready to send to Korea. Keep in mind that Korea is just one piece of this massive risk board that you're looking at when Japan suddenly surrenders. And so it may not be number one on the priority list, but they try to get their guys there

as quickly as they can to Korea. But by that point, Stalin has kind of made it effect accompli. He has the Red Army coming down full speed through Manchuria, northeastern China, on their way to the Korean Peninsula. And they stop at the 30th parallel, which of course is now the, the, dividing line between North and South Korea because Truman suggests let's let's let's let's split Korea. There's more color and detail that I could get into, but but it's all in the book. Effectively what you what you get to is you have the Soviets in charge of the north and then you have the Americans in charge of the South. The Soviets need somebody who can be their figure, their their their their guy in Pyongyang. And so their first choice is actually

a conservative Christian, which doesn't really work for the Soviets if you think about it that way, but they have to work with him because he is, without question, the most popular political figure north of the 30th parallel. So they kind of reluctantly, grudgingly work with this guy. His name is Chomai Sik. They call him the Gandhi of Korea because he always wore traditional Korean robes, and he was an advocate of nonviolence in terms of resisting the Japanese and then later the Soviets. But basically, Kim Il-sung manages to out-maneuver him, despite being much younger than Cho Man-Sik. I mean, Kim Il-sung, keep in mind, is just 33 years old at the time of the collapse of the Japanese and the division of Korea. He's just 33 years old. But he's in the right place

at the right time, and he plays his cards very well with Soviets. One aspect of his rise that I really get into in the book that you don't see anywhere else is that his Christian upbringing in Pyongyang, I do think played a role in this, because The Soviets recognized pretty early on that we're just taking control of this half of Korea where all the Christians are. And we need to figure out what to do with all these Christians. And they didn't like Chomai Sik because he was too conservative and too anti-Soviet. But Kim Il-sung, they have a guy who grew up in the Jerusalem of the East, who could understand the Christians,

and who could quote Bible verses to them. And indeed, the North Korean official record has Kim Il-sung quoting, from scripture to argue against the conservative pastors that are trying to oppose him to try and bring them on side. And this is stuff that isn't really written about by anyone else. I mean, it's there in the North Korean literature, but very few scholars or anyone has ever really taken it seriously or dug it up or even looked at it. And so that's part of what I have in this research project that I've done as well. But he was kind of an inspired choice for the Soviet. because he could neutralize the Christian strength in the Northwest, in the North.

But also he was very pliable, and he was nominally a socialist. And maybe I'm being too harsh with the word nominally. I mean, he certainly was with the Red Army. He was, he served under the Soviets. And I only sort of say that because his knowledge of Marx and Lenin and all the theory was not, particularly deep. And I think that's true of many of the Asian communists. I mean, Ho Chi men, I think, and many of the others that that, that you sort of encounter from this period are not particularly well versed in, you know, the intricacies of, you know,

dialectical materialism and all the rest of it. They're really nationalists who sort of see the Soviets as, as potential partners. I mean, they saw what happened in 1917 and they say, well, you sort of want that. And so he's in the right place at the right time. And so he maneuvers himself into position such that he takes over at the age of just 33. He's relatively, lives a relatively long life until 1994. So from 1945 until 1994, he runs his country. That's almost exactly half a century. And when you, I'm going off on a little tangent here now, but if you compare that to Stalin, you compare that to Mao, the period under which Kimmel's Song was the unquestioned leader of North Korea is just unparalleled. And unlike Stalin, who

was followed by Khrushchev, and unlike Mao Zedong, who was followed by Deng Xiaoping, you never had a liberalizer who sort of came along afterwards and said, we went too far. Let's rein this in a little bit. Let's take down some of the Stalin statues. Let's rename Stalin grad. Let's take down some of the Mao statues. We may have gone a little too far. That never happened in North Korea, because we know who replaced Kim Jong-il. It was Kim Jong-il. and we know who replaced Kim Jong-il, it's Kim Jong-un. And so this cult has only ever grown more and more and more intense over the years. And now it's been 80 years.

