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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Tabor. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And my name is Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World. During the Cold War, there was a lot of research done trying to answer the question, what is the nature of communism? What is the essence of Soviet communism? And there was a big literature that suggested that communism served as a kind of replacement religion.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:It served to replace the function of the church. And I think that's a good thing to keep in mind when thinking about our discussion for today, which is with Jonathan Cheng, who is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, who just published a incredible new book that just came out in April titled Korean Messiah, Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Cult, which makes an argument that Kim Il Sung essentially his reign and his cult of personality was fundamentally influenced by his Presbyterian roots.
Nick Tabor:Thanks so much for coming on the show. Danny and I both really enjoyed the book. We were talking about it earlier this morning and we were saying there's so much here. In a way it is a full scale history of modern Korea. I learned a lot from that perspective that I didn't know.
Nick Tabor:Also, it has quite a lot of great history on Christian missions, but it's also in a way at the heart a story of how this one person, Kim Il Sung, who was raised as a Presbyterian, raised, as you say in one part, in a Christian bubble for the first twenty years of his life, who was a Sunday school teacher, played organ in the church, how he went on to manufacture a religion centered on himself, did it in a very conscious way, did it sort of aggressively, and really quite successfully. Almost shocking how how successful it was to read your narration. So I I think that as we go through it, we'd like to have you kind of tell it as a story as you do in the book. And I think as we go, we'll get to some of these questions of both context and historical interpretation and how it how your reading differs from from some of the other literature. So to start with, maybe you could talk about who Kim's parents were and the the milieu in which he was raised.
Jonathan Cheng:First of all, Nick, Danny, it's really great to be here, and your podcast is very much sort of trying to ply the same waters as the book that I wrote. And so really does feel like a match made in heaven here to talk about Korean Messiah.
Nick Tabor:Yep. We felt the same way.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. And, you know, I mean, first of all, mean, this book was just a major project for me. It took twelve years. It's 768 pages. We don't wanna scare anyone, but it is quite it took a big chunk of me.
Jonathan Cheng:Let's put it that way. And it was very much a personal project as well as being an intellectual project.
Nick Tabor:I mean, we should say the last couple 100 pages are notes, So don't let people, you know, I don't want people to be intimidated by that. The the documentation is voluminous. It's a credit to you that that there's as much, you know, back matter as there is. But the actual narration, it's it's it's totally a manageable read.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. You know, and that was sort of the goal. You know, I never went and got a PhD. You know, I studied history. I consider myself a certified history nerd, and yet at the same time, I am a journalist.
Jonathan Cheng:And so part of being a journalist, I I would sort of pluck two threads from that. One is that we do our best to try to be as neutral as we can be. I know that's a little bit of a fool's errand to try and be neutral because you'll never please everyone, but I do think it's worth the effort. And I certainly did make that effort to try and be fair to North Korea and try to understand North Korea on its own terms in in one way. The other part of being a journalist is just trying to keep things lively.
Jonathan Cheng:You know? Journalism, it's an attention economy, and we have to get to the point, and we have to be snappy in what we say. And so I tried to bring that to this project as well, even though it did end up being 500 pages. If you take all the back matter out, you're talking about a 500 page book here. And yet, the the the hope is that I kept it breezy.
Jonathan Cheng:I kept it page turning. It's it's not quite a beach read, but but I I certainly tried to keep it moving. And so I hope I accomplished that aim.
Nick Tabor:Yeah. I think I think you did. Yep.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. But but but anyways, just just to answer your question, I mean, look, what really intrigued me about the topic was just this notion that North Korea, this state that we look at as being so different from America, as being kinda like the ultimate adversary. They're nuclear armed. Mhmm. They've got this Stalinist sort of architecture.
Jonathan Cheng:You've got these Kims that sit atop this incredible cult of personality. It just feels so foreign and so different. And yet, what was so interesting to me was to trace how much of its ideological heritage came from American Presbyterianism. And so I look at the Kim family. Of course, it's Kim Jong Un who's running the show now, but before that, it was his father, Kim Jong before And him, it was Kim Il sung who was the founder of the state and who's really sort of the central figure of the book that I'm writing about.
Jonathan Cheng:But you're right, it really begins with his parents. So we'd really be talking about the great grandparents of Kim Jong un. And these two people, I fear I've already given too many Kim names, so I'm I I don't even necessarily need to name them, but the father
Nick Tabor:Sure.
Jonathan Cheng:He was raised very devout, very much in the Presbyterian church. He was an upwardly mobile young man who believed every word of the scripture. He was one of the first converts to Christianity in Korea and he saw it as not just a way to attain spiritual salvation, but also a way for Korea to attain political salvation. Because during this period, this was when Korea was the colony of Japan. And I don't think any colony necessarily likes being colonized, but the Koreans perhaps hated being colonized more than many colonized people.
Jonathan Cheng:And so, for him and for so many Koreans, the church was his vehicle for nationalist aspirations as well as being really a pathway to spiritual salvation. And his mother was very much from the same cloth as well. She was a second generation Christian because we know that her father was a church elder, and she was known as a bible woman. That was the term that they used because, in the Presbyterian church at the time, there was no real mechanism for women to have any position of leadership in the church, and so they created this sort of informal deaconess sort of a position called the Bible Woman. And Bible Woman, and the missionaries document this quite well, were tasked with going from village to village and introducing the outside world to women who were almost entirely illiterate.
