Why has Christianity become the religion of choice for most defectors?
(Image: iStock/ Cecilie_Arcurs)
“There’s no religious freedom in North Korea? What are you talking about—there are churches in North Korea. You know less about North Korea than I do.”
This was something I heard less than three months after settling in South Korea. It was baffling. Later, after doing some research, I found out that the church being referenced was the Bongsu Church, located in the Mangyongdae District of Pyongyang.
This church, where no worship can be held without permission from the authorities, was constructed by the regime in the 1980s for the purpose of showcasing supposed religious freedom to foreigners during the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students.
The church was also part of a broader strategy to secure humanitarian aid through public displays of Christianity during ‘the Arduous March’ famine of the 1990s, when millions of people starved to death amid economic crisis and food shortages. With the collapse of communist nations and the loss of aid from socialist allies, North Korea sought to engage with capitalist countries, and Bongsu Church served as a space for visiting foreign dignitaries to attend Sunday worship.
But this church doesn’t symbolize religious freedom in North Korea. For someone like me, who had never even heard of a church in the North, learning about Bongsu Church and that Pyongyang was once called the Jerusalem of the East came as a startling revelation.
This was because of what we learned through our elementary school Korean language textbooks. One story in particular stands out. It told of a boy in South Pyongan Province during the Japanese occupation who sneaks into an American missionary’s orchard to steal an apple and gets caught. As punishment, the missionary writes “thief” on the boy’s forehead using sulfuric acid, condemning him to live his life branded as a criminal. The imagery of the missionary’s sharp nose, the cruel branding, and setting wild animals on the boy filled us with fear and hatred.
In North Korea, the cross was more terrifying than a starless, stormy night sky. That’s the reason I used to get chills just walking past churches in South Korea. Even after I began attending church myself, it took time to shake the subconscious fear that came with anything associated with churches, missionaries, or the cross.
Volume 1 of the Selected Works of Kim Il Sung, a compilation of his speeches and writings from 1967 onward, states, “Religion is a kind of superstition. Whether the belief in Jesus or the belief in Buddhism, they are all essentially beliefs in superstition.” In Volume 5, it reads that “Religion is a reactionary and unscientific worldview. When people believe in religion, they lose their class consciousness and become disinterested in revolution. Religion is like opium.”
At the core of these writings is the belief that “religion is reactionary.” To be religious, to believe in Christianity, is to engage in anti-social behavior tantamount to choosing death. And yet, ironically, many North Korean defectors, people educated to demonize missionaries that believe in God and taught that religion is reactionary, end up finding their way to churches in the process of settling in South Korean society. In fact, according to a 2019 survey by the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), 51.2% of respondents identified as Protestant, while only about 10% said they followed Buddhism.
Experts who have spoken to the media about why so many defectors choose Protestantism often point to three main reasons. First, most of the people who help North Koreans escape North Korea from China to South Korea are Christian organizations. Second, many of the groups that support North Korean defectors are led by Protestants, and traditionally, Protestant missionaries are especially active in the border areas between North Korea and China. Third, major churches in South Korea actively invest financial resources and support into defector-related business projects and devote significant energy to mission work targeting defectors.
Most people agree with this analysis. I frequently witnessed many of my defector friends go to church, and receive some form of help from the church.
If I were to add one more reason it would be familiarity. In North Korea’s education system, one of the most memorable aspects of life was organizational life. Every morning, we would get into formation and march into school from the school gate singing songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. By 7:30 a.m., we would arrive at school, and from 7:40 onward, we had about 20 minutes of ideological study. The leader of these study sessions would lead them based on instructions from Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, or passages from prepared textbooks. After settling in South Korea and attending a Christian school, this writer could not get rid of the thought of how similar the school days began with a Bible verse and prayer seem to these ideological study sessions I experienced in middle and high school.
Even the monthly “life critique session” in North Korea felt oddly reminiscent of confession time in Sunday Service. The act of confessing and repenting in Sunday Service at church is similar to self-criticism and mutual criticism time during the life critique session. People who are noted as lacking effort in organizational life stand up and start to criticize themselves. Then they say “I’d like to criticize comrade so-and-so…” and go on to criticize others. Furthermore, there’s the Ten Commandments, written in the Bible, which closely resembles the Ten Principles for the Establishment of the Monolithic Ideological System that must be memorized for North Korean organizational life. These 10 principles, which describe the things that must be done to establish the party’s sole ideological system, were principles every North Korean had to memorize from elementary school through university, and workplace. These principles were non-negotiable—”something you had to remember even if you forgot your own father’s name.”
Additionally, the doctrine of the Trinity also bears a striking resemblance to North Korea’s socialist philosophy with the Great Leader as the brain, the Party as the bones, and the people as the flesh.
“When I heard the story about Jesus walking on water, it reminded me of our history books about Kim Il-sung throwing pinecone grenades at Japanese soldiers and destroying them, and using teleportation techniques to appear at both the East and West Seas,” said Choi Kwang-myung, a defector who is now an office worker. “It was hard to take seriously.”
“During new believer training, they said we’d get a gift card if we memorized the Ten Commandments,” he said. “That reminded me of memorizing the Ten Principles back in the North, and it was a breeze. I don’t really feel uncomfortable with the church atmosphere itself, but in North Korea I had no choice but to participate in organizational life, but this isn’t North Korea, so why would I keep going to church?” He decided to stop attending.
Kim Sun-kyung, a college student living in Seoul who defected five years ago, said, “When I attended university in North Korea, I took Juche philosophy classes. The Trinity and Juche are kind of the same, the difference is whether you apply to religion or politics.”
“One story from the Bible about Jesus healing a blind man was strangely similar to this North Korean propaganda piece I once saw,” she said. “In the propaganda, an American missionary tries to perform human experiments on a girl in the name of God, applies some medicine to her eyes, and she ends up going blind. However, she regains her sight after being embraced by the loving arms of the Supreme Leader.”
“I personally came to realize while going to church that North Korea doesn’t simply suppress religious freedom, the whole North Korean system is a monolithic ideological faith that is centered on the Supreme Leader. It is a type of religion,” she said. “In that sense, Christianity is seen as a competing belief system, which is why it’s suppressed. They’re too similar in that both demand belief in an absolute being.”
Perhaps the reason so many North Korean defectors choose Christianity isn’t only because the faith community helps them. It may be a personal transformation, where they build a new center in life within a framework they already know. Therefore, what they’re choosing might not just be a religion, but a new order for their lives.
Jia defected from North Korea in search of basic freedoms, including the right to travel and freely express herself. Her identity as a North Korean has given her a sense of responsibility to represent the voices of her family and hometown friends and is also the reason she has chosen to work as a journalist.
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