Jonathan Cheng
speaker
201 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Jonathan Cheng’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He was born into a rich Christian environment.
He grew up not only going to church on Sundays with his mother and his father, he grew up learning to play the organ in church.
He grew up performing in church plays.
He taught Sunday school.
He spoke at the YMCA.
He was a leader of a church youth group.
He lived in the home of a pastor for several years.
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.
Showing 41–60 of 201 · page 3 of 11
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