Ideas - What North Korea’s personality cult has to do with Jesus

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

North Korea is no place for evangelical Christians today but peel back the decades and you’ll find Christianity at the heart of the Kim family’s rise to power. Journalist Jonathan Cheng has spent a decade and a half piecing together the crucial role evangelical Christianity played in North Korea’s Kim dynasty — especially in the upbringing of Kim Il Sung, the first leader of the country who's seen today as an immortal and sacred figure. Cheng's book is called Korean Messiah.Jonathan Cheng is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and was previously the Korea bureau chief, running coverage of the Korean peninsula, including politics and society in both North and South Korea. He has traveled to North Korea twice.

Have you ever wondered how clean the seats on the TTC are? I found, like, chicken bones or, like, bed bogs. Or why so many Toronto restaurant bathrooms are in dank basements? Sometimes it's the most sketchy things. Like, when you go down, it's like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast, This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport.

We have to bring jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto strip club in its final hours. We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto and all its big, beautiful, frustrating, warty, fascinating glory. So find and follow us, this is Toronto, wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Island.

Written in 1946, the song of General Kim Il-sung. In North Korea, this piece of music is more important than the national anthem. In fact, one escapee from North Korea said they rarely ever heard the official anthem. By contrast, that person said, everybody had to learn this song, quote, as soon as they were born. North Koreans worshipped their founding leader.

Then they worshipped his son, Kim Jong-il as well. And now the grandson, Kim Jong-un. The Kim family's personality cult is unlike anything seen in other socialist countries, or in fact, any modern country. A new history of North Korea seeks to help us understand how it all happened. It zooms in on one part of the storyline, but an extremely revealing part. For those who know North Korea as an atheistic, communist nation, generally seen as the world's most oppressive place to try to be a Christian. This tale of Kim Il-sung's rise to power contains some big surprises. The book is called Korean Messiah. The author is Canadian journalist Jonathan Chang. He heads the

China Bureau for the Wall Street Journal, and he's based in Beijing. But right now, he's here with me in Toronto. Hello, Jonathan. It's a real pleasure to be here on CBC. Thanks for coming in. I rarely talk to people who've been to North Korea. You've been to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, twice. What's the story behind those visits? I went in 2013. I'm at the Wall Street Journal. I've been at the Wall Street Journal now for two decades as a journalist.

When I first moved to Seoul, the capital of South Korea in 2013, the company actually had me first go and visit Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, because even though I couldn't be based there, I knew that I'd be writing a lot about North Korea. And so it was important just for me to go. At the time, it wasn't so unusual to go to North Korea. It wasn't normal by any measure, but it wasn't that unusual. It was certainly possible for almost anyone who wanted to go to go.

And so I went as a tourist. I was there for about a week. And that was really interesting because I know you don't get to see everything. They're very careful about what they show you. And yet what they show you is so revelatory because what I found was a country that, in my opinion, is less of a nation state, less of a country, as we would normally think about it, and more of what I describe as a religious society. It's this place where the Kims are basically treated like gods, and it's been this way for eight decades now. So you saw that right from the very beginning.

Yeah, right when you actually, even when you're still on the plane, because once you cross the border, they have an announcement that says you've now entered, you know, the land of the Kim's, effectively. you land there and you see his portrait everywhere. You see it on the walls of every room you step into, including the airport terminal. You see it pinned over the hearts of every single North Korean citizen. They all wear these badge pins. They're on the front pages of the newspaper. There aren't everyone's tongues, everyone's lips. And it's just, it's kind of overwhelming.

You walk down the street, you see their statues. There are no billboards or advertisements. You just see their mosaics or their murals or their statues and all the rest of it. I have been, I guess the word is lucky because so few people get there. I've been very lucky to have also been to Pyongyang, only once, but I went as a journalist. I went as part of an invitation, an omnibus invitation to dozens of journalists who showed up for a party, a ruling party conference, which was really interesting. And I have been to repressive states all over the world, you know, everything from Russia to, you know, pre-war Iraq. I have never seen anything like what I saw in Pyongyang.

And I wonder just what your immediate reaction was to just seeing it, to just being in the midst of it. Yeah, I couldn't believe that such a place really exists in this world. It's not a figment of our imaginations. This is reality for 25 million people. And I said that in 2013. I could just as easily say that for 2026. It felt like a Disneyland of sorts. Yeah, Disneyland except take out the Mickey Mouse and the Donald Ducks.

and it's just Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and now Kim Jong-un. Yeah. When was the last time you were there? I was there again in 2017, and this time was, just like yours, at the invitation of the North Korean government. And in that case, we went in as a team of four. They put us up at the same guest house where Jimmy Carter stayed when he visited in 1994. And they kind of rolled out the red carpet for us. This was during Trump's first term.

And I think they wanted to send a message to the White House through big American media outlets that they weren't afraid of Donald Trump. They weren't afraid of his military threats. They weren't afraid of his sanctions, his maximum pressure. They wanted to show us that they were doing very well. Thank you very much. And so they wanted the Wall Street Journal there, in part, to show them that we're still standing. How free were you to move around as a journalist? We weren't free.

I mean, no one is ever really free to move around North Korea. And just doing the research for the book, I find even the Chinese, even the Russians, even their so-called friends are kept on a very short leash. But for us, they did ask us on the first night opening banquet. They sat around the table with us and they said, well, you're here for a week. What would you like to see? And so we asked for an interview with Kim Jong-un. We asked for a visit to the nuclear facilities. They were both politely declined.

