Escape from North Korea

Eom Myong-hui was describing her personal faith journey from atheist to committed Christian, from member of the Korean Workers’ Party to Protestant minister. Among North Korean escapees, she is unusual, though not alone, in becoming a pastor. She is far from unusual, however, in her Christian beliefs. A large percentage of the North Koreans who reach China make the same spiritual journey.

One of the remarkable aspects of the North Korean diaspora is the high number of men and women who, once they leave their country, choose to become Christians. Protestant missionaries in the Sino-Korean border area are highly successful in winning converts to their religion, and the charitable example of the Chinese-Korean Christians who help the refugees sets a powerful example. There is no way of knowing how many refugees become Christians. Nor is there any way of knowing how many conversions are genuine. But reports by refugees suggest that many North Koreans in China make the decision to become Christians and that they are sincere in their faith. Refugees also report a growing interest in Christianity in North Korea itself. That interest is spurred by refugees who tell their relatives about their new religion and—somewhat amazingly, given the penalties if the regime gets wind of their work—by North Koreans who return to their country to preach the Gospel.

One reason for the attraction of Christianity among North Korean refugees in China is easy to pinpoint: Christians run almost all of the aid organizations. So, too, much of the informal assistance that refugees receive comes from Christians, especially local Chinese. Christians are the only people who seem to care. In a country where helping North Koreans is against the law, there are few others to whom a refugee can turn for protection and support.

It would be a mistake to dismiss North Korean converts as mere “rice Christians,” the cynical label applied to converts in pre–Mao Zedong China who were presumed to have accepted a strange Western religion solely for the purpose of receiving the benefits provided by the missionaries. Although it’s impossible to judge the depth of anyone’s faith, the fervor with which many North Koreans have adopted Christianity seems real. It is consistent with the enthusiasm, in post–Cold War Europe, that many citizens of former Communist countries showed toward Christianity. Even in China, which remains officially atheist even while loosening restrictions on religion, Christianity is rapidly winning converts. There are at least seventy million Christians in China today, or 5 percent of the population.² That is nearly the same number of people who belong to the Communist Party. A top Communist Party official felt it necessary to warn in 2011 that party members are required to be atheists. “Our party’s principled stance regarding forbidding members from believing in religions has not changed one iota,” he said.³

North Koreans who become Christians in China do not jettison their faith when they reach South Korea. If anything, they often seem more committed and eager to share their new religion with fellow refugees. Christianity is widespread in the North Korean community in South Korea, where there are numerous so-called defector churches. These are often small congregations made up mostly of North Koreans.

Once a refugee arrives in South Korea, it is the government, not the church, that is his principal caregiver. The South Korean government provides an array of services, including a three-month resettlement program, vocational training, housing, and cash settlements. The government support is of course unconnected to a refugee’s religion, which belies the theory that North Korean converts are merely “rice Christians.”

In contrast to the government’s support, the South Korean people themselves often can be unwelcoming. South Korean Christians are an exception in paying attention to refugees. Although the government provides for the refugee’s basic needs, South Korean Christian organizations provide personal connections and spiritual support. South Korea is the second-most Christian nation in Asia, after the Philippines. In the 2005 national census, approximately 30 percent of the population of forty-eight million identified themselves as Christian.

Pastor Eom spent several years in China before eventually escaping to South Korea on the new underground railroad. She became a Christian in China, studied for the ministry in South Korea, and eventually emigrated to the United States. She worked for a while at a church in Virginia before moving to the Dallas area to accept a job at a Korean-American church. She lectures widely in Korean-American churches, relating her own personal story and discussing the attraction of Christianity for many North Korean refugees.

Pastor Eom was a math and biology teacher in North Korea. She was so good at her job that she won an award for being a model citizen. In the 1990s, during the famine, she went into the business of selling Korean antiques and specialty foods such as ginseng root across the border in China. Both the business itself and the trips to China were illegal, but times were hard, the trade was lucrative, and she had a husband and two young daughters to feed at home.

