Jonathan Cheng

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 the Hermit Kingdom • A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026

“How do personality cults take hold? What happens when leaders mix politics and faith to demand immense sacrifices? Jonathan Cheng’s magnificent tale poses questions about the world far beyond North Korea. This utterly eye-opening history deciphers a defining pattern of global politics in the 21st century.” —Evan Osnos, National Book Award-winning author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

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

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 that 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 end of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable following—one that would include the Kim family that today presides over one of the world’s harshest persecutors of the Christian faith.

At the center of this story 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 Christlike 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 often 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.