North Korea's religious dictators

The longevity of North Korea

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1:21$9.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at bloomberg.com. More than three decades after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the USSR, the North Korean regime remains steadfastly in place, defiantly ploughing its own path some eight decades after its founding.

1:58What might explain this remarkable longevity? In Jonathan Cheng's new book, Korean Messiah, the Wall Street Journal correspondent argues that it owes much to the enduring cult of personality around its founder, Kim Il-sung, who took inspiration from his own Christian roots to create a modern religion that endures to this day. Jonathan is a finalist for the 2026 Kundal History Prize, and in today's episode of the History Extra podcast, he discusses these ideas with Rob Attar.

Pyongyang as the Jerusalem of the East

2:27Jonathan, when we think today of the Christian nations around the world, North Korea doesn't tend to figure in that narrative. But this wasn't always the case, was it? How did Pyongyang once come to be known as the Jerusalem of the East? Well, a lot of people, if you know South Koreans or people from South Korea, either in the UK, the US or otherwise, many of them you'll find are Christian or are tied to the church in some way. And that comes back to that same legacy. You're absolutely right that North Korea is not known as a land that's very friendly towards Christianity today.

2:57But if you go back to before the end of World War II, if you go back 100 years ago, there were indeed a lot of Christians in Korea, but they were in the north, not in the south. And very specifically, they were in the northwest and in and around the city of Pyongyang, which, of course, today is now better known as the capital of the Kim dynasty, the nuclear armed Kim dynasty, where you see the missile launches and you see the Kim ruler, whoever it may be, Kim Jong-un right now. But it was Kim Jong-il. It was Kim Il-sung before. Watching all these soldiers goose-stepping by, that Pyongyang was once the most Christian city in all of Asia.

3:34And how far did that Christianization owe to the United States and the influence of American missionaries? Quite a bit. And that's one of the things that I loved so much while I was researching this book is, as somebody who works for the Wall Street Journal, I've been to North Korea and reported on North Korea. Throughout that entire Trump-Kim, first the fire and fury phase, and then the rapprochement between the two men, to think about how different the two countries appeared on the surface, and then to go back in time and realize how joined at the hip they were in a certain sense.

4:05Because as you suggest right there, it is, in fact, only because of American missionaries that Pyongyang became so Christian, that the Kim family itself became so Christian. And so that's the tale I try to tell in this book. It starts with one young man. He's only 26 years old. In fact, he arrives on his 26th birthday in Korea in 1890. He's one of just a handful of missionaries, a handful of Westerners altogether that show up in Korea when Korea is newly opened to the outside world.

4:40He goes up to Pyongyang, this city that is not very promising as far as cities go, in the sense that it was very well known for its drunkenness, for its fistfights, for its dancing women, and all the rest of it. And within a short span of time, a decade and a half at most, you see the city get transformed from what the missionaries would have called the Sodom and Gomorrah of Korea to becoming this incredible city, the Jerusalem of the East. A city that was just so full of churches, of hospitals, of seminaries, schools for the blind and the deaf and YMCAs and all the rest of it, that you had missionaries from all over the world, church leaders from all over the world, sailing to Korea to see what was going on in this city.

Fertile ground for Christianity

5:23And as you said, it didn't at first seem like the most promising destination for Christian missionaries. So why do you think this part of Korea proved to be such fertile ground for the rise of Christianity? It's a great question. And it's a question that I think has befuddled missionaries and non-missionaries from that very time, from a century ago. I think there are a lot of reasons that people would point to. But certainly, I think the one that was most salient is this notion that Northern Korea was a pretty wild place. As I mentioned, it was known for not just the women and the fighting and the drunkenness,

5:56but it was also known as the one part of Korea that had really been locked out of power. They were excluded from the Confucian system that allowed any young Korean man, and it was only men, to be able to prove their intellect and to be able to rise to positions of power. That was the case for any man in Korea except in the Northwest for reasons that are complicated, but again, date back to this notion of this part of Korea being a rugged, brutish sort of a place. And so when you have this message that comes in, a message of a kind of a quality before God, of this sense that if you work hard, if you pull yourself up by the bootstraps, as the American missionaries would have said, that you too can get ahead.

