Posted on 11/13/2017 5:37:14 PM PST by GoldenState_Rose
Unknown to the general public and ignored by the academic and foreign affairs establishments, Americans once were leaders of religion, education, and intellectual life in Pyongyang, as missionaries who created the foremost Christian community in Northeast Asia. Before the Soviet Union installed an atheist Communist regime in Pyongyang headed by Kim Il Sung, the city was the center of the Presbyterian Church in Asia, and hundreds of thousands of Korean Christians lived there and elsewhere in what is now North Korea. It was a union of Koreans and Americans that set the course that made South Korea the majority Christian nation that it is today, and whose memory has contributed to the exceptionally severe persecution of Christians by the North Korean regime.
(Excerpt) Read more at providencemag.com ...
Kim Il-Sung had a church rebuilt there shortly before he died. Likely this was for propaganda purposes. But he also allowed Billy Graham to preach to some NK military officers. (They sat in stoney silence, probably not having been informed as to how they were to react; and Graham had to read from a script which an NK handler observed over his shoulder. But he was allowed to preach.)
Kim’s mother was a Christian and he knew Christian hymn tunes.
He had ordered the railroad to the South repaired so that he could make
a journey to the South; and was supposedly preparing to remove Kim Jung-Il as his successor in favor of another son.
Then (abruptly?) he died. He was old enough to have died of natural causes; but one wonders...
There is also a large number of Catholics, though Protestants can’t see them, and they go back to the 1600s. The group of Holy Martyrs of Korea includes 103 from 1839 to 1867. Together the Presbyterians and The Catholics from before them formed the business class in Korea as the Catholics did in Japan and do in Vietnam. Christians share the Mosaic ability to trust each other and can do business with un family related others. They can make a deal and each has a reasonable expectation that the other will follow through. That is almost unique to the Judaeo Christian tradition. It is absent in almost all other cultures except Buddhists who are able to take what works from other traditions and apply it to themselves. Moslems can’t do that except as individuals in J-C societies.
“Natural causes” in such a society encompasses a wider range of deaths than in civilized nations. A bullet in the head is a natural cause in a hard Communist society.
As a Catholic myself, I appreciate that history! Thank you! :)
In Pyongyang under Soviet occupation, both the Soviet-installed regime and its opponents reflected the recent American Christian presence. Kim Il Sung was a son of Christian parents, his father a Presbyterian from a rural area near Pyongyang who had attended middle school at Union Christian College, his mother a daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He renounced the religion of his parents and embraced Communism, returning to Korea as a 33 year old junior officer in the Red Army.
And Kim created the state religion in an attempt to declare himself a replacement for Christianity.
Been tried hundreds of times in history with the same results - a tomb that holds the remains of the founder.
Source (taken from wikepedia): http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/16.28.html
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