Jonathan Cheng:There were very few women who could read in Korea at the time. This is the late nineteenth century, earliest early twentieth century we're talking about here, by the way. And so many of the women didn't even have names. And that was one of the things that really struck the first Presbyterian missionaries to get to Korea, to think that women were so downtrodden in Korea, they sort of made the point that even India and its caste system couldn't even really hold a candle to Korea and how stratified society was. And so women were at the bottom of the heap, and they weren't permitted to learn how to read, and they weren't even given names.
Jonathan Cheng:And so part of the task of the bible woman was to go village to village and was to teach women about the outside world, to teach them to read using the bible, and in some cases to even give them names. And so this is sort of the parentage that Kim Il sung had when he was growing up.
Nick Tabor:Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, could you talk a little about the kind of world that he lived in and the way that his like, what was his childhood like and who who were the people surrounding him?
Jonathan Cheng:Sure. So Pyongyang, this is the city what that we're talking about here at the center of the book. Pyongyang, of course, today is the capital of North Korea. It is home to Gim Sung Square. So when you see footage on TV of Kim Jong un standing on the rostrum watching, goose stepping soldiers go by or intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads on them, that's Pyongyang.
Jonathan Cheng:But before Pyongyang became known as the capital of this Kim dynasty, it was known as the Jerusalem Of The East. It was known as the city that became perhaps more Christianized than any city in all of Asia. And I should just note very quickly, I I know we're on common wheel here. I should make it clear that when I say Christian in this context and when I say Christian in, you know, for the next hour or so, I really mean Protestant Christianity here. I don't mean Catholicism, although Catholic history in Korea is a fascinating one and actually stretches far further back into history than Protestantism.
Jonathan Cheng:Yet, really the force that we see really emerge as the main driving force in certainly North Korea, but also in South Korea as well, is Protestantism and more specifically Presbyterianism. And so we saw Pyongyang become this city that was known as the Jerusalem Of The East because it was so heavily Christianized. And so this is the sort of milieu that the Kim family sort of becomes Christian in and that Kim Il sung is raised in. And as you mentioned, he taught Sunday school, he played the organ, he spoke at the YMCA, He performed at church plays. All of these sorts of things.
Jonathan Cheng:This was this is the upbringing that the founder of the North Korean state had, not just for his first five, six, seven, eight years. No. This was really the first twenty years of his life. This was the bubble that he grew up in, in a city that was so Christianized it was known as the Jerusalem Of The East.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Excellent. It's really fascinating because of that background given what ends up happening, namely him becoming the leader of North Korea, a communist. And so is there an explanation as to what led to his disillusionment with this Christian upbringing? You know, Nick and I were talking earlier on the show about how a lot of different thinkers were very much attracted to Woodrow Wilson and the idea of self determination. And they hope that the Treaty of Versailles would lead to national self determination all over the world.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And then only to be recognized that this only focused on essentially ethnic groups and peoples in Central Europe. And then, of course, someone like Ho Chi Minh who was very much attracted to Wilson became disillusioned and turned to communism. Is there a similar story here? Or I know the evidence gets a little hard to confirm these things, but what is your explanation for what leads him to abandon this faith in which he was raised?
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. That's a great question, and I do get into it quite a bit in the book. And I can tell you've read the book because of the question. But, yes, you're right that we can't know for sure what leads to Kim Il sung's disillusionment with the upbringing that he had in the church. And I should be clear that he actually never is, rhetorically at least, very what's the word?
Jonathan Cheng:He's never resentful, it it seems, or or burdened too much by his upbringing in the church, at least, again, not rhetorically. He doesn't complain about it. In fact, insofar as he acknowledges it at all, and he does, by the way, towards the end of his life in great detail. That's how we know so much about his Christian upbringing is because he himself told us about it. He talks about it in actually quite positive terms.
Jonathan Cheng:He doesn't seem to have been for example, I don't have any evidence that he was disillusioned by the church. It wasn't like he was a churchgoer one day or very much into the church and one day left it because he had some terrible experience or he realized that everyone was was was a hypocrite in church or this or that or he had some intellectual disagreement with some teaching, some theology. It wasn't like that at all. It felt actually like he drifted away from the church, if anything. I mean, certainly, there's a question, and I get the question a lot.
Jonathan Cheng:Was Kim Il sung ever a Christian? And that's a really tough question for me to answer because as far as I see it, that's a heart question. Right? And Mhmm. I don't know what's in his heart.
Jonathan Cheng:He died in 1994. I never met him. I never had a chance to speak with him. And even if I did, I don't know that I could really tell you what was going on in his heart. He could tell me what he wanted to tell me, but at some level, it's sort of between him and God, and that's sort of how I feel about it.
Nick Tabor:Right. Well, let me also say that, you know, there are cases where we do know quite a lot about what was in people's hearts because of the record that they left. But it seems like one challenge that you were dealing with here is that most of the records are propaganda that were produced by his administration. So it's hard to parse those things.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. I mean, he's literally one of the most mythologized people in the twentieth century. Perhaps among the most mythologized, self mythologized people. And so you have to peel back layers and layers and layers of all this propaganda, as you say, before you kinda get to the core. And I don't know that it's possible to get to the core.