6:40And so there was a real appeal to this message, and it really caught on like wildfire. It's a cliche to say, but really, I mean, it spread so quickly that even the missionaries themselves couldn't keep up with it. It was just a complete surprise for everyone. But when you look back on it, it makes sense in a certain way. But, you know, whether you point to this reason or that reason, I think the missionaries simply said, it almost doesn't matter. What we need right now is just to take advantage of this. It's incredible how quickly the people here are embracing this faith. And so you just see this city transformed in less than a generation.

7:14And when we're talking here about Christianity, which specific form or forms did it take? What kind of Christianity was it that was flourishing there? Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question, because I shouldn't just use the word Christian without any qualifier. Catholicism had actually entered Korea well before Protestantism did. When I say Christianity and Christian here, I am primarily speaking of Protestant Christianity, and very specifically of Presbyterian and Methodist Protestant Christianity, because these were the two major denominations that played the lead role in bringing Northwestern Korea to the Christian faith.

7:47It was primarily Presbyterians with the Methodists in second place. And many of them traced the roots back to Scotland. They were very proud of their Scottish Presbyterian roots. And they brought that whole ethos, the same one that crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States and to Canada, where I grew up. I went to a Scottish Presbyterian high school growing up. So I'm very familiar with those traditions as well. And it was that same intellectual lineage that flowed through America and, again, across the Pacific to the Korean Peninsula. But really, it was a spectacular sight to see. And the missionaries, within just a few years, as I said, so many church leaders from the Western world wanted to sail to Korea,

8:23wanted to sail to Pyongyang to see what all the fuss was about. And you see so many of them arrive there. And they write letters back home. They write diary entries. Many of them are very well preserved. And they all say the same thing. They say, we thought we were bringing the Christian gospel to Korea. Within 15 years, we come here and we wonder if we even qualify as Christians next to these Koreans. They are waking up at 3 or 4 or 5 in the morning every day to pray out loud for hours before breakfast. They are memorizing entire books of the Bible from beginning to end, verbatim.

8:56And it makes me wonder, maybe I need to be evangelized. Maybe the Koreans need to sail to my country and teach me again because I almost feel like I'm not worthy.

The impact of Japanese imperialism

9:04Now, as many listeners will be aware, the first half of the 20th century was very traumatic for Korea. What impact did some of these major events have on the flourishing Christian faith? Sure. So the deepest impression, perhaps, of the first half of the 20th century was left by Japanese imperialism. Japan had embarked on its modernization path in the 1860s. And by the 1890s, it took them just three decades to then want to become a major player in the global colonial imperialistic game.

9:36They looked at the UK. They looked at France. They looked at America. They looked at these countries and said, we want a piece of this as well. And so it began with Taiwan. But very close behind was Korea. Japan did have designs, especially towards the end of World War II, on subduing almost all of the Asian mainland. And for them, the bridgehead was really Korea. And so when they seized Korea in 1905 and then made it a formal colony in 1910, this was without question the most formative experience in modern Korean history.

10:06For 35 years, Korea was under the thumb of the Japanese. And you see it today still in relations between North Korea and Japan, South Korea and Japan, China and Japan, of course, as well. But I've been living and reporting in both countries. I can tell you that you don't feel it quite as much as you do in China as you do in Korea. Those scars remain today. And so for many of these Korean nationalists who chafed at Japanese rule, many of them saw the Christian church as a vehicle for their nationalist aspirations.

10:38It wasn't merely a form of spiritual salvation that they were after, but also a form of political salvation. And that included Kim Il-sung's father. He was very typical in that regard. He saw the booting out of the Japanese as linked intimately with his Christian faith. He wanted to expel the Japanese, but he wanted to do it in the name of Jesus Christ. And that was very much the tradition that Kim Il-sung was raised in. This was what he himself believed when he grew up. And when he grew up, he was a church boy to the fullest degree.

11:09And what we see actually over his lifetime is that he gives up that Christian faith, but he does retain that hatred for Japanese rule and this desire for Korean nationalism. So it sounds like from what you're saying that the Japanese, though they controlled many aspects of Korean life, didn't suppress the Christian faith. In fact, it was the one pocket of civil society that they did not crush. There was a specific reason for this is simply that Japan wanting to show the Western world that, hey, we too can be enlightened colonial rulers.

