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Messiahs of Misery: The Gospel According to Kim
Bogdana Pozdnyakova
25-2 Yonsei PSCORE
The Kumsusan mausoleum (금수산태양궁) glows white, its marble floors polished to mirror gloss so that their faces would be reflected by the faithful shuffling along them. Outside, the spring breeze stirs the magnolias planted along Pyongyang's boulevards. Inside, the mourners bow three times before a glass bier, where Kim Il-sung lies, his lips set in an artificial repose. Loudspeakers whisper hymns to his eternal presence: the "Eternal President" who rules the nation from beyond the grave. To North Koreans, this is no tomb but a temple.
The Kim family did not only centralize political authority. They consecrated it. What the world refers to as authoritarianism, Pyongyang refers to as faith. What others refer to as propaganda; North Koreans feel as catechism. It has scriptures: Kimilsungism, Kimjongilism, the leader's treatises; it has liturgies: mass games, parades, confession meetings. And of course, it has icons: shining portraits every day and gene-engineered flowers turned into symbols of eternal devotion. But, as with all religions, this one demands sacrifice. Its altar is piled high with the famine years, the concentration camps, and the silenced voices.
The Kim cult as it enters political power, social life, and economic activity, transforms the dictatorship into divinity.
Politics as Theology: The Eternal President and His Gospel
It is followed by a doctrine. Juche (주체사상) was in 1972 incorporated into North Korea's constitution, not as an ideology but as a weltanschauung. Juche, literally "self-reliance", was broad enough to cover everything from agricultural policy to visionary destiny. By the 1990s it had merged with Songun (선군), the "military-first" doctrine, into a compound creed later canonized as Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism.
The party enforces this ideology with the insistence of scripture. The writings of Kim Il-sung are compiled and enshrined as infallible. Workers recite them at night rallies, children memorize them like prayers, soldiers sing loyalty hymns in the trenches. There is no separation of politics and religion when disobedience is not just treason but blasphemy.
Death itself was a religious innovation. When Kim Il-sung died in 1994, his embalmed body was turned into the eternal head of state. No successor would ever be president; the title was timeless, transposed into a sacred absence. It was its political counterpart, making his son, Kim Jong-il, not a successor but a high priest presiding over the immortal reign of his father.
Constitutional writing, mass media, and ritualized rituals solidified into a political theology whereby the dynasty rewrites history in order to join it.
Society as Sanctuary: Portraits, Policing, and the Moral Gaze
Enter the living room of a North Korean, and the first thing you notice are the portraits. Photographs of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, usually together, gaze down from the neatest wall in the home. They are to be hung by families in the place of honor. White-gloved testers, who sometimes appear unannounced, pass gloves over the glass to inspect for not a dust speck invading the visages of the leaders. Children learn to wipe them clean reverently, part of the daily ritual.
They are not simply decorative. They are domestic shrines. They are sufficiently widespread that they establish a moral gaze, an invisible eye under which domesticity takes place. They have a panoptic effect: even within the home, citizens perform obedience.
Beyond the gates, the society is organized into small flocks. Every community is divided into inminban (인민반) "people's units" which are tasked with watching for loyalty, distributing tasks, and reporting suspicious behavior. In the weekly meetings, the neighbors confess small sins, accuse one another, and reaffirm loyalty to the leader. The rituals are secular, but they are of a shepherd's nature: sin confessed, penance done, faith reaffirmed.
Children at school learn amazing stories about Kim Il-sung's guerrilla feats against the Japanese and Kim Jong-il's genius military tactics with god-like accuracy. In North Korea, most of modern Korean history has been re-created already for the legitimization of Kim Il Sung's monocracy, and the Juche ideology was already adjusted for the purpose of justifying the "blood kinship" thesis in preparation for the transfer of power to Kim Jong Il by hereditary right. Under such conditions, there was only a need to create a pertinent birth legend of Kim Jong Il. In the official version, he was born in a partisan camp in the mountains of Paktusan, now a kind of pilgrimage place for hundreds of thousands of North Koreans. It was later determined, however, that he was actually born near Khabarovsk in the Soviet Union, where the 88th Brigade headquarters were located. So the line between history and myth vanishes; the classroom is transformed into a state theology Sunday school.
Songbun: Birth Sin
If North Korea is a church, it is a church with a caste system. Songbun (성분), the hereditary allocation of citizens into "core," "wavering," and "hostile" classes, determines just about everything: where one lives, whether one can study, the quality of rations one receives.
The core class, dutiful children of revolutionaries, are chosen. They live in Pyongyang, they graduate from the country's top universities, and they have party jobs. The wavering, fight on the periphery. The hostile are the descendants of landlords, defectors, or political prisoners who suffer this curse generation after generation.
