A landmark history of North Korea, told through the rise of the Kim dynasty and its surprising ties to American Christianity—a spectacular, penetrating account of the Hermit Kingdom • A Foreign Policy Most Anticipated Book of 2026
For nearly eight decades, North Korea has marched defiantly to its own beat, shaking off its Soviet and Chinese sponsors to emerge as the world’s most enigmatic nation—a nuclear-armed state ruled by a dictatorial dynasty. Underpinning the state is a personality cult more soaked in religiosity than those constructed by Stalin or Mao—one that traces its roots back to the Christian fervor of post–Civil War America.
Jonathan Cheng, the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief and former Korea bureau chief, takes us deep inside Pyongyang, a city once so dominated by Christianity that it was known as the “Jerusalem of the East.” Cheng introduces us to Samuel Moffett, a Presbyterian missionary from Madison, Indiana, who would venture into Pyongyang at the end of the nineteenth century and build a remarkable following—one that would include the Kim family that today presides over one of the world’s harshest persecutors of the Christian faith.
At the center of this story is North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, son of two fervent Christians and progenitor of an ideology known as Kimilsungism, an exercise in idolatry that has elevated him, and his successor son and grandson, to Christlike status, from the humble manger where he was born to the subway seat on which the venerated leader once placed his posterior, cordoned off as if it were a religious relic.
Drawing on letters, diaries, and never-before-unearthed archival material that temper and often contradict the glorious historical record promoted by Kim Il Sung’s legions of hagiographers, Korean Messiah tells the true story of a country shrouded in fictions.
Jonathan Cheng is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and was previously the Korea bureau chief, running coverage of the Korean peninsula, including politics and society in both North and South Korea. A native of Toronto, he lives in Beijing. He has traveled to North Korea twice.
Cheng will be in conversation with Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and author of At the Edge of Empire: A Family’s Reckoning with China. The book received the inaugural Baifang Schell Book Prize from the Asia Society in New York and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the U.K. It was named by The Washington Post as a top non-fiction book of 2024 and by The Atlantic as a top summer read. Edward has reported for the Times for 27 years, working for 13 of those as a correspondent and bureau chief from China and Iraq. Edward was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley. While writing his book, he was a fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington and at the Belfer Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Edward was awarded the Livingston Prize for his reporting on the Iraq War and was on a team of finalists for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the war. He received the Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University in 2024 for diplomatic reporting. Edward graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and from U.C. Berkeley with joint master’s degrees in journalism and international studies. He has received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury Language Schools. He speaks on global affairs on television, radio, and podcasts.