Just think about that. There's almost nobody alive in North Korea today who can even remember what life was like without Akim as this God figure leading the country. Interesting to use the word God figure because technically he is still in charge, right? technically Kim Il-sung is the eternal president of North Korea. It was written into the Constitution three years after he died in 1994. So in 1997, he was made the eternal president. And if you go around North Korea, you will see these obelisks. They look like the Washington Monument.

But down the side, it sort of says, the great leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung, will be with us forever. And that's just incredibly striking language that is reminiscent. of the language that Christ himself sort of said to his disciples when he ascended into heaven at the beginning of the Book of Acts. And many missionaries I know who have done work in North Korea have made that comparison to me. They look at the words on these obelisks, tens of thousands of them around the country, that sort of just talk about the eternal presence of Kim Il-sung with us even today in the year 2026. And it's pretty remarkable. But yes, of course, Kim Jong-un runs the country

today. But sort of does it in the name of his grandfather, which is, which is, which is a very remarkable. which is pretty remarkable. I've only got you for a few more minutes, so I'm trying to be efficient here. But I do want to, okay, things get off to a little bit of a rocky start in 1945. And you write about this speech at the Pyongyang Sports Ground. What is his public debut like? Yeah, it's sort of the beginning of his myth.

He's 33 years old. People who are at this venue later describe him looking like a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. They describe him as having an ill-fitting suit and a bad haircut. They talk about his voice being duck-like. So not the most inspiring figure. And yet what you have is you have him presiding over this welcome ceremony for the social. Soviets. And this is really where the myth begins to take shape. And what's wonderful about this is you see North Korea now reimagining this moment. Because standing behind him are all these Soviet generals. He has a Soviet war medal pinned to his suit. And of course, if you look at the North Korean imagery today, what you have is you have all of this literally airbrushed out. You have it airbrushed out to the point where, where, you know, you have that famous photo of Stalin, where one after another, one of his, you know, sort of comrades disappears and then another one disappears until it's just Stalin at the end with, I think, maybe one other figure next to him, right?

So you have this whole kind of a thing happening in North Korea, but writ large because everything gets airbrushed and everything gets rewritten. And Kim Il-sung recognizes from the very beginning just how important history is in, shaping his his his his his his his his personality and so he's ruthless about it to the point where not only did the americans not liberate uh or defeat the japanese with these atomic bombs not only did the red army not take a leading role the red army wasn't even involved this was just me taken down the japanese by the end of it and so that's sort of a glimpse into how things were rewritten there and again it's not unique to north korea but i think north korea took it much, much farther than anyone else.

What are the aspects of American Christianity, because it is, those were American missionaries, that he pulls out that you see as like the big influences in the creation of this personality cult? Well, so a lot of people will point to these, I would say, almost kind of superficial similarities. I don't want to dismiss them because I think they're very real as well. But you'll see people say, well, North Korea has kind of its holy trinity. It has the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit being this sort of juche ideology that Kim Il-sung propagates. They'll talk about, you know, weekly confession that you sort of have to do.

They'll talk a lot about, you know, North Korean books will publish Kim Il-sung's words in bold face and in a slightly larger font. Sometimes they'll even publishes words in red. And that's very similar to many Bibles that you'll see where Christ's words are in bold or in red. And you have hymns that have been written to Kim Il-sung and all the rest of it. So there are a lot of similarities there for sure. But I don't want to just be seen as saying, look, Christianity has this. North Korea has this and track them one to one. I don't know that it tracks that easily. For example, Well, one of the main things that you do in North Korea is you bow before a statue of Kim Il-sung, and you do that on his birthday.

You do that on New Year's Day. You do that on your birthday. You do that on your wedding day. And that's not really a Christian practice. You don't really go to church and bow before a statue of Jesus. That's a little bit weird. That would be called idolatry in the Christian church. So you wouldn't do that.

