SEOUL, South Korea — Did the star of Bethlehem appear over the infamously atheist capital of North Korea?
That was the question international reporters asked each other, sotto voce, as an image of a bright star in a night sky, leading a figure over a dark, barren landscape, flashed up on the cards held by thousands of perfectly choreographed performers at North Korea’s famed Arirang Mass Games.
Certainly not, interpreters scolded the visiting journalists. The image did not represent Jesus’ birth, they said. Instead, it was their leader, Kim Jong-un, navigating his people on a perilous course toward a bright future.
That was Pyongyang, 2005. The capital’s most notable physical propaganda was Soviet-style statuary and portraiture, European-style monoliths — including a reproduction of Paris’ Arc de Triomphe—blended with architectural nods toward Korea’s royal dynasties.
Christian symbolism, however, was no accident. Pyongyang was once dubbed “The Jerusalem of the East,” and communist guerilla, Red Army captain and state founder Kim Il Sung was raised in a deeply Christian household.
This under-explored irony is the subject of Jonathon Cheng’s “Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult,” (Knopf, 2026).
Canadian Mr. Cheng grew up in a Christian household before embarking on a journalistic career that took him to Hong Kong, Seoul and Beijing, where he is presently The Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief.
During a reporting trip to Pyongyang, he was struck by recognition.
“Bowing to statues, dusting off portraits every morning, reciting Kim Il Sung’s words, singing his praises, lapel pins,” he recalled to foreign correspondents in Seoul last week. “This was not so much a political system … it was obviously, manifestly religious in nature.”
He considered writing a feature — “Let me tell you this crazy history: That Kim Il Sung was raised in a Christian family in a city evangelized by U.S. missionaries!” — but swiftly realized an article could not do the topic justice.
Twelve years of research and writing followed. The end result is not just an examination of Christianity’s influence; it is, at 768 pages, near-Biblical in size.
Kims, Christians, Communists
Mr. Cheng notes that Christian missions had penetrated deeply into East Asia — China, India, Japan, Indochina, the Philippines — before entering Korea, dubbed “The Hermit Kingdom,” in the late 19th century.
Based on those hard-won experiences, a tidal wave of Korean conversions followed — notably in Pyongyang. Kim was born into a faithful Presbyterian family there in 1912, two years after the peninsula’s colonization by Japan.
His mother was devout. Educated by missionaries, she became an itinerant “Bible Woman,” Mr. Cheng relates, travelling from village to village, using scripture to promote female literacy.
Her son was equally devoted: He lectured at Sunday school and played the church organ.
But outside the chapel, revolutionary winds, kicked up by Japanese jackboots, were blowing.
Many pastors urged congregations to take a “live-and-let-live” approach to Japanese imperialism, while building nationalist credentials via education and peaceful resistance.
Meanwhile, a more action-centric philosophy, was circulating: Leninism.
Kim’s father was an independence activist, and the revolutionary philosophy captured his son’s heart. In Manchuria, where his family had moved, the rugged landscapes — alive with bandits and violent activists of all political stripes — were custom-designed for guerilla warfare.
In a crucible rife with brutality, peril and treason, Kim took up arms, earning a reputation for combat leaderships. That would later be massively expanded upon to create North Korea’s national foundation myth.
In 1940, as Japanese counter-insurgency intensified, Kim retreated with his decimated partisan band to the Soviet Far East and joined the Red Army, earning a captaincy.
World War II ended in 1945, with the U.S. atomic bombings and a massive Soviet offensive into Manchuria and Korea. The peninsula was divided: Soviets occupied the north, Americans the south. In 1948, two states emerged.
For reasons that remain unclear even today, Kim — then 32, a mere captain, but a Russian speaker — was chosen by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and his intelligence chief, Lavrentiy Beria, to lead the nascent North Korea.
Kim, a hard-bitten communist combatant enjoying Soviet patronage, was not kind to his former co-religionists — particularly given that many Protestant missionaries in Korea were American.
Kim’s policies compelled Christians to flee North Korea for the South, where some would found huge Protestant churches that thrive to this day. That generated an irony, Mr. Cheng noted.
Prior to the 1950-1953 Korean War — initiated by Kim, with Stalin’s support — southern Korea was strongly leftist, while northern Korea was strongly Christian. Today, the situation is starkly reversed.
Ultimate personality cult
In the late 1950s, as North Korea rebuilt from the devastation of U.S. bombing, Kim began forging his personality cult with a vengeance.
He borrowed mass portraiture, massed statuary and massive parades from Soviet practice. His promotion of hyper militarism and paranoid nationalism harked back to his old adversary, Imperial Japan. And his implementation of dynastic succession drew from some 2,000 years of Korean hereditary monarchies.
He also leveraged his boyhood practices.
“He drew on what he grew up with … he had it in his bones,” Mr. Cheng said, noting that Kim lacked a high-school education. “Speaking in Sunday school, performing in church plays, playing the organ, singing hymns — he was fully immersed.”
Instructive oratory, and the nationwide spread of revolutionary schoolyard plays and mass singing became features of his rule. (All persist to this day under Kim’s grandson and current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un).
As the cult expanded, fellow comrades bore witness.
“Eastern European diplomats [in Pyongyang] were sending cables that this was not Marxist-Leninism,” Mr Cheng said. “It was something closer to worship.”
Christianity’s long history of resistance to persecution and leverage by rulers made it a sound organizational model.
“Christianity has proven itself as a pretty good system,” Mr. Cheng said. “And if you create your own personality cult, you better make sure that the real thing is kept at bay!”
Hence, North Korea’s state atheism.
“Kim was perhaps the greatest persecutor of the Christian faith of the 20th century,” Mr. Cheng continued. “He crushed it while building an alternative that was very close to Christianity.”
With Kimian power entrenched, Mr. Cheng said that neither of the second- and third-generation leaders — Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong-un — had Christian upbringings.
The camouflaged Christian influences embedded into North Korean public life may explain why those who escape it so often join churches.
“When defectors encounter Christianity and are presented with a Bible, they say, ‘This is so similar to what I was raised with in North Korea,’” Mr. Cheng said.
The aging Kim, in the late 1980s, apparently experienced intense nostalgia after dreaming of his late mother.
“He had a remarkable re-engagement with the religion of his youth,” said Mr. Cheng. “It was not an embrace — but he re-engaged.”
He built two churches in Pyongyang and invited South Korean, Korean-American and American pastors to visit.
Among the pastors invited were Rev. Moon Sun-myung, founder of the Unification Church (who escaped North Korea and survived a Korean War massacre) and U.S. Evangelist Billy Graham, who unleashed two barn-storming sermons in Pyongyang.
Kim died in 1994, to be succeeded by his son.
One Seoul-based reader of Mr. Cheng’s book is Tim Peters, an activist pastor who helps North Korean defectors in China escape to South Korea, and secretly sends seed packages and other aid to the North’s underground churches network.
Rev. Peters’ said personalities subjected to intense belief can cross religious and ideological barriers while retaining powerful fervor.
“Josef Stalin attended a seminary: Just because someone starts on the narrow path it is no guarantee that they will finish the work,” he said. “Despite all the advantages Kim Il Sung had as a child, he threw it all away for Marxist-Leninism and Soviet patronage.”
Mr. Cheng concurs.
“People do bad things, with good intentions, all the time,” he said.
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