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Posted on 05/14/2026 1:39:50 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
How could the country that is now the foremost persecutor of Christians in the world have emerged from the work of a dedicated Christian missionary?
Jonathan Cheng’s history of North Korea, "Korean Messiah," sets out to explain...
Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary who arrived in ‘the Hermit Kingdom’ of Korea in 1890, built a vast mission compound in Pyongyang. His ministry helped spark the great Christian revival of 1907, which led to Pyongyang being called the ‘Jerusalem of the East’ with great churches and crowded Wednesday prayer meetings.
Moffett ran a world-class seminary, and his theology carried a message of radical equality before God that resonated deeply with Koreans under Japanese colonial pressure...
I felt the vibrancy of Pyongyang coming alive on the page...
But Christian revival soon fused with Korean nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiment, even though Moffett explicitly opposed political involvement. The first of the book’s great ironies is that the man who told his congregation to ‘render unto Caesar’ created the very structures that made resistance to Caesar almost inevitable. Those structures educated and galvanised a generation of Christian nationalist Koreans. Among them was Kim Hyong-jik, father of Kim Il Sung, who became leader of North Korea after Japan’s defeat in 1945. Brought up in this Christian bubble, Kim Il Sung never apparently professed faith in Christ, but understood intuitively what faith could do to secure power. Faith has the power to mobilise devotion, create community, demand absolute loyalty, and inspire awe and fear. That understanding proved more consequential to Korea than any personal conviction...
Cheng’s core argument is that what Kim took from his upbringing was not the faith itself, but its architecture...
(Excerpt) Read more at premierchristianity.com ...
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Stalin was a seminarian.
This general idea is not new
The historian Arnold Toynbee said that Marxism is a Christian heresy. It takes Christian teleology and replaces it with historical materialism. It takes the Kingdom of Christ and replaces it with the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Christian ethics are twisted into “class consciousness.”
Pope Francis was a follower of Liberation Theology, aka Communism, in Argentina as a young man at least.
My take: The U.S Army, came should have LIBERATED Korea from the Japanese Military Complex at the end of WWII, instead the gave Power, Authority and Gov’t Titles to their Japanese Occupiers over Korea.
Francis was a Peronista.
Kim Il Sung was a communist.
Placed there by the Soviets after they occupied North Korea after the WWII.
Like all communists, he persecuted Christians, to the point there are no open Christians in North Korea.
All are in underground.
In Potsdam, US asked Soviet Union to help in was with Japan.
Soviets invaded on August 8, 1945.
In very quick advance against already defeated Japan, they took over Manjukuo, North Korea and Sakhalin.
And from there they got China, Vietnam etc.
The little help US got from Soviets in Asia cost us and Asian people a lot!!!
The communists hijacked post-occupation resentment of the Japanese as if only they, the communists, had the right to carry that banner, and then they hijacked Korean nationalism and enslaved it to the communists power ambitions. Having succeeded in that in the north, one of the communists continuing claims was that South Korea was in the pocket of Japan.
That is similar to how all Leftists in the west will label any great opponents as Nazis; a narrative created in the Kremlin, passed into the academia class in Western Europe and the U.S., and made a never ending mantra of Leftists everywhere - all their great opponents are Nazis.
“Stalin was a seminarian.”
It was during that period he became an atheist.
The Japanese occupation ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945. The U.S. did not leave Japanese forces in charge there. IMMEDIATLY following the surrender, the peninsula was divided into occupation zones: Soviet forces occupied the north, and the United States occupied the south to accept the Japanese surrender.
Yep, no way the Soviets were going to allow US soldiers to be stationed right on the Soviet border.
The Soviet Union occupied ONLY Manchuria (Northeast China), Inner Mongolia, and parts of northern Korea at the end of WWII. That is all of China they were in.
Following their August 1945 invasion of Japanese-occupied territories, the Red Army controlled these areas briefly, stripping industrial equipment and holding key cities until pulling out by May 1946, handing control to the Chinese Communist Party. The Soviet military did not ever enter Vietnam.
There are people that think with the Japanese Surrender, and them having occupied Korea, that the JAPANESES INFRASTRUCTURE was recognized as the TRANSITIONAING team, the culture in Koren that existed was Culturally Japanese, and NOT Korean. That it would have worked out better, to remove ALL Japanaese Leaders in Korea, and begin with Korean Nationals... That the ‘bitterness’ of Koreans turned against the US troops as they saw the next government a continuation of Japanese influence. I am no expert, but some comment it was THIS policy of MacArthur that turned the Pentecostal Leader and Protestants against the US TROOPS that they felt the future would only continue with Japanese influence.
Koreans eat a lot of garlic.
“the culture in Koren that existed was Culturally Japanese”
Not true at all. Yes, Japanese controlled the economic levers and with that the corruption of some of the elite in Korea who just wanted the advantages of doing deals for and with the Japanese. That was economic and political and a corruption going on inside Korea. It was not “the culture” of Korea.
Culturally the Japanese were rejected and always the occupiers of Korea, not culturally part of Korea. As soon as the Japanese left those in Korean society who collaborated the most with the Japanese were socially and culturally scorned.
“the culture in Koren that existed was Culturally Japanese”
Not true at all. Yes, Japanese controlled the economic levers and with that the corruption of some of the elite in Korea who just wanted the advantages of doing deals for and with the Japanese. That was economic and political and a corruption going on inside Korea. It was not “the culture” of Korea.
Culturally the Japanese were rejected and always the occupiers of Korea, not culturally part of Korea. As soon as the Japanese left those in Korean society who collaborated the most with the Japanese were socially and culturally scorned.
Interesting post!
“Koreans eat a lot of garlic.”
Maybe not popular with Union Goons, but I LOVE garlic.
It’s sad a lot of extraordinary pieces of Korean Art and Culture got lost or destroyed during the Japanese occupation. Amplified now by the fact the nation’s been cut into two: North & South. The turmoil and anguish linger in the national psyche.
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