But obviously, it's religious. So much of what is there. You have people who will go to North Korea and talk about how actually some of the structures of government and some of the structures of how they do things are actually almost taken from Presbyterianism. And that goes back to the question you were asking earlier about Presbyterianism in particular. But there's just all these sorts of things. I mean, I think that the one thing that really strikes me, too, is this idea that you see emerged in the 1980s, where Kimmel-sung and North Korea kind of says to everyone, you have a physical, biological life.

You're going to die one day. We're all going to die one day. Ashes to ashes, dust-to-dust. But you have this other life that is what they call your sociopolitical life. And this life, if you sacrifice yourself for the cause of Kim Il-sung, or if you do this and that, you can kind of live beyond your physical, biological life. You have this other life that can kind of attain transcendence. And obviously, that's a pretty Christian sort of a notion, right? There's also a similar parallel idea that you have a physical human father, your dad, the guy who physically made you. And yet you also have a spiritual father. You have a heavenly father. You have this other father figure. And one doesn't negate the other. Both are real fathers, but Kim Il-sung is your spiritual father. And you have that sort of idea, too, which is very Christian.

I don't want to say that it was necessarily directly plucked from Christianity because I wasn't a part of the process. And they don't tell us this. They don't document it. But you have to sort of look at that and say, that can't be a coincidence, you know? And I can't prove it. But you look at enough of this and you look at the cosmology that they have to create the rituals that they have, the symbols and all the rest of it. And ultimately what I'm trying to say here is not to say Christianity is what explains everything

about North Korea. That would be going too far. I wouldn't certainly go so far as to say that Kim Il-sungism is basically a Christianity that's sort of been twisted. I don't think that's quite right either. But I think what I'm trying to contribute to our understanding of North Korea is to understand that it is less a nation state, although it definitely is a nation-state. although it definitely is a nation state.

It has a seat at the United Nations. It has a military and a flag and a currency and an anthem and all the rest of it. It is, for better for us, it is a nation state. But I think you're kind of missing the essence of what North Korea is. Unless you look at it the way that I've come to look at it, which is at heart, at root, I think it is a religious society. And it's a religious society that's happened to take on the trappings of a state. It's also a religious society that happens to have nuclear weapons.

And so we need to take this country. very seriously for what it is, it can seem very easy to ridicule. You look at Team America, you look at the interview, you look at all this and that. And I get that. I get that it's easy to ridicule in some ways. And yet we really have to take it quite seriously as well because it is a nuclear-armed religious society. And a religious society, I mean, it's a polite way of saying, I mean, if you want to

look for a synonym for religious society, you could use the word cult, although I try to avoid that because I know how pejorative that word is, distinct from cult of personality, which I think is a little bit more neutral. or even a theocracy. That's the other words that you sometimes hear used, although it's not Iran either. It's a little bit different. And so religious society is sort of the term I've kind of settled on,

partly because I think it's a respectful term. And I think we need to give respect in a certain twisted, weird way to what Kim Il-sung built, because it has lasted. And now that they're nuclear-armed, I don't know that it is never going to continue to exist. I mean, I don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. And certainly many things that seem inevitable and impossible to change do change.

And yet sitting here talking to you on Easter Monday, 26, it's kind of hard to see how North Korea is dislodged at this point in any way. It is a nuclear-armed country that has the, you know, devotion to the point of death of 25 million people that I don't think has ever been seen in the history of human. And so I think we need to take that quite seriously. Well, I think that that is the perfect note to end on. We didn't get to half of my questions. So listeners, if you want to know why Jim Jones is in the book, how that meeting with Billy Graham went and like the opportunities that were perhaps missed in the 90s. And you want to know how de-Stalinization went in North Korea,

which I also thought was a very interesting story. Get Korean Messiah. It is out on the 14th, right? Is that the date? That's it. And it is excellent. Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking to us about this. This is great.

Fascinating book, and so thank you for coming. It was a real pleasure to be here. That's all for this episode of Angry Planet. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, and Kevin O'Dell, who's created by myself and James. Jason Fields. If you love the show, please go to anchor planetpod.com and sign up. You get bonus episodes. You get commercial free early access. You get all the written work. We will be back again soon with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until then.