Jonathan Cheng on 'Korean Messiah' — Kim Il Sung and Christianity
Wall Street Journal reporter Cheng reveals the surprising Christian roots of North Korea's personality cult, tracing how a missionary religion shaped a totalitarian state.
Why we picked this
The connection between American Christianity and North Korea's personality cult sounds like a stretch until you read the evidence — Cheng makes the case meticulously.
Jonathan Cheng’s “Korean Messiah” traces one of modern history’s stranger genealogies: how the Kim dynasty’s personality cult borrowed directly from the Christian missionary tradition that shaped the Korean peninsula in the early twentieth century. Kim Il Sung’s rise didn’t emerge from a vacuum — it drew on religious structures, liturgical language, and messianic frameworks that American missionaries had spent decades building.
Cheng, who covered the Korean peninsula for the Wall Street Journal, brings a journalist’s eye for narrative and a historian’s patience with primary sources. The result is a book that illuminates both the origins of one of the world’s most opaque regimes and the unexpected consequences of American religious expansion abroad.
Free at Politics and Prose, The Wharf.