Jonathan Cheng:It's possible that even he himself was wrestling with all of this and wasn't himself entirely sure exactly what he believed or how he felt about all this. But what I would say is that definitely there is a very clear drifting away, and it does seem like it's intellectual at some level. It does seem like it is driven by his political and nationalistic inclinations, and that was not at all unusual for Korean Christians at the time. Again, I don't wanna say that he was a Korean Christian, but you can look at the arcs, the trajectories of so many Korean Christians of this period. As you mentioned, Woodrow Wilson, he was the president of The United States, of course, but he was also the son, the grandson, and the nephew of Presbyterian ministers.
Jonathan Cheng:And when he talked about self determination, when he unveiled the 14 points, when he talked about making the world safe for democracy, when he talked about all of these high ideals, they were very much flowing out of this Presbyterian heritage that he had. And so Korea, by the time the war ends, World War one here in 1918, by the time it ends, let's note that Kim Il sung at this point is six years old, so he's not exactly politically aware or politically active at this point. Even the North Koreans don't try to portray him as a six year old sort of prodigy who who can lead the North Korean nation at this point. But but certainly, you read a lot of the testimony and the memoirs of people who came of age at this time, they looked at Woodrow Wilson and they really put a lot of their hopes in him because by this point, not only was Pyongyang the Jerusalem of the East, there was a lot of talk, lot of discourse in the global church, and by the global church I really mean the western church. And really what I mean is in the American church, in New York, in London, in Toronto, in Ottawa, places like this, that Korea might actually become the first Christian nation on earth.
Jonathan Cheng:There was this sense that so many people were becoming Christian that the waves of revival had washed over Korea so thoroughly that perhaps this could be the first Christian nation on earth. And so that was part of the appeal that many of the Korean Christian nationalists made to Woojoo Wilson, and many of them found ways to send letters or find intermediaries to talk to Woojoo Wilson. Syngman Rhee, who later goes on to become the first president of South Korea, was actually a student under Woodjo Wilson when Woodjo Wilson was the president of Princeton University. And so he made a personal appeal to Woodjo Wilson on Korea's behalf, making very much to this point because Syngman Rhee was a lifelong Methodist, and he made the argument that if there's any country that's deserving of self determination, it is Korea. Because not only is Korea a distinct society with its own culture and language and clothing and food and all all the rest of it, but it's also the first Christian nation, and America should really be going to bat for Korea.
Jonathan Cheng:And so there were so many hopes that were put on Woodrow Wilson because of this coming out of Korea. Mhmm. And, of course, we know what happened in 1919 is that Woodrow Wilson did not bring self determination to Korea, and so there was a great disillusionment that resulted from this. And so many Korean Christian nationalists and I should just pause one more moment there to highlight this idea because Christian nationalism has a very, very specific meaning in our day today, but you really have to sort of disassociate it with what's happening in America these days. It's a very different circumstance.
Jonathan Cheng:This is half a world away. This is a century earlier. A century earlier. But still, you have this situation where many of the Korean Christian nationalists turned pretty sharply away from Woodrow Wilson, and instead what they did was they looked to Vladimir Lenin because Vladimir Lenin was also using the language of self determination. And the difference is he was succeeding.
Jonathan Cheng:He was able to put his money where his mouth was, if you wanna put it that way, because we saw Bolshevism take hold in what used to be Tsarist Russia, of course, which became the Soviet Union. And so many of these Korean nationalists and I would put Kim Il sung in this camp, but even though, again, his name was not Kim Il sung at the time and he was six years old. But but he was a part of this larger current that moved from Wilsonian Christian nationalism towards sort of a more Leninist, socialist, Christian nationalism.
Nick Tabor:Mhmm. It seems like it was kind of a generational split to a degree. My sense from reading it is that this affected younger people the most. At least those are those are kind of the case studies that you that you focus on. Is that correct?
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. No. I think that's very much the case. I think the missionaries at the time were all and and by the way, this wasn't just Korea. This was happening as well in Japan, happening in China.
Jonathan Cheng:They called it, you know, the isms that suddenly started to flourish in the late nineteen tens and then to the nineteen twenties. Not just Bolshevism, but anarchism, and all sorts of different isms started to flourish. Nihilism, fascism, all of these sort of isms start to emerge. And so you have a flourishing of all these ideas. And yes, the missionaries were kind of appalled by it because they were fundamentalists, they would have been proudly fundamentalists.
Jonathan Cheng:Many of the Presbyterian missionaries who were active in Korea and especially in Pyongyang were appalled by this. And so I think there was even a generational divide between Kim Il sung and his own father because his own father, as far as I've been able to tell, despite what North Korea would tell you these days, was a conservative Christian nationalist. He would have subscribed to the sort of ideals that America would proclaim, which would be, you know, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and all the rest. Not to say that let Marxism, Leninism doesn't also proclaim these as well, but he would have very much been more in the mold of a an American style Christian nationalist. But his son went in a more left leaning direction.