As she tells it, converting to Christianity began as a business decision. Her principal buyer—and the person on whom her livelihood depended at the time—was a Chinese-Korean man who would visit North Korea to pick up the wares she was peddling. After they had been doing business together for a while, he confided to her that he was a Christian. She knew it was dangerous to associate with Christians, but she was afraid of losing his business, so she listened politely. “When he started talking to me about Christianity, I didn’t respond in any negative way,” she said. “I just nodded my head and listened. I wanted to be on his good side. My only purpose was making money.” She told no one that she had spoken to a Christian.

The buyer turned out to be an evangelist working for a South Korean church. He was a bit of a shady character, she said, and in retrospect she believes he was less interested in building a successful business than in recruiting North Koreans to Christianity even at the expense of exposing them to punishment at the hands of the North Korean regime. She later learned that he operated on a quota system, with the South Korean church paying him a bonus for every North Korean he introduced to the church’s underground mission in China. She figured this out after he tricked her into visiting the mission house by promising to pay her the money he owed her only if she would come and pick it up. When she arrived at the mission house, he told her that before he would give her the money, she had to complete a “New Believers” course. She had no choice but to comply.

To her surprise, she found herself receptive to the Christian message. After three weeks of studying the Bible, her perspective shifted. “I started sensing that maybe there is a God,” she said. “There was a glimmer of light that began to shine on me.”

But she still wanted to go home. After a month in the Chinese mission house, she crossed the border back into North Korea, accompanied by the buyer-evangelist. They were caught. North Korean police arrested them and took them to a detention center, where they were interrogated. Pastor Eom was in a bind. What should she say when she was asked, as she knew she would be, if she had met any Christians in China? Contact with Christians was a crime punishable by time in a political prison. “But I couldn’t really say no,” she said. “The person I was caught with was a known Christian, at least to the authorities. So the way I answered that question was to say, of course he talked to me about Christianity, but I didn’t believe him. That’s how I did it.”

Interrogations in North Korea are not mere question-and-answer sessions. More persuasive measures are employed. Pastor Eom was beaten by her interrogators, who kept trying to get her to confess to being a Christian. She denied it. Finally, they gave up. Her denials, coupled with her past record as a model citizen, had an impact, and the police decided to let her go. She was released with a warning.

When she got home and told her husband what had happened, he was furious. “Christianity is no good,” he told her and berated her for putting their family in jeopardy. She tried to persuade him that her business relationship with the Chinese-Korean man was too important to jeopardize, but he wouldn’t listen. She showed him a palm-sized Bible her business partner had given her. Her husband grabbed the Bible out of her hand, took it to the kitchen, and burned it. A few months later, a friend tipped her off that she was about to be arrested again. She fled to China.⁴

Asked why so many North Korean refugees become Christians, Pastor Eom cited her own faith journey. “Not a lot of conversions are genuine at first,” she said. Refugees are usually desperate, and some falsely claim to be Christians in order to get the aid they need. Pretending to accept their benefactors’ religion is also a way North Koreans can show respect and appreciation to the Christians who help them, she explained.

But, as in her case, the message often sticks. “There’s a seed planted in their hearts,” she said. “And some of the refugees eventually become true Christians. Because they have been exposed to the pastors, to missionaries, to prayer, to the Christian lifestyle, it has a profound effect on their thinking.” How so? “At first they can’t believe that someone would want to help others for the sole benefit of helping, just for the purpose of serving God.” But seeing is believing. Once North Koreans realize that the Christians who help them aren’t motivated by the hope of personal gain and run serious risks by helping them, she said, they often take a closer look at the religion. The example of Christians who put their faith into action is a powerful recruiting tool.

On one level, North Koreans are ready for the Christian message, Pastor Eom argues. The old socialist system has broken down, and Kim Il Sung, once revered as a deity, has been exposed as a fraud. “A lot of people know that they have been lied to all their lives” by the government, she said. At the same time, they are wary. She explained: “They are not ready to put their faith in another unseen force, in another unseen god, like Kim Il Sung, that they cannot see or touch. They don’t want to be fooled again.” It takes a while for North Koreans to understand that Christian faith is different from worship of Kim Il Sung.

