A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim Dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity—a spectacular, penetrating account of a world like no other

North Korea. The Hermit Kingdom. For eight decades, it has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as one of the world’s most enigmatic nations—a nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty unlike any the world has seen. Underpinning the state is a personality cult larger and more soaked in religiosity than those constructed by Stalin or Mao—one that, unbeknownst to the world, traces its roots back to the Christian fervor of post–Civil War America.

In Korean Messiah, Jonathan Cheng, The Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, takes us deep inside Pyongyang, a city once so dominated by Christianity it was known as “the Jerusalem of the East.” Cheng introduces us to Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary from Madison, Indiana, who would venture into Pyongyang at the turn of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable following—one that would include the very Kim family that today presides over one of the world’s harshest persecutors of the Christian faith.

At the center of this story—its messiah—is North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, son of two fervent Christians and progenitor of an ideology known as Kimilsungism, an exercise in idolatry that has elevated him, and his successor son and grandson, to Christ-like status, from the humble manger where he was born to the subway seat on which the venerated leader once placed his posterior, cordoned off as if it were a religious relic.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and never-before-unearthed archival material that temper and oftentimes contradict the glorious historical record promoted by Kim Il Sung’s legions of hagiographers, Korean Messiah tells the true story of a country shrouded in fictions.