11:41The one institution that they could not clamp down on, that they would not clamp down on, was the Christian church, knowing how important the Christian church was in Washington, in London, in Paris, and some of these other places. And so I think they wanted to make that abundantly clear. And of course, that made it a refuge for all of the Korean nationalists who wanted to be able to express their desire for independence, but do it in a way that was politically safe. Indeed, it was not so politically safe, but it was the safest that there was. And so the Japanese then came to have a very deep suspicion of the Christian church,

12:13but couldn't do anything about it. And again, this is where Kim Il-sung comes of age under the guidance of his dad, who was very much also in this vein as well. So Kim Il-sung, as you've mentioned, is the founder of the modern North Korean state. How in the first place does he become the leader of this fledgling country? So I think the main thing to point out is that he is 33 years old in 1945. He's a relatively young man when you think about the ages of many people who come to take power. You think about Stalin in particular, you think of Mao, his closest allies and counterparts.

12:48They were both in their early 50s when they eventually secured power. But what's interesting is that Kim Il-sung is just 33. He doesn't finish high school. He's not a particularly book-learned man. And yet he does have a very deep instinct for the way that faith and religion, spirituality, how powerful they can be as political forces. He witnessed this himself growing up in the church and being surrounded by nationalists in the church. And, you know, ultimately, he does give up that Christian upbringing and embraces Marxism-Leninism.

13:26He flees into the Russian Far East because all of Korea is under Japanese rule. Even Manchuria, now what we would call northeastern China, was a chaotic place. That's where he ended up at first. But eventually he crosses over and ends up somewhere near Vladivostok. And, of course, it's under the auspices of the Soviets that he is installed as the leader of North Korea. He does outmaneuver many of his political rivals. It helps to have very sharp elbows, and he indeed had very sharp elbows. But, again, I come back to this notion that so much of what made him excel as a leader in a certain sense from the very earliest days

14:04was his intuitive understanding of how power works, of how faith works, of how these two can be interlocked in very powerful ways.

Suppressing the Christian church

14:12Once Kim does come to power in North Korea, how does he treat the Christian church at that point, which, as you've shown, has been very successful for the past few decades? What happens to the church once his regime takes hold? Well, he later comes to crush the church, and I think that's not incorrect when you think about how Kim Il-sung dealt with the church. And yet it's incomplete because, for the first few years, he's actually very much trying to woo the church. He's trying to win over the Christians of the North. After all, he knows better than anyone that the northern half of the Korean Peninsula,

14:46which he inherited with the help of the Soviets, was the Christian corner of Korea. It was where his own family heritage came from, not just genealogically, but also ideologically, spiritually. And so he knew very well that the power brokers in Pyongyang, his now new capital, the biggest power player was the Christian church. And so his first attempt was really to try and win it over. He makes an appeal to Christian socialism. This is a notion that actually goes back centuries,

15:18this notion that although we may think of Christianity as effectively being a more conservative, ideological persuasion these days, there has always been a very strong strain of thought that says, listen, Jesus and his disciples shared all of their possessions. They didn't own anything. They gave things away to the poor. That's what they did. And that intellectual current was one that Kim Il-sung tried to appeal to. It didn't really work. He tried to cajole. He tried to coax. He tried to apply soft pressure.

15:49And it was only when he was spurned again and again by the Christians of Pyongyang, in fact, many of them try to kill him at some point, that he turns decisively against the church. And you start to see the iron fist come out. And that is the main impression that we have of North Korea and religion and Christianity in particular. And again, it's not incorrect, but it does gloss over this early period that I get into in quite some detail because it's fascinating to see how he draws upon his own upbringing in the church. He presents himself as a Moses-like figure, a saviour-type figure,

16:21leading the Korean people out of Japanese captivity, much as Moses led the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity.

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17:34Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify. This fall, build a wardrobe for the way you live with exceptional designs and personalized help from client advisors at Neiman Marcus.

