Escape from North Korea by Melanie Kirkpatrick

Author:Melanie Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

The American evangelist Billy Graham visited Pyongyang in 1994 at the invitation of Kim Il Sung, who was then 81 years old and nearing the end of his life. Graham was traveling through Asia on one of the international crusades that have taken him to more than 180 countries and territories. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham, accompanied him. The trip to North Korea was something of a homecoming for Mrs. Graham, who was the daughter of Presbyterian medical missionaries in China and had gone to high school in Pyongyang in the 1930s. That was an era when Pyongyang was home to so many Christians that it was known as the Jerusalem of the East.

Kim Il Sung knew his audience. He regaled the Grahams with stories about attending church with his mother when he was a boy, and he told them about a Presbyterian minister who was an early influence on his life. In Hong Kong, where the Grahams flew from Pyongyang, I spoke with the American evangelist. He speculated that “some of [Kim Il Sung’s] early experiences may be influencing him now.”14 With age can come wisdom.

Pastor Graham also pointed to the explosion of interest in Christianity elsewhere in Asia and attributed the growing numbers of Christians there in part to the rapid changes that Asians are experiencing in their culture, economy, and politics. “There’s a void,” he said. Asians are turning to Christianity to fill that spiritual hole. Why should North Koreans be any different?

Numbers are uncertain, but Billy Graham is right that Christianity appears to be winning converts in much of Asia. China has at least seventy million Christians and maybe as many as one hundred million. Pastor Graham noted that Christianity is growing rapidly in Thailand, a Buddhist country, as well as in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. There is a resurgence of Christianity in Vietnam, which has about five million Catholics now, compared with a million and a half in 1975. Fundamentalist Protestantism is catching on in the Philippines, which is overwhelmingly Catholic.

“Christianity does teach freedom,” Pastor Graham said. If Christianity it were to come to North Korea, that would be a good omen. “God through the Bible teaches freedom of choice in everything.”

The North Korean leader died a few months after the Grahams’ visit, and he gave no sign that he had rejected his atheism or that his early exposure to Christianity had had any tempering effect on his regime’s brutal policies toward Christians. The only worship allowed in North Korea remained the same: that of the Kim family.

But Billy Graham’s essential point about Christianity—the connection to freedom—is the reason the North Korean regime fears it. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in part because the Christian message of freedom took new hold in places where it long had been repressed. In China, Christianity exploded after Beijing lifted some of its restrictions on religious freedom. The government now appears to be trying to reassert control over unregistered churches as part of an overall crackdown on dissent. The examples

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