Faith in Ideology: A Review of ‘Korean Messiah,’ by Jonathan Cheng
Cheng, Jonathan. Korean Messiah: Kim Il-sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult. New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026. 768 pp. ISBN 978-1-5247-3349-0.
Cover image: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026
Why use Christianity as a prism through which to view and account for North Korean ideology? Such a method appears obvious to some, and counterintuitive to others: Kim Il-sung’s Protestant heritage has long been known and studied, and yet, no other nation in the modern era has banished Christianity as fervently as the DPRK. The regime’s Marxist roots, and firm rejection of organised religion of all types, perhaps explain why no previous large works have explored Kimilsungism through the tenets of the church. As such, Jonathan Cheng’s new work serves as a valuable addition amid the recent spate of Kim biographies (as reviewed by Sino-NK here, and here), bringing as it does much-needed fresh thinking to examination of the North Korean ruler.
Cheng’s curriculum vitae could not be better suited for studies of Kim. A speaker of Mandarin and Korean, and a former Seoul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, Cheng even attended a Sunday church service in Pyongyang in 2017. In this, his first book, the author also demonstrates his aptitude as a researcher, using a broad range of sources in multiple languages, notably Korean, including old North Korean newspapers, South Korean histories of the church, and academic articles.
The book’s main success comes as a result of painstaking cross-referencing of sources which ground the origins of Kim’s family at a key moment in Korean history in the late 19th Century. This was the moment when the “Hermit Kingdom” was pried opened, by force, by American Christianity from the West, and Japanese colonialism from the East. Cheng traces the tale of American missionaries to Korea, and carefully reconstructs Pyongyang’s dynamic history (act I), so too the place of Kim’s family within it (act II).
Cheng’s early chapters on the entry and takeover of Christianity in the north leans on an array of old, new and under-used sources which offer a far more detailed account of the lives of Kim’s ancestors and relatives than has previously been achieved in English. Among these, the autobiography of Pai Min-su, the Korean Presbyterian minister and childhood friend of Kim’s father, help the author illuminate the early life of Kim Hyong-jik (see, for example, p. 137). Similarly, anecdotes from the memoirs of Methodist Pastor Pak Dae-sun, who served in Pyongyang from 1942 to 1950, drive Cheng’s account of how Kim’s uncle, Reverend Kang Ryang-uk, habilitated himself as the fledging North Korean leader’s righthand man during the Soviet period (chapter 27).
Cheng’s treatment of this period is nothing short of pioneering as he expertly guides the reader through the complex power dynamics of Soviet North Korea, without overstating the significance played by its large Christian population (chapters 22 to 27). The book’s account of this key moment from 1945 is particularly valuable, aiding understanding on how Kim’s uncle became so powerful, and the extent to which he secured support from the north’s large Christian population at a time when the Soviets were engineering the church’s decline. Readers more used to serial Soviet perspectives and accounts of this post-1945 era posed under the proverbial Soviet hammer will find freshness in Cheng’s treatment. In approaching the late 1940s from a Christian perspective, Korean Messiah unlocks fresh understanding on how Kim rapidly ascended to power, and the role played by the church and its followers in both aiding and stalling this dynamic.
As with many a Kim biography, this work falls into the trap of over-usage of Kim’s alleged autobiography With the Century. Numerous sections rely on the book to connect narrative passages, and in doing so the author overly exposes himself to the flimsy vagaries of North Korean hagiography. Cheng’s short disclaimer, that With the Century “must be treated with care and skepticism” (p. 141), hedges this liberal usage, and the book’s accuracy suffers as a result. For example, two pages prior, Korean Messiah tells the reader that the doomed expeditionary vessel, General Sherman, was attacked by Koreans including Kim’s great-grandfather Kim Ung-u, “North Korea’s official historians would later write” (p. 139). Only the notes for this passage inform us that “outside historians dismiss this claim as fiction” (p. 590), thereby all but leaving the casual reader to accept this telling as fact. While some readers might balk at more exegesis, serious doubts on this narrative would have served the book better in the main text.
Elsewhere, Cheng refers to Kim’s birthplace in Mangyongdae, on Pyongyang’s outskirts (p. 146), despite Fyodor Tertitskiy having all but extinguished this North Korean myth in his own recent Kim biography, Accidental Tyrant.[i] This familiar pitfall remains a feature of Kim biographies, including Michael Seth’s Forever President published in 2025, as noted previously by Sino-NK. However, this anomaly becomes more substantial here than in Seth’s work in that Korean Messiah frequently references Mangyongdae, thereby repeating all too often – and failing to investigate – North Korea’s questionable narrative.
Cheng is on firmer and more beneficial ground when his references to With the Century are cross-referenced with additional, independent sources. One such example records Kim Hyong-jik working in and around Pyongyang among the people, according to North Korean hagiography, which Cheng checks against missionary accounts, positing that Kim’s father was likely preaching God’s word, a detail omitted in Pyongyang’s telling (p. 164).
Korean Messiah weighs in at 768 pages, and the hardcover version at nearly one kilogram, a sizeable volume even by comparison to North Korea’s own treatments of Kim. While impressive, one wonders if the book might have been shortened by telescoping some of the lengthy sections on the American missionary movement, or sections overly reliant on With the Century.
These shortcomings do not overly tarnish Cheng’s end product, however. The book concludes with the end of Kim’s life, and his embrace of a succession of childhood church friends, and numerous men of the cloth (chapter 24), as the author traces the North Korean leader’s ascension to immortality in the DPRK (epilogue). This end-of-life, circling back to Kim’s youth and the church, in death, aptly frames the book.
Rarely has a recent work on Kim covered so much original ground. Korean Messiah, by approaching the life of the North Korean leader from the new vantage point of Christianity, succeeds in locating and introducing a range of new material which fleshes out Kim’s life. In inviting the reader to consider North Korea in its appropriate Christian place and time, before and during Japanese colonialism, and Kim’s early rule and ideology as a construct founded in the church, Cheng succeeds where many Korean studies scholars have failed.
As such, Korean Messiah does not so much cover new ground, it invites the reader to think of the DPRK through a novel lens, and in doing so reveals new understanding on Kim and the unique ideology preached in his name. Amid the growing list of recent Kim biographies, Cheng’s book reads like a new testament to a little-understood facet, or foundation, of the North Korean leader’s life.
[i] Fyodor Tertitskiy. Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung (London: Hurst and Co, 2025), pp. 61, and 113.