The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), the founder of ideological communism, was ethnically Jewish and came from a long line of rabbis on both sides of his family. However, his parents converted to Christianity for professional and social reasons before his birth, and Marx himself was baptized, raised without Jewish religious traditions, and later embraced atheism. Marx famously dismissed religion as an illusion, calling it the “opium of the people.” Yet, as Robert Orlando argues, “when his thought is examined carefully, a striking parallel emerges: Marx didn’t eliminate redemption. He translated it into political economy. The traditional Christian story of history unfolds in a recognizable pattern: creation, fall and eventual restoration in heaven. Human life is marked by injustice and suffering, but the ultimate resolution of history arrives through divine action. Marx absorbed this narrative while rejecting its theological foundations. Capitalism was akin to the fall; class struggles became the engine of history, and revolution the moment of redemption. The proletariat, the working class, was elevated into the historical agent of liberation. In this way, Marx transformed a theological drama into a secular narrative of historical inevitability.”

Orlando further elaborates on Marx’s perversion of Christian eschatology:

• Marx himself insisted that philosophy must undertake the “ruthless critique of everything existing.” His critique of capitalism was powerful because it described genuine problems with industrial society. Marx argued that modern economic life had produced alienation—workers estranged from the products of their labor, from one another, and ultimately from themselves. As “The Communist Manifesto” puts it, the history of society is fundamentally “the history of class struggles.”
• Marx’s revolutionary language often carried an apocalyptic tone. The overthrow of capitalism isn’t reform but the decisive turning point of history. “Once politics assumes the role of redemption, the temptation is to justify extraordinary measures in the name of historical necessity. Twentieth-century philosophers recognized this transformation. Alasdair MacIntyre observed that Marxism was one of the few modern systems capable of translating hopes once expressed in religious terms. The promise of liberation remains, but its horizon has shifted from divine action to a historical process that humans can bring about. ‘Marx’s revolution wasn’t only a political change. It was the secular culmination of redemptive history.’”
• Understanding Marxism in this light helps explain its emotional power. “Political programs alone rarely inspire the level of devotion that Marxist movements often generated. When people believe they are participating in the final chapter of human liberation, sacrifice becomes meaningful and opposition evil. The 20th century revealed the consequences of this dynamic with unsettling clarity. As the historian Leszek Ko?akowski observed, Marxism functioned for many as ‘the greatest fantasy of our century’—a promise that history itself would bring final justice . . . Marx didn’t abolish the Christian structure of redemption. He relocated it within history—and that relocation continues to shape the political imagination of the modern world.”

Karl Marx provided the secular world with an explanation of evil (i.e., capitalism), how to overcome that evil (i.e., revolution), and how to usher in “heaven on earth” (i.e., the classless society). Humans have the power and the capacity to translate hope into reality. Communism is indeed a perversion of biblical eschatology!

Along this line of the relationship of communism to Christianity, I was intrigued by a new book by Jonathan Cheng on the founder of North Korean communism, Kim Il Sung: Korean Messiah: Kil Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult. Cheng authored a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes the main arguments of his book. In that article he makes the following points:

• “In the short history of world Communism, North Korea has always stood apart. Stalin’s Soviet Union is gone. Mao Zedong’s China has liberalized and integrated itself into the global economy. But not North Korea. In the eight decades following World War II, the country carved a unique path among the nations of the former Soviet bloc as the one country that has endured—largely in the same mold in which it was first fashioned under state founder Kim Il Sung . . . Unlike China and Vietnam, it hasn’t openly adopted key elements of the Western-led economic order it once spurned; unlike Cuba, it has become a major threat—one of the West’s most consistently confounding geopolitical adversaries.”
• “Foreign visitors to North Korea were shocked to see the country’s leader hailed as nothing less than a god . . . To ensure complete devotion, North Korea spent decades stamping out rival faiths, most notably Protestant Christianity, killing pastors and thousands of lay believers; the mere possession of an unauthorized Bible could mean imprisonment. As North Korea’s hagiographers rewrote history, they held American missionaries responsible for the country’s misfortunes, while state-sponsored novels, plays and museums depicted them as jackals who subjected Koreans to vile human experiments. Kim sought to portray himself as the true Messiah, displacing Christ as ‘the benevolent sun’ of the world. ‘People of the world, if you are looking for miracles, come to Korea!’ an official North Korean party newspaper declared in a Christmas 1980 editorial. ‘Christians, do not go to Jerusalem. Come rather to Korea. Do not believe in God. Believe in the great man!’”

