The ancient city of Pyongyang, located in South Pyong’an Province on a majestic S-curve of the Taedong River, once was the center of Korean Christianity, known half-seriously as the “Jerusalem of the East.” As a center of missionary work and the site of many schools, it was a magnet for youth all over northern Korea and produced a generation of Christian leaders.

Tonight’s lecture will begin with a review of theories about why the northwest part of Korea was so receptive to Christianity and then will move on to an account of how the Second World War and the incoming Kim Il-sung regime put north Korea’s Christians under pressure, reducing their numbers and ultimately forcing thousands to flee south of the 38th parallel.

When Korea was liberated from Japan in 1945, the Christians of Pyongyang at first challenged the regime that the Soviet Union was implanting in North Korea. However, with the detention of the Christian leader Cho Man-sik and the forced assimilation of the church into a state-controlled “Christian League,” the potential power of the Christian community was harshly limited and then completely eliminated. This was sometimes a violent process, generating counter-violence that spilled over into South Korean politics in the late 1940s.

Korean Christians today see reunification as a chance to redeem North Korea from the clutches of the Kim regime. This prospect, while tempting, would require today’s North Koreans to abandon their long-held civil ideology. Their current belief system is based on a narrative of modern Korean history that is completely at odds with the story told in South Korea and is reinforced by an autarkic political ideal known there as juch’e and focuses on the persons of the Supreme Leader Kim Il-sung, now deceased, and his son the Great Leader Kim Jong-il. Whatever the failures of the Kim regime, it shows no signs of loosening its grip on the minds of the people in North Korea. Any approach to reunification, therefore, has to confront the question of whether to work with the regime for change, or to work against it, perhaps in ways that would lead to chaos and more mass suffering. Dr. Clark will discuss how Christian approaches to North Korea reflect this dilemma. South Koreans, Christian or otherwise, can offer much to help the situation. Christianity and the “juch’e” idea offer some interesting points of comparison, but a clash between the two belief systems could also present great dangers.

Donald Clark is the son and grandson of American missionaries who served in Pyongyang before the Second World War. He grew up in Seoul in the 1950s and earned his Ph.D. in East Asian History at Harvard in 1978, the year he began teaching at Trinity University, an independent liberal arts college in San Antonio, Texas. Among his publications are works on Korean Christianity and U.S.-Korean relations. His 2003 book entitled “Living Dangerously in Korea” informs much of what he will present tonight, along with experiences traveling in North Korea in the spring of 2007. He has been a lifelong member of the RAS Korea Branch, the co-author of two RAS books on the history of Seoul, and sometime RAS councilor and tour leader.