Jonathan Cheng

And this deep understanding of faith and how it works, I think, played a pretty central role in the state that he created when he was catapulted to power in 1945 at the age of just 33 years old.

Well, I think partly because of the way he was raised, I think he had a really intuitive understanding of this idea that if you want to get people to do what you want, if you want to control people, there is almost no better way than to look at religion, to look at faith.

And I don't think this is a particularly novel idea.

I think many men throughout history have figured this out.

But I think Kim Il-sung uniquely was positioned partly because of the circumstances of his upbringing, as well as the circumstances of how he came to power in 1945.

When that happened, he did draw upon Stalinism, but I think he did also draw upon his Presbyterian upbringing and just this idea that if you can create the rituals and the doctrine, the cosmology of faith, of religion, that you can really get people to not only be loyal, but to devote themselves to you and to your cause.

And that's something that he was expert at.

If you go back to the most famous Messiah, Jesus Christ, what's interesting, of course, is that he was regarded at his time as a political Messiah, somebody who could deliver Israel, the Jews, from Roman rule.

And

Kim Il-sung in many ways positioned himself as a political messiah, freeing Korea, a country that had been colonized by the Japanese.

He could rid Korea of the Japanese presence and later the American presence because the Americans took control of Southern Korea, South Korea today.

But of course, Jesus Christ is a major figure in human history, not necessarily because of what he did politically, but for what he represented as a spiritual messiah.

And there too, Kim Il-sung presented himself as a kind of spiritual messiah for the Korean people.

He did try to set himself up as a figure who, if you were loyal to him, if you went even further and you put your trust, you put your faith, you gave your life for him, you could attain some measure of transcendence, some measure of immortality.

through him and you see this cosmology, this kind of theology develop over the decades because he did rule North Korea for a very long time and he creates this cosmology where all ritual, all belief, all of life revolves around him

And of course, when he died, unlike Mao, unlike Stalin, he didn't have a successor who came along and tried to repudiate some of his own legacy.

Kim Il Sung, of course, handed off power to his son, Kim Jong Il, who then handed off power to his son, Kim Jong Un.

And so in a certain sense, Kim Il Sung himself

attained a measure of immortality because after he died in 1994, the state rewrote its constitution to make him the eternal president of North Korea.

So even today, more than 30 years after he died, he is still, in essence, the leader of North Korea.