Is Christian evangelicals' money helping to prop up North Korea's regime?
By Suki Kim April 28 at 1:19 PM
Suki Kim is author of “Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.”
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Under the system of the authoritarian Great Leader, which functions more like a cult ideology than a presidency, the worship of another God is not condoned. There have been several arrests of Christian missionaries, including Jeffrey Fowle, who, in 2014, was detained for five months after leaving a Bible in a public bathroom, and Kenneth Bae, who, in 2013, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, though he was released the following year. But they were grass-roots missionaries who entered North Korea on tourist visas — they did things that were not allowed by the regime and got punished accordingly.
PUST, however, is unique. The North Korean regime is well aware of the organization’s religious background; James Kim is an active evangelical in the region. He also founded Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), a Christian university, in China on the border of North Korea, where Tony Kim taught until he came to PUST. An unofficial deal was struck between PUST and the regime that allowed the evangelicals to build the school in Pyongyang, fund it and teach the students as long as they do not discuss Christianity in public. The foreign faculty, many of whom are deployed there after extensive training at YUST, can observe their religious rites within the privacy of their dormitory, but they are forbidden from pursuing missionary efforts outside it.
PUST offers a mutually beneficial arrangement for both North Korea and the evangelicals. The regime gets free education for its youth and a modern facility, which can be used for propaganda, while the evangelicals get a footing in the remote nation. Missions in foreign territories often work with a long-term goal of conversion, where the spreading of the religion is conducted subtly through seemingly unconditional kindness, with the hopes of those beneficiaries eventually turning to the religion out of gratitude.
James Kim denies that he handed over any money to the regime. However, with North Korea, nothing comes free. Famously, the government of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for the 2000 Inter-Korean summit, had secretly helped to funnel $500 million to Kim Jong Il. This month, foreign journalists paid $300,000 to report from Pyongyang to cover the Day of the Sun military parade. So then, is the evangelical cash generated for PUST being used to prop up Kim Jong Un’s regime?
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