Jonathan Cheng:Although I should also just quickly note here too that Kybal Song was not a particularly intellectual Marxist Leninist. He was he did finish high school. I don't wanna say that that's the be all end all. He was in many ways a very intelligent guy, but I don't think he was a theorist at heart. And, actually, you see that argument made of many of the Asian socialist nationalists, Ho Chi Minh, maybe to a lesser extent Mao Zedong, but but certainly with Kim Il sung, I would put him in that category.
Jonathan Cheng:I don't know that he really understood the ins and outs of dialectical materialism. I don't know that he could have waxed poetic about all these sorts of things. I don't know how many of the classic Marxist texts he had actually read, although he does claim to have read some of them. But many people who went to meet with him late in life wanted to talk theory with him, and they all found themselves quite disappointed that Kim Il sung wasn't actually able to talk very much theory. And so there is a view and I I find it compelling, that he was a nationalist at heart.
Jonathan Cheng:He wasn't really so much a socialist as he was a nationalist. Although, of course, the institutions that he presided over would have been classically socialist in in terms in terms of the nomenclature, in terms of the structure, in terms of all this sort of stuff. It certainly looks and has the trappings of a socialist state and yet of course, what I would argue at the heart of my narrative, my book is not you've you've both read my book. My book is not at heart a polemical book. It's not a policy book.
Jonathan Cheng:It's not an argument. It's a historical narrative. And yet I think you would find embedded in my book the sense that he wasn't really a dyed in the wool sort of a theorist, not a Marxist Leninist or a socialist. He was very much a nationalist and I would say one that was informed in large part, perhaps more so by his Christian upbringing. Upbringing.
Nick Tabor:Mhmm. Great.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Yeah. So I agree it's not a polemical book at all. It's really an informative read and I think makes a very compelling case. That being said, you know, for a long time there's been a kind of, when it comes to cults of personality and Marxism, there's been attempts to view these things as secularized forms of Christianity. That's been a critique of Stalinism for decades.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And I don't think that's your intention here, but maybe can you explain how you see the relationship specifically, I know you go into a great deal, just for our audience, the relationship between his background, his Christian background, Presbyterianism and the cult of personality because my sense is is that that strikes a lot of people as perhaps counterintuitive and then if you come from like an intellectual world like I do, that sounds like some of the old cold war arguments that were made by liberals about Stalinism and Marxism not being a science, it's just a replacement religion. So maybe can you talk a little bit about this connection?
Nick Tabor:Well, let me also say, I think we could also use a little bit more kind of narrative connective tissue. You know, we have in the timeline, we we kind of maybe you could bring us up to the point when he begins to create this cult of personality and explain how he first turns against Christianity because I think he becomes a guerilla fighter like in the nineteen thirties, and then then when he comes back, this project begins. Yeah. So maybe bring us up to that point.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. Actually, that's perfect. That's exactly what I was going to do in fact because I think what is key here is to note that he comes to power at the age of 33. He's very young when he becomes the leader of what we would now call North Korea. Of course, for the pedantic folks out there, no.
Jonathan Cheng:He does not become the leader of North Korea in 1945, but he does return to what is now North Korea in 1945. The state that we now know as North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic Of Korea, was not founded until '48. But effectively, by the end of 1945, he is the first among equals. He is effectively the leader of North Korea. Although, I guess you could argue February 1946 is sort of when he really sort of takes this, title that that launches him on this path.
Jonathan Cheng:But for the sake of simplicity, let's talk about 1945 because that's the end of World War two. That's when Japan surrenders. That's when Korea is liberated. It is liberated by two countries. It's liberated by the Soviet Union north of the 30th Parallel, and it's liberated by the Americans south Of the 30th Parallel.
Jonathan Cheng:And, of course, that's still the division that we see today, although there was a Korean War in the middle that moved that border quite a bit, but settled in the end kinda right where it started. You know, when he comes back, he's just 33 years old. And when you compare that to Stalin and when you compare that to Mao Zedong, they both came to power and secured their sort of unquestioned leadership of their countries in their early fifties. And so Kim Il sung is just 33 years old. As I mentioned, he didn't go to high school.
Jonathan Cheng:He is not anyone's first choice to be the leader of what is now North Korea. He kind of stumbles into it. I don't wanna argue that too hard because he is quite a cunning character as well, and so sharp elbows are definitely at play here. But he was a dark horse. Let's put it that way.
Jonathan Cheng:He was certainly not the odds on favored to become Stalin's pick to lead North Korea. So I think when he starts to build the cult of personality and by the way, he builds the cult of personality starting almost day one, almost from the very beginning. And Stalin certainly gives him some help. Many of the socialist bloc states that emerge after 1945 do feature these little Stalins, as they were called. These are Soviet backed states that have mini Stalinesque kind of cults of personality, and Kim Il Sung has one of them.
Jonathan Cheng:So he's sort of given this. It's launched, you could say, by the Soviets, but almost immediately, it starts to go off in its own direction. And so Mhmm. The point of getting into this narrative for me is to make the point that I don't know that Kim Il Sung was so premeditated about how he did this. He was 33.
Jonathan Cheng:He kind of has catapulted into this position. He has to maneuver with Moscow and he has to become Stalin's chosen guy. That's the one way that he becomes the leader of North Korea. It wouldn't have happened but for the approval of Stalin. But he also has to navigate the waters of the city he grew up in, this Jerusalem of the East as Pyongyang was known.