Pastor Eom does not hold a high opinion of many of the foreign missionaries who work in the Sino-Korean border area. She thinks many have unrealistic expectations about the effectiveness of their evangelism. In her view, a lot of the South Korean and Korean-American missionaries are under the mistaken impression that just because they speak the same language and share the same ethnicity, they have an advantage in talking to North Koreans about the Gospel.

The most effective way to spread Christianity in North Korea, she argues, is through North Koreans who have escaped. That is already happening, as North Koreans who have left the country talk about Christianity in phone calls to their relatives at home. As North Koreans inside North Korea observe the spiritual transformation of their relatives who have become Christians, it will be the beginning of what Paster Eom calls “the opening of the hearts and minds of all North Koreans for the Gospel, for Christianity.”

Like Pastor Eom, Kang Su-jin had an experience with a Christian evangelist who treated her in a devious way. When she arrived in China from North Korea, a South Korean Christian made her an offer too good to refuse: Study the Bible, become a Christian, and return to North Korea as a secret missionary. “That was the deal,” Kang Su-jin said. If she said yes, the missionary promised to reward her at the end of her studies with a gift of 3,000 Chinese yuan. That was the equivalent of about $500, a small fortune in North Korea.⁵

Kang Su-jin evaluated the missionary’s offer in purely practical terms. Since she was planning to return home anyway after she accumulated some cash, she thought, Why not? In return for studying the Bible, she would receive room and board and, above all, a safe haven that would keep her out of the line of sight of the Chinese police. She decided she would go through the motions of becoming a Christian—baptism, Bible study, and the like. But she did not plan to become a real Christian, and she certainly did not intend to proselytize when she returned home. “So only for the money, I decided I would stay and study,” she explained

In the end Kang Su-jin changed her mind about returning to the North. Two unexpected things happened. First, she became a real Christian. Her change of heart about Christianity was much like that of Pastor Eom’s. As she tells it, the Bible study she had undertaken for pecuniary reasons took hold. “My eyes were opened to Christianity,” she said. Second, she decided to go to South Korea. She came to realize the danger of returning to North Korea, where Christians are viewed as traitors. She put it bluntly: “I became afraid to go back.”

Kang Su-jin’s escape story ends well. She met an American pastor in China who was a conductor on the new underground railroad. He found a home for her in a safe house. She spent a few months in the safe house, spending her time cross-stitching murals of the Last Supper and other religious scenes while she was waiting for her turn to leave. The pastor guided her across China and helped her cross the border into Laos; from there, she eventually made her way to South Korea. In South Korea, she has built a new life running a nonprofit agency that helps North Korean women who have been trafficked. She has been reunited with family members who also escaped from the North. She is still a Christian.

An unknown number of North Koreans have made the decision that Kang Su-jin rejected. They have returned to North Korea as Christian evangelists. The practice began in the late 1990s, when the number of North Koreans in China was at its height and Christian missionaries were hard at work in the borderlands.

Proselytizing in North Korea is life-threatening work. The government’s harsh treatment of Christians is well known, and the North Koreans who make the decision to return to their country to spread their faith are keenly aware of the risks they are taking. They literally are risking their lives.

Mere possession of a Bible can be a capital crime in North Korea. So it was for Ri Hyon-ok, a thirty-three-year-old woman who was executed in 2009 for distributing Bibles in a city near the border. Ri Hyon-ok was also accused of spying and organizing dissidents. Her husband and three children were sent to the gulag.⁶ Her execution was public. The government was sending a message: Christianity is dangerous; stay away from it.

Worship is also an offense, as it was for twenty-three Christians arrested in 2010 in a raid on their illegal house church. The worshippers had been to China, where they became Christians before returning to North Korea. Three were executed; the others were sentenced to the infamous Yodok political prison camp. ⁷

There is much more clandestine Christian worship in North Korea today than there was in the late 1990s or early 2000s, according to Scott Flipse of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. “That’s all I can tell you,” he said. “I don’t know the numbers, and there’s no way to count them.” How many Christians are there in North Korea? “You’ve got some people claiming there are one hundred thousand Christians in North Korea,” he replied. “You’ve got some people claiming ten thousand. All we know is that it is happening and that it’s happening at a much larger level than it was ten years ago.”⁸

