CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Digging Up North Korea’s Christian Roots

Photograph Source: John Pavelka – CC BY 2.0

In the summer of 1998, I traveled to the northeast region of China to visit a unique educational institution. The Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), founded six years before, was the first private and the first foreign university to emerge under Chinese communism. Located in a region populated by many Korean-Chinese, YUST trained the children of the elite in computers, engineering, and architecture, among other specialties. It was also the forerunner of an affiliate that opened in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang a few years later.

YUST was also remarkable because it was established by evangelical Christians from the United States, something the Chinese government tolerated in exchange for high-quality vocational training. The staff I talked with, who were all Korean-Americans, were happy enough to be working in China, where they were careful to conceal their religious sympathies except in one-on-one interactions with the students. But the hope of most of the faculty, I was told confidentially, was to work in North Korea. Although it was exciting to proselytize covertly in China, the teachers had their hopes pinned on doing God’s work among North Koreans.

Those teachers were oriented toward the mecca of North Korea in part because that region of the world had once witnessed one of the most extraordinary upsurges in conversion to Christianity in the modern era. That upsurge had been suppressed during the period of Japanese rule in the half of the twentieth century before being eliminated altogether in 1945 when communist North Korea began to actively suppress all official religions. The teachers were eager to restore Christianity to its former home in Korea.

At the time, I knew that Pyongyang had once been the “Jerusalem of the East,” that the country’s founder Kim Il Sung had a Christian background, and that some elements of Kim’s ideology drew on religious sources. This was common knowledge among North Korea watchers.

But it was only after reading Jonathan Cheng’s voluminous new account, Korean Messiah, that I can now connect all the dots between the rapid spread of Christianity in nineteenth-century Korea and the rapid consolidation of Kim Il Sung’s rule in the latter half of the twentieth-century.

Journalists rarely have the luxury of digging deep into a topic and then developing an argument across multiple articles. As a former Korea bureau chief of the........

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