But I had been working on this book already for a few years by 2017. And I said to them, I understand you have a few Protestant churches here in Pyongyang. We maybe like to see if we could visit them. maybe attend service on Sunday. We happened to be here over a weekend. And they looked at each other. They thought about it a little bit. And they said, yeah, I think we can make that happen for you. So it was a pretty interesting trip. We were able to, we saw all the things they wanted us to see. But we were also able to see some of what we wanted to see, including attending Sunday morning church service in North Korea. That's extraordinary. What was it like?

It's surreal. You know, if you walked in, you wouldn't actually think you were in North Korea. They don't have portraits of the Kims on the wall. They don't have the badge pins of the Kims over their hearts. It looks kind of like a church. It has pews and it has the pulpit and it has the choir standing over there on the right and they're all in their robes and you've got Bibles donated by South Korean Christians there in front of you. There's been this long-running debate about whether these churches, how real are these churches. And I don't want to overstate how real they are because this is North Korea after all.

And I know that the controls on what people can do, how they can worship are extraordinarily limited. I don't know that there's any place on earth where it's more repressive. And yet, I do think that within the very narrow confines of this little church, and there are two of them, we're talking a couple hundred people in a country of 25 million people. I actually do think that there's some freedom given here, again, within the very narrow parameters here. I guess you could say a dog has the freedom to move within their cage. They're still in the cage, but they have the freedom to move within their cage. Maybe that's the analogy there. Yeah.

Before that trip, when you went there as a tourist, you listed a whole bunch of signs that began to hint to you very strongly that there was some correlation to the Christian history of Pyongyang. Was there one thing when it kind of just hit you? And you thought, oh, my God, this is actually very familiar. And it has to do with Christianity. You know, actually, I do have one. I think when we were taken to the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, this is. a sacred site, you know, it's pilgrimage site.

I've been there. Yes. And so, very odd. And it's this sort of humble, thatched hut. It's these bucolic grounds. They literally have these, I don't know what they are, like plastic mushrooms that are there on the side and they pipe this very ethereal sort of music. So it feels like you're in this sacred space. You know, Billy Graham, the evangelist, he was invited to visit North Korea by Kim Il-sung twice in 92 and 94. And when Billy Graham first gets there, he says the same thing that I think I was thinking when I got there. He says, all they're missing here is the manger and the three wise men. And of course, the reference there is to the nativity of Christ. And the humble beginnings. Yeah, and how eerily similar it was, how obviously

modeled it all was. And so that was perhaps one moment. I guess the other would be the resting place of Kim Il-sung. That's another place where people are taken. He's embalmed in formaldehyde, under glass, and you're expected to go into the Holy of Holies, as it were. And they have these dust blowers to blow off any particle of dust. I guess I've also been the semiconductor fabrication facilities. It's almost similar in that sort of over the top, kind of making sure you're totally pure before you go in, and then you're expected to bow three times before his body. And there was something just very religious, very eerie there that this is nominally an atheistic state, and yet you know it's anything but.

Yeah. And as you say, the ubiquity of his image, I mean, the fact that it is literally on the wall of every home, of every business, of every institution really is hard to miss. I wonder whether there were any really nuanced signs that you picked up on as well that really, again, hinted at the Christian roots to this cult of personality. Sure. You know, if you pick up North Korean publications, and I've picked up a lot over the years, doing research for this, I bought as much as I could when I was in North Korea,

I packed my suitcase full of basically propaganda. What you'll note is that when you flip through North Korean text, you'll find that the words of Kim Il-sung are typically printed larger than the rest of the text, oftentimes in bold, and very occasionally in red letter. And that, to me, was just incredible. If you walk into many churches, you pick up a Bible, the words of Christ will be in red. And here you have the words of Kimmel-sung treated like sacred writ, which it is. What was just your reaction to realizing this connection?

I was bold over. I was bold over because I think intuitively we all kind of understand that people kind of need something to believe in. And so I think in modern society that vacuum in many ways, you take it out of an explicitly religious context. And you have movie stars, you have pop stars, you have rock stars and so on. And if you saw one walking down the street, you'd get kind of excited. Your heart would race faster. Your palms would get sweaty. If you met your idol, if you want to use a word that does have a religious inflection to it, you meet your idol.

You're going to, even though you know intellectually this person is just like you and me. And yet at the same time, you can almost get to a point where it's more than just respect. It's almost devotion. It's almost reverence that you have for another person. Kim Il-sung, the founder of the North Korean state, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, I think he just really, understood that. And the way that he was able to tap into this and the worshipful tone that people use, even when they just refer to him, even when they walk by his image, the way they treat him like a living deity. I mean, he's been dead for more than 30 years, and he's still

treated like a living deity. He has literally written into the Constitution as the eternal president of North Korea. So he's gone, but he's not gone at all. He's everywhere. And it's that in itself is kind of referencing Christianity. The eternity, the eternal. That's right. That's Right. And actually it was a missionary, an American missionary in North Korea, who first pointed this out to me all over the country, tens of thousands of these obelisks. They look just like the Washington monument in Washington. And down the side, they all say, our dear leader, our great leader, Comrade Kim Il-sung, is with us forever. And this sort of statement is, this missionary, he pointed it out to me, said, it's so evocative of what Jesus Christ was said to have said to his disciples when