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18:35Well, I think many of the Korean Christians at that time were still committed to this notion that the church could kick out the Japanese, that it was an American-style Christianity. There was a lot of hope still that America, which many Korean Christians thought of as perhaps the Christian nation, that's obviously a very contested notion then as much as now. But you can see how they may have come to think of America as the quintessential Christian nation. And so there was some hope there that in the same way that America had aligned itself against communism

19:09and Christianity was seen as a bulwark against a godless communism. There were many Koreans who looked at it exactly that way. And so when they saw Kim Il-sung come along and try to pair Christianity and communism, that was something that was anathema to them. I don't think it was just ideological, but there were also personal elements to this as well. But whatever the real fundamental underlying cause may have been, there's no question that they had turned against him. They certainly weren't going to accept Kim Il-sung and the Soviets as the protector of the church,

19:41no matter what they had said and no matter what they had promised. And they did promise freedom of religion. They did promise all of these sorts of things. And yet we know that what ultimately happened was several bombs thrown at Kim Il-sung and at his distant uncle who became the leader of the North Korean state-backed church. He was a proper ordained revivalist minister, but he cast his lot with Kim Il-sung and almost paid for it with his life. But after those two incidents in early 1946, that's when you really start to see a very, very different path taken by Kim Il-sung.

20:15And on the subject of that path, what kind of repressive measures did Kim and the North Korean state take against Christians? Well, they shut down the churches. They forced many of the seminaries and many of the schools to combine and to join and to reduce the number of them. Many of them were persecuted. The state would certainly deny that now, but there's plenty of documentary evidence that among the very first to have been executed when there were retreats that were made, particularly during the Korean War, many of them were Christians because we know in so many contexts,

20:46not just in Korea in this period, but we know in so many contexts that political leaders are rightly suspicious of spiritual leaders because a spiritual leader can make a claim to authority that transcends flesh and blood. And so if you're a human political leader, as Kim Il-sung was, you don't want to have to contend with somebody who can tap into a higher power. And so those that could not be co-opted were imprisoned, were executed in many cases.

21:17But the early years of the Korean division, the dividing line between the two Koreas was porous enough that many Koreans in the north effectively fled to the south. There was partition in a certain sense, although a slightly different circumstance than on the Indian subcontinent. And nonetheless, it was brutal. It was violent. And it had to untangle that central irony, which is that historically most of the Christians were in the north of Korea and most of the communists were in the south. And so that was an escape mechanism

21:47and you could say an escape valve for the North Korean state to have so many ideologically committed opponents to Kim Il-sung's rule slip across to the south. And of course, establish the great megachurches of South Korea and turn South Korea into one of the great missionary sending countries. In fact, it's the second largest dispatcher of foreign missionaries in the world behind the United States, which has a population that is seven times that of South Korea. Now, although the official church was suppressed in North Korea,

22:17in its place you have this personality cult growing up around Kim itself and you describe it as the greatest personality cult in the history of mankind.

Building the ultimate personality cult

22:26Could you give us some sense of what this entailed? Sure. First, I'll talk about that claim that I make. It's a very back-of-the-envelope sort of a claim here. But if you do consider that North Korea today has 25 million people and that it has had a cult of personality in place now for 81 years and counting with absolutely no liberalization, absolutely no period in which new ideas were allowed to creep in, no glasnost and perestroika as in the Soviet Union, no reform and opening as in China, and you look at the magnitude and the intensity of this cult of personality,

22:57I would argue that indeed, yes, this is the most number of people kept under the most intense personality cult for the longest period that we've ever seen in human history. And for that reason, we need to go back to the roots of it and understand where it came from. Because you're right, Kim Il-sung did not merely come along to suppress Christianity. He suppressed Christianity in part because he was replacing Christianity with another spiritual calling, I guess you could say. And that was, of course, to himself. Because, as I said earlier, he understood the power of religion, of faith,

23:30of turning what might otherwise be mere political support into something closer to loyalty or to devotion or to veneration. And he wanted to cultivate religious fervor in his people, and he succeeded to a great degree. Of course, many people will point out that his was hardly the only cult of personality at this time. And in fact, it was indeed Stalin that first set up Kim Il-sung with his cult of personality in 1945. But it doesn't take very long for Kim Il-sung to take the reins himself and for Soviet diplomats to start complaining

24:01that Kim Il-sung's cult of personality has far exceeded Stalin's, far exceeded that of Mao's, and all of the other Eastern Bloc little Stalins. Very quickly, you have diplomats from the Eastern Bloc states writing cables back to their capitals, talking about how what was present in North Korea looked less and less like Marxism-Leninism. It was looking a lot like a religion. And I think they were absolutely spot on. By the time Stalin is dead in 1953, this is the end of the Korean War.