Guilt by association, yeon-jwa-je (연좌제) taints sin. Disloyalty charged against one member of a family brings punishment to three generations. Entire families vanish in kwan-li-so (관리소), political prison labor and starvation camps.
Sacrifice as Virtue
The 1990s famine, the Arduous March, demonstrated the cult's strangest power: its ability to transform hunger into sainthood. The crops perished, Soviet aid vanished, floods rampaged the countryside. Deaths were estimated at anywhere from a half million to over a million (the population at the time was about 23 million). But the regime had convinced people that to live was loyalty, suffering was patriotism, and hunger a front against imperialism.
Those that died were symbols of idlers who live off the regime. While citizens boiled grass to live, Pyongyang constructed monuments: the Tower of the Juche Idea, the giant Mansu Hill statues, and endless parades.
Flowers for the Living Gods
There are not many symbols which sum up these God-like leaders more than two flowers.
Kimilsungia, an orchid of violet color, was presented to Kim Il-sung by President Sukarno of Indonesia in 1975 and named after him. Kimjongilia, a red begonia, was bred in 1988 by Japanese floriculturist Mototeru Kamo on Kim Jong-il's birthday. They were adopted by North Korea as sacred flowers. There are annual shows in Pyongyang where the flowers are set out in highly patterned displays, writing slogans or portraying the ruling politicians. The crowds line up to look at them as if at relics.
They are assigned histories: the Kimilsungia, a symbol of immortal youth and magnificence; the Kimjongilia, of immortality and passion. They are not just flowers. They are living symbols, proof that even nature does not excuse the dynasty.
Children in school march by displays, heads bowed, on anniversaries. The flowers are catechisms in bloom, beauty of propaganda.
Penal Liturgy: Camps as Hell
Beneath the veneer of marble mausoleums and festival flowers, there is the penal complex. The kwan-li-so, enormous political prison camps hidden in mountains and valleys, are gulags of religio-political purification. In addition, inmates with whole families are subjected to hard labor in mines, logging camps, and fields, whilst on basic rations to sustain themselves. Guards ritually humiliate: forcing prisoners to kneel before images, beating prisoners for slight infringements, and holding public executions as communal warnings.
As in medieval hellscapes, so here: punishment, pedagogy. These are the wages of apostasy's forms. To hear defectors recount them is to hear Dante rewritten in the 20th century: circles of hunger, fire, cold, and unending labor, all in the service of the Eternal President.
Isolation as Holy War
To the outside world, North Korea accounts for its isolationism in terms of self-defense. To its inner world, it is a sacred struggle. Sanctions, foreign media reports, even humanitarian censure are reconfigured as persecution, proof that the holy nation alone resists evil forces of capitalism.
When there are foreign visitors, the rituals are performed as ceremonies. Red carpet, orchestrated applause, military flybys: a liturgy of sovereignty. It's a show for the outside world as much as for North Koreans. It reminds them their leader is the equal of emperors and presidents.
A Religion of Ruin
The Kim dynasty cult endures because it has discovered what most governments do not dare attempt: the politicization of theology. Through divine-righting rulers, sanctifying martyrdom, and blessing symbols, it cloaks repression in religious robes.
The mausoleum in Pyongyang is a shrine and a warning. Kim Il-sung's embalmed visage promises immortality. Yet, the silence before it bears witness to the millions who perished in famine, to the prisoners taken away never to be seen again, to the families who live under portraits they do not dare ignore.
"Messiahs of Misery" is no metaphor. It is the reality of a country that lives by a gospel it did not choose, spread by leaders who turned starvation into dogma and flowers into idols. To see North Korea clearly is to see not just its politics but its theology and the price in human sacrifice that such worship exacts.
References
Korea Konsult. “Kumsusan Palace of Sun — Pyongyang Mausoleum, North Korea.”
KoreaKonsult, https://www.koreakonsult.com/Attraction_Pyongyang_maosoleum_eng.html. Accessed 2 Oct. 2025.
Lankov, Andrei. The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia.
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Lankov, Andrei. 김치 뿐만 아니라. Seoul: 창비 (Changbi), 2010.
Park, Jieun, and Keum-Ok Lee, editors. Ask a North Korean: Defectors Talk About Their
Lives Inside the World’s Most Secretive Nation. Tuttle Publishing, 2017.
“North Korea’s Kumsusan Palace of the Sun: Inside the Mausoleum.” BBC News, 15 Apr.
2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgqdz17ye3o. Accessed 2 Oct. 2025.
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