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One of the stranger headlines that we have come across in recent months was a story reported in the Daily NK, “Christian Movie Being Shot Inside North Korea.” The headline was perhaps subtly misleading: the movie was a biopic of Paek Son Haeng (1848-1933), philanthropist, “people’s capitalist,” –and devout Presbyterian. And to further complicate matters the low budget film was being underwritten by a New Zealand Christian group but slated to be broadcast on North Korean television. Paek herself is an acceptable figure in North Korea—she is praised in Kim Il-sung’s memoirs, and in 2006 KCNA reported that her burial monument had been discovered and was being restored— but one got the impression that the issue of her faith--incidental to the North Korean authorities, essential to the producers—would be contested editorially.
Christianity has a long and complicated history in North Korea. It was not without reason that Pyongyang was once known as the Jerusalem of the East. Kim Il-sung himself is said to have been raised in a Christian household. Ever the visionary, when he reached out, it was to Rev. Moon and Billy Graham, not Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger.
More recently the role of churches in the refugee exodus out of North Korea and high rates of conversion among North Korean refugees has raised the issue of how widespread Christian belief might be among North Koreans. David Hawk and co-authors produced two reports (2005 and 2008) for the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom based on extensive interviews with North Korean refugees, including former security agents. Their interviewees provide compelling eyewitness accounts of public executions of religious believers and the torture and execution of refugees forcibly repatriated from China who had adopted Christianity or were thought to have come into contact with South Korean missionaries. In one of history’s weirder manifestations of state paranoia, former security agents report being taught that South Korean and American intelligence agencies were behind the spread of evangelical Protestantism. (Sorry, but our intelligence agencies are no ways near that effective.)
Clandestine religious practice, undoubtedly fueled by the loosening of controls on the China-North Korea border over the past 15 years, remains deeply underground. Newlyweds will not be informed about their spouse’s family’s religious practices for some time until sufficient trust has developed. The prevalence of belief is impossible to assess.
Nevertheless, Christianity continues to be practiced in North Korea and indeed may well be expanding. I will never forget a conversation I had on the border with a Chinese-Korean Presbyterian pastor. It had been strictly business until shortly before taking my leave I asked him about his own family history. His grandfather had been a pastor in what is now North Korea. During the 1930s the family had moved into China when the Japanese occupation of Manchuria effectively erased the border. He interpreted this move as God’s way of establishing a Korean Christian population in a more relatively secure environment from whence they could minister to their brothers still enslaved by Pharaoh.