The late Song Jong-nam was one of the North Koreans who converted in China and returned to North Korea to spread his faith. His story was pieced together by his younger brother, Song Jong-hun, who now lives in South Korea. Song Jong-hun said his brother became a Christian in China, inspired by the example of the South Korean missionary who helped him. The missionary worked undercover as the manager of a timber mill, where he hired North Korean refugees and gave them a place to live. The elder Song returned voluntarily to North Korea in 2004 with the intention of proselytizing. In 2006, the police found Bibles at his home and arrested him, charging him with spying for South Korea and the United States. He was sentenced to execution by firing squad. Song Jong-hun, by now in South Korea, heard about his brother’s sentence and launched a campaign to draw international attention to his plight. He later learned, from a man who had been incarcerated with Song Jong-nam, that his brother had died in prison.⁹

A North Korean teenager recounted a similar story to four thousand fellow Christians from 190 countries at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010. The girl, Son Gyeong-ju, described how her family had fled to China, where they became Christians. Her father disappeared after he went back to North Korea to teach Christianity. He “chose to return to North Korea—instead of enjoying a life of religious freedom in South Korea,” she told the audience. He wanted “to share Christ’s message of life and hope among the hopeless people of his homeland,” she said. The girl escaped on the new underground railroad and now lives in South Korea.¹⁰

Steven Kim’s main work, as mentioned earlier, is rescuing trafficked women through 318 Partners, the nonprofit organization he set up on Long Island, New York, after his return to the United States from jail in China. But in addition to this work on the new underground railroad, he also supports a mission to send Bibles to North Korea and plant churches there. The Bible-smuggling operation was relatively easy to organize, he said. It’s not difficult to find North Korean border guards who, for a price, will look the other way when a courier crosses the river with a load of Bibles. All it takes is enough money.

Planting churches is far more difficult, and far more dangerous. 318 Partners already has opened four secret house churches in North Korea and has plans to open twenty more. The churches were founded by North Korean refugees whom 318 Partners recruited and trained in China over a two-year period. The future evangelists received vocational training in addition to their religious instruction. The aim was to help them get jobs or set up small businesses on the black market once they returned to North Korea. The vocational training was an afterthought, Steven Kim said. He and his colleagues couldn’t figure out how to get financial support to the evangelists after they went back to North Korea, so they hit on the idea of giving them training that would allow them to become self-sufficient.

Open Doors, founded in 1955 by a Dutchman who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain, is a Christian ministry dedicated to helping persecuted Christians worldwide. It estimates that there are four hundred thousand secret Christians in North Korea—and that the number of Christians there is growing quickly. The organization also estimates the number of Christians imprisoned for their religious beliefs to be between fifty thousand and seventy thousand.

Some of the secret Christians in North Korea belong to what Open Doors refers to as the catacomb church. They are remnants of the church that flourished before the establishment of the Democratic People’s Republic in 1948 and the ban on religion. These Christians took their worship underground. They have been worshipping in secret for more than half a century and introducing their children to their faith. Carl Moeller, who heads Open Doors USA, explained how Christians in North Korea’s catacomb church have survived. “They are like the Jews in Spain in the 1400s,” he said, referring to Jews who pretended to practice Christianity after the Catholic monarch ordered them to convert to Christianity or face expulsion from the country. “They became good Communists on the outside but remained believers on the inside.” Open Doors estimates that fifty to sixty thousand of these Christians worship in the catacomb church in North Korea today.¹¹ A catacomb Christian whom Open Doors sheltered in China gave the organization a tattered copy of a New Testament he’d smuggled out of North Korea. The New Testament dated back to the early 20th century. The family of this catacomb Christian had hidden it ever since Kim Il Sung declared religion illegal.

Open Doors works with North Koreans in both China and North Korea. It operates shelters for refugees in China, it sends Bibles and other religious literature into North Korea, and it supports North Koreans who want to go back to their country as missionaries. Unlike some other missions in China, Open Doors does not recruit North Koreans to be evangelists. It believes that the decision to go knowingly into a life-threatening situation must originate with the individual. “We don’t have a program to train refugees to go to North Korea, but if they want to go, we will support them,” Mueller said. “People love their home country. As strange as that sounds, North Koreans love North Korea. By becoming Christians, they have found freedom. They have a message of hope. They think of their families and want to share that message.”