he ascends into heaven at the end of, sort of at the end of the gospels at the beginning of the Book of Acts. And so you have this notion that he's gone, but he's not gone. He's present among us, but he's present in our hearts. He's present in our lives. He's present in our songs of praise and everything else. It's just incredibly religious. Notwithstanding the presence of those two churches that you visited, I'm just curious, what is the official stance of the regime there on religion today. Sure. Well, there's what they say and there's what they do. What they say is actually pretty similar to what you would find in any socialist country. They say religion is the opiate of the masses. They say we tolerate religion, but we are officially atheistic because, look,

we're moving into this future, this communist paradise where we're not going to need religion. We're going to get beyond this superstition. We're not quite there yet. So we're going to let the simple-minded follow their funny little superstitions for a few more years. But eventually we're going to move past that. So to that end, they do officially say we do have a quote-unquote state backed church, a state-backed Catholic association, a state-backed Buddhist association, and so on, that's what they say. What they do, of course, is they have cracked down pretty heavily and for decades on the church. Again, they have these carve-outs. They do have these two Protestant churches in Pyongyang. They have a Catholic cathedral. They even have a Russian Orthodox

church in Pyongyang. But this is one city in a country of 25 million people, and the number of people can actually go there and attend service and worship freely is extremely. extremely limited. Do people actually still use the term Kim Il-sungism to describe the country's guiding philosophy? You know, the word that you'll usually see, if you read a lot of North Korean stuff, I don't suppose many people have, but I have. You'll usually see juche ideology. That's the term that they usually use. It's usually translated as self-reliance. But North Korea makes clear in its literature that juce ideology is but a subset of this larger idea called Kim Il-Sung. And Kim Il-sungism kind of speaks for itself. I mean, what does it represent? What does it mean? Well, it means this person, this man who founded North Korea and ruled it for half a century.

It's been referred to as a gospel. It has been and in fact, I mean, it's been used pejoratively as a gospel because many of Kim Il-sung's former socialist allies were so appalled at the direction that he took it in that they kind of mocked it because they themselves would have seen themselves as orthodox socialist. They would have said, we're sticking to Marxism, Leninism. But what is going on here in North Korea is totally different. It is worship of a person. It's a cult of personality and it's abhorrent. And so they sort of. said, yes, there is this gospel. It was actually used this notion of a gospel, the good news, literally, of Kim Il-sungism, was something that the state did also try to propagate. They took out newspaper ads in the New York Times, in the Boston Globe, in all sorts of newspapers, and they tried to sort of position Kim Il-sung kind of as this messianic figure, not just for North Koreans, but for the world. It wasn't terribly successful, but there are people out there who do actually look up to North Korea and say, hey, here's a plucky little country that really, by all, you know, rights, it should have been crushed by the United States. And yet here it is still standing. It's nuclear armed and it answers to no one. And that is a pretty strong and powerful and attractive message for many people who don't like America. And there are many people around the world who don't like America.

Yeah. It's so interesting you mention the countries that in effect should be and have been North Korea's allies. And yet the current leader, Kim Jong-un, is the grandson, as you said, of Kim Il-sung. When his grandfather took power, Joseph Stalin was running the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong, ran China, but neither started family dynasties. And nor did the Eastern European communist leaders. We'll get into what makes North Korea special. But just to get kind of at the bigger picture, how unusual is Kim's families hold on power compared to what we've seen elsewhere in the world since World War II? is unparalleled, unprecedented. I mean, I don't want to say unprecedented. Certainly, we've seen

millennia of hereditary succession. And you don't need to be socialist to have that. In fact, it was a big deviation from Orthodox Marxism, Leninism, because that was one of the primary rules. You don't hand off power to your son or to your daughter or to your relatives. And so, you're right. Stalin did not hand off power to his son. son or Mao to his son. Instead, they both saw after their death the scrapping of their personality cults, not their entire scrapping. We still see elements of Maoism walking around Beijing. That's where I live now. You still see Stalin's image preserved in this former Soviet Union. And yet what came after Stalin's death in 1953 was Akita Khrushchev, his successor, basically

saying the cult of personality is monstrous and we need to get rid of it. And so you saw Stalin grad get renamed. You saw many of the Stalin statues come down. And after Mao Zedong died in 1976, you had Deng Xiaoping come along and Deng Xiaoping took China on a completely different path. And he also took down a lot of the Mao statues. And he also launched this process called demowification. And so you have those two precedents. By the time Kim Il-sung dies in 1994, This is well after both Stalin and now are gone. He decides he doesn't want that. He's less of an orthodox Marxist-Leninist.

He is a Kim Il-sungist, and he's going to do things the way Kim Il-sung does it. So we know who he ends off power to. It's his son, Kim Jong-il, and we know who Kim Jong-il hands off power to. It's his son, Kim Jong-un. And we also know who Kim Jong-un is going to hand off power, I think, presumably. Yeah, I mean, now you see Kim Jong-un going around, firing off missiles, riding in tanks with his young teenage daughter. We think her name is Kim Juei. We're not 100% sure about that.

We're not 100% sure that she's the successor. There's a great debate going on about this right now. I don't have any inside information. I'm not speaking to Kim Jong-un. I don't know what his intentions are. But I will just note that, of course, Kim Jong-un is not necessarily at the end of his run. He is in his early 40s.

