History of Christianity in North Korea
Christianity was brought to the Korean peninsula in the late 1700’s when in 1784 the newly baptized intellectual Yi Seung-hun returned study in Beijing to found the first Catholic community.
A refusal to venerate ancestors saw a fierce persecution which killed 8000 believers in 1866. Protestants arrived most notably in 1864 with a convert called Suh Sang-ryun smuggling a Korean translation of Luke’s Gospel produced by Protestant missionaries in China. Soon Christianity was flourishing and even though the Japanese occupied the country from 1905-1945 a revival broke out in 1907 in Pyongyang, causing it to be dubbed “the Jerusalem of Asia.”
Hundreds of thousands converted but many fled south during the Korean war, bringing their influence and revival with them into South Korea. Meanwhile, the North fell to the Communists under Kim IL Sung in 1945, who launched one of the severest persecutions of Christians in the 20th century. The 1950’s saw extraordinary attempts to annihilate the faith, including teachers enlisting all their pupils to spy on their parents for signs of religious activity.
When Christians were exposed, they were usually killed. This was in part to make sure there were no rivals to the bizarre worship cult around Kim IL Sung and his descendants. Each town has a vast statue of a member of the dynasty; the countryside is festooned with posters; children are taught to say grace to him for their meals, and claims continue to be made that the Kim’s have godlike powers. Not for nothing have some labelled the world’s most Stalinist country, ironically, “the world’s most religious country.”