A typical Christian church in North Korea is tiny. The congregation may consist of only one family, or even just a husband and a wife. Children are excluded from worship until they reach the age when they can keep a secret. A few families occasionally will get together to risk group worship if they can find a way to avoid attracting attention, Moeller said. On Kim Il Sung’s birthday, for example, many gatherings are devoted to celebrating him, and a group of house churches might take the opportunity to worship together under the guise of partying.

Voice of the Martyrs also focuses its work on persecuted Christians. Like Open Doors, Voice of the Martyrs dates back to the Cold War, when religion was banned in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1967 by Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian pastor who emigrated to the United States after spending fourteen years in jail because of his religious beliefs. Voice of the Martyrs says it has smuggled ten thousand Bibles into North Korea. It also has dropped Christian literature from balloons launched in South Korea.

Voice of the Martyrs sponsors a program aimed at evangelizing North Korea’s elite. It does so by using a technology considered old-fashioned in most of the rest of the world: fax machines. Like every technological device that allows users to communicate with the outside world, fax machines are tightly controlled in North Korea. Their use is strictly limited to government offices and state-sponsored businesses that trade overseas. Voice of the Martyrs spent a year collecting the fax numbers of such enterprises. It now faxes them weekly Christian messages and Scripture passages. The faxes apparently get through. After one round of faxes, Voice of the Martyrs received an anonymous return fax written in Korean. “We know who you are,” the fax began. “We warn you that if you send this kind of dirty fax again something very bad will happen to you. Don’t do something you will regret.”

Seoul USA is another ministry that helps North Koreans. Based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Seoul USA is a network of Christians who aim to mobilize Christians worldwide to support the underground churches in North Korea. Among its projects is the Underground University, a mission school in Seoul that trains North Korean refugees as evangelists.¹² After one year of study, the graduates are dispatched to work with North Koreans in one of four mission areas: North Korea, China, South Korea, or among North Korean students and diplomats abroad. Inside North Korea, Seoul USA’s mission includes launching and operating what it calls “repression-proof mini–house churches.” These are tiny congregations, often made up of members of a single family.

In recent years, two American Christian activists have entered North Korea illegally, hoping to draw international attention to the plight of Christians in that country. To their supporters, they are committed Christians seeking to share their faith. To their detractors, they are at best misguided, at worst mentally unbalanced.

The first was Robert Park, a twenty-nine-year-old man from Arizona, who walked across the frozen Tumen River on Christmas Day in 2009. He carried a Bible and a letter to the dictator at the time, Kim Jong Il, demanding that he free all political prisoners in North Korea and then resign. As he touched North Korean soil, Park shouted, “I bring God’s love.” An American friend of Robert Park described him as a “zealous Christian.” “Robert is fiercely adamant” about the human rights situation in North Korea, the friend said, “particularly the suffering of the Christians in the gulag.”

Robert Park was arrested and taken to Pyongyang. After he read a confession on North Korean TV, North Korea announced he had repented and let him go. He was freed after forty-three days in detention. Park later said his apology was fake and had been dictated to him. In an interview on South Korean TV, he gave a harrowing account of his imprisonment, which he said included beatings, torture, and sexual abuse. In early 2012, Park said he would bring a lawsuit against North Korea in a U.S. court.

On January 25, 2010, exactly one month after Robert Park crossed the Tumen and entered North Korea illegally, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, from Boston, followed his example. Gomes had known Robert Park in Seoul, where they had both lived and worked for a while. They attended the same church. Gomes was an English teacher in Seoul and a frequent protestor against North Korea’s human rights violations. Like Robert Park, he was arrested immediately upon entering North Korea. Unlike his friend, he received a much more draconian sentence: eight years of hard labor and a fine of $700,000 for illegal entry. Seven months after his arrest, North Korea granted him amnesty and released him in the custody of former American President Jimmy Carter, who was visiting Pyongyang.

