Houses of the Hidden

Yet Kim Jong Il clearly cannot tolerate the worship of any gods other than himself. As a result, many believers in the North must live in hiding. "Like the catacombs of Rome, North Korean churches went underground to survive," says one South Korean pastor who teaches the Gospel to Northerners in areas of China close to the border. "Christianity was passed on from parents to children and to grandchildren, creating family churches." Those who cling to the faith are known as gruteogi, or "stumps." Choi Joo Young, 69, spent half a century in the North until she managed to escape to South Korea in 1998. She and her family never gave a sign of their belief in public, but at home they'd lie down on the bed together and quietly sing hymns under a blanket. Sometimes they'd listen to covert broadcasts of sermons from the South on a radio: "We were deeply touched by the great sermons of the Southern pastors," she says, now living in a spartan apartment in Seoul. "We were really hungry for holy words."

Reports of the faithful doggedly clinging to survival continue to trickle out of the homeland. Those who have stayed behind, as well as the new converts, are forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with the authorities. North Korean believers wrap their Bibles in vinyl and keep them buried in the backyard when they aren't needed. Preachers based in China sometimes conduct services for the faithful in the North via illicit cell-phone calls. In five to 10 minutes, the pastor reads from the Bible and prays for the sick and needy. Worshipers have to keep the services short because North Korean authorities hunt the phones down using GPS trackers. Those caught worshiping or smuggling in Bibles from the outside world can be sent to concentration camps—or simply shot in front of press-ganged audiences in town squares. In 2004, the executed even included a North Korean general who, according to the U.K.-based Forum 18, an independent religious-rights watchdog, had converted to Christianity and begun to evangelize among the ranks. Meanwhile, Pyongyang continues to show off its four official churches to gullible foreign visitors, who often don't realize that the only "worshipers" on view are actually communist party members chosen to play the role temporarily.

Given that level of repression, it's hard to imagine that organized religion could, despite Kim's paranoia, become a real threat to his rule any time soon. Nonetheless, underground churches can do serious damage to authoritarian regimes. Pope John Paul II's visits to his native Poland in the 1970s and 1980s struck a blow against the communist dictatorship there. In 1986, it was a Catholic cardinal in Manila who led protesters in the People Power uprising against the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos. And Christianity has a powerful anti-authoritarian record in Korea, where the religion played a role in the underground struggle against Japanese colonialism. And the growing appeal of Christianity signals that more and more North Koreans may be searching for spiritual alternatives to the communist personality cult—a transformation exemplified by Son Jong Nam's own journey from communist functionary to Christian. That unrest could eventually prove dangerous to Kim. In the meantime, Son remains in jail. The last indication that he remained alive came in March of this year. His supporters outside the North have continued to soldier on, in the hope that they can prevent his final metamorphosis: into a martyr for the faith.

© 2007