KOREAN MESSIAH

An eye-opening view of North Korea’s apocalyptic, messianic, weird—and Christian-based—cult of personality.

Call it Kimilsungism, as Wall Street Journal China bureau chief Cheng does, which, if classified as a religious rather than political movement, “would be one of the world’s largest, claiming roughly as many adherents as Judaism.” What paved the way for that multigenerational cult was the arrival of Protestant missionaries in Korea. One, a Scottish Presbyterian, landed in Manchuria and, though denied entry into Korea proper, converted enough expatriates that when they returned home, they smoothed a path for later generations of proselytes. That infrastructure proved a bulwark of resistance against the conquering Japanese and their demand that Koreans worship at Shinto shrines. Surprisingly, too, that infrastructure was strongest in the northern half of the peninsula, so that after partition northerners fleeing from Communist rule launched “90 percent of the roughly two thousand new churches that opened in the South in 1950 alone.” Meanwhile, Cheng notes, Kim Il Sung assumed the mantle of the messiah, with required rituals of devotion that included cleaning the mandatory portrait of the Great Leader “using state-supplied dusters,” as well as bowing at statues, singing hymns of praise, and learning a language remade so that “the sun” was reserved to describe not the star above but the ruler below. A small army of writers was put to work creating texts that “portrayed Kim Il Sung as a savior in the Christian mode, bearing the sufferings of his people,” part of an effort to create a quasi-religion “that could, like Christianity, outlive its charismatic founder.” The beneficiary, on Kim’s death, was his son, and following his death, the current dictator, Kim Jong Un—though today the original founder is still commemorated in thousands of “Towers of Immortalization” that dot the North Korean landscape like so many cathedrals.

Fascinating insight into the birth of the moral equivalent of a totalitarian theocracy.