Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality CultBy Jonathan ChengAlfred A. Knopf (Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.) Before the first dictator of North Korea persecuted Christians, he was one himself. As a boy, Kim Il Sung learned to play the organ in church. His parents were Protestant converts. According to Korean Messiah, a 700+ page tome by Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan Cheng (the paper’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief), Kim might have used the Christian framework as the inspiration for his own version of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Korean Messiah is a seminal text in the making. It’s a curious, biting look at the web of myth-making that built up modern North Korea, coming after over a decade of research including interviews with descendants of missionaries who once claimed the region for the Kingdom of God. It’s hard to study a regime so bent on bending the truth. And North Korean politicos aren’t the only ones bending it. Certain U.S. leftists travel to the DPRK and report back that everything’s fine and dandy (instead of just saying a divinely chosen wealth-hoarding ruling family might not be real communism). Right-wing U.S. politicians invoke North Korea as an existential threat to freedom everywhere, eliding their own institutions’ roles in creating the issue and manufacturing consent for global crusades in the name of their own market gods. Both in 1980 and in 2024, South Korean presidents used the specter of North Korea as a justification for martial law, dog-whistling accusations against the mass protests that ensued. Navigating these treacherous seas is Cheng, whose most damning evidence on the Jesus-Kim link is often from the regime’s own hagiographies. In a generous move as a historian, Cheng engages with uncertainty. He presents his sources along with the speakers’ motives, ready for readers to dissect. Much of the work Cheng’s book does is not in dumping information but in preparing the reader to understand it. The “Korean Messiah” himself, Kim Il Sung, isn’t even born until page 146. Before that, we get deep into the psyches of missionaries from the U.S. Midwest who seem to both love Koreans (like pets) and be disgusted by them. Cheng quotes missionary James S. Gale, who calls Pyongyang “a veritable cage of evil birds from all time” and “the vilest of the vile.” Though the book is about an isolated country, the implications it draws are far-reaching. The power Christianity has over South Korea, for example, is traced back in the book to a mass exodus of Christians from North Korea, once called the “Jerusalem of the East” for its Western missionary success stories. Because the book starts before Korea was even a colony of Japan, it also gets into the story of the creation of South Korea — first led by Syngman Rhee, a Christian Korean who used to visit the same missionary-fostered networks as Kim Il Sung. Around the time Cheng’s book was published, I was on a bus to a high school to learn about the 4.19 Revolution against Syngman Rhee. In writing about the photos I saw there, I came across a declassified CIA document calling Rhee a self-imposed “Korean Moses and Messiah.” The concept, it seems, might have just as much to do with East-meets-West as it does with the North/South divide. It might also have to do, Cheng suggests at least for North Koreans, with the powerlessness of a people who spent four decades under Japanese colonial rule, dreaming of overcoming, only to have to credit their “freedom” to outside forces (the Soviet Red Army, the U.S.’ atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It’s fertile soil for a hero narrative. A revealing moment in Korean Messiah comes as Nikita Khrushchev of the USSR begins “De-Stalinization” reforms against the lionization of the deceased Joseph Stalin. Here, Kim Il Sung breaks from his Soviet contemporaries, launching further into Stalin worship (later dropping that for exclusive worship of himself and his son). Cheng writes that Kim’s “fealty was more to Stalin the man than it was to the Soviet Union or whatever ideological lines it was espousing at any given moment.” Studying the precise, at times outrageous events that led to Kim Il Sung’s dictator dynasty takes the nation’s history out of the oft-assumed realm of the natural consequences of communism. That isn’t to say Cheng shifts the blame to Christian evangelism. He does bring certain realities under the microscope. Like: the fact that U.S. missionaries’ runaway success in Korea started in the North. Or the mutual admiration between Kim Il Sung and Sun Myung Moon, cult leader of the “Moonies.” Cheng writes with a humor that matches the absurdity of the history he is describing. When he refers to key missionaries from the state of Indiana as “the young Hoosier” or “these two earnest Hoosiers,” we’re reminded that Indiana and its goofy nickname preceded the entire DPRK. Cheng’s lightness never feels at odds with the seriousness of the subject matter. It’s an effective vehicle for a history cobbled together by the interests of empires and circumstantial ego trips. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction—and to write it, you gotta get strange. Sign up here to get Gwangju Midbrow email updates delivered straight to your inbox. The post How A God Is Born appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less