Overview
North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom. For nearly eight decades, it has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as the worldās most enigmatic nationāa nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty unlike any before seen. Underpinning the state is a personality cult more soaked in religiosity than those constructed by Stalin or Maoāone that, unbeknownst to the world, traces its roots back to the Christian fervor of postāCivil War America.
In Korean Messiah, Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journalās China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, takes us deep inside Pyongyang, a city once so dominated by Christianity it was known as the āJerusalem of the East.ā Cheng introduces us to Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary from Madison, Indiana, who would venture into Pyongyang at the turn of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable followingāone that would include the very Kim family that today presides over one of the worldās harshest persecutors of the Christian faith.
At the center of this storyāits messiahāis North Koreaās founder, Kim Il Sung, son of two fervent Christians and progenitor of an ideology known as Kimilsungism, an exercise in idolatry that has elevated him, and his successor son and grandson, to Christlike status, from the humble manger where he was born to the subway seat on which the venerated leader once placed his posterior, cordoned off as if it were a religious relic.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and never-before-unearthed archival material that temper and oftentimes contradict the glorious historical record promoted by Kim Il Sungās legions of hagiographers, Korean Messiah tells the true story of a country shrouded in fictions.
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