Houses of the Hidden

During the first part of his life in North Korea, Son Jong Nam had it good. As the son of a high-ranking officer in the all-powerful military, Son never had to worry about getting enough food, and after he joined the Army himself, his background helped him land a spot in an elite unit that guarded North Korea's leaders.

But then things began to change. In the mid-1990s, plagued by natural catastrophes and stripped of support from its erstwhile Soviet sponsor, the North saw its economy plunge into a tailspin. One day Son's pregnant wife made a carelessly critical remark about the country's mismanagement. The next thing they knew, she'd been taken in for questioning. One of her interrogators kicked her in the stomach, triggering a miscarriage. Disillusioned, the Sons decided to defect to the South. In 1998 they took their young daughter and slipped over the border into China. But Son's wife died after the crossing, and Son, bereft, soon met a South Korean missionary who was there to help North Korean refugees find their way to freedom. Through him, Son discovered Christianity and decided to convert, joining the growing legions of desperate North Koreans who are turning toward God. This led to Son's next step, which may yet prove fatal: he resolved to head back to the North in 2004 in order to bring the Gospel to others.

Today Son finds himself on death row in Pyongyang, awaiting execution for the crime of spreading his faith. North Korea theoretically allows religious freedom; it even maintains Potemkin cathedrals, where worshipers are supposedly welcome and ersatz services, staffed by loyal communist party cadres, are held each Sunday. In reality, however, the government of Kim Jong Il has a history of persecuting believers in the most savage of ways, including public execution. Religion, say activists, is viewed as a particular threat by Kim, who, like his father, Kim Il Sung, stands at the center of a bizarre personality cult with numerous religious overtones. "To be a Christian [in North Korea] is not just to follow a different religion," says Todd Nettleton of Voice of the Martyrs, an American Christian organization. "It's really seen almost as treason against their whole political system—a system built to deify the leader." Nettleton and his allies in the United States and South Korea are now trying to save Son's life by bringing international pressure to bear on Pyongyang. In the process, they're also drawing attention to a phenomenon little noticed in the outside world: North Korea's growing underground churches, and new legions of Koreans willing to defy their government in the name of God.

Given the secretive nature of Kim's regime, it's hard to say for sure just how many Christians now live inside the country. Estimates range from the low tens of thousands to 100,000, most of whom are Protestants (the country also has at least 10,000 Buddhists, according to government sources). Many of the Christians find religion in the same way as Son. Cross-border travelers come into contact with evangelical Protestant missionary groups from South Korea, who play a prominent role in helping Northerners escape from China—where, if caught, they will be sent back to North Korea and an uncertain fate. Says a South Korean pastor named Song (who withheld his first name to ensure the confidentiality of his work), Christianity is "spreading like wildfire" in the North. Ryu Seong Min, a professor of religion at Hanshin University, says that the North Korean government has been fairly successful in tamping down organized churches. Still, he notes, "people are increasingly turning to religion [there] as their suffering grows."

What many outsiders don't realize is that Christianity has long played an outsize role in Korea. The religion was brought to the peninsula in the late 19th century, primarily by American missionaries. This timing coincided with Korea's colonization by the Japanese, and the new faith soon became linked in the popular mind with anti-Japanese activism. Pyongyang, in particular, soon became known as the "Jerusalem of the East" for its status as a hub of Christian education and evangelizing. (Ruth Graham, the late wife of American evangelist Billy Graham, actually attended Christian boarding school in Pyongyang as a teen in the 1920s.) In 1950, at the beginning of the Korean War, some 3 million believers fled to the South. Today 40 percent of South Korea's population professes some form of Christian belief; most are Presbyterian or Methodist. Their numbers make South Korea the most Christian nation in Asia after the Roman Catholic Philippines. South Korea's megachurches have started to produce a worldwide army of Korean missionaries; with 16,000 of them stationed overseas, they are second only to the Americans in size, and recently made headlines when some were kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The North, meanwhile, has done all it can to crush faith; even neighboring China permits far more religious freedom. It's worth noting, however, that Pyongyang's leaders themselves have clearly learned a lot from Christianity. Kim Il Sung came from a devout Presbyterian family, and even played the organ in church as a child. North Korean converts to Christianity remark that they are struck by how much Kim obviously borrowed from the church for his peculiar brand of communism. Party members are taught 10 commandments of proper political behavior, for example, and often have to meet at Saturday-morning self-criticism sessions, where they confess their sins against the people.