The religious roots of North Korea’s Kim dynasty
Jonathan Cheng’s 'Korean Messiah,' a landmark history of North Korea, begins with the story of a Presbyterian missionary named Moffett
In 2013, as he was settling into his position as Seoul bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Cheng asked himself a question — one that would end up guiding the next decade of his life and work. That question was: How did North Korea come to be this way?
After logging hundreds of hours of research and spending 10 years gathering narratives and details and names, Cheng shared his answer with the world— all 768 pages of it. His book "Korean Messiah," published on April 14, illuminates the threads that weave together the stories of a 19th century Presbyterian missionary and the young Kim Il Sung, who grew to become the “god-king” of North Korea. Described by Publishers Weekly in its starred review as “a fascinating account of the deep intertwining of religion and politics,” "Korean Messiah" draws connections between the Presbyterian presence in Korea at the dawn of the 20th century and the development of North Korea’s cult of personality that idolizes its founder, Kim Il Sung.
And Cheng did it with the help of the Presbyterian Historical Society archives.
“When you think about Korea and Christianity, I don’t think it’s a secret to many people in the world of Presbyterianism that there has always been a special relationship between the Presbyterian Church and the Korean peninsula,” Cheng said in an interview with PHS in early May. He was in Toronto for the final week of his five-week tour for "Korean Messiah." After that, he’d return to Beijing, where he works as the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. “But I think where most people get it wrong is that they think that South Korea is the Christian part of Korea — because of course that’s where the church is today — but actually, if you look at the history of Korea, most of the Christians were in the north, and, more specifically, around Pyongyang, which is today the capital of North Korea.”
"Korean Messiah" is divided into three acts, bookended by a prologue and epilogue. Kim Il Sung himself is the focal point of Act II. Introduced in Act I is a player much less known: Presbyterian missionary to Pyongyang, the Rev. Samuel A. Moffett. Cheng, after coming across Moffett’s story, discovered a plethora of archival resources, many of them penned by Moffett himself, housed in two locations: the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia, and the archives at Princeton Theological Seminary's Wright Library.
“Writing "Korean Messiah" has been the biggest challenge of my life. But as I was pulled in, I was stunned by what the archives revealed,” Cheng said. “Between the Presbyterian Historical Society and the Princeton Theological Seminary’s Wright Library, I was almost drowning in material.”
Moffett was a native of Madison, Indiana, where he’d been born and raised in a Presbyterian family. He arrived in Korea on his 26th birthday, in January 1890, to serve as a missionary with the Presbyterian Church. Before the year was out, he’d set his sights on winning over Pyongyang, in the north — and soon was writing letter after letter to the Board of Foreign Missions back in New York, urging them to send him help. He was astonished and amazed by the reception of the people to the gospel, as there hadn’t been much evangelistic success on the peninsula — in Busan, it took missionaries three years to baptize their first convert.
“They called Pyongyang the wickedest city in Korea,” Cheng explained. “So when Moffett gets set up there, there is very little hope … and yet within a few weeks he is writing these letters back saying, ‘I don’t know what is going on up here, but I don’t have any time to eat or sleep — I’ve got a queue of inquirers out my door.’”
Reinforcements started to trickle in, and Moffett’s group of missionaries grew. Their children were born in Korea and earned an education at the Pyongyang Foreign School — where Ruth Bell Graham, the wife of Billy Graham, attended high school in the 1930s. The Pyongyang mission compound continued to blossom and grow, becoming a hub of Presbyterian activity that encapsulated 120 acres.
Cheng gathered information such as this from the records kept by the missionaries themselves — not just Moffett, but others as well, like the Baird family, whose records live in the PHS archives. In “W.M. Baird of Korea: A Profile,” his son Richard H. Baird writes that: “When the history of the Great Century of modern missionary activity is complete it may well be that Pyongyang Station in Korea will be found to have been the greatest mission station of that period. It would seem to have a claim to that title on the basis of the following criteria: 1. The vigor and vitality, as well as actual size, of the indigenous church developed through the whole region of which Pyongyang was the center. 2. The variety of different missionary activities, evangelistic, medical, educational, agricultural, social, which were centered in this station. 3. The actual number of the foreign missionary force and the number of different mission boards represented.”
This was paired with a map of the station as it was in 1930. Titled “One Sixth of a Square Mile of Missionary Activity (120 Acres),” the map features 41 marked areas within the “Pyengyang Presbyterian Compound” and its perimeter is dotted with facts. As of 1930, the Foreign School for missionary children (#31 on the map) had 100 students enrolled; 150 university students were enrolled at Union Christian College (#40 on the map); there were 697 Sunday Schools in the province, with over 45,000 pupils.
Moffett’s Home can be seen at point #29 on the map. “He was, singlehandedly, the one person who was first sent up to Pyongyang; he’s the one who first set up shop there. And he presided over it for an extraordinary period of time, until his death in 1938,” Cheng told PHS. “So really it was almost for half a century that Samuel Moffett was synonymous with the Christian presence in Pyongyang, which was known as the ‘Jerusalem of the East.’”
Though the built environment relating to the history of the Presbyterian mission no longer exists —Pyongyang is now the capital of North Korea, with Kim Il Sung Square at its heart — other resources remain that helped Cheng paint a vivid picture of Pyongyang during the height of its Christian fervor.
Along with materials from the personal collections of missionaries like Moffett and Baird — the Moffett Korea Collection at PTS Wright Library and the Korea Mission History digital collection in Pearl were invaluable resources — Cheng drew from North Korean records, as well. Kim Il Sung, whose youth and family history is the focus of Act II of "Korean Messiah," began publishing an eight-volume memoir in the years before his death. Written in the first person, the memoir describes his upbringing — specifically, his childhood growing up as the son and grandson of devout Christians.
“It’s only because of Kim Il Sung himself that we know that he not only attended church on Sunday, but that he learned to play the organ at church,” Cheng explained. “We learn that he performed in church plays, that he taught Sunday School, that he attended the mission school founded by Samuel Moffett. We learn that he lived in the home of a Methodist pastor for two years as a teenager; we learn that he spoke at the Y.M.C.A.”
Cheng took what the North Korean sources told him of Kim Il Sung’s childhood and family and what the Presbyterian archives told him of Samuel Moffett’s evangelistic work in Pyongyang at the turn of the century, and he wove these two threads together into a vibrant portrait of the north Korean city that was once called the “Jerusalem of the East.”
Of his time in the PHS archives — which has amounted in hundreds of hours of research and 145 pages of endnotes — Cheng said that, “Digging in, it was a treasure trove! I couldn’t believe how much there was to excavate from the archives, and I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface.” PHS is honored to have played a part in the creation of Cheng’s book, and we hope to see him in the reading room again in the future, diving back into the deep well of the archives.
"Korean Messiah" is available now — readers can learn more and grab a copy on the book's website. The Presbyterian Historical Society welcomes everyone to use its collections, regardless of affiliation, background, or the nature of the research. Readers interested in exploring the archives can do so online via Pearl Digital Collections; those interested in an on-site visit for research can find more information on the PHS website.
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