Not all Christian activists agree about the wisdom of sending North Koreans into North Korea to proselytize. There are conflicting views about how best to deliver the Christian message to North Koreans. The question, put simply, is this: Do you evangelize in North Korea, or do you evangelize only to those who have escaped?

Open Doors’ Carl Moeller believes that carrying the Christian message into North Korea is necessary. Jesus told us to go into all the world and spread the Gospel, he said, quoting the Gospel of St. Mark. “That doesn’t mean just the places where we can go with a legal visa.” He added: “Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will part. That’s what’s going on in North Korea.”

Tim Peters, the Seoul-based American missionary who has been working with North Korean refugees since 1996, takes a different view. “Yes, we need to send Bibles in, and I do that,” he said. “But ever since I started my work with the refugees, I very firmly have been of the conviction that the way to help the North Koreans the most is to help them as they come out.” It is “common sense,” he said, “that we try to help people once they come out of the iron grip of the regime—that means the refugees.”

Like Moeller, Peters turned to Scripture to back up his opinion. He quoted the Gospel of St. Matthew: When you are persecuted in one place, flee to another.¹³ In Peters’s view, sending Christians into North Korea is at cross-purposes from what the Scripture says. He emphasized that there might be exceptions—cases where “the hand of God is at work and we shouldn’t stand in the way.” But he is deeply troubled by the practice of sending new Christians back into North Korea to win converts to Christianity. “The Scripture says flee persecution,” he said. “It doesn’t say run into it. It doesn’t say put a little baby Christian on the tracks where an oncoming locomotive is going to run over him.”

The American evangelist Billy Graham visited Pyongyang in 1994 at the invitation of Kim Il Sung, who was then 81 years old and nearing the end of his life. Graham was traveling through Asia on one of the international crusades that have taken him to more than 180 countries and territories. His wife, Ruth Bell Graham, accompanied him. The trip to North Korea was something of a homecoming for Mrs. Graham, who was the daughter of Presbyterian medical missionaries in China and had gone to high school in Pyongyang in the 1930s. That was an era when Pyongyang was home to so many Christians that it was known as the Jerusalem of the East.

Kim Il Sung knew his audience. He regaled the Grahams with stories about attending church with his mother when he was a boy, and he told them about a Presbyterian minister who was an early influence on his life. In Hong Kong, where the Grahams flew from Pyongyang, I spoke with the American evangelist. He speculated that “some of [Kim Il Sung’s] early experiences may be influencing him now.”¹⁴ With age can come wisdom.

Pastor Graham also pointed to the explosion of interest in Christianity elsewhere in Asia and attributed the growing numbers of Christians there in part to the rapid changes that Asians are experiencing in their culture, economy, and politics. “There’s a void,” he said. Asians are turning to Christianity to fill that spiritual hole. Why should North Koreans be any different?

Numbers are uncertain, but Billy Graham is right that Christianity appears to be winning converts in much of Asia. China has at least seventy million Christians and maybe as many as one hundred million. Pastor Graham noted that Christianity is growing rapidly in Thailand, a Buddhist country, as well as in predominantly Muslim Malaysia. There is a resurgence of Christianity in Vietnam, which has about five million Catholics now, compared with a million and a half in 1975. Fundamentalist Protestantism is catching on in the Philippines, which is overwhelmingly Catholic.

The North Korean leader died a few months after the Grahams’ visit, and he gave no sign that he had rejected his atheism or that his early exposure to Christianity had had any tempering effect on his regime’s brutal policies toward Christians. The only worship allowed in North Korea remained the same: that of the Kim family.

But Billy Graham’s essential point about Christianity—the connection to freedom—is the reason the North Korean regime fears it. Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe in part because the Christian message of freedom took new hold in places where it long had been repressed. In China, Christianity exploded after Beijing lifted some of its restrictions on religious freedom. The government now appears to be trying to reassert control over unregistered churches as part of an overall crackdown on dissent. The examples of Eastern Europe and China would be well known to Kim Il Sung’s son and successor, Kim Jong Il, who continued his father’s antireligion policies. They would also be well known to current dictator Kim Jong Eun, who appears to be following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.