24:32And at this point, Kim Il-sung's cult of personality has so far surpassed Stalin's, so far surpassed Mao's, that you have both of these countries, Moscow and Beijing, staging a joint intervention of Kim Il-sung. They fly in senior officials from both. You had Peng De-hoye come in from China, and you had Mikoyen come in from the Soviet Union to effectively try and oust Kim Il-sung, but Kim Il-sung effectively talks them out of it. He says, I'll change, I'll change, and he does that for about a month

25:03before he waits for them to depart, and then he's back on his merry way again. And so this is what I mean when you say there's almost no period of liberalization, perhaps there's one month in August 1956 where you get a little bit of breath for sure, but from there it was off to the races, and from 1956 certainly until 2026, that's seven decades now, there hasn't been anything quite like that. And it's interesting how far he seems to have been treated as some kind of god. I mean, there's one detail that in your book I found really interesting, that he apparently somewhere he sat on a subway train,

25:34that chair was then venerated from then on, and just those little details, it's really something else, isn't it? That's right. Every single building that he visits, every single school, kindergarten, hospital, this room, that room, he drove along this street sometimes, will be memorialized with a plaque, and if he goes back and visits it again, every single date will be listed there. Many of the places, whether it be a greenhouse or a laboratory or whatever it may be, is named frequently the date of the first visit

26:06by Kim Il-sung. And the subway seat is perhaps perhaps the most memorable one, because yes, he sat on this subway seat, and therefore we're going to now put a white cloth over it, and we're going to put some rope around it to make sure that nobody ever sits there again, and to make sure that this is consecrated, sacralized, because that's precisely what it was. It became a relic of a sort, and so because the sacred posterior had once sat here, no other posterior could ever sit there again.

26:37Now, obviously, North Korea over this time was not a free country. There was a lot of repression, a lot of propaganda. How far do you think this veneration of Kim was genuine from the people of North Korea, and how much of it was imposed or fake almost? Well, I think part of the success of the Kim cult of personality can certainly be chalked up to repression. It does have a repressive machinery that is frightening, and that is formidable, and there's no doubt that that played a very, very big role,

27:07but I think what we don't give enough credit to, and I hope I've gotten this across in the book, is that the carrot was just as important as the stick here, that there was a belief system that has been created in North Korea, and that does give people more than merely something to fear, but also something to place their hopes in, as a vehicle for the expression of many of the things that religions all over the world provide, a sense of solace, a sense of community, a sense of meaning. All of these things were created

27:39in the name of Kim Il-sung, and they were remarkably effective. That's not to say that the stick didn't play a big role as well. You need to have both, but I think that we do underestimate at our own peril the appeal of the North Korean ideology, as strange as that may be to say, because it is true that he also was able to cordon off his state of 25 million people from the rest of the world, and even with the advent of the internet, and now smartphones, and perhaps with artificial intelligence, we'll see how the Kims handle all of that,

28:09but even now, they've managed to effectively seal off their country and keep it still very much the hermit kingdom, as it was the first nickname more than a century ago. So you block the outside world out, you punish those who dissent, and yet I think what is missing is a sense that people, I think in many cases and to a large degree, really did come to look at Kim Il-sung as a father figure. You could even put a capital F on that father figure because he did want his people to call him father in that way,

28:39and certainly I think there's a simple fact of human nature that he understood, which is that when you tell people the same thing again and again and again and again and again, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, you do come to believe it. I think all of us would come to believe it to a degree. I don't know that I would exclude myself from that, especially when you may have been born into this reality and you may die in this reality. This is the world that he has created for them. So yes, I do actually think

29:09that a lot of it is truly felt. Obviously, it's not based on reality as you and I would know it, but within their own reality. Yes, I do believe that when you see footage of North Koreans in rapturous ecstasy in the presence of the Kims, when they're weeping and wailing and mourning at the death of one of the Kims, I believe that that's very genuine. And I think if anyone's ever been in a large stadium or in a large demonstration or something, you can understand how the psychology and the sociology of the moment

29:40can overwhelm us. We are rational human beings and yet it's not that difficult to manipulate human nature to a certain degree. And I think, again, this is another key to how the Kims have been able to cultivate this devotion, this passion, this love even for their ruling dynasty. Now, there's one really interesting period in this story where towards the end of Kim Walsong's life, he seems to soften a bit on Christianity itself. And there's this memorable bit where he invites the American evangelical Billy Graham to North Korea.