Jonathan Cheng:It was the most conservative Christian city in a country that was very heavily Christian. And so his main rival for power was an older fellow, three decades older than him in fact, named Chomansik, who was called the Gandhi of Korea because he was a church elder, but he, wore traditional robes and he insisted on nonviolent resistance against the Japanese. And so the reason why Chomansik ultimately falls is because he's too conservative, but he's actually the first choice of the Soviets because he is, without any question, the most popular political figure North Of The 30th Parallel. And so Kim Il sung has to outmaneuver Chomansik. And all of this is to say he is not trying from the very beginning necessarily to say, oh, I was raised a Presbyterian.
Jonathan Cheng:Therefore, I'm gonna take these Presbyterian tactics and techniques and apply them to my own cult of personality. I think that's giving him a little bit too much credit, and I think that's giving him a little bit too much foresight. I think he was kind of making it up as he went along because 1945, '46, '47, '48, these were tumultuous years. As I said, he was a 33 year old nobody when he comes to power. He did do some guerrilla fighting, as you say, and he did have some genuine exploits to his name.
Jonathan Cheng:But that's very different from being catapulted to leading a country of about 10,000,000 people at that time and now 25,000,000 people in North Korea. I think it's instinct. I think he instinctually understood how faith, how belief work, and how it intertwines with political power, and how it can be harnessed. I don't think he learned it from a textbook. I don't think he learned it from somebody who told him, here's how you should do it.
Jonathan Cheng:I don't think he had a playbook. I think he probably just kinda made it up as he went along, but I can't prove that one way or the other. But if you ask me, was it a conscious decision to appropriate so many of the rituals and doctrine of Presbyterianism? I think my guess is that it was probably more subconscious than conscious. It was probably more just making it up as he went along than it was some premeditated master plan.
Jonathan Cheng:But the result is unmistakable. What you see is within weeks, within months of him taking power, the cult of personality begins to flourish. And it begins to flourish on a scale that appalls the rest of the socialist bloc. I think many East Germans, many Poles, many Czechs, many Soviets who are in Pyongyang, the diplomats and all the rest of it, very quickly start to say, what we're seeing here in North Korea is not Marxism Leninism. This is what we see around Kim Il sung can't even fully be captured with that phrase cult of personality.
Jonathan Cheng:Very quickly, they start to say, this is closer to worship, what we're seeing in North Korea, what he's cultivated here. And by the time he turns 40, he's already got a cult of personality that has far exceeded Stalin's cult of personality. Of course, by the time he turns 40, he is basically weighing whether or not to follow the path of destalinization because, you know, he's got a choice to make because he comes to power. But when Stalin dies in '53, we have Khrushchev come along and say, need to get rid of the cult of personality around Stalin. We need to introduce collective leadership.
Jonathan Cheng:We need to go in a different direction here. And Kim Il sung kinda says no. That's effectively what happens because he doesn't wanna destalinize. He just wants to destalinize insofar as you remove the figure of Stalin but replace Stalin with Kim and make Kim, the center of this all encompassing cult of personality, which as I said, very quickly becomes something that is more akin to worship.
Nick Tabor:Right. Right. Well, now we're getting into some of the material that I found the most fascinating in the book. You give quite a lot of texture of this sort of what I think goes beyond like a conventional cult of personality and becomes like a full fledged religion. There's a lot of tactile detail of how it's lived.
Nick Tabor:And so you talked just a moment ago about how he repurposed forms from Presbyterianism. Maybe you could talk about some of those, maybe just give some examples. I will say that one that I loved was that he like the the hymn book that that was published, which you kind of draw a connection there to his time playing organ in church. But maybe give us a couple of examples.
Jonathan Cheng:Sure. Yeah. And before I do, a lot of people I'm not the first to point these similarities out. Mhmm. I should start with North Koreans themselves.
Jonathan Cheng:Many of them fled North Korea. 30,000 of them fled North Korea primarily starting in the nineteen nineties when a great famine hit. That was the same decade that Kim Il sung himself died. Of course, there was also the decade in which we saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the so socialist bloc. But, you know, many of the North Koreans who fled the country are introduced to Christianity when they're trying to make their way to South Korea because the people who were most responsible for helping North Koreans make it to South Korea were South Korean missionaries operating undercover in China.
Jonathan Cheng:And so many of them, while bringing North Koreans through this underground railroad through China, introduced them to the Bible, and sometimes in quite draconian fashion. They're basically in these safe houses and basically made to read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, basically, and to memorize large chunks of it and all the rest. And many of these North Koreans all say the same thing. They all come back and they kinda say to the missionaries, this Bible stuff you're teaching me, it's so similar to what I was raised in back in North Korea. It's so similar to Kim Il Sungism.
Jonathan Cheng:And many of them will point to the 10 principles, which is sort of the highest law of the land in North Korea. And so, obviously, you'll say these 10 principles that many of the North Koreans come to jokingly call it the 10 commandments because it's so similar. Right? And you have the hymns, of course, but you also have this the ritual the weekly ritual of self criticism, public confession of your transgressions against the Kims. You have the publishing and the sacralizing of Kim Il sung's words, such that they're memorized, such that they're printed in a larger font than the rest of the text in a North Korean publication that you might pick out.