Although North Korea has relentlessly suppressed religion and vilified American missionaries, the origins of this hereditary cult are found in a surprising place: Protestant Christianity, and in particular American Presbyterianism. In the fall of 1991, the American evangelist Billy Graham received an unexpected invitation from Pyongyang. “It will be a great joy to welcome you to our church,” read the letter sent by leaders of North Korea’s state-sanctioned Protestant and Catholic churches.

Cheng summarizes the relationship of Graham to North Korea: “Pyongyang was a familiar place for the Graham family. In the 1930s, his wife, Ruth Bell Graham, had attended high school there, on a sprawling Presbyterian mission compound on Pyongyang’s west side. Missionary kids like Ruth attended school there amid some of northern Korea’s earliest and most prestigious Western institutions: its first missionary-run high school, college and modern hospital, as well as a Presbyterian seminary, the world’s largest. Then there were the churches, none greater than Pyongyang’s Central Presbyterian Church, which was so packed each week with congregants that missionaries feared ‘the walls will begin to bulge out’; Wednesday evening prayer meetings could draw crowds of 1,400 people. The city of Pyongyang became so dominated by Christians that it acquired a nickname: the ‘Jerusalem of the East.’”

“By the time Rev. Graham boarded his plane in the spring of 1992, the Jerusalem of the East was no more. The devastation of the Korean War and decades of Kim Il Sung’s rule had systematically wiped out the churches and Christian schools, driving 300,000 Christian believers in the North into hiding—or across the thirty-eighth parallel to the U.S.-backed South . . . Kim Il Sung supplemented and eventually replaced Marxism-Leninism with the Chuch’e Ideology, a philosophy that the Great Leader, as Kim Il Sung was known, is said to have begun developing as a 14-year-old revolutionary. Though Chuch’e (sometimes spelled Juche) is typically described as an ideology of ‘self-reliance,’ it was replete with quasi-religious overtones, so much so that one scholar has dubbed it ‘the gospel of Chuch’e.’”

Where did Kim Il-sung, a former Sunday school teacher from a devoutly Christian family, get these ideas? After all, Kim Il-sung’s parents were among the first converts enrolled by Presbyterian missionaries in local Christian schools. Bruce Cumings demonstrates that “His father, Kim Hyong-jik, was a well-known Christian nationalist who likely traveled the country seeking converts and helped plan the March 1, 1919, independence uprising against the Japanese colonizers. Cheng brings to bear a lot of evidence showing that Kim Il-sung was also a Christian activist, well into his teens.”

Cheng: “In America, Presbyterians preached salvation from sin through the grace of a merciful God. But they also taught a message of equality of all people before God, a radical idea when it was introduced to Korea in the late 19th century. These tenets were embraced with unusual fervor by Koreans in the country’s northwest, especially in and around Pyongyang, where the future North Korean leader came of age in a Christian bubble. Kim Il Sung’s upbringing gave the young man a front-row seat to the power of faith—its power to mobilize and inspire awe, devotion, fear or zeal. More than money, power or fame, faith alone could speak to one’s eternal fate. When Kim Il Sung was catapulted into power at the end of World War II, he began crafting a state that, consciously or unconsciously, drew on the ideological heritage his family had received from Presbyterian missionaries. He demanded faith and even worship from his followers, creating a belief system that was redolent of the Christian teachings and practices that he had been raised with.”

Followers of Kimilsungism were called upon to study his works and memorize his aphorisms, to dust framed portraits that hung in the main room of every residence and to bow in reverence before his statue on Kim’s birthday, on New Year’s Day, and on almost every other day of any significance, including one’s graduation and wedding days. Kim Hyon-hui, a North Korean agent who helped blow up a South Korean jetliner in November 1987 before being arrested and eventually converting to Christianity, went further in drawing a line between Christianity and Kimilsungism. ‘If you learn the Bible first and then learn Chuch’e, you’ll be able to understand it much easier,’ she said. ‘I think you can even replace the name Jesus with the name Kim Il Sung.’”

See Robert Orlando in the Wall Street Journal (21 May 2026); Bruce Cumings in New York Times Book Review (17 May 2026), p. 16; and Jonathan Cheng in the Wall Street Journal (11-12 April 2026).