30:11What do you think that's going on there? Is this just something about his impending mortality and perhaps thinking maybe he's made some mistakes, wanting to do things a bit differently? What do you think explains this?

Kim Il-sung and Billy Graham

30:20I'm really glad you're asking about it because this is, without question, my favorite part of the book. It's a little bit of a spoiler alert in the sense that this does come right towards the end of his life and yet it's remarkable to see that Kim Il-sung too, of course, was human just like we are and he knew that he himself was a mere mortal as well as much as he wanted to believe otherwise. I should note that the North Korean constitution to this day makes and has Kim Il-sung set up as the eternal president of North Korea, the capital E,

30:51eternal, capital P, president of North Korea. He remains the head of state in North Korea under its constitution. So in a certain sense, he did attain immortality and yet, of course, he was but a mere mortal as well. And so, yes, as he gets into his 70s and his 80s, he eventually dies at the age of 82, you see him start to really think back a lot to his childhood. Psychoanalysis is always treacherous. It's always very difficult and should only be done

31:21with great care and yet, for me, it was very hard to resist this notion that, yes, towards the end of his life, there was a great sense of guilt, perhaps, nostalgia for sure, but I think mixed with guilt and mixed with some sort of ambivalence about what he had done to not only his country but also to the faith that he was raised in. He was very close to his mother and he thought often of his mother late in his life and there was nothing that he associated more closely with his mother

31:52than church and that in her own fervent faith, she was known as a Bible woman in the Presbyterian church at the time and that was an informal title that she had in the church and what she did was she would go around the villages of Pyongyang and she would teach women to read using the Bible. She was a very, very devout woman and towards the end of his life, there's one scene that is indelible for me where Kim Il-sung talks to one of his top officials and tells his top official that his mother has come to him in a dream

32:23and it's hard to read between the lines of a transcript that is provided by the North Korean state but this is how we know that this conversation happened but one gets the sense that Kim Il-sung is distressed when his mother appears to him in a dream and he asks his interlocutor what should I do and the answer comes back perhaps you should build a church on your mother's birthplace and so Kim Il-sung orders his officials to go and find the precise location of his mother's birthplace and then goes on

32:53to erect a church there, a Protestant church there, it's a church that is still there, I was able to visit myself when I made a reporting trip to North Korea in 2017, Billy Graham as you've mentioned there visited North Korea twice, met with Kim Il-sung twice, said grace with Kim Il-sung, gave him a Bible, talked about his youth, reminded him of his mother's faith and also preached at that very church preaching the same message that he preached everywhere around the world which is for God to love the world that he gave his one and only son, that was what Billy Graham

33:24would have preached anywhere and he did the same in Pyongyang as well and so it's a remarkable coda to the life of Kim Il-sung to watch him come full circle back to his childhood again but this time at the center of his own extraordinary cult of personality which had elements taken right from Christianity, a substitute Christianity, he made himself an alternate Christ figure and yet here he was building a church to his mother's faith on her birthplace and inviting the world's most famous evangelist to come

33:55and to pray with him and to talk about his childhood faith. It's an extraordinary moment isn't it

Passing power through generations

34:00and I think something else that's extraordinary is the fact that you have this cult of personality that's so powerful and yet it's able to survive and carry on through Kim Il-sung's son, his grandson which is remarkable really I mean Stalin's children didn't go on to rule the Soviet Union nor did Mao's nor did Ho's what was it about Kim Il-sungism that allowed it to carry on through the generations where other cults of personalities weren't able to do that? It's a great question we have to start with the idea and I've already