Jonathan Cheng:Sometimes it's in bold. Occasionally, his words will be in red letter. And so you have a lot of these sort of echoes here. And yet at the same time, I wanna be very careful because I'm not the first to point many of these things out, but you'll start to see that things don't track one to one. I don't wanna suggest for a moment and my argument insofar as there's an implied argument in the book, I don't want it to rest on the idea that he copied, pasted, copied, pasted because I don't think that that is what Kim Il sung did.
Jonathan Cheng:I don't think it was that simple. I don't think it was that straightforward. To give a couple of examples, a lot of people will point to the holy trinity. They'll say there's a holy trinity in North Korea. They'll say Kim Il sung's the father, Kim Jong il's the son, and who's the holy spirit?
Jonathan Cheng:Well, this is where it breaks down a little bit because you'll have some people say, holy spirit is Juche ideology, the sort of ideology that that Kim Il sung created. Or some people might say, oh, it was Kim Il sung's wife, the mother of Kim Jong That's the third person of the trinity. Or some people will say, it's the masses. The masses are the third person of the trinity. I lay all this out to say it doesn't really track one to one.
Jonathan Cheng:I don't think you can say that he just copied and pasted. I don't think it's that simple. The other thing that people will point to, and this was one of the things I was most struck by because I've been to North Korea twice. I went in 2013. I went again in 2017.
Jonathan Cheng:And one of the first things that you're supposed to do, one of the first things that any visitor to North Korea is expected to do is to go to the 66 foot tall bronze statue of Kim Il sung in the center of Pyongyang, and you're expected to bow before it. And that is obviously, to me to me anyway, that is obviously a religious act. There's no two ways about it. But I don't know that I would call that Presbyterianism because I've never set foot in a Presbyterian church where you're expected to bow before a graven image of another person. That's not Presbyterianism.
Jonathan Cheng:And so would I say that Kim Il sung just transplanted the practices of Presbyterianism? No. I wouldn't say that. And if Mhmm. The whole premise of my book rested on that, then it would crumble pretty quickly because I don't think that that's what happened here.
Jonathan Cheng:But I do think that more broadly, more generally, Kim Il sung, as I said, understood intuitively how faith works as an instrument of power. And I think he applied it through a socialist structure. This was the Soviet Union that established the state for him and in a very Korean way. And so that means that there's Confucianism in the mix. That means that there's shamanism in the mix.
Jonathan Cheng:Some would even argue that there's Japanese emperor worship in the mix because Japan was basically the hegemon in Korea for four decades before Kim Il sung comes to power, and they had introduced Shintoism with its emperor worship built into it as well. And so there are many different ideological threads that come to play here. So I don't wanna suggest for a moment that Christianity is the thing that explains North Korea because I think that would be pushing it too far. And Mhmm. Much of the criticism that I've gotten for the book, The New York Times reviewed it, Bruce Cummings of the University of Chicago, and that was one of his critiques was sort of say, it feels like Cheng here is foregrounding Christianity a little too much.
Jonathan Cheng:And, you know, what I would say to Bruce Cummings with respect is that my claims are more modest. I'm not trying to suggest that North Korea is some sort of a pseudo quasi crypto Christian state. But certainly, in a state as personalist as North Korea is, and I don't believe there is any state on this planet that is more personalist in its rule than the Kim family and North Korea, that we have to look at the ideological upbringing of the guy who founded the state and who presided over it for forty nine years until his death in 1994, and who then handed it off to his son and then later his grandson to run it into a ninth decade. We have to look at the first twenty years of his life, and he was absolutely steeped in Christianity. He was absolutely steeped in Presbyterianism.
Jonathan Cheng:He marinated in this and he understood the Bible very well. And in fact he quotes liberally from the Bible throughout the rest of his life and I have that sprinkled throughout the book. I show you how well versed he was in the bible until the very end of his life. And so, again, I don't want to draw a one to one sort of a, you know, a line between here's Presbyterianism or here's Protestantism or Christianity and here's Kim Il Sungism and this thing is this and this thing is that. I don't wanna go in that direction, but I wanna show and I hope I did show convincingly that there's no mistaking that the ideological heritage upon which he drew considerably from was his Christian, Protestant, Presbyterian upbringing.
Nick Tabor:Yeah. I think you do show it persuasively. Go ahead, Danny.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Yeah. I was just gonna add on to that. I like this idea of it not being a copy and paste or just some kind of constructed attempt but that intuitively given his background and I do think, I'm not a Sovietologist but Stalin himself went to seminary.
Jonathan Cheng:He did.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:There could be just an awareness of the importance that religion has in society and the need to provide some kind of orientation that it provides, right? That makes more sense to me than some kind of like, you know, conscious attempt to download an entire new religion.
Jonathan Cheng:Right. And you know, mean, the solemn example I think is a good one too, but I think where it differs of course is that Christianity is very much a part of Russian culture and it always has been, of course, Orthodox Christianity. Korea, it was a totally new transplant, right? I mean, the Christianity, Protestantism was utterly foreign on the Korean Peninsula until the eighteen eighties. Right?