He may yet live another 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Who is to say? And it means that even if he is positioning his daughter as a potential successor, it still may be decades to come. It may not be her at all. We simply don't know. But it does seem very clear that Kim Jong-un does already have a succession plan at least in mind. And what that says to me is that says that this family dynasty now in its third generation is poised for a potential fourth generation. This is now 81 years that the Kim family has been in charge.

I think there's a very good chance. I mean, I don't have a crystal ball. I'm a journalist. I don't make predictions. And yet one has to think, especially when you consider its nuclear arsenal, that it isn't likely to go the way of a Venezuela or in Iran. I think we're going to see North Korea potentially preserve the system for years and years to come. This is not a hope on my part, certainly. But I don't know that I would bet against them.

right now. You are a journalist and a student of history, which is why you've written this book, and I do want to get into that history. There are so many parts to the story of Christianity's popularity on the Korean Peninsula. That's why I'm seeing it right here, sitting here. That's why it's 800 pages, this book that you've written. I want to go to an especially vivid scene that started in 1907 in Pyongyang, an extraordinary moment called the Great Revival. What would we see, if we were standing in Pyongyang in 1907 right now, what would we see around us? You know, the missionaries that were very present in Pyongyang, they were astounded, they were overwhelmed, they were almost appalled at what they saw because, to answer your question,

what you would have seen is you would have seen Korean converts, many of them having just become Christian a few years earlier, at most 10 years, in sort of a convulsion of mass hysteria, It starts in one church in January 1907. People come up to the pulpit. It's a Monday evening. It's not a church service, but people are coming up and they're confessing their sins in front of hundreds and hundreds of their fellow congregants. Just spontaneously. Spontaneously.

One after another, it is like a mass hysteria in the sense that I think the emotionalism and the way that one person's confession leads to another coming up. And people are literally banging their heads on the floor. they're banging their fists on the floor until the blood is flowing. They're howling in agony. They're screaming out these anguished confessions of murder, of adultery, of theft, of all sorts of things, as the missionaries themselves said, it seemed like the gates of hell had been unleashed, and it seemed like every sin in the Ten Commandments was poured out there. And what was this an expression of?

It was an expression, I think, of, of repentance. of, you know, it was, that was the whole idea is that the missionaries, and these are American missionaries primarily Presbyterian and Methodists, they're actually very straight-laced missionaries. These are, these are not, they were not thrilled. They were not, they didn't understand what was happening with all this emotionalism. They were very buttoned up people. They did not expect for the gates of hell to be, you know, unleashed as, as they saw. And so it begins in Pyongyang. It happens in 1907. as you say, that's just five years before Kim Il-sung is born in the very city where he is born,

and it washes out down to Seoul, now the capital of South Korea, all over the Korean peninsula. It spills out over into China, and you see for weeks and months that you have missionaries all over the place talking about their churches just being overwhelmed with people flocking into the church, screaming out these confessions and just being overwhelmed with emotion. It was quite a scene. In reading it, it was quite an expression. of the passion with which people there in the north embraced Christianity. Even before that, the missionaries were writing about the zeal with which people were embracing religion there.

I just wonder what explains this huge appeal of Christianity to Koreans at that time? Sure. I should clarify, it wasn't Koreans all over the peninsula. It was specifically Koreans in the northwest of Korea clustered around Pyongyang. Actually, the missionaries had been active in Seoul and in Busan down in the deep south for several years by the time the first missionary moves into Pyongyang. And they don't actually have all that much success. It's not until they get to Pyongyang that you have this overwhelming outpouring. And what is the explanation? The missionaries themselves struggled to explain it.

At some level, they said this must be what God wanted. But of course, there's still that next question. Well, why would God want that to happen there? else because this was the one place in all of Asia where you see Protestant Christianity really blossom in a way that you don't see in China, in India, in Japan, even in other parts of Korea. It's really around Pyongyang that something truly very special emerges. Our guest is Jonathan Cheng. His book is called Korean Messiah. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. At XYZ Storage, spring cleaning just got a whole lot easier.

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Sometimes it's the most sketchy things. Like when you go down, it's like, what is this? I'm Hayden Waters, a reporter and producer on the podcast. This is Toronto. From breaking down Doug Ford's obsession with the island airport. We have to bring jets in. To being inside an iconic Toronto strip club in its final hours. We go beyond the headlines of the day and get to know Toronto

and all its big, beautiful, frustrating, ward-y, fascinating glory. So find and follow us, this is Toronto. wherever you get your podcast. In 1912, the year Kim Il-sung was born, the city of Pyongyang was the center of Christian practice in Asia. Missionaries referred to it as the Jerusalem of the East. The flourishing of churches and the devotion of new converts was beyond anything American and Canadian evangelists had ever seen.

Jonathan Cheng is the China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal. He grew up in Toronto and now lives in Beijing. He's fascinated by this chapter in Pyongyang's history. Right around the time Kim Il-sung was growing up. The kind of Protestant Christianity that came to Northwestern Korea at the time was one that was really appealing to people there. Why? Because they saw it as a religion of equality before God. they were discriminated against by the power brokers in Seoul, and they didn't like it.