34:30hinted at this earlier but Kim Il-sung was not particularly wedded to orthodox Marxism-Leninism Stalin I think certainly had to at least pay lip service to it but by the time Kim came along I think he saw precisely what happened to Stalin and precisely what happened to Mao after they died we know that after Stalin died you had Khrushchev come along give a secret speech in 1956 and say that we made a terrible mistake with the cult of personality we now need to embrace collective leadership we need to rename Stalingrad we need to bring down some of these Stalin statues

35:01and then we saw that Deng Xiaoping came after Mao's death in 1976 and you had Deng Xiaoping come along and also repudiate large swaths of the legacy of Mao Zedong take down a lot of the Mao statuary and portraits around the country I live in Beijing now and rare is the time you will see Mao's image most of the time you'll see Mao's image will be in a kitschy sort of a context now and I don't think that Kim Il-sung wanted that for himself and so unlike Stalin and unlike Mao we know that he did not have

35:32a Khrushchev or Deng Xiaoping type figure come afterwards I think that he knew that the only way that he could preserve his legacy would be to have somebody else whose legacy was so wedded to his that they were inseparable and that was Kim Jong-il who in many ways set himself up as the high priest of his father's cult although in time Kim Jong-il himself managed to bring himself not quite up to be an equal of his father but almost an equal of his father and certainly if you go to North Korea today you will find two statues two enormous

36:03bronze statues standing in the center of Pyongyang one of Kim Il-sung and now one of Kim Jong-il you will find two faces pinned over every heart of every North Korean and that would be Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il's faces and of course in every room in North Korea you will have two portraits positioned on the most prominent wall in every building every room and again that will be Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il and when Kim Jong-un the third generation ruler comes along he has yet to add a third statue a third portrait to the walls but nonetheless

36:34you can see that about three decades after his grandfather's death he is still very much beholden to the legacy of what Kim Il-sung built one of the things that he did and this was striking at the time I remember it covering it at the time as a journalist in South Korea looking at how much Kim Jong-un fashioned himself to resemble his grandfather they were already very striking in their resemblance that may have played a role in his selection as the next successor and yet he played the part so well

37:04while also updating it for the internet era for the smartphone era and of course we now see him potentially positioning for a fourth generation handoff because he is constantly showing up in public with his rather young daughter at his side and whether or not she is the designated successor or not is an open question I think most people think that she likely is and yet there's no way to know Kim Jong-un has not told me about his intentions that's for sure so in your book you refer to what you call

37:35Kim Jong-un essentially as a religion would you describe it as similar to other world faiths and should it be considered in that bracket I think it should be and certainly this has been debated by scholars of North Korea if you look at religion and how to define religion you can go back several centuries there has been this long debate anthropologists and sociologists ethnologists have been wrestling with this since the time of Emile Durkheim two centuries ago interactions with tribes in Africa or in the South Pacific and so on

38:06and trying to figure out what makes a religion a religion I'm not going to get into all of those scholarly details because I'm not a scholar myself but certainly when you think about doctrine and you think about ritual I could run through the list for you but there's so much that is so striking in its parallels to Christianity perhaps the best testimony would come from Kimil Sangis themselves what I mean by that is North Koreans who flee the country many of them fled in the 1990s and in the 2000s when a great famine

38:38washed across North Korea you now have 30,000 North Koreans who are now settled resettled in South Korea many of them have become Christians many of them are assisted in their flight from North Korea by South Korean missionaries operating undercover in China when many of these North Koreans encounter Christianity for the very first time their testimony is almost identical they all say it is uncanny it is incredible how similar this Bible

39:08you've given me resembles the teachings that I had growing up in North Korea many of them say you could almost sub in sub out the names Kimil Sang and Jesus Christ and it all starts to click it's not obviously so obvious it's a copy they're not teaching that Kimil Sang was crucified on a cross and rose from the dead three days later and can save all of our sins if we believe in him it wasn't quite that similar and yet there were so many aspects of both ritual and doctrine that were taken almost whole cloth from Christianity that I think

39:39reflected Kimil Sang's intuitive sense of how power faith how they intersect and how they operate and I think they transmuted in this very strange way through his person and through his own experiences and through his incredible grip on this country and sort of became the national faith and so if you consider that you have 25 million people in North Korea I think even if you applied a 20% discount and said

40:09you know maybe 5 million of those people are not true believers they pay lip service but deep down they detest and loathe the Kim family even if you were to say that you would still have 20 million members of this faith of Kimil Sang-ism which I wasn't the first to point this out but I'll point it out now is that it would make it a world religion on the scale of Judaism it would make it larger than Judaism by the number of practitioners in this day and age of course all confined primarily almost entirely to one country and yet

40:39it would be a world religion as much as Judaism is and you yourself as you've mentioned a couple of times have spent time in North Korea

Living inside a state religion

40:46what impression did you get of this Kimil Sang-ism when you were there did it feel like a religion to you it felt very much like a religion to me and that is what launched me on this journey of trying to research and trying to figure out how it was that this city that was known as the Jerusalem of the East Pyongyang it was so Christian how did that cauldron of faith which produced Kimil Sang-ism and his family result 100 years later in this three generation nuclear armed cult of personality when you're there it's almost hard

41:16to believe that such a place really exists in this day and age in the year 2026 you can in theory go to such a place that we share the planet with these 25 million people whose reality is so different from our own that when you wake up in the morning truly you will get up out of bed and there will be the two portraits on the wall that you must dust every morning when you walk down the street you will indeed see no advertisements you will see mosaics you will see billboards you will see statues you will see all of these totems to Kim Il-sung everywhere you go

41:47when you open the newspaper when you turn on the evening news when you look at the badge pin over every single heart of every person you walk by when you start your work day when you start your school day it is all by reciting the words of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il sometimes and you're literally singing his praises because every week you're going to effectively a repentance session a worship session where you read the words of Kim Il-sung you recite them you discuss them and then you talk about how you managed to fail

42:17the high ideals of Kim Il-sung that week and pledge repentance it's very religious and this is a fervor that is demanded of all the people there that's what launched me on this project I needed to find out how North Korea became the way it did and to me it was inseparable from the question of who Kim Il-sung was because there is no state in the world that is as personalist in its rule as North Korea is to Kim Il-sung and to his two descendants

42:47and do you think therefore that this cult personality this religious fervor is what's enabled this isolated regime to carry on to survive when a lot of its peers have fallen or been opened up and might potentially allow it to carry on many decades into the future that's certainly one of the lessons that I've taken from this you go back to 1989 and 1991 the Berlin Wall falls the USSR collapses all of the socialist bloc states certainly in Eastern Europe collapse or dissolve and at that time

43:19there were very few people who thought that North Korea would be able to defy those trends after all at the same time as you have the dissolution of the Eastern socialist bloc you also have Kim Il-sung die in 1994 you have this horrible famine wipe out millions of people in North Korea it seemed almost inevitable that it was a matter of time before North Korea too collapsed and yet we can now say more than three decades later that North Korea is not only still with us but arguably stronger than ever one potential lesson from that is

43:50it doesn't pay to deviate from this cult of personality if you're going to be doing a cult of personality your commitment must be total and we know that the North Koreans have been utterly uncompromising in their cult of personality it certainly helps to have a nuclear arsenal you can't overlook that and yet at the same time that wasn't enough to prevent the dissolution of the USSR yeah I think I think very much so that this cult of personality helps explain so much of the longevity of the North Korean state and I don't really know

44:20what I see up on the horizon to imperil this familial dynasty so you never say never because the world is a messy place and it's only once you say that an outcome is certain that I think history goes and wrong foots you but I would say with a large degree of humility that I don't really know what it would be that could endanger the Kim family's grip on power but again because it is so personalist and because we are all human it could be one bad fall it could be one bullet

44:50it could be one heart attack it could be one anything that could throw this all off and yet it's hard to see that right now and that hope has been there for so many years for people who have been looking to North Korea and wondering how long it could possibly last it's lasted far longer than anyone could have suspected that was Jonathan Cheng China Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal Jonathan's book Korean Messiah Kim Il-sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's personality cult is out now published by Nopf and it's one of the finalists

45:21for the 2026 Kundal History Prize you can find out more at kundalprize.com and listen to interviews with other finalists and shortlisted authors in the coming days here on the History Extra podcast everyone's got a hard question about AI your job your kids

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