Jonathan Cheng:So insofar as Stalin would have drawn upon those tropes and those traditions, that was very much part of just what it meant to be Russian. Right? The where does Mhmm. Russianness end and Christianity begin or where does Christianity end and Russian heritage begin. Right?
Jonathan Cheng:The two are so intertwined and have been for centuries, but that wasn't the case in Korea. So it's a more it's just the impact of it is just so much clearer in my opinion. And so that's where I would diverge a little bit in terms of comparing Stalin's upbringing in the church and Kim's.
Nick Tabor:Right. Well one thing I want to make sure we get to is the way you deal with the way this was all received by the people of North Korea. And it it seems like by and large, best we can tell, it's been quite successful. Like, it it really did take root. You talk about these Western visitors kind of puzzling over this, like wondering are these people, like is this devotion real?
Nick Tabor:You know, do they really believe this stuff? And the records seem to suggest that that they do. And just one kind of programming note, would like to say just before we run out of time, maybe you'll also be able to speak a little about what's happened since he died. But Yeah. But please, yeah, talk about their response.
Jonathan Cheng:Sure. Yeah. I mean, look, I think a lot of people will ask me and they have asked me, is North Korean devotion to the Kims real? If you go on YouTube, you can see footage of North Koreans weeping and wailing and beating their breasts and all the rest of it when one of the Kims dies, Kim Il sung and then Kim Jong il. Or they'll see these great outpourings of emotion when Kim Jong un shows up somewhere and people are literally raising their arms above their head, jumping up and down in ecstasy.
Jonathan Cheng:Are these emotions real? I think that they are. I can't prove it, and I don't know for sure, and I don't know that anyone could tell you with any certainty even if you ask the North Korean. I they could answer for themselves, but they couldn't answer for all 25,000,000 North Koreans. Because even if people were faking it, which I believe there must be some who are faking it, there's but no way to know.
Jonathan Cheng:Even the North Korean state doesn't know who's faking it and who's doing it for real. But I will say that on balance, I I I kinda find it more persuasive that many of them do believe it because we're now in the eighty first year of Kim rule. Unlike the Soviet Union, where you saw Khrushchev come along and destalinize after the death of Stalin, unlike China, where you saw Deng Xiaoping come along after the death of Mao and demaoify and obviously take China in a very different direction, you never saw that in North Korea. There was never any glasnost or perestroika. There was never any Mhmm.
Jonathan Cheng:Reform and opening. There was none of that. The only Mhmm. Direction we saw the cult of personality go in North Korea was towards more and more extreme devotion towards the Kims. And so I think what we see is eighty one years of this Kim cult almost entirely isolated from the outside world.
Jonathan Cheng:Yes. Modern technology has changed the equation a little bit, but we know I'm recording this podcast right now in China. China, it was predicted, could never handle the Internet because the Internet was simply too free. There's no way the Communist Party could control the Internet, and yet we've seen now that the Internet's been here for several decades. And China's done very well in terms of insulating its people from the outside voices that it doesn't want inside and making sure that its voice is heard very loudly and very clearly in in China.
Jonathan Cheng:Right? And North Korea has taken that much further because there's even less porousness of the Internet and of cell phones and of this sort of technology. And so they've basically had a near perfect cordon of information around the country. And I think we all know if you wanna talk about religious societies, which ultimately I think North Korea is at root, at heart, a religious society, we know that the playbook of building one of these is to isolate your followers from outside sources of information and to control those flows of information. And North Korea has done it perhaps more fastidiously than almost any other place on earth.
Jonathan Cheng:I would argue they have done it more. Uh-huh. Better than any other place on earth. Better, obviously with scare quotes around that word. But, you know, I think I think the North Koreans have created a reality for their people, for their 25,000,000 people.
Jonathan Cheng:And if you're talking about eighty one years, yes, there are people who can still remember a time before the Kims ruled North Korea. But those people are fewer and fewer by the day, and they're very, very old right now. And so you've already had several generations who have lived and in some cases already died in this alternate reality that the Kims have created in which they are demigods, in which they are deities, in which all life revolves around them. And so I do think that that devotion is real to a large extent, but I can't prove it. Yeah.
Jonathan Cheng:Let me stop there. I could I could talk on and on.
Nick Tabor:I'm sure. I mean, there there's one anecdote about the person who talks about, at least one, talks about, like like, genuine religious experiences, like Kim appearing in a vision or something like that. And I I I don't know how to make sense of that. It's a there's there's a profound questions that come up here.
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah. I mean, I I think, you know, I sometimes compare it to secular idolization. Right? I mean, we literally have the word idol for pop stars and for, you know, rock stars and all the rest of it. Right?
Jonathan Cheng:You talk about k pop to stay on the Korean Peninsula. Right? I mean, their k pop stars are referred to as idols. And all of us have our heroes. And if you met your hero in person, yes, you would find your heart pounding faster.
Jonathan Cheng:You would find yourself getting a little bit nervous in the presence of somebody that you get to meet, who you never thought you might be able to meet, who you put up on a pedestal, who you kind of do worship, you do kind of deify. And this is just more literal. They literally have deified him. They have literally made him an object of worship. And so why should we be surprised that when North Koreans are in the presence of Kim Jong un actually, you know what?
Jonathan Cheng:If I were in the presence I don't worship Kim Jong un. But if I were in the presence of Kim Jong un, yes, I would find myself in a heightened state of of of emotion or however you wanna put it because, wow, that that's that that that's kinda crazy. Right? So True. You take that except that that that you've been trained and taught to bow before none other than the Kims, and there there he is in your presence.
Jonathan Cheng:Of course, you would almost faint. You would almost you know, it would be a lot to take in.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Yeah. Maybe this will I don't know Nick if you have a final question, but if not, maybe maybe this can be that because I know we're running out of time here. But given what you've said, you know, we're living in a new authoritarian age, at least that's the way that many people refer to it as. And you know, Donald Trump does things that seem to cultivate a cult of personality, building a big statues, you know, replacing himself with Christ in certain images. Even recently on Truth Social said that, you know, no one knows God like he does or something Given like your studies of Kim Il Sung and this book, I mean, what do you make of the moment that we're living in and this turn to new kind of political authoritarianism?
Jonathan Cheng:Yeah, it's a great question. And it's also a question that came up quite a bit on my book tour. But you know, I think that there's very little question in my mind that we are in a period where you're seeing the politicization of religion, the religionization of politics. There's no question that the two are merging. And it's curious that it should happen with Donald Trump because Donald Trump, I think I don't think it's a controversial statement for me to make that I don't think Donald Trump is a particularly religious person.
Jonathan Cheng:Right? I mean, he, certainly has, yes, done all those things that you've just mentioned there, and yet he himself, I don't think he would describe himself as very devout or pious in any sort of a way, you know, when yet he's been able to command so much reverence from Christians in America. So it's a very interesting phenomenon to me. I don't know that I can necessarily explain it other than to say that there's always been a nexus there between politics and religion, between belief, because belief can be spiritual, belief can be political as well. Right?
Jonathan Cheng:And so, I mean, you saw it to some degree with Barack Obama just to be more politically ecumenical here, right, and hope, and all these sort of images that you saw of Obama almost as a messianic figure as well. Right? And so certainly, Democrats wouldn't want to acknowledge that because many Democrats would not want to associate with religion in an open way. And yet, of course, we see that these same sort of techniques and tropes are applied equally on both sides of the aisle. Again, perhaps more by the Republican party, but but but certainly they don't have a monopoly on this.
Jonathan Cheng:Right? And so I think what Kim Il sung understood better than anyone else was how powerful faith can be. And maybe you could say he recognized that there was a God shaped hole or a Kim Il sung shaped hole that needed to be filled and that political ideology, insofar as it's dealing with the here and now, was all well and good. But to be able to speak to transcendence, to be able to speak to something larger, everybody wants to have something to believe in. Everyone wants to feel part of something bigger.
Jonathan Cheng:Right? And so so much of the great religions of humanity have, of course, both of those elements. They give you something to believe in and they give you a community to be a part of. And so I think that mega and however else you wanna describe political religion or religious sort of religiosity in in in politics, I think, has many elements of this. Now you can say that that's a negative thing, but you can also say it's a positive thing in some ways.
Jonathan Cheng:I'm not gonna take a position either way, but I don't think that it's I I think it's apparent to all that after all these decades where it seemed like religion was becoming less and less relevant in polite society, certainly, you know, on the East Coast, on the West Coast, and sort of the coastal elite country, religion just seemed to be a quaint thing. Oh, yeah. They built these beautiful churches, but nobody uses them anymore, and it was nice to have. But no. I mean, you see the Pew surveys that show that religiosity is making a comeback in America among young men, but also just young people in general.
Jonathan Cheng:And I don't know whether this will stick or not. This may just prove to be a small bounce as we generally see secularism continue its march forward. But I don't know. I don't know that to be the case, and and it's possible that we are entering a new era where you see religion take more of a front seat. And if that's the case, then North Korea well, nobody did it nobody did it to quite the same extreme as North Korea.
Jonathan Cheng:And so when we talk about Donald Trump and we talk about Kim Il sung, I'm not even sure we can really put them in the same sentence. This is not, anywhere in the same ballpark. And yet, I think there is something philosophically similar that does link them. Although the magnitude is so different that that I would be I would I I don't wanna really lump the two together.
Nick Tabor:Thank you. Mhmm. Yeah. Alright. Well, I I think that's all the time we have.
Nick Tabor:We'll let you get going for your TV spot. Really enjoyed this conversation. This was excellent, and the book is excellent. As we said, we encourage everybody to check it out.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Thanks so much, Jonathan. It's a really fantastic book.
Jonathan Cheng:It was no. A real pleasure to to be here and and to talk to two guys who've read it and really wrestled with it. And again, I mean, I think it's not a polemical book, but I I I really do hope that people who pick it up and read it are going to find themselves even if you're not interested in North Korea, you're gonna come out of this thinking, wow, my goodness. There's a lot about the world in here. And and and of course, you will learn a lot about North Korea as well.
Nick Tabor:Excellent. Sure. And I'll just just say the title one more time. The book is Korean Messiah, Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea's Personality Called by Jonathan Cheng. Alright.
Nick Tabor:Well, thanks again, and good luck with the book promotion.
Jonathan Cheng:Yes. Thanks. It was real pleasure to be here.
Nick Tabor:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.