BEIJING - Juche a religion? The
national ideology of North Korea has been named
the world's 10th-largest religion, according to a
prominent US religious research website,
Adherents.com. The website estimates the number of
juche "believers" to be 19 million out of a
total North Korean population of 23 million
Juche, or "self-reliance", joins
the list alongside the world's major religions
such as Christianity and Islam, and even elbowed out
some
better-known religions such as Judaism, which is
estimated to have 14 million believers, from the
top 10 "major religions of the world" list.
From a sociological point of view,
juche delivers a full range of what a
religion is supposed to deliver in society, the
website says, explaining its rationale for
classifying North Korea's state doctrine as a
religion. In fact, the site has a separate link
devoted wholly to explaining painstakingly in
multiple pages the theoretical and sociological
basis of what makes juche count as a
religion.
This view, however, is not
necessarily shared in North Korea, which is after
all a communist country and officially atheistic.
The Pyongyang government promotes juche as
a state ideology but does not outwardly endorse it
as a religion. North Koreans actually use the term
juche sasang, meaning the "juche ideology".
Nonetheless, the US website says
juche is de facto the only officially
sanctioned national ideology and also the only
allowed belief system in the country at the
exclusion of all other religions, so it "clearly"
qualifies as a religion. Importantly, it asserts,
juche, in many ways, is even more overtly
religious than were Soviet-era communism or
Chinese Maoism.
Many visitors who have
been to North Korea are inclined to be convinced
by the argument, including Han Sung-joo, a former
South Korean foreign minister. Han was recently
quoted as saying that the cult of two Kims
(current ruler Kim Jong-il and his late father,
the country's founder Kim Il-sung) is very
extensive.
"There is a deification and a
religious emotional element [in juche] in
the North," said Han. "The twinned photos of Kim
Il-sung and Kim Jong-il are everywhere. Every
speech says Kim Il-sung is still alive. I think if
I stayed another two weeks, I might even see Kim
Il-sung. The country worships someone who is
deceased, as if he were alive."
A US State
Department report tacitly agrees with this view,
saying juche "has practically [reached] a
level that makes it a state religion".
Eun
Hee-shin, a Korean-Canadian who has been teaching
"religion and culture" at North Korea's Kim
Il-sung University since 2003, recently told a
South Korean magazine: "Whenever I visit
Pyongyang, I get the feeling that North Korea is a
place that doesn't feel the need to have other
religions. For North Koreans, the juche
ideology is the most uplifting religion and has
become a firm faith."
In a surprisingly
sympathetic view, Eun saw similarities between
Christianity and juche. If Christianity is
a distinctive form of religious culture that
believes in "Father God", the juche
ideology is North Korea's distinctive form of
religious culture that believes in "Supreme
Father", Eun said.
"The juche
ideology goes beyond being a political ideology
and has become a state religion. The deification
of Kim Il-sung has been carried out accordingly.
From the perspective of the academic study of
religion, this is similar to the deification of
Jesus that [occurred] after his death," Eun said.
From Eun's point of view, it's simplistic
to think of a female schoolteacher who died in
flames while trying to save the portrait of Kim
Il-sung during the 2004 explosion incident in the
Yongchon region as strange. Deification always
produces fervent followers, and there's little
difference between a Christian martyr in a remote
African village and the North Korean teacher, Eun
said.
Juche began to impinge on the
outside world from the mid-1960s in some
translated North Korean works. Yet the origin of
the ideology goes back to a 1955 speech made by
Kim Il-sung, titled "On Eliminating Dogmatism and
Formalism and Establishing Juche in
Ideological Work".
The juche
philosophy gradually emerged as a systematic
ideological doctrine in North Korea while it was
witnessing the China-Soviet split in the 1960s.
Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental
principles of juche in 1965. They were
"independence in politics", "self-sustenance in
the economy", and "self-defense of the national
security".
A survey conducted by the
Christian Science Monitor in 1998 didn't include
juche among the world's top 10 organized
religions.
Adherents.com says it used
organizational reporting, census records, polls
and field work to determine the number of
followers of each religion.
It is not easy
to travel to North Korea to find out for oneself
the magnitude of the cult indoctrination of
juche in real life. Last year, the country
had only about 20,000 visitors from abroad. But
this month Hong Kong-based Phoenix TV offered
viewers a rare glimpse of how the theology of Kim
worship is practiced in North Korea, airing an
hour-long program fresh from Pyongyang.
Reporter Liu Fang quizzed a young student
and checked on the degree of deification of the
Dear Leader by asking questions that very much
sounded like a Sunday-school teacher asking her
pupil about the bedtime prayer. "Do you spare a
particular time of the day, such as before you go
to bed, for Kim? Do you talk to Kim? Does he talk
to you?"
The young student's answer to all
these questions was, "Yes."
Sunny
Lee is a journalist based in Beijing, where he
has lived for five years. A native of South Korea,
Lee is a graduate of Harvard University and
Beijing Foreign Studies University.
(Copyright 2007 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