Many of the people up there, they had more of an up-by-the-bootstrap sort of a mentality. They were more independent, they were more capitalistic, they were more rough around the edges, but also more receptive to new ideas. And so I think when this Christian gospel first gets to the Pyongyang area, they embrace it with gusto. Yeah. Do you think it had anything to do? And maybe I'm just riffing off of what you just said, but does it have to do with the people

who brought it. I think it definitely does. And it's interesting. I mean, many of the missionaries actually are coming from Toronto. They're coming from the University of Toronto because this is a period where we're talking the late 1800s here, where you have many graduates of universities, colleges, medical schools, very well-educated men and women, generally again, Presbyterian and Methodist. They're 22, 23, 24, 25, and their greatest mission. There's no higher calling that they could have in this world than to go to the ends of the earth and to share the gospel of Christ. Many of the Canadian missionaries were the ones who were the most active in what we now call North Korea. They were more active in the northeast than in the northwest around Pyongyang,

but nonetheless, they are very much a part of this story. How much of that history did you know before you went to North Korea? Not very much. I had a dim sense. Again, I mentioned I'm ethnically Chinese, but growing up in Toronto, you're going to meet Koreans. Of course. I went to school. down in the States, there I met a lot of Korean Americans. And when you meet people from the Korean diaspora, inevitably, you will find that many, many, many of them, a very high proportion, almost higher than almost any other community you'll meet, seems to be tied to the Christian church in some way. And that was always a bit of a puzzle to me. I didn't quite understand that.

So I had this foggy notion in my head that Koreans and Christianity, there's some connection there. But I always thought it was South Korea, because South Korea is today home to some of the largest megachurches in the world. It sends more foreign missionaries out into the world than any other country other than the U.S. And so I always thought it was South Korea, but the history tells you actually most of the communists were in the South. Most of the Christians were actually in the north. It was a bit of a mind twist for me. And, you know, that's what I love about history. That's what I love about journalism. You start with a little bit of a notion, a question. You start pulling on a thread. And before you know it, you discover all these things, you never

could have imagined. Yeah. Also, the missionaries provided help beyond the spiritual to the population. Can you explain? Yeah, that was a big part of the appeal. They really had two prongs to this, education and medicine. In Korea, prior to the arrival of the first missionaries, first Protestant missionaries, I should be very clear about that.

Catholics have a separate history, which is very, very rich as well in Korea, but that's not really the story I'm telling here. Protestant Christian missionaries first arrived. in the 1880s. At that time, there's very little education if you're poor. There's no education if you're a girl. It was just not done. And so the missionaries came along and said, well, that's not right. And so they start to educate not only the poor, but they educate women for the first time, young woman for the first time. And it's shocking in Korea at the time. the very first university graduates in all of Korea, the first generations of them, I would say the first

couple of hundreds of them were all Christian. They were all educated in the missionary system. The other thing they brought was medicine, because medicine was, I think by our standards here, was not very well developed in Korea. People were pretty superstitious. Some of the cures that they had for one another, I don't know that we'd want to try them here today. They certainly didn't help in many cases, but you had these missionaries, again, very earnest, and they're going over and they're treating patients. They're going out into the countryside. And of course, while they're teaching, while they're healing, they're also sharing the Christian message. And so this is part of the reason why it spreads so quickly in Korea. I mean, it happens in other countries too.

Sure. They didn't just do this in Korea. And yet there was a special receptivity in Korea. And one last thing is also there was a special receptivity among women in what would have been a pretty traditional society where women are concerned. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the missionaries were stunned, shocked, appalled. I think we all would be to learn that most Koreans didn't give names to their daughters. They named their sons, and the daughters would be named literally number two or the one with the birthmark on the ear or, I don't know, this or that.

They didn't actually give them formal names. So the first woman to have names were all names given by missionaries. So Kim Il-sung was born in 1912, just after the revival, as you mentioned. Where did his parents fit into this rapidly growing response to Christianity? His parents, I'll spare you their names, but the father, he was such a devout Christian. He was also a Korean nationalist. This is a very new idea at the time because Korea traditionally didn't really have a sense of its own collective nationhood in a way that we would now. think about it, it sort of took the Japanese colonizing Korea. And this process begins in 1905,

where you really start to see Korea awaken and say, wait a minute, we're not a part of this Japanese empire. We're not even a part of the Chinese empire, which is traditionally more the way that Koreans would have thought of themselves. But Kim Il-sung's father, he conducts this blood ritual in a tomb, in a graveyard effectively, where he and another friend of his are praying devoutly for the Japanese imperialist to be kicked out of Korea. And they cut themselves, shed some blood, and write using their blood, this commitment that they have to fighting for Korea's independence. And yet what's really crucial here is that they're praying for all of this in the name of

Jesus Christ. they see the church as the vehicle for how the Koreans are going to throw off this imperialist outside presence. And that's his father. His mother is really interesting. His mother is the daughter of a church elder. And she is what they called at the time a quote unquote Bible woman. That was the name of this position that they created in the Presbyterian church in Korea because this was a relatively conservative church in the modern sense.

they didn't allow women to take positions of leadership in the church. And yet they obviously wanted to harness the enthusiasm and the energies of their women converts. And so Kim Il-sung's mother becomes this Bible woman. She knows her Bible inside out. And her job is to go from village to village in the countryside, meeting with these women who don't have names. She's giving them names. And she's teaching them to read. And how is she teaching them to read?

She's teaching them to read using the Bible. These are the parents of Kim Il-sung. These are the great-grandparents of Kim Jong-un. They are devout. Almost missionaries themselves. They are missionaries. Usually when we think about missionaries, we mean foreign missionaries, but they're very much missionaries to other fellow Koreans. What's interesting, and this was a surprise to me, is that Kim Il-sung does not deny that history.

He doesn't deny that his parents were Christians and that he lived in a Christian home. But he does point out that they weren't, well, he claimed. that they weren't actual believers. Maybe explain what that nuance is. Sure, yeah. I mean, I think at some level, he can't deny that his parents and that his upbringing was in the church because A, it was true. And B, I think he was fond of it.

I think he recognized its role in his upbringing. And yet at the same time, as you say, in his memoir, and by the way, there is an eight-volume memoir, whether or not he wrote it himself is another matter. but it's written in the first person. It's on the bookshelf of every North Korean home. It's been read by virtually every North Korean. These are... And you've read that. And I've read that. Yeah. And there he talks a lot about his Christian upbringing. But you're right. He says, yes, my parents did go to church every Sunday. But, you know, my mom, she wasn't really a believer. She went because she had a hard life. And she liked to take a nap. And on a Sunday morning, where would be more comfortable than to sit in a church pew and take a nap there? So I almost had to wake her up when the Berman was over because she was sleeping so soundly, he would say that my father, yeah, he also went to church too. Yeah, he spoke in front of church groups and played the organ in church. He did all this other stuff, but he wasn't really a Christian. He was actually an atheist.

As I read this, I think to myself, you protest a little too much here, you know. You can just say that your parents went to church and leave it at that. I think we all know what that means. Is there anything controversial or hidden about the role of Christianity and Kim Il-sung's youth? Some of this was known, but North Korea itself never really acknowledged it until their great leader himself puts this in his memoirs when he's turning 80. And it's such a striking thing that the quasi-divinity that has been leading North Korea for half a century, who has been demonizing the Christian church. And it's a Christian church, and American missionaries at the end of his life tells us in his own words that he was actually

raised in the church, that he actually was quite close to all these institutions that the missionaries built. It was so striking. North Korea literally had to rewrite its dictionaries, literally had to redefine words like pastor or church or Christianity or religion, because the definition of these words in the dictionary before were all these incredibly pejorative and negative things. They would describe it as this evil imperialist religion. Pastors were coming in cloaked as messengers of God, but really they were there to undermine the Korean people and all the rest of it. And yet here you have, wait a minute, why is our great leader spending so much time with these evil imperialists? All the dictionaries literally had to be rewritten. You can see it before 92 and after

92 when volume one is published. How do you explain that? I explain it simply by the fact that Kim Il-sung really was raised in the church. And by the end of his life, I think he genuinely felt this, I don't know if I want to say regret. I certainly haven't had any opportunity to speak with him. He died in 1994. He was so self-mythologized to such a great degree, but he was a human being. You and I know this. He was just another human being like the rest of us. I'm not in my 80s, but I imagine that when I am in my 80s, I am going to start looking back at my life and start reassessing everything. There's also one other. fascinating detail, which is that Kim Il-sung tells one of his top lieutenants towards the end of his life

that his mother has come to him in a dream. This is the Bible woman, his mother, this devout Christian. And he is troubled by this dream. Ask his lieutenant, what should I do about this? And his lieutenant says, you should build a church on the birthplace of your mother. And that's one of the two churches that I was able to visit when I went in 2017. And so this, this This is all happening at the same time that he's revealing to the world the extent of his upbringing in the church. Because we knew we, I mean, not you and I perhaps, but it had been known that, yes, Kimmel-Sung grew up in church. But it wasn't until his memoir came out that he told us that not only did he show up to church on Sunday every morning with his mom and dad, he learned to play the organ in church. He taught Sunday school.

He was a Sunday school teacher. He was a Sunday school teacher. He performed in church plays. He spoke at the YMCA. He led a youth group when he was a young man. He lived in the home of a pastor for two years. And he reveals all this in this memoir. He does.

Not just in the memoir, but in conversations he has because at the same time, he's also inviting all these pastors to come and visit him in Pyongyang, like Billy Graham, who he invites to come twice. And so when he meets all these pastors, he asks them to say grace with him. He shows off his knowledge of the Bible, and he reminisces at length about his upbringing in the church. Could this have been, I mean, sometimes when people get older, they may harken back to faith or religion, maybe think about it, reembrace it, reflect on it. Do you think that was at play here?

I think that's definitely possible. Certainly, yes, you have this notion of a deathbed conversion, right? You see the end coming. Look, ultimately, that's in his heart, in his head. he was perhaps the most deified person of the 20th century. I don't want to suggest that I have any real insight into what's going on inside him. I think even he himself would probably have struggled to articulate it, but he was a mere mortal, and I don't know that he is excused from all of those same things that every human would have to wrestle with, which is what does happen after we die.

And I think when he can kind of feel the end coming, yes, there's all sorts of feelings that must be welling up inside him. So going back to the young Kim Il-sung, why did he start calling himself Kim Il-sung? Great question. That's not his birth name. His birth name is Kim Song-ju. And that name, according to North Korea, means to become a pillar. The research I found suggests that actually it had a different origin. His name meant a pillar of holiness. because he was born to two very, very devout Christians. That is what his name was. But you're right.

He adopts this other name, Kim Il-sung, which means to become the son. Why does he, the son, S-U-N, S-U-N, yes. We need to make that clear here. This name was actually a legendary name. By the time he adopts his name, he's not living in Korea anymore. He's living in northeastern China slash Siberia, the Russian Far East. We don't know exactly where he is at all points. But he's out there. And this is sort of a hinterland. It's sort of what we might call the Wild West.

And one of the many refugees who left Korea when Japan basically annexes. Precisely. Precisely. And so there is a legend here, almost like a Robin Hood figure, in this kind of a Wild West. I know I'm mixing some metaphors here. Robin Hood was not in the Wild West, but just go with it. You got this Kim Il-sung, who almost has these supernatural qualities ascribe to him. He's able to teleport. He's able to, you know, bullets can't puncture his skin and all the rest of it. All of these sort of attributes are ascribed to this legendary Kim Il-sung figure. Those are obviously fictional, but apply to a whole bunch of different guerrilla fighters. This would have been maybe even several dozen people who claim to use his name Kim Il-sung. But the man that we now referred to as Kim Il-sung, was this Kim Song-ju, who adopts this moniker. And he adopts this moniker in part because, and he tells us this, again, in the memoir,

because the Korean people need someone to believe in. The Korean people have been beaten down and battered for so long under the Japanese where this small nation wedged between the Chinese nation, this massive population, the Soviets or the Russians to the north, we have the Japanese encroaching on us and colonizing us. Korea needs a hero. And so there's this wonderful scene in his memoir. This is where he pulls back the curtain a little bit.

And I just find this scene just so fascinating. He recounts it where he's in one room and one of his top right-hand men is talking to a simple peasant. And the simple peasant is saying, is it true that Kimmel Song can walk on water, can dodge bullets, can teleport, can do all this? And his right-hand man keeps saying, oh, yes, he can. Oh, yes, he can. And later, Kimmel-Song talks to his right-hand man and says, why did you let this simple peasant, why did you lead him on? Why did you say yes when he asked you all these questions? You know I can't do that.

And the right-hand man says to Kim Il-sung, the people need someone to believe in. And Kim Il-sung then sort of kind of turns to the camera, as it were, in his memoir, and kind of explains, breaks the fourth wall and kind of says, he's right. The Korean people do need someone to believe in. Who am I to crush this man's hopes? I should be this messianic figure that they want me to be. I should be this Korean Messiah. and you can see him kind of make this almost conscious decision. Now again, this is in his memoir.

We need to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. And yet at the same time, it's incredibly revealing to just show the thought process that goes into becoming Kim Il-sung. What happens to the story of Christianity in North Korea after Kim Il-sung takes power? When Kim Il-sung comes to power in 1945, I think I need to note, he was just 33 years old. Wow. That's a really young age. You think about Stalin. he was in his early 50s.

You think about Mao, he was in his early 50s when they came to power. So they didn't have that much runway. They didn't have that much time left. But Kim Il-sung had 49 years left after he becomes leader in 1945. The first thing he does is actually not to crush the church. The first thing he does is to try and co-opt the church. His message to the Christians in this very conservative Christian city. Again, that's what Pyongyang was known as at this time.

It's known as a very conservative Christian city. And therefore, they're not going to like the Soviets that are coming in. because the Soviets are socialist. They're Stalinists. Atheists. Kim Il-sung, part of his appeal to the people of Pyongyang, his hometown, the place where he is now setting up his capital, he goes and says to them, I'm like Moses. In the same way that Moses delivered the Israelites from Egyptian captivity, I'm going to rescue Korea from the clutches of the evil Japanese imperialists. And he literally presents himself as this Moses-like figure.

He has his uncle. He has this distant uncle of his, Reverend Kang. He has Reverend Kang, who is an ordained Presbyterian pastor, a revivalist minister. He travels around the country giving sermons. He summons him back to Pyongyang when he comes back in 1945. And he asks his uncle to gather all the pastors in Pyongyang together to tell them, here's Kim Il-sung's his favorite hymn when he was growing up. He was a devoted church boy.

He learned to play the organ in church. He didn't smoke. He didn't swear. He didn't drink. He was a good church boy. we should follow him. And that's part of the appeal. And the appeal actually works.

So Christianity is kind of put in the service of Kim Il-sung's consolidation of power. That's right. And he even ends up, and this comes from North Korean sources. This is not even, this is from the horse's mouth, as it were, with Kim Il-sung quoting from the Bible to kind of say to his conservative Christian pastors who are opposing him, he says things like, don't you know that Jesus healed on the Sabbath? why are you opposing my attempts here to have an election on a Sunday? If Jesus could heal on the Sabbath, then I should be able to do.

And so you see him showing off his Bible knowledge in a certain sense to consolidate power. Does it work? It does. It does work to a degree because there are Christians who are a little bit sympathetic to socialism and do cast their lot with him. For those who don't, well, there is repression. and North Korea, above all, I mean, there's a lot of trying to get people to believe in Kim Il-sung, but for those who don't, he will crush them. And so he does crush a lot of them.

Now, because of the Korean War, which starts five years after the Japanese surrender and Kim Il-sung returns to Pyongyang, the battle lines really move quite dramatically. And so there are a lot of opportunities for those who don't want to stay in the North to flee to the South. And indeed, that's really what happens. And that's why when you think about South Korea and you think about it being the home of some of the world's largest mega churches, which it is, you will find that almost all of them, at least in the early years, were all founded by North Korean Christians who fled to the South. Right. He claimed that he was not suppressing Christianity. I mean, people with the Christian faith actually are killed for their faith. They absolutely are. Can you describe that period

and what exactly happened? Yeah. So what we know happen. Yeah, well, we don't know all that much. This is North Korea. Independent sources that are not North Korea. are fleetingly scarce from this period. We have the official North Korean record, but they're not going to tell us about this either. So we only really are able to dimly grasp exactly how it happens. There are signs that the North Korean authorities root out, people who continue to stay in the North and practice the faith in secret.

But in the late 50s, you really see a shift in the language from Kim Il-sung, away from an accommodationist sort of approach towards Christians, to a much more ruthless program. They start wanting the people of North Korea to refer to Kim Il-sung as father, capital F, father. And there's more and more of this idea in North Korea that we're supposed to regard ourselves as having two fathers. We all have a biological, earthly father, but we also have this heavenly father, this other spiritual father, and that's Kim Il-sung. Our father. Our father. That's a pretty direct substitution there for the Christian God. Knowing this history and knowing that link, is any of that helpful, do you think, in recasting North Korea world relations in today's context?

Yeah. I think that definitely changes the way you think about it. It's a place where the connection with the leaders, where the connection with the state is rooted in pretty deep soil because Kimmel, song is firmly ensconced in the hearts, in the souls, if you will, of the North Korean people. That's a different relationship than almost any citizen of another country might feel towards the state that they live in. I think that has two very obvious implications to me. One is that insofar as we think about North Korea and how to deal with it, how do we get them to engage more in the world with the world, how do we get them perhaps to think about a future without nuclear weapons and this and that, can we use economic carrots and sticks? I don't know that that really moves the needle for a religious society. I don't know that a religious society is ultimately

going to be that influenced by economic considerations. That's one thing. And I think the other is when you think about North Korea on the battlefield, and we've seen North Koreans fighting at the warfront between Russia and Ukraine in this war, you see the fervency with which they fight. It is closer to religious fanaticism. I think we need to understand that they are kind of wired a little bit differently now. I don't want to say it's more nurture than nature here. And yet when you're steeped in this reality, it's 81 years and counting with almost no access to alternative realities, alternative worldviews, alternative anything. Have you come to any conclusion about why the Kim family has managed to hold on to control in such a lot of?

an enduring way. Yeah, I think if you look at the Soviet Union, if you look at the People's Republic of China, you see states that went through different periods of tightening and relaxation. After Stalin's cult reached its peak and then he died, you had a period of relaxation. Certainly in the 1980s, under Gorbachev, you had this period of Glasnost and Parastroika where the Soviet Union tried to loosen up a little bit. it didn't lead to a very good fate for the Soviet Union. And in China, you saw after Mao's death, this program of reform and opening begin trading with the rest of the world.

Of course, now in the year 2026, we can see how deeply embedded China is into the global economic system, perhaps deeper than any other state. It's the world's factory floor and its supply chains. We're learning every day just how deeply embedded they are in the global economy. North Korea never went through a period of even slight relaxation. There was no breath. There was no breath. It only had one mode and it only got tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter. And you know what?

In a perverse way, it worked. What Kim Il-sung built was not so much a state as a religious society. And it's one that's built to last. It's one that has outlasted the USSR, East Germany. One could say that it's outlasted the entire socialist bloc, but also even China, Vietnam in terms of its commitment to the principles that it had at first. It marched to the beat of its own drama and it kept at it. And not only did it survive the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR,

it is arguably stronger than ever in the year 2026. Nobody would have predicted that. And I think part of the reason is because of its adherence, its commitment, its understanding of human nature and how we all need to worship, believe something, and they harnessed it, they weaponized it with extraordinary success. That's quite stark, quite a powerful statement. With that lens on, have you seen signs of similar opportunism, let's call it that, in today's context with other leaders, other countries, other regimes?

Yeah. Yeah, I think that we do live in, in. a time when religion and politics are merging a little bit more. I think you could call it the religionization of politics. I think you could flip it around and call it the politicization of religion. Certainly, it's not a new concept. I mean, you take something like the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican, there, you sort of have religion and politics literally merged together. You can look at Iran and people call it a theocracy, right? And there you have Islam and a political state sort of becoming one.

And yet all over the world, I think that you see signs of religiosity rising again in surveys in the West. And I think you can see that politics needs to be fought almost at a transcendent level, almost at a level that just, it's not just about zoning laws and tax policy and all the rest of it. It's about identity. It's about who we are as people. It's about human nature.

It's about the direction that we should all take. And you layer on artificial intelligence and the debate that we're all having about the future there. And what does it mean to be human and all the rest of it? I think it's a potent combination. But I think the North Koreans in some ways almost got there first and sort of perfected it in a sense by, again, not ever yielding. They sort of stuck to this principle that religion and politics, if we can combine it, that's going to be a powerful thing. And they never, ever, ever wavered. And again, I'm not certainly not advocating for the North Korean state.

but you have to admire on some almost uncomfortable level how successful they were at this. You've certainly changed the way I think about North Korea. I really appreciate you coming in and telling us about all this. Thank you so much. It was a real, real pleasure to be here. You've just heard my conversation with Jonathan Cheng, author of Korean Messiah, Kim Il-sung and the Christian roots of North Korea's personality cult. This episode of Ideas was produced by Tom Howell.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production, Emily Kiervezio